My interest in the intellectual tradition inspired by Aby Warburg and developed in the Library and Institute named after him (first in Hamburg, then in London) played an important role in the collection of essays we are talking about: Miedo, Reverencia, Terror. Cinco ensayos de iconografĂa polĂtica. As I argued in the introduction, Aby Warburg’s notion of Pathosformeln (formulae of pathos) provided —as I realized retrospectively— a sort of fil rouge, a red thread that runs throughout all those essays.
Images are —nowadays more than ever— unavoidable. We are surrounded by and submerged in images: in the street, in movie theatres, on the screens of cell-phones, computers, TV sets. Those images act upon us (although we may also resist them). They shape our social environment, they mold our minds and emotions: we must learn to analyze them and their power.