For the September survey of “What’s New in Translation,” Xie Yue Shan reviews At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality by Andrea Pinotti. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“‘Imagination has turned into hallucination,’ the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once warned, in response to our collective hypnosis after the advent of the image: ‘They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens. Instead of representing the world, they obscure it…’ It’s a familiar line of thought within the study of image consciousness, for as long as there has been representation, there has been the struggle to track the real and the facsimile—where they separate, where they congregate, and to what extent they denigrate and draw from one another. Now that technological innovation is coming in a deluge to redefine magic, to create surfaces anew, to induce vision and sensation, and to readdress our bodies’ sensual functions, the same question of demarcations is growing alongside the innovations. It is into this dialogue that Andrea Pinotti arrives with his fascinating and rangy At the Threshold of the Image, which advocates for neither admission nor insulation against the invasion of image, but simply—as the title states—addresses our enduring romance with the boundary, and how it underscores our resistance to physical limits.”