Abstract
In his personal letters from the 1920s, Walter Benjamin expressed his desire to join Aby Warburg's circle. Compared with the epistemological resonance of their “Final Plans”, the connection between Benjamin and Warburg during this period was more essential. Warburg described the kinetic form of the inversion and repolarization of history energy as the “Dynamogram,” emphasizing its vertical operation. Similarly, Benjamin proposed a spatialized historical dynamic in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Both the allegory and “Dynamogram” provided a similar historical Structure, the spatialization of time in allegory corresponded to the naturalization of Baroque history structure. The allegorical antinomy signified the kinetic inversion of ancient “Pathosformeln.” Warburg's work carries an implicit dimension of the philosophy of history. Melancholy emerged as the dominant metaphysical emotion in both Baroque history and The Mnemosyne Atlas. Here, the corpse served as a medium connecting the viscera and the astra, revealing a cosmological soul dynamic. The stage of the tragic drama (Trauerspiel) was inevitably occupied by ghosts, and Baroque history was a “ghost story (Gespenstergeschichte)” in Warburg's sense.
Keywords
Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Baroque, tragic drama, The Mnemosyne Atlas
First Page
213
Last Page
223
Recommended Citation
Qiao, Hongkai. 2025. "Skull or Angel: A “Dynamogram” of “Auffahrt”: On Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin's Baroque." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 45, (1): pp.213-223. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol45/iss1/20
