Hermeneutics of the Image: A Conversation with Thomas Pfau

Athenaeum Review

Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University, with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty, is the author of Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame, 2022). The journal Modern Theology recently devoted a forum to this book, with contributions from Cyril O'Regan, Kevin Hart, William Desmond, Ben Quash, and Anne M. Carpenter, and a response by the author.

In this conversation: The path from Minding the Modern to Incomprehensible Certainty; what is an image?; which figures were included in the book (and which were not but might have been); how the Renaissance and Baroque periods fit into the book's argument; the problem of disciplinarity and specialization; phenomenology in contrast to other critical theories; the relevance of Gerschom Scholem's Walter Benjamin; and more!