The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art

Originally published in French in 2002, The Surviving Image is an extensive examination of the life and work of foundational art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg envisioned an art history that engaged with anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy in order to understand the "life" of images. Drawing on a wide range of Warburg's unpublished letters and diaries, Georges Didi-Huberman demonstrates the complexity and importance of Warburg's ideas and the ways in which his legacy was both distorted and diffused as art history became a "humanistic" discipline. He also addresses broader questions regarding art historians' conceptions of time, memory, and symbols and the relationship between art and the rational and irrational forces of the psyche.