Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? is the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name that was mounted in 2011 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. With this project, Georges Didi-Huberman continues his exploration of the links between desire, collecting, images, and redemption (or at least remembrance). Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is the point of instigation for the exhibition and catalogue. Didi-Huberman has already written extensively on Warburg, whom he seems to claim as a kindred spirit. Warburg’s work resisted both scientism and aestheticism, though he was fully capable of dogged empiricism and refined taste. Much the same can be said about Didi-Huberman’s work.

Warburg’s Mnemosyne has been liberating for contemporary artists and scholars because no system seemed to be used in creating it beyond the idiosyncratic sensibility of its creator. Another way of saying this is to underscore, as Didi-Huberman does, that nothing is a priori more relevant to a particular image than anything else. Warburg tacked pictures of various sorts onto large plates or boards, images that he would use in lectures or for further research. The juxtapositions of images did not just illustrate lectures or provide evidence for arguments; they revealed new possibilities, new avenues for contemplation, for wonder. He moved images around, sometimes adding new ones or taking others down. Patterns of gesture, of shape, of thematic content sometimes emerged. The images worked off one another and their beholder.

Warburg wanted to understand—perhaps even to feel—the reappearance and reuse of the past in different cultural contexts. His project has what has come to be seen as a cultural studies/visual studies dimension, and it is also an invitation to artists to make the past meaningful anew through juxtaposition, appropriation, repetition. Historical time is not linear in the Warburgian universe. You never know what images will become alive again, or what elements that one thought long dead are actually working in the present.

This revenance, as Didi-Huberman called it in his L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes (Paris: Minuit, 2002), can be an occasion for delight when something one loved and thought lost reappears. It can also be an occasion for horror or despair when something one had hoped destroyed rears its head once again. Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? investigates both how Mnemosyne Atlas fits into Warburg’s life’s work and how artists and writers have made memory come alive through their reconfigurations of images, things, and words. Carrying the world on one’s back is treacherous business; much can be lost along the way. But in unpacking one’s atlas one also discovers or makes sparks—one has a renewed capacity for connections. There was no clear method for this, but suddenly the plates of an atlas help us see the world anew: “The Warburgian atlas is an object conceived on a bet. It is the bet that images, collected in a certain manner, would offer us the possibility—or better still, the inexhaustible resource—of a rereading of the world” (19). Rereading was never fixed into a conclusion or a final set of images. Imaginative reediting was a never-ending process for Warburg, and flipping back and forth through the pages of this catalogue recreates it for the reader.

In his reimagining of Warburg, Didi-Huberman draws on Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s notion of affinities and on Jorge Luis Borges’s notion of defamiliarizing tables (to name just a few of the writers). Foucault called heterotopias places of crisis and deviance, spaces in which freedom is practiced. Warburg’s atlas was a heterotopia of art history—a space of paradox but also of potential power.

In the catalogue, Didi-Huberman spends a considerable amount of time reflecting on the psychic price that Warburg paid for carrying the world on his back. Warburg spent 1921–24 in the Kreuzlingen sanatorium after having suffered a psychotic breakdown. Didi-Huberman imagines that the art historian’s psychic distress was a response to the world’s coming apart during World War I, and there is plenty of suggestive material showing that Warburg felt this coming apart at a deeply personal level. He felt he was investigating dark powers that sometimes overwhelmed forces of stability, and so there are clear affinities between his own breakdown and the collapse of European culture in the First World War. He provided evidence of his mental stability after years of institutionalization by lecturing in the sanatorium on Native American ritual. Atlas is a “suffering knowledge” and a “knowledge of suffering” (76).

The tension between the chaotic forces of disorder and the harmonious forces of stability results in an enormously varied repertoire of gestures. Friedrich Nietzsche’s picture of the struggle between Dionysius and Apollo is one figure of this tension, and the philosopher is an important touchstone for Didi-Huberman. So is Francisco Goya, whose own “anxious gay science” stress-tested notions of Enlightenment against the experience of horror and cruelty. The images in this catalogue, along with the scores of quotations, play off one another with illuminating flashes.

Didi-Huberman’s Atlas is animated by the spirit of the collector, and by the ability of collections to generate new meanings when rearranged. The author is fascinated by lists, by the items that great thinkers and artists notice. How do we learn to attend to the world in different ways? How can we break through conventional associations that allow us to see only a fraction of what we might experience and instead turn ourselves to take in more of what the world might be offering? How do we learn, in other words, to carry (more of) the world on our backs?

An imaginative atlas answers these questions through its reconfigurations. Its connections are associative, the connections of dreams and fantasies, though sometimes also the connections of logic or simple juxtaposition. The trick is to defy our expectations in such a way as to keep us open to the world and to a cultural memory of the world as it has been. The defamiliarization table of Borges or the long lists that Goethe made of everyday items are presented in the catalogue so as to create a sense of wonder. There are certainly affinities between this project and the exhibitions on Wunderkammer that were popular fifteen to twenty years ago. Wonder is not just the beginning of philosophy, of meaning or knowledge, after all. Wonder can be a pathway to heightened experience. “This supposes a style of knowing opposed to any positivist and engaged classification, in what we call here an atlas, that is, a dynamic montage of heterogeneities” (110).

The images in the book work extraordinarily well to underscore the argument—or perhaps it is the argument that works well in helping us see how Goya and August Sander, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Eugène Atget resonate with one another. But this is not solely in the service of a more capacious aestheticism. It is also in the service of learning how to cope with (and remember) the traumas of history. Disaster is never far from Warburg’s or Didi-Huberman’s concerns (see, for instance, Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [click here for review]). Bertolt Brecht’s view that “the dislocation of the world: that is the subject of art” is one of the book’s section titles. “We know of no world that is not disorder,” concluded the playwright (120).

The catalogue for Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? allows us to reflect on disorder, on suffering, and on what Didi-Huberman calls the poverty of the collector. It also allows us to reflect on order, ecstasy, and the practices of the artist. The author/curator’s choice of objects—bits of hair, plants, eyeglasses, buildings, diaries—are an instigation to dream, or at least to imagine. His choice of artists, from Goya to Gerhard Richter, from Robert Smithson to Walid Raad, offer myriad possibilities for looking harder at familiar images and just absorbing new combinations. “An atlas is neither a dictionary nor a scientific manual nor a systematic catalogue. It is a collection of singular things, often extremely heterogeneous, whose affinity produces an infinite (never closed) and strange knowledge” (284), writes Didi-Huberman. Although I did not have the opportunity to see it, this must have been a singular exhibition, and its catalogue makes for singular (but never closed) reading.