ABSTRACT
Among W.J.T. Mitchell’s countless investigations into the lives, loves, powers and desires of images for more than forty years, politics has always played a very important role. The chapter of his Iconology devoted to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and his considerations on the artistic frontiers between poetry and painting, similar to nation-state borders, or the essay focused on Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theory as a framework to enable a rereading of Burke’s later critiques of the French Revolution, are the very first examples of a brand new research program for political iconology. According to Mitchell, politics is more than a struggle between men – and women – for power, leadership or equality. It is inscribed at the very core of the “Image X Text” battlefield.1 His intellectual work has coped with many different aspects of politics, from the Abu Ghraib archives of the “war on terror” to various spaces of representation and nonrepresentation. His considerations on landscape are deeply rooted in a critical tradition going back to the analysis of eighteenth-century painting by Raymond Williams and John Berger, who famously criticized the display of the English countryside with its owners but without the peasants who actually produced it.2 Therefore, to paraphrase another thinker of space, W.J.T. Mitchell is not a political philosopher, but there is a political philosophy in his iconology.3
