Didi-Huberman Dialektyka Monstrum (o Warburgu).pdf

Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 24 No. 5 November 2001 pp. 621±645

Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the

symptom paradigm

Georges Didi-Huberman

In 1923 Aby Warburg defined the aim of his library, but also his work in general,

as eine Urkundensammlung zur Psychologie der menschlichen Ausdruckskunde. 1

What else, then, is the `science without a name' invented by Warburg, if not a

living metamorphosis of traditional art history ± this ostensible history of objects

± into a history of the psyche, as embodied in styles, forms, `pathos formulae',

symbols, fantasies, beliefs; in short, all that Warburg intended by the term

Ausdruck (`expression')? 2 A metamorphosis in which `historical psychology'

profoundly modifies the positivist point of view of history and `expression'

profoundly modifies the idealist point of view of art.

`Historical psychology'? This means that the time of the after-life is a psychic

time; a hypothesis that must be situated on several levels all at once. First, the

chosen motifs of Nachleben are the great psychic powers: pathetic

representations, dynamogrammes of desire, moral allegories, figures of mourning,

astrological symbols, etc. 3 Next, the domains of Nachleben are style, gesture and

the symbol, as vectors of exchange between heterogeneous spaces and times. 4

Finally, the processes of Nachleben can only be understood from the basis of their

`connaturality' with psychic processes in which the actuality of the primitive

manifests itself. Thus Warburg's interest for the latent or critical aspects of the

Pathosformel, as well as those that pertain to the drives and to fantasy.

It is highly significant that Warburg undertook a vast, never finished, and

never published `foundational' project on the psychology of art while working on

his dissertation on Botticelli, a work through which dream motifs, themes of

unconscious desire, of the erotische Verfogungscene (`erotic chase'), of sacrifice

and death discretely, yet confidently, make their way. In the three hundred or so

folios of this manuscript, written between 1888 (when he was just twenty-two

years old) and 1905, Warburg devised an entire psychological and philosophical

vocabulary (we would not want to call it a system) aimed at working out such

formidable problems as `art and thought', the relationship between `form and

content', the `theory of the symbol', the status of `anthropomorphism', the

`association of ideas', `images of thought', etc. 5

A vocabulary of `expression' remains omnipresent in all his attempts to

formulate a psychology of art, continuing up to the 1927 Allgemeine Ideen. 6 If all

history falls within the realm of a psychology then, for Warburg, the entire history

of images necessarily falls within the realm of a psychology of expression.AsI

ß Association of Art Historians 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers,

108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

621

ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM

have started to indicate, what is being formulated here is a psyche unconfined to

the familiar, heroic tales of artistic `personality'. This formulation points toward a

more basic and transversal, impersonal and trans-individual psyche; a psychic

condition common to what we customarily call body and soul, image and word,

representation and movement, and anthropologically central to what has been

somewhat impoverished by classical aesthetics under the concept of imitation. 7

This not only means that Nachleben should be thought of as a psychic time, it

means that the Pathosformel should be thought of as a psychic gesture. Gertrud

Bing recognized this fundamental trait. According to her, `pathos formulae' make

visible `not a quality of the external world like movement, distance or space, but a

state of the emotions'. 8 Bing, the historian slightly alarmed by the swampy psychic

terrain she has just touched on, concluded: `We are here treading on dangerous

ground.' 9 Yet, the Warburgian demand, dangerous or not, lies therein: the

Pathosformel must not be translated in terms of a semantics or semiotics of

corporeal gestures, but in terms of a psychic symptomatology. Pathos formulae are

the visible symptoms ± corporeal, gestural, presented, figured ± of a psychic time

irreducible to the simple thread of rhetorical, sentimental, or individual turns.

But, where does one find the theoretical paradigm for this demand? This was

Warburg's lengthy and obstinate quest. Its vocabulary would undoubtedly remain

that of expression, but its point of view was that of the symptom. For expression,

according to Warburg, is not the reflection of an intention, but is instead the

return of the repressed in the image. This is why Nachleben appears as the time of

a contretemps in history (thought of in terms of the development of styles), and

Pathosformel as the gesture of a counter-movement in history (thought of in terms

of the storia that an image represents).

`Expression', then. But symptomatic expression. [Translator's note: The word

Georges Didi-Huberman uses in French is `symptomale'. He wants to make a

distinction between symptomale, which is a critical term, and symptomatic, which

is a clinical term.] What kind of symptom? Symptom of what? And, above all,

symptom how? Without being certain what he would find, Warburg first turned

to medicine for answers. As early as 1888, it was the medical metaphor that

sprang to mind when he tried to express his hope for an epistemological

breakthrough, his desire to finish with the `aestheticising history of art' of

connoisseurs and sogennanten Gebildeten (`so-called cultured') specialists:

We of the younger generation want to attempt to advance the science of art

so far that anyone who talks in public about art without having specially

and profoundly studied this science should be considered just as ridiculous

as people are who dare to talk about medicine without being doctors. 10

When Warburg spoke of his desire for epistemological displacement, it was

again medicine, along with anthropology, that would dismantle the judgements of

taste proper to the `aestheticizing history of art'. He needed ethnology ± via his

voyage to Hopi country ± to teach him the meaning of the primitive, and medicine

to teach him the meaning of the symptom, so that traditional art history could cede

to an anthropology of images capable of `organically' grasping the stylistic and

symbolic phenomena of the Florentine Renaissance and the German Reformation:

622

ß Association of Art Historians 2001

ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM

Amongst other things, I was sincerely disgusted with the aestheticizing

history of art (der aÈ sthetisierenden Kunstgeschichte). It seemed to me that

the formal contemplation of the image ± which does not consider it a

biologically necessary product (als biologisch notwendiges Produkt)

between religion and art practice (which I only understood later) ± led to

such sterile prattling that after my trip to Berlin in the summer of 1896 I

decided to switch to medicine. I had no idea that after my trip to America

the organic relationship between the art and religion of `primitive' peoples

would appear with such clarity that I plainly saw the identity, or rather the

indestructibility of primitive man who remains eternally the same

throughout all epochs (die UnzerstoÈ rbarkeit des primitiven Menschen zu

[der] allen Zeiten), in such a way that I could demonstrate that he was as

much an organ of the Florentine Renaissance as he was, later, of the

German Reformation. 11

In fact, between 1891 and 1892 Warburg had already taken preparatory courses

in psychology for medical students. It seems clear, then, that for the young historian

of images medicine signified medicine of the soul above all. As nearly every

connoisseur of Warburg's work would attest, 12 from this moment on the question

remains as to which psychological or, rather, psychopathological framework

Warburg needed to found his stylistic analysis and symptomatology of renascent

culture. To claim that he was trying to get at the `symptoms of a collective spirit' is

far too imprecise. 13 Reducing the question of the symptom to one of a Hegelian

`meaning of history,' as Gombrich attempted, is even more unjustified. 14 And, calling

upon the obscure, if original, evolutionist Tito Vignoli as evidence for Warburg's

recourse to the pyschopathological paradigm is equally insufficient. 15

Only from 1918 onwards, from the very pit of his own psychological collapse,

did Warburg begin to see the proximity between his intellectual project and

psychoanalysis. By glossing over this episode, Gombrich effected a considerable

act of epistemological censure. 16 Once more, it was a question of burying the

demons of the Freudian unconscious ± as well as of the Nietzschean Dionysiac ±

under the ancient ramparts of a Mitteleuropa in ruins. It was a question of

providing the, henceforth Anglo-Saxon, `Warburgian tradition' with the return to

order of a philosophy of the faculties (Panofsky traded Nietzsche and the eternal

return for Kant and the a priori), bolstered by a `positive' psychology (Gombrich

traded Freud and fantasy for Popper and perception). In order to break through

this censure, we must try to re-imagine the path that brought Warburg to Freud.

* * *

Warburg's dreamed-of `historical psychology of expression', the theoretical

foundation for his anthropology of images, was envisaged, above all, as a

psychopathology. The Warburgian history of images attempts to analyse the

pleasure of formal invention, during the Renaissance for example, as well as the

`culpability' of repressed memory that can be manifest there. It evokes movements

of artistic creation, as well as `auto-destructive' compulsions at work in the very

exuberance of forms. It highlights the coherence of aesthetic systems, as well as

ß Association of Art Historians 2001

623

ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM

1 NiccoloÁ

dell'Arca, The

Lamentation of

Christ, Detail of

Mary Magdelene,

c. 1480. Terracotta,

Bologna: Santa

Maria della Vita.

Photo: Antonio

Guerra.

the sometimes `irrational' nature of the beliefs upon which they are founded. It

studies the unity of stylistic epochs, as well as the `conflicts' and the `formation of

compromises' that can traverse and dissociate them. It considers the beauty and

charm of masterpieces, as well as the `anxiety' and the `phobia' for which, says

Warburg, they provide a kind of `sublimation'.

Naturally, the theoretical archaeology of this vocabulary requires examina-

tion. It already reveals that if the symbol was at the centre of Warburg's pre-

occupations, it was not there as an abstract synthesis of reason and unreason, of

form and matter, etc. 17 but as a concrete symptom of a cleavage ceaselessly at

work in the `tragedy of culture'. When Warburg rests his eyes on a pathetic Mary

624

ß Association of Art Historians 2001

ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM

2 Bertoldo di

Giovanni,

Crucifixion (Detail),

c. 1485. Bronze

relief. Museo

Nazionale del

Bargello. Photo: the

author.

Magdelene by NiccoloÁ dell'Arca, Donatello, or Bertoldo di Giovanni (plates 1 and

2), it becomes clear that gestural `expression' is only symbolic in that it is first

symptomatic. Here, the gestural formula `expresses' solely to crystallize a moment

of intensity for the female saint, which appears, above all, as a veritable rupture in

the symbolic order of evangelical history. It is the moment of a contretemps in

which the unbridled desire of Antique maenads is repeated in Mary Magdelene's

body. 18 It is the gesture of a counter-movement which recalls, in Mary

Magdelene's body, a paganism that is duly ignored by the entire symbolic

content ± the sacrifice of the incarnate Word. Therefore, it seems to be a question

of something like a symptom.

ß Association of Art Historians 2001

625

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: