pany their gestures. On the other hand, whirling characterizes the scribbles that Benjamin himself sketched during a series of experiments with drugs conducted under the guidance of Dr. Fritz Fränkel. The spiral then becomes the sign of the sinking of the logos into the depths of the unconscious. Both cases are evoked by Didi-Huberman to allude to the indeterminacy that characterizes the margins of language as well as those of figuration: is a whirlpool an image or not? Jesse Prinz, in his "Realism Relativized: A Cultural-Historical Approach to What Images Capture", offers a fascinating journey into both western and non-western artistic tradition to expand the survey around the concept of pictorial realism. What does it mean that an Italian Renaissance painting or a Japanese ukiyo-e print are realistic? Are we talking about the same kind of realism? And does it make sense to compare the two types of realism or even to draw a rule that lumps them together under the same definition? After examining (and rejecting) two distinct groups of philosophical theories -those that emphasize perceptual processing and those that define realism in terms of informativeness -Prinz proposes his own alternative account of pictorial realism. The MCA analysis (an acronym standing for manners, capture and aspects) describes what aspects of reality an artwork or a style capture, and in what manner they capture these aspects. Given these premises, the MCA solution is necessarily relative to a specific historical, cultural and social context, so the philosophical analysis must proceed in concert with art history investigation.In her "On the Narrative Potential of Depiction", Katerina Bantinaki argues against skeptical positions that depreciate the narrative potential of monophase pictures. She identifies two main strands of skepticism. The first one derives from Lessing's Laocoön: static pictures are related to space and not to time, so they cannot represent actions. According to this account, any sense of temporality emerging from the picture is not really perceived but depends on our imagination or interpretation. The second one claims that monophase pictures have to be excluded from the realm of narratives because they cannot express causal relations between temporally ordered events of which a story is composed. While the first strand of skepticism has been brilliantly faced in many ways -for example, emotions facially expressed by the characters in a painting lead unambiguously to the recognition of a specific action -the second strand is more thorny. In order to tackle this last position, Bantinaki argues that (i) the concept of 'causal relation' itself needs to be better defined, and that (ii) in this case empathy plays a fundamental role. For what concerns the second point, looking at a picture, gestures, gaze directions and facial expressions can activate the viewer's life experience in order to recover the causal relations between depicted characters and events. From this perspective, causal relations are not an imag-