Abstract
There is an unmistakable irony in the emergence of the English translation of Georges Didi-Huberman’s L’Image Survivante 15 years after its publication in French. Presented without modification, save for sparing notes from the translator and the addition of bibliographical resources that had since been published in English, the volume arrives to the English-reading world as a kind of fossil-in-motion, much like the author’s conception of Aby Warburg’s history of art. Its central figure, the German art historian, is for Didi-Huberman the phantom that continues to haunt the discipline of art history – impossible to forget but equally futile to apprehend completely. Throughout the text, which performs simultaneously as an intellectual portrait and philosophical treatise, the author elaborates on Warburg’s untimely survival within the discipline, offering a critical elaboration of the art historian’s questions and methods while making the case that the repression of Warburg’s groundbreaking ideas continue to disturb the foundations of art history.
Indeed, Didi-Huberman positions the enduring, albeit interrupted, significance of Warburg’s work as itself symptomatic of the concerns of the late scholar’s research – namely, the survival of the phantom image and the pathological energy of its untimely return. In three chapters, Didi-Huberman considers the image iteratively as phantom, pathos, and symptom as he brings Warburg into dialogue with researchers and philosophers whose theoretical concerns resonate with Warburg’s ambitious project. Notably, most of these names come from outside of art history, an approach that testifies to Didi-Huberman’s ongoing critique of the discipline, developed previously in Devant l’image (1990) and Devant le temps (2000) and of which this text functions as the trilogy’s conclusion.
Indeed, after addressing Gombrich’s and Panofsky’s sanitation of their mentor’s overarching concept of Nachleben into a mere periodization of stylistic innovations and revivals, Didi-Huberman departs from art history to consider Warburg’s debt to a range of other thinkers, citing the British anthropologist Edward Tylor as a precedent for his notion of survival and Jacob Burckhardt’s anachronistic conception of time as a model of an historical method that assesses the impurities of culture as they appear rather than distill its forms into abstract theoretical ideals. Impure time, with its vertiginous depths and imbricated surfaces, becomes for Didi-Huberman the point of departure for an art history that does not submit to the artificial hierarchies and periodizations of positivism and structuralism. Art history’s scientism, the pride of Panofsky, is posited as an oppressive formula that strips cultural time of its heterogeneity and images of their Nachleben – their persistence through time and the force of their living plasticity.
Didi-Huberman’s Warburg thus emerges as anti-positivist and anti-idealist. He is neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but rather a keen observer of culture and a hypersensitive seismograph to the unfelt rhythms of history. Within this impure time, Didi-Huberman develops the crux of his argument by joining Warburg’s symptomatology of the Pathosformel manifested in ‘accessory forms of motion’ in Renaissance art with the metaphor of the philosopher–historian as the ultimate receptor of historical traumas, the events that flow against the Zeitgeist and by virtue of their exceptional qualities exert an overdetermined influence on history – a concept he develops between the poles of Burckhardt and Nietzsche. Didi-Huberman thus deftly sutures the visual and formal concerns of the pathological art historian with his methodological approach to the overarching question of the persistence and transformation of the forms and forces of images in motion through time. Didi-Huberman’s recovery – one might call it an excavation – of Warburg’s pathological tendencies from their repression within art history is a commendable feat, requiring as it does not only hefty intellectual prowess but dogged archival research, given that the vast majority of Warburg’s writing remains woefully unpublished, and perhaps unpublishable.
And yet, the historian-as-seismograph seems to reach a breaking point just as its waves take form. Didi-Huberman labors over his vibrating image of the pathological art historian, drawing heavily on Freud’s theories of the symptom through his associations with Ludwig Bingswanger, the Director of the Kreuzlingen Sanatorium who cared for Warburg during most of his 5-year psychological crisis. Binswanger, whose contributions to existential psychology Didi-Huberman convincingly correlates with Warburg’s pyscho-historical method, becomes Warburg’s interlocutor par excellence, but at the unfortunate expense of most others. What Didi-Huberman offers is a Warburg who can speak formidably among his peers – Tylor, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Binswanger – but fails to engender substantial discussions with a generation of philosophy and scholarship that comes after. While lamenting that Foucault never encountered the work of Warburg, Didi-Huberman avoids all but tentative brushes with any thinker whose work might have once been considered poststructuralist. Setting aside a presumed suspicion for the label itself, it seems a missed opportunity to largely separate Warburg’s exceptional methods from the philosophers who might have, albeit unknowingly, carried them forward. Perhaps the author wanted to rescue his charge from the pitfalls such an association would inevitably invite. Or perhaps Binswanger’s significance in the domain of phenomenological psychology puts Warburg’s caretaker–interlocutor, whom Didi-Huberman elevates significantly in his influence on Warburg’s ideas, at odds with post-phenomenological methodologies. At times, Didi-Huberman seems to surpass this self-imposed limit, as when he cites Foucault’s admiration of Binswanger and Lacan’s dialectic of symptom and style as related to, yet not informed by, Warburg’s Pathosformel. These moments are fleeting, though they hint at the kind of work that might be taken up by successors to this ambitious project.
Didi-Huberman’s Warburg is seismic and explosive, with thoughts spurting off and fleeing like so many Baudelairian fusées. He does not shy from the limits of Warburg’s psychological condition, but rather acknowledges and unfolds their fundamental significance to the art historian’s radical method. Thus, he returns to art history a Warburg more complete and thus more troubled than ever before. Yet still, out of what seems to be a kind of self-limiting respect or admiration – at times, Didi-Huberman’s sympathy for Warburg is palpably poetic, as when he recalls a journal entry from the day of Warburg’s death in which a withered apple tree in the garden suddenly bursts forth with green buds – he stops short of coaxing his charge out from withdrawal and into the present conditions of art history. Didi-Huberman, henceforth finished with his tripartite critique of the discipline, has left us, as he would call it, a slithering pile of lively snakes for the next generation to untangle and to begin art history anew.