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So beyond any thought about thinking women dirty or unclean, we can now reapproach the rituals associated with purity and impurity as a semiotic system, the production of rules and the rituals associated for dealing with the inevitable life-processes that, disturbing them, cause them to come into existence. Impurity thus refers to an experience of encounter with the most heavily freighted zones of experience at the indelibly entwined social/subjective threshold: life and death and the way in which this gives rise to a concept of the feminine.

17 In the form of technological mastery over the natural resources on which human survival persists, Modernity radically transforms the conditions of artistic and cultural reflexes, destroying the distance that shapes what Warburg called Denkraum: the ‘space for devotion and reflection’. Warburg’s tragic vision echoes what Karl Marx wrote more analytically in 1857, in the Grundrisse where he discusses the disparity between the exquisite achievements of Greek art and epic literature and the relatively low level of economic development of that society, attributing to the charm of Greek art its role as metaphorical childhood of humanity.

Warburg’s tragic vision echoes what Karl Marx wrote more analytically in 1857, in the Grundrisse where he discusses the disparity between the exquisite achievements of Greek art and epic literature and the relatively low level of economic development of that society, attributing to the charm of Greek art its role as metaphorical childhood of humanity. Relating, as a materialist would, cultural forms and even its underlying imaginary to the stages of development of the social relations of production, Marx points to the unevenness of that relation in the case of the Greeks, whose glories of the epic are no longer possible in an age of industrial mastery of energy and communication: It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but its foundation.