Dead and Alive: Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas

The article examines some contexts that are relevant to the production of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in terms of the mass dissemination of photographic images and the ordering of images as typologies and taxonomies. The journal, L’Esprit Nouveau , Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of microscopic bodies, Flinders Petrie’s archaeological typologies and photographic methodology and Andre Malraux’s musée éphémère are among key references in the discussion. How, in Bernard Stiegler’s terms a reifying schema is produced is crucial in the discussion leading to how Ranciere’s use of parataxis opens up to the possibility of an organizational order linking the analogue with the digital.