Delivered at Colby College on October 7, 2024, The Last Physician of Images delivered the lecture "The Affective Properties of Images Within the Power of Play." This performative lecture traces the political and affective power of images across centuries — from Plato's warnings about art's capacity to destabilize society, to Andrew Fletcher's conviction that whoever controls the ballad controls the nation, to André Breton's surrealist call to liberate imagination from the cage of rationalism — arguing that images have always operated as a form of political speech, communicating faster and more deeply than words. Bryant connects this historical thread to contemporary meme culture, reading it through Aristotle's concept of the enthymeme as a mode of persuasion that works precisely by leaving its premise unstated, and through Hannah Arendt's assertion that speech — and by extension the image — is what makes us political beings. The lecture then turns to the particular authority that accrues to images of the dead, examining how AI-driven reanimation of historical figures produces a new kind of affective power, one that exceeds what the living person commanded, and calls for a critical iconoclasm — not the destruction of images, but a liberation from the forensic reverence we grant them — proposing play as the pedagogical and philosophical mode best suited to that task.