Thanks to the new technologies, images have become the true obsession of our time. The Internet, smartphones, television, newspapers, and even the instruments of medical research, subject us to a daily bombardment, a constant flow of images which penetrate and overwhelm the canons of cultural transmission and of the interpretation of the present. The age- old conflict between image and word seems to have ended with the unexpected defeat of the latter.

Is it possible to find our way through this new forest without adopting excessively reactive attitudes, tending towards a new iconoclasm? Will we be able to benefit from the potential of images, by recognizing the needs that their hyperproduction expresses, without suffering its violent consequences? The new task is to identify the model of reason for a world where images are no longer appearances but cultural environments.