Peter J. Schwartz, Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature an der Boston University, hat soeben in der Zeitschrift "New German Critique" (Nr. 139, Februar 2020) einen instruktiven Aufsatz über "Aby Warburg and Cinema, Revisited" veröffentlicht, der hier zur Lektüre empfohlen sei. Überzeugend ist vor allem die auf intensiver Quellenbefragung beruhende kritische Auseinandersetzung des Verfassers mit Positionen von Autoren wie Georges Didi-Huberman, Philippe-Alain Michaud und Thomas Hensel.
Schwartz zieht am Schluss seines Beitrags folgendes Fazit:
"This continuum of conceptual development [Bezug sind im Zusammenhang "ways to address the exciting, empowering, and sometimes debilitating ambiguity of the affectively laden images that Warburg called Pathosformeln"] owes a great deal to Warburg's thinking on the relationship of words and images on the printed page, and something, no doubt, to the modernist Zeitgeist, but little or nothing to cinema. In the end, the strong thesis of a relationship to film may be something of a pathos formula in its own right: it reinterprets an exciting yet often ambiguous corpus of thought in a manner that resonates with our moment. Warburg himself might have cautioned us to beware of investing such monstra with life by reifying our own projections. A more accurate genealogy of Warburg's praxis of image arrangement – one that correctly perceives its origin in a wartime concern with the role of print media and expanding communications networks in mobilizing traditional forms of irrationality to often violent ends at moments of crisis – may permit us more clearly to see the relevance of his work to our own current media conjuncture."
