Posmodernity and Aby Warburg: Portrait of an Author Beyond His Time

Abstract

We live in the age of the image: advertising, posters, social networks, emoticons, etc. This paper seeks to understand this phenomenon linking two broad domains: the Warburg method and postmodernity. Is it possible to think postmodernity apart from Warburg´s intuitions? Why connecting Warburg with postmodernity? Two issues, at least, are quite present both in Warburg’s thought and in postmodernity: image and tension. Starting from these nodes, an attempt is here made to deploy a critical exercise on postmodernity and its specific forms of knowledge. For which, both the thought of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, which provides a framework to delineate aspects of postmodernity, and Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne shed light, especially if put in dialogue.