Georges Didi – Huberman, IMMAGINE INSEPOLTA. ABY WARBURG, LA MEMORIA DEI FANTASMI E LA STORIA DELL’ARTE, 2006

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) made “survival” the central motif of his anthropological approach to Western art. It is studied here in its logic, in its sources and in its philosophical resonances, ranging from historicity according to Burckhardt to the unconscious according to Freud, passing through the eternal return according to Nietzsche, biological memory according to Darwin, morphology according to Goethe. A multiplicity of approaches which is the only way to describe the paradoxical “life” of the images and through which Warburg introduces the constitutive paradoxes of the image itself: its “ghost” nature; its power to transmit pathos; its “symptom” structure and its nature as a theater of the times.