There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge ?
The Emptiness of the Image offers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an...

Each of the contributors addresses the theoretical questions by pursuing a definite artistic problem, including a close look at the relation between the image and the object in Hitchcock's Vertigo, the sexual aesthetics of Caravaggio, the artistic pen of Barthes, and how Cronenberg's film Crash functions as a sinthome.