Body and Image. Vico, Suzuki, and Nam June Paik Critique of Western logocentrism

Abstract

The paper intends to briefly explore the relationship between perspective and normativity, looking at the discipline called legal aesthetics, based on Roman law, Canon law, and Hobbes' theory of sovereignty. The presumed universal dimension of political theology of the image raises as well complex problems similar to those of Panofsky's perspective as a symbolic form, as Belting's aesthetics shows. The paper's thesis can be resumed in two topics. Firstly, Nam June Paik's artistic reading of Suzuki, and his reference to the robot in contemporary Japanese culture, may be interpreted as a critique of the political theology of the image that presides over the theory of Western rationality . Secondly, like Suzuki, even in a different form, Vico and Derrida criticize the logocentrism and anthropological ethnocentrism of Western rationality. The two points could be integrated with Pierre Legendre's emblems theory and Belting's anthropology of the images, starting from a political-aesthetic theory in which the construction of the perspective in Alberti's and Piero della Francesca's works could be understood as the building up of the political institutions and a paradigm of the western dogmatic structure. The human language, art, and law come up from the cross of the mind and the abdomen, in Eastern and Western cultures.