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The Promise of Irreconcilable Difference

Tamara Levitz

in Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone

Chapter 8 examines Persephone’s rebirth and return to the underworld with the goal of understanding what its emancipatory promise and historicity—or relationship to the past, present, and ... More

Chapter 8 examines Persephone’s rebirth and return to the underworld with the goal of understanding what its emancipatory promise and historicity—or relationship to the past, present, and future—tells us about the politics of modernist neoclassicism. Gide introduces the cardboard figure of Triptolemus as a symbol of renewal he associates with the Soviet Union, and with Orpheus’s “backward glance” and the anxious politics of his pédérastie. Rubinstein, Copeau, and Stravinsky, in contrast, think of Persephone’s rebirth in terms of the resurrection of Christ. Stravinsky interprets resurrection from Suvchinsky’s Eurasianist perspective as related to the notion of cyclical history, and to the political idea of Russia resurrecting as a theocracy after the Bolshevik revolution. In his music he realizes the temporal idea of the simultaneity of past, present, and future by composing music that functions as a “vitalist” sculpture, and that can be compared to Aby Warburg’s notion of the Pathosformel. The chapter ends with reflections on how Perséphone failed on the night of its premiere, and the heterogeneity of interpretations it elicited.Less

Ad oculos: Ways of Seeing, Reading, and Collecting

Christopher D. Johnson

in Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

This chapter engages Ernst Gombrich's essay “Icones symbolicae” and Michael Baxandall's interpretation of Leon Battista Alberti's debts to the rhetorical tradition to examine the iconology of ... More

This chapter engages Ernst Gombrich's essay “Icones symbolicae” and Michael Baxandall's interpretation of Leon Battista Alberti's debts to the rhetorical tradition to examine the iconology of Warburg's early essays in the context of Italian humanism and Dominico Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds. It returns to Warburg's concept of the “metaphoric distance” characterizing the manner in which the Adoration's rhetorical qualities, its copia (eloquent abundance) and varietas (variety), help to balance competing forces and themes. It then rehearses Warburg's cardinal notion of the Pathosformel (pathos formula) and finds analogies with E. R. Curtius's notion of literary topoi. The chapter also compares the aims and organization of Warburg's famous Library in Hamburg with those of the Bilderatlas.Less

Visibilia

in Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence

This chapter discusses how alchemy's relation to “visibilia” extends beyond the extremely rich field of images that appear in alchemical manuscripts to embrace vision, transmutation, and ambivalence. ... More

This chapter discusses how alchemy's relation to “visibilia” extends beyond the extremely rich field of images that appear in alchemical manuscripts to embrace vision, transmutation, and ambivalence. To speak of alchemical images as content without considering the materiality of their forms is to strip them of a vital life force that is not something ineffable, but rather, something at the limit of language, in the realm of the pathosformel.Less

Timely anachronisms

Chari Larsson

in Didi-Huberman and the Image

This chapter shifts its attention to the role anachronism plays in Didi-Huberman’s thinking. Art history as a narrative structure has traditionally been sustained by chronological time, with art ... More

This chapter shifts its attention to the role anachronism plays in Didi-Huberman’s thinking. Art history as a narrative structure has traditionally been sustained by chronological time, with art historians implicitly drawing on Hegel’s teleological progression as a model for artistic improvement. When the Hegelian narrative establishing art’s history is exhausted, however, what models of time are available? Didi-Huberman adds his voice to the anti-Hegelian current characterising French thought since the 1960s. Like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida before him, Didi-Huberman avoids a direct confrontation with Hegel, but engages through intermediaries Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Didi-Huberman rereads the great avant-garde montage experiments of the 1920s and 1930s in relation to a general antagonism to linear understandings of time.Less

Warburg’s Renaissance and the Things in Between

Emily J. Levine

in Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School

Influenced by Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Warburg promoted a radically new understanding of how the Renaissance inherited a more complex aesthetic heritage from classical antiquity. Yet in the spirit ... More

Influenced by Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Warburg promoted a radically new understanding of how the Renaissance inherited a more complex aesthetic heritage from classical antiquity. Yet in the spirit of the cultural historian Karl Lamprecht, Warburg also wished to create an interdisciplinary methodology that would permit him to analyze this process in a holistic way. The second chapter argues that Warburg’s prewar writings on Botticelli and Ghirlandaio reveals how he took certain tropes from his mercantile home city, including, most notably the merchant, the widow, and the amateur “private scholar,” to develop a new portrait of Renaissance art and its social milieu. His approach, which connected perennial problems of form and content, and genius and predefined classical tropes, with the observation of a single detail, captured in such concepts as the Nachleben der Antike and the pathosformel, would become his greatest intellectual contribution to art history.Less

Introduction

Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis

in Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests

This chapter lays out parameters of the contemporary. It takes up authorship and authorization as a position and practice after the determinations of inquiry and vindication. The chapter introduces ... More

This chapter lays out parameters of the contemporary. It takes up authorship and authorization as a position and practice after the determinations of inquiry and vindication. The chapter introduces four further parameters of the contemporary. It identifies a metric of repair as a contemporary response to breakdowns in and of modernity and narrative modes of comedy, irony, tragedy and pathos. Drawing on Aby Warburg’s paired concepts Nachleben and Pathosformel the chapter specifies how breakdown, repair and narrative mood can be given (temporary) form. The introduction to Part 2 further specifies interpretive analytics for taking up cases in an anthropology of the contemporary. It is argued that these parameters should be used in domains of indeterminacy – domains in which the trouble or tension or induced confusion turns or appears to turn on issues of conceptual clarity, diagnostics of problems, orientation to understanding.Less

Gerhard Richter’s Pathos

Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis

in Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests

This chapter takes up the work of the German painter Gerhard Richter as well as the critical apparatus and reception that has gathered around his artistic production as exemplary of a situation that ... More

This chapter takes up the work of the German painter Gerhard Richter as well as the critical apparatus and reception that has gathered around his artistic production as exemplary of a situation that can be taken up as contemporary. The chapter argues that Richter himself in his work as well as his elliptic commentary on his paintings and in his replies to his interpreters adopts a distinctive contemporary practice. He does so by tacitly focusing his work and his life on the issue of what to do with modernist technology? He invents an original and fluid technē tou biou that meets the challenge in an ongoing series of ways. His insistence that the past can be made actual, although never in a stable and satisfactory manner instantiates Aby Warburg’s concepts of Nachleben and Pathosformel. By so doing he demonstrates one mode of contemporary practice thereby opening up a clearer path for other modes of invention with different materials and practices—including anthropologyLess