Nancy's writing on the image may be understood as a critical engagement with the traditions of modern aesthetics and classical theories of art. However, the starting point for his approach to the image indicates that his writing on this topic has much wider ambitions than the treatment of a regional aesthetic topic. Nancy defines the image as a mode of access to sense. He clarifies the stakes of this position when he emphasises that the ‘access’ to sense that the image provides is neither comprehensible in the terms of traditional mimetic theories of the image (Plato), nor in those of the idiom of representation (Christian icons). It is clear that he wants to contest the view that the image is merely some sensuous version or presentation of a prior and primary intelligible idea. The traditional conception of the image is not able, in Nancy's view, to comprehend the access to sense that the image provides. Hence Nancy attempts an ontological rehabilitation of the image, which reiterates the precepts of his conception of being as ‘co-presence’.

The point of departure for Nancy's ontology is the absence of any compelling existential regime of meaning for existence. His philosophy acknowledges the exigencies of this situation, by taking the question of ontology raised at the ‘end’ of Western metaphysics, to be the ‘question of social Being’. ‘Being-with’ is, for him, the collective, interstitial network of its occurrence, meaning that there is no single node or term that grounds being. He articulates the co-presence of being in terms of the category of sense or meaning. Being, he argues, does not ‘have’ meaning; rather ‘the phenomenon of Being … is meaning’, and this meaning is ‘in turn, its own circulation– and we are this circulation’. He writes: ‘Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence’. The articulation of this conception of being as copresence is one that is enabled by a series of historical shifts on the question of intelligible forms. These shifts, which can be seen in exemplary form in the way modern aesthetic theory treats the topic of the image, culminate in the unravelling of the coherence of the dualism between intelligibility and materiality.