The Civil War of Images - Political Tragedies, Political Iconographies

Aug 24, 2026

Explores how tragedy operates as a key for understanding the political fate of images in art and media history. Centers on two major re-readings: Georges Didi-Huberman’s political recovery of Warburg’s formulas of pathos and T. J. Clark’s reinterpretation of Picasso’s Guernica. Develops a method linking tragic form to political iconography, including debates over Leviathan’s frontispiece and iconic images surrounding Italy’s long 1968 and the years of lead.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages24

Reading Time1 h 0 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Tragedy as a keyword for political images

From tragic scene to political constellations

Leviathan and the enemy image

Iconic images and contested events: Italy 1968-1970s

The Tragic Scene, or, The Vanished Fist

Atlas Mnemosyne and tragic knowledge

Alberto Toscano* The Civil War of Images Political Tragedies, Political Iconographies An officer of the Nazi occupation forces visited the painter in his studio and, pointing to Guernica, asked: ‘Did you do that?’ Picasso is said to have: answered,‘No, you did.’ —Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’ What would art-historical analysis look like if its paradigm were not the greeting of a friend to a friend, but instead a mortal enemy slipping by unnoticed, or signalling cryptically to a co-conspirator invisible to us?…Lulled into the illusion that the objects we interpret are our friends, we struggle to make sense of enemy pictures. —Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch & Breughel Introduction Tragedy has recently emerged as a privileged keyword through which to think the political fate of images, or the fate of political images, in the history of art and media. I am thinking in particular of two projects that make strong claims to reinterpret the history of visual forms from perspectives at once attached to, and variously despondent about, the passionate marriage of politics and poetics – that marriage hailed, under the names of Rimbaud and Marx, by André Breton, and which today is annulled by a quotidian, if spectacular, barbarism. These projects are Georges Didi-Huberman’s political recovery of Aby Warburg’s morphology of the formulas of pathos – in his book sequence L’Oeil de l’histoire (2009–2016), but also in his remarkable film and video installation at the Palais de Tokyo (co-produced with Arno Gisinger), Nouvelles histoires de fantômes / New Ghost Stories (2014)– and T. J. Clark’s re-reading of Picasso’s Guernica, in * Department of Sociology and Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London 17 alberto toscano 18 an exhibition at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid co-curated with Anne Wagner, and especially in a catalogue essay on ‘Picasso and Tragedy’. Elsewhere, I have tried to take issue with Clark’s framing of ‘politics in a tragic key’,1 whereas here I want to explore how the tragic can serve to configure, formally and visually, the constellations of the political.2 I will thus move from Didi-Huberman and Clark’s partially divergent inflections of the tragic – as atlas and scene respectively – to explore it, with the aid of Carlo Ginzburg’s recent work, from the angle of political iconography. This will then be followed by two explorations of how the political element par excellence of the tragic sensibility – civil war, be it as Greek stasis, Roman bellum civile, or a‘global civil war’ – can be the object oficonographic depiction and contestation. First, I will explore the ongoing debate over the interpretation of the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (which I would like to envisage here, to use a crucial concept from the art historian Joseph Leo Koerner, as a kind of enemy image3) . Second, I will touch on some of the political, semiotic and forensic debates orbiting around the iconic images (and the covert or unwitnessed events) that marked the fateful collapse of Italy’s ‘long 1968’ or ‘red decade’ into the infamous ‘years of lead’ – debates that involved semioticians like Umberto Eco, film-makers like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elio Petri, as well as a vast and fractious galaxy of militancy, image-work and counterinformation. Though I will not directly address our neoliberal age and its mediascape, I hope that this methodological and conceptual inquiry can shed some light on how and why‘tragedy’ and ‘civil war’ can become names for our present, but also what they might occlude – indeed, how much the state simulation of civil war, denounced by Toni Negri from prison in the early 1980s,4 and earlier anatomised by Guy 1 See Alberto Toscano,‘Politics in a Tragic Key’, Radical Philosophy 180, July-August 2013, pp. 25–34; also available at: <[www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/politics-in-a-tragic-key](www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/politics-in-a-tragic-key)>[acces

FAQs

Why does the author use “tragedy” to analyze political images?

Tragedy is treated as a privileged keyword for thinking how images—and the politics inscribed in them—move through art and media history, including what they reveal and what they may conceal.

Which two projects frame the author’s discussion of tragedy and political images?

The discussion builds from Georges Didi-Huberman’s political recovery of Warburg’s morphology of pathos and T. J. Clark’s re-reading of Picasso’s Guernica.

What does the author focus on next after comparing Didi-Huberman and Clark?

The text turns to how tragic sensibility can configure the constellations of the political, using political iconography and examining cases such as interpretations of Hobbes’s Leviathan frontispiece.

Aug 24, 2026

Upload by Callum