Includes bibliographical references and index.

Presenting the Figural -- The Idea of the Figural -- Lyotard's Leap into the Void: The Aesthetic before the New Media -- Paradoxes of the Visual, or Philosophy after the New Media -- Reading the Figural -- Rehearsing the Figural -- Foucault through Deleuze, or The Diagrammatics of Power -- Reading the Figural -- The End of Modernism -- The Figure and the Text -- Film and the Scene of Writing -- "With dreams displaced into a forest of script" -- Hieroglyphics, Montage, Enunciation -- The Ends of the Aesthetic -- The Historical Image -- A Plea for the Dead -- Social Hieroglyphs and the Optics of History -- The Antinomic Character of Time -- Anteroom Thinking, or "The Last Things before the Last" -- A Genealogy of Time -- Two Stories of 1968 -- Two Audiovisual Regimes: The Movement-Image and Time-Image -- The Ends of the Dialectic and the Return of History: Hegel and Nietzsche -- Genealogy, Countermemory, Event -- An Uncertain Utopia--Digital Culture -- An Image of Technological Abundance -- A Digression on Postmodernism -- Three Questions concerning Digital Culture -- An Impossible Ideal of Power.

In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of "the figural" to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick -- one of the foremost film theorists writing today -- contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.

To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.