Pathosformeln. Aby Warburg, das Nachleben der Antike und die Natur der Affekterregung (ABGESAGT)
A lecture by Prof. Dr Erhard Schüttpelz, Professor for Media Studies, Universität Siegen
According to Aby Warburg, art history is a story of memory and ghosts. He said about his library which he baptised "Mnemosyne" that it was "a ghost story for grown-ups “which gives visible form to the movement of the soul".
Warburg introduces us to the constituent paradoxes of the image itself: its nature as a ghost and its capacity for revival, for haunting; its power to convey pathos in a choreography of fundamental gestures; its symptom structure where latencies and crises, repetitions and differences, repressions and aftershocks mingle.
From all this comes new knowledge. It is a knowledge through editing that Warburg's project, Mnemosyne, implements in a surprisingly topical way. Walter Benjamin posited that a history of culture cannot go without bringing to light an “unconscious of vision”. Aby Warburg had understood that such an update is only possible by questioning this “unconscious of time” which is survival.
In 2020 Prof. Dr Erhard Schüttpelz was involved in the project of reconstituting the picture atlas Mnemosyne by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and The Warburg Institute.
In 2021 he wrote a film essay on Aby Warburg's famous lecture on the Hopi snake ritual A Kind of World War (in collaboration with Anselm Franke).
Lectures
Exploring the In-Between
LECTURE SERIES 2022/2023
Exploring the In-Between:
Haunting Ghosts, Fantasies, Emotions, Memory and Memes
Transition marks a state which is always incomplete, stretched between different ends, suspended like a restless spectral figure.
However, such a state is also one where the dice have not yet rolled, where surprise still has a chance to overwhelm our expectations. To think within the "in-between" thus also renders possible a renewed appreciation of ambiguity and indecision and, perhaps, offers a space to form unanticipated apertures.
Free entrance