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“You live and do me no harm.” Aby Warburg's thought-space and image

  • The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
  • Abbr : JASA
  • 2017, 52(), pp.3-39
  • DOI : 10.17527/JASA.52.0.01
  • Publisher : 한국미학예술학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Published : October 31, 2017

Seung-Chol Shin 1

1강릉원주대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper critically examines the lecture on Serpent ritual, which was planned by Aby Warburg to overcome his schizophrenia and the obscurantism. Warburg's lecture focused on the images from the region of the Pueblo Indians in North America. In his lecture, Warburg tried to show his scholarly ability and to enlighten the disordered world. He is highly interested in overcoming realities and making distance from them. Warburg focuses on the ritual, in which American indian cope with the painful reality symbolically. They visualize the phobic object, such as snake and lightning, and adjust its destructive energy in the activity of symbol. European technological civilization interrupts the thought through the image, whereas American Indian people have been raising possibility of the various relationship with environment in their own way. Warburg called it as magical causality. Warburg tried to build the cultural memory on the basis of symbolic praxis. He arranged space for the activity of image, namely thought-space, in the European culture. For Warbirg, this is the fundamental act for civilization to prevent the annihilation of distance from painful reality. In his lecture, Warburg achieved successfully his purpose to build thought-space, and he constructed his own methodology for his future project, image-atlas mnemosyne.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.