Pathographies of Modernity with Aby Warburg and Beyond: An Astral Map of Warburgian Constellations

The present volume aims to follow the many intersections, and interferences, between art history and other disciplines (such as history of literature, theatre, cinema, photography, dance), which can be found in Warburg’s writings. In particular, the volume is designed as an “astral map,” whereby each chapter represents a “Constellation” of polar keywords, such as Pathosformel, Ancient/Modern, Memory, Performativity, that hark back to a Warburgian linguistic and conceptual tradition. The “word,” just like the “image,” polarises within itself two meanings, or rather two opposed expressive modalities. As “binary” terms, the four keywords chosen for this volume express simultaneously the vehicle of movement and the movement itself. Through the reading and contextualisation of Warburg’s work, the essays presented here intend to underline the importance of the concept of “dynamic energy,” in order to investigate the ability of an artwork to “move” and constantly change over time. Scraps and anachronisms are understood as the “negatives” of a historical time conceived as a continuous flow, whereas the history of culture is rather conceived as a “tensive dialectic” between forms that never disappear completely and that return, revealing the “unconscious of time,” the “pathographies of modernity.”