Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science by Georges Didi-Huberman

Author:Georges Didi-Huberman [Didi-Huberman, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Caught up in the vortex of this bellicose age, and given only one-sided information, with no detachment from the great changes that have already taken place or are about to do so, and with no sense of the future that is forming, we begin to have doubts about the meaning of the impressions crowding in on us, we begin to doubt the value of our own judgments.185

Yet, where Warburg could only accumulate feverishly the images of his Kriegskartothek and the files of his Notizkästen, without ever succeeding in formulating an articulate theoretical response to his anxiety—hence the slipping of imbalance into madness—Freud succeeded, from 1915, in reconstructing or in reassembling and reviewing his own psychological thinking in a masterly series, published in French as Métapsychologie, that involved reexamining and bringing things back into play, a collection whose concluding essay dealt, by no accident, with the question of mourning and melancholy.186 Other anxieties and other imbalances would demand, in the following years, a thinking about something “beyond the pleasure principle” (for the repetition and the death impulse), the “future of an illusion” (for the incessant psychomachy of the astra with the monstra), and, finally, “civilization and its discontents”187 (another way to name the tragedy of culture).

Where historians are able to give a precise date for the end of the Great War—that is, 11 November 1918—the “psycho-historian” Aby Warburg and the “metapsychologist” Sigmund Freud quickly realized that such a war survived or outlived, psychically, culturally, and politically, the silence of the weapons. The war was finished, yet it was an interminable war: finished in the eyes of Clio (history) but interminable in the eyes of Mnemosyne (memory). Interminable as a war of mourning.188 But also as a war of images: Let us imagine, for example, the actual “psychomachy” that, in the 1920s, set the photographic montages of Ernst Friedrich in his work Krieg dem Kriege! against the lofty iconography of Ernst Jünger in his atlas of images entitled Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges in 1930 and Die veränderte Welt—subtitled Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit, “an alphabet primer in images of our time”—in 1933 (figs. 63–64).189

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