Pour une anthropologie des singularités formelles. Remarque sur l'invention warburgienne

Résumé Fr

Georges Didi-Huberman: Note on Warburgian invention This article attempts to examine the problems inherent in the method implemented by Aby Warburg under the name of iconology. The need for a «return to Warburg» is expressed in todays hiatus between the Warburgian tradition willingly used by historians and sociologists of art since Erwin Panofsky and Warburgian invention, riskier, more philosophical and more fertile in its ability to formulate the problem of image. Warburg generated a new understanding of images along with a malaise in understanding incarnated in his 1902 article on Florentine portraits, the «missing link» of the wax ex voto modeled dal vivo on their donors. Here Warburgian knowledge is shown to be divided knowledge, i. e. the tradition. Carlo Ginzburg, for example, kept only the answers (e. g. the clue as an identifying signal) and skipped over the questions (e. g. the clue as a disidentifying symptoms). Knowledge for Warburg is open knowledge involving symptoms and multiple hidden motives - similar in that respect to Freudian knowledge - as opposed to signs and deductions in the manner of Panofsky. Finally, it is dialectical knowledge, capable of combining the non-specific, anthropological point of view with the analysis of the specific «formal peculiarities» in each datum. For Warburg, structure can only be attained in peculiarity. That is his methodological lesson for our reflection today.