Why something which in the eyes of many is just a "stupid little thing", may appear to others so precious to exceed the value of a person?
How can an image, a piece of cloth, a gesture, a word, made with bad material, suddenly achieve a surplus making them more precious than their own and other people’s human life? The observation of ancient and recent "irrational" cases, as the destruction of "icons" and of the lives linked to them, suggests the need to deepen the centrality of symbolic dynamics in the construction of individual’s identity: there is hope in this way to come to understand the "sense" of gestures often too hastily branded as "primitive", "foolish", "schizoid".
Keywords: Symbolic interaction, visual communication, denotation and connotation, transcendence.