In this rich, highly illustrated book, Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think – as artists and writers – about our own creative work.

"Iconomania". Prologue by W. J. T. Mitchell 1. Introduction: Making as Thinking, and vice versaMaterial Image-ThinkingSearching for a TermImage-Thinking for Thought-ImagesThresholds: the merging of Thinking, Imagining, and ImagingOverview of Chapters Part I: Keys to Intermediality 2. Time-Space: Spatialising Film A Long History of MadnessNalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg; Pieter Breughel the Elder, Mad MegIntroduction: Beginning Becomes EntrancePolitical Spacetime: Film in the GallerySocial Relevance: Madness to Learn FromForms of Madness BeginningStorybookPicture BookWorking Through and Overcoming Iconography"Schizophrenia": Two Sides to Every Story, Two Figures in Every LifeA Sense of an Ending 3. Voice: who speaks the film, in documentaries? Mille et un joursMarcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time; Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the RainIntroduction: Subject, Source, SpeakerMigratory Aesthetics and the Trouble with VoiceVoice and the Documentary TraditionMurmuring Voices: Intimacy and Hybridity WithinPhantom SentencesDispersal of VoiceThe "Other" Tradition and Cultural BelongingTravelling Forking Paths 4. Multi-Tentacled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Preposterous History2MOVE (the exhibition) Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled; It’s About Time! Reflections on UrgencyIntroducing Time’s Thought-Image: An OctopusTogetherness in TimeHeterochrony Caught in the ActHeterochrony versus Clock TimeFrom Anachronism to Preposterous HistoryIt’s About Time! 5. Making Up, Making As: Fiction and/in/with Reality Becoming Vera, Reasonable DoubtVarious works of contemporary art Introduction: Think againBecoming Vera in Free Indirect DiscourseThinking in FilmWhy Imaging and/of Thinking MoveMastery, in DoubtFrom Impatience as Lifestyle to Mis-EncountersAfter-Effects and Pre-FigurationsPart II: Special Issues, Special Pleading 6. Showing Trauma? Difficulty and NecessityDon Quijote, A Long History of MadnessLooking at photographsTrauma PredicamentsAlone Within Himself: Drama versus NarrativeImpossible Story-Telling: Toward the CinematicA Way Out? 7. Agency, FacingNothing is Missing (the installation)Bertien van ManenIntroduction: Facing Migration Abandoning Control The Triple Act of FacingIntercultural Ethics: Relationality across GapsPreposterous TimeFacing RestraintFacing SpeechFor Critical Freedom 8. Cultural Citizenship vs. Identity Becoming Vera State of Suspension, Separations, Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugeni Onegin Introduction: Citizenship Political, Colonial, CulturalBecoming French in Cameroon, African in RussiaBecoming PushkinPreposterous Encounters of the Third KindReality in Fiction"My Africa": Memory, Nostalgia, ExileEncountering Cultural CitizenshipImpossible Cultural Citizenship 9. Affect as a Political ToolMadame B (the film, various installations) Doris Salcedo: PalimpsestoIntroduction: The Point of AffectFrom "Madame Bovary c’est moi" to "Emma is Us"Positing WitnessingWhat is Focalisation?An Illness We All Have: Emotional CapitalismEmpathy: Siding with the Dying Affective Things?The Experience of Feeling-LookingThe Anthropomorphic ImaginationAffect, Medium and Mood 10. By Way of Conclusion For Memory: Mis-remembered, Dis-rememberedAccess Denied, A Long History of Madness, Reasonable Doubt Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where?Introduction: Meandering Through Memory ThoughtMaking Acts of MemoryReunion, Resilience, ResistanceWhat Kinds of Memory Matter?Failing the Past is Failing the PresentFor a Different Mode of Thinking Author’s FilmographyReferencesSelective Index of Names and TitlesSelective Index of Terms and Concepts