Description
The aim of this paper is to study the re-use and re-semanticisation of classical images in the light of Georges Didi-Huberman’s re-reading of Aby Warburg’s thought in his essay L’image survivante (2002). The German scholar’s work represents a turning point in Western thought for the way in which it forces us to rethink historical and chronological categories: what Warburg’s ‘psychohistory’ demolishes is the linear conception of time in favour of a syntomal time, built on the continuous dialectic of latencies and re-emergences that characterises the life of forms. The psyche is the backdrop to the epistemic model on which the pivotal concepts of Warburg’s thought unfold. We are on the line that from Burckhardt to Nietzsche dissolves all classicism, all Olympian and Apollonian depictions of the Greek and Mediterranean worlds, grasping instead all the destructive and constructive force of ancestral divinities, of ancient cosmogonies, in a word, of the Dionysian spirit that moves in the individual psychic devices and collective structures of civilisations. Accomplice to their common filiation from Schopenhauer, in Didi-Huberman’s analysis Nietzsche and Freud continually pass the baton on to each other, the former for having directly influenced Warburg, the latter because he offers the theoretical tools to justify his belonging to that current of thought that, between the mid 19th century and the early 20th century, unmasked the autonomy of reason and the centrality of the ego by revealing the vital power of archetypes.
