Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Translator’s Note
Chapter 1: The Image as Phantom: Survival of Forms and Impurities of Time
Chapter 2: The Image as Pathos: Lines of Fracture and Formulas of Intensity
Chapter 3: The Image as Symptom: Fossils in Motion and Montages of Memory
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Georges Didi-Huberman is on the faculty of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His books in English include Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration; Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière; and Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, the last also published by Penn State University Press.
Harvey Mendelsohn is a professional translator of French and German and the proprietor of H. L. Mendelsohn Fine European Books, an antiquarian book shop specializing in scarce and out-of-print books on the history of architecture, city planning, landscape, and the decorative arts.
“A painstakingly detailed examination of Warburg’s writing, showing
its connection with works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jakob Burckhardt,
and other notable pioneers of a psychologically oriented analysis
of culture. Didi-Huberman offers insightful readings and criticism
of such scholars as Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst
Gombrich, accused of trafficking in ‘canons, ideal entities and
transcendental notions,’ not to mention a more general denunciation
of unnamed practitioners of a ‘positivist’ art history.”—W. Cahn
Choice
“For anyone interested in the intersections of art, material and
visual culture, anthropology, and philosophy, The Surviving Image
stands as essential reading, long overdue to any English-language
reader familiar with Giorgio Agamben, Philippe-Alain Michaud, and
Christopher Johnson’s writings on Warburg. Didi-Huberman’s book may
itself feel ‘untimely’ in a risk-averse intellectual age; this fact
only serves to recommend it, and Aby Warburg’s original work, all
the more.”—Richard Baxstrom Visual Culture in Britain
“It is wonderful to have this book in English. Didi-Huberman's
magnum opus is an impassioned, critical love letter to the
discipline of art history, which he considers as ossified by
‘systematic and reassuring’ methodologies, ‘territorialized,’ and
bound by institutional expectations, but since Warburg also
potentially open to the numinous, unsystematic, undependable,
inconstant moments in which representation and desire present
themselves as art history. Of the many attempts to revive Warburg,
this is the only one that takes the consequences of a full
engagement seriously.”—James Elkins, editor of The Stone Art Theory
Institute Series
“Didi-Huberman argues that Warburg offers offers us a
‘psycho-history’ of culture: a model of historical understanding as
a response to images possessed of vital power and emotional force.
This book fills the need for a better understanding of Warburg’s
contribution to the discipline of art history, and will draw the
attention of anyone who teaches its history and methods as well as
that of students who seek to understand the intellectual life of
their chosen field of study.”—Keith Moxey, author of Visual Time:
The Image in History
“When Georges Didi-Huberman’s The Surviving Image was first
published in French, it transformed the image of Warburg as the
scholar immersed in the arcana of Renaissance magic, art, and
philosophy, and he gained his place as a theorist, urgently
questioning the nature of inquiry into art history and visual
culture. Ostensibly about Warburg, the range and significance of
this key work of art theory and historiography is far wider, for it
deals with important philosophical questions to do with art,
memory, time, and the construction of art-historical knowledge.
Harvey Mendelsohn has created a lucid and elegant translation, an
admirable accomplishment that will ensure that this book gains the
wider readership it deserves.”—Matthew Rampley, author of The
Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of
Scholarship, 1847–1918
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