The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology

Weimar's Others: Art History, Alterity and Regionalism in Inter‐War Germany

“…On the contrary, it symptomatically and phantomatically survives its own death: disappearing from a point in history, reappearing much later at a moment when it is perhaps no longer expected and consequently having survived in the still poorly defined reaches of a 'collective memory'. 15 Scholars like Margaret Iversen and Didi-Huberman have expertly unravelled some of the indeterminate impulses of Warburg's thought and both point to the idea that fully conscious explanations of the concept of Pathosformeln remain purposefully elusive. 16 Giorgio Agamben has suggested that it refers to 'an indissoluble intertwining of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content'.…”

Evidence in the museum: Curating a miscarriage of justice

“…These concepts were adopted by the art historian, Aby Warburg (1866–1929), and are sustained by Warburg’s contemporary interlocutor, Georges Didi-Huberman. For Warburg, survival was not triumphant, but rather some kind of haunting; a phantom that has survived its own death (Didi-Huberman, 2002). Didi-Huberman wrote that the surviving object, ‘having lost its original use value and meaning, nonetheless comes back, like a ghost, at a particular historical moment: a moment of “crisis”, a moment when it demonstrates its latency, its tenacity, its vivacity’ (Didi-Huberman, 2005: xxii).…”

“…Survival in the cultural world, Warburg argued, made historical time more complex, challenging the very nature of historicity. In its afterlife, Azaria’s jumpsuit does not ‘triumphantly outlive’ so much as ‘survive its own death’ (Didi-Huberman, 2002: 68). Having ‘disappeared from a point in history’, it now reappears in the museum repository, ‘when it is perhaps no longer expected’ (Didi-Huberman, 2002: 68).…”

“…In its afterlife, Azaria’s jumpsuit does not ‘triumphantly outlive’ so much as ‘survive its own death’ (Didi-Huberman, 2002: 68). Having ‘disappeared from a point in history’, it now reappears in the museum repository, ‘when it is perhaps no longer expected’ (Didi-Huberman, 2002: 68). Its survival is confounding and, for its entanglement of law, forensic science, family memory, human remains and myriad other qualities, it poses ongoing practical and ethical challenges for those charged with its preservation.…”

Habit: Time, Freedom, Governance

“… 12. The concept of the primitive as survival is most closely associated with the work of Edward Burnett Tylor (1871); see also Didi-Huberman (2002) and Ratnapalan (2008). …”