Les paradoxes de l'image

Abstract

How can science use images to heuristic ends when they are neither discursive nor global and lack a point of entry, when they play on sensitivity from which official science claims to have freed itself? But scientists who believe they have escaped the hold of images are naive; all research originates in images. Whole sections of science are built on images. The images of science raise questions concerning images as a whole. If nothing else, they have the merit of directing thought to the outsideness of the image, of bringing us back to objective reality. To a certain extent, the image is also a window giving onto the text of the world.