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This contribution, is an extract from Philippe Despoix, KBW – La Bibliothèque Warburg, laboratoire de pensée intermédiale (Presses du réel, Dijon 2023). The book reconstructs the original gestures that established the Warburg Library as a ‘laboratory’ for collective research into the ways in which images and knowledge have been transmitted since antiquity. Implemented by its founder Aby Warburg, with Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, in the renowned setting that became the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in the 1920s, these gestures are combined like so many technical mediations: photographing and collecting, cartographing and putting into series, constructing ‘neighbourhoods’, projecting, and finally exhibiting. Only these modes of arrangement and visualisation allowed for the specific concepts developed at the time, such as the “pathos formula” (Pathosformel), “posthumous life” (Nachleben) and “migration of images” (Bilderwanderung), “intermediate space” (Zwischenraum) and “space of thought” (Denkraum). It is the dynamic articulation of these operations, at the heart of which lies photographic reproduction, that distinguishes the Library and its image collection as an intermediary knowledge device. Its archaeology allows us to clarify the conditions of possibility of the space of thought opened up by the Warburgian instrument, the singularity of its visual anthropology, as well as its critical potential. |
