Abstract
Even since William of Ockham’s critique of scholastic realism, the nominalist impulse in philosophy has been understood to undercut the inherent intelligibility of the world and abet its disenchantment. As a result, it has often been tied to a voluntarist notion of God or of human subjects who construct a world through self‐assertion. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss and most notably W. J. T. Mitchell, this paper explores an alternative version of non‐conventionalist nominalism, which it calls ‘magical’ based on the Adamic quest for ‘true’ names. It argues that photography in certain respects exemplifies a visual expression of the same quest, which can be understood as the assertion of the world against the domination of the subject.
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