‘What is at stake is the specific function of the image and its eminently historical character. There are a couple of important details here. First, man is the only being who is interested in images as such. Animals are only interested in images to the extent that they are fooled. You can fool a bird with an image of another bird, in order to trap it. But when the animal realizes its dealing with an image, it loses interest completely. Now man is the animal who is interested in images when he has recognized them as such. That is why he’s interested in painting and why he goes to the cinema [..] He is interested in images after he has recognized they are not real beings.”
From Georgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonagh (MIT: London, 2002).
“At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror-image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child’s actual helplessness and lack of coordination”