From the beginning of the article:
The purpose of this essay is not exhaustive research concerning the iconic
space and vision in Byzantium. Rather, the aim is to reshuffle the texts –
from theological statements in defense of the image to liturgical, living
ritual – to build up a polemical discourse with a tradition and a cognitive
theory that have proved incapable of explaining the endurance of the
Byzantine scheme of the icon and of its oxymoronic (paradoxical)
definition, except through an appeal to primitivism.
I will attempt to put forward an alternative reading of the iconic space
and show how vision itself is transfigured through participation. My thesis
is that the icon belongs to another order of cognitive apprehension. It
resists Kantian logic or any other categories of modern cognition. The
paradoxical play between presence and absence in the definition of the
iconic space is founded on a theology of kenôsis. Presence and absence,
emptiness and fullness, are both "foiled" and transfigured in the icon – a
theological and a doctrinal statement in its essence ...