Movement and Miracle in Michael Psellos’s Account of the Blachernae Icon of the Theotokos

Bachelard's model is profoundly logocentric even as it seeks to open subjectivity to that which lies beyond the intellect. It delights in the language of those poets and writers who confront the other with the imaginary force of words. As such, it is arguably constrained by the medium of its expression. The chapter suggest that the power of the pre-modern icon lies in those spaces that open beyond words. The judicial point also determines Psellos's larger argument, namely that it is the inability to understand the miracle and therefore to represent it in discourse, which ought to remind the reader that he or she confronts something miraculous in the Blachernae. Psellos returns to the relative impotence of words in the face of miracle when he addresses the topic of the crowd that witnesses the advent of the Mother of God. The miracle was meant to take place every Friday evening in the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae in Constantinople.