Guided Pathway

An unresolved coda

The ’last’ image (#14), however, unambiguously gestures at a transcendent solution, even as it makes tangible the pathos of earthly creatures. The clipping’s layout seems to imitate a Renaissance emblem, replete with gnomic superscript, compelling image, and explanatory subscript. Its superscript consists of four seemingly unrelated headlines—though “ab Nach Lakehurst,” a reference to where the Zeppelin landed in New Jersey, takes us almost full circle back to panel C [#5.1-3], where this technological marvel flies, as of then, undaunted. In any case, the imago, Warnke and Brink observe, concerns a “Eisenbahnunglück bei Düren: ein Sterbender erhält das letzte Sakrament” [train accident near Düren: a dying man receives Last Rites]; while the subscript, the photograph’s caption, secures the image’s (discursive) meaning. The ’last’ note in Warburg’s Gesamtkunstwerk, this “Transubstantiation” suggests that, despite the lethal chaos produced by distance-annuling technology, the possibility remains humanity might master its fear of death through symbolic practices. That Warburg makes this the subject of the last panel may well correspond to an apprehension of his own impending death—his heart condition had worsened in the summer of 1929—but also to the notion that recent political and technological changes for all their ominous effects continued to engage and remake antique pathos formulas. Still, with this panel’s enormous temporal scope (from the ninth century to 1929), cultural heterogeneity (from Japan to Italy and Germany), and thematic tensions (between the sacred and profane, the individual and mass), here again syncrisis, or the comparison of opposites, is the rule: the inexhaustible metonymies of the Atlas yield no clear resolution – nor, I would add, should we want them to.