## Giorgio Agamben (1999). *Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science*. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Author(s): [[Authors/Giorgio Agamben]] Zotero Link: [Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science](zotero://select/items/@agamben_aby_1999) Index: ### 89 - The essence of Warburg’s teaching and method - as a rejection of the stylistico-formal (스타일을 연구하는) method dominant in art history at the end of the nineteenth century. - displaced the focal point of re­ search from the study of styles and aesthetic judgment to the program­matic and iconographic aspects of the artwork. - 하지만 그의 method가 현재의 iconographic과는 다르다는 점은 강조해야할 것 같다. ### 90 - he realised that any attempt to **comprehend the mind of a Renaissance painter was futile** as long as the problem was confronted from a purely formal point of view. - “**honest repugnance(혐오)**” - Warburg’s obsessive, almost pious attention to the force of images proves, If proof is necessary, that he was all too sensitive to “**for­mal values**.” - Pathosformel 컨셉은 which designates an indis­soluble imertwining of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content, suffices to demonstrate that Warburg’s thought cannot in any sense be in­terpreted in terms of such inauthentic(확실하지 않은) oppositions as those between form and content and between the history of styles and the history of culture. - It is as if Warburg were interested in this discipline solely (0 place within it the seed that would cause it to explode. The “good God” who, according to the famous phrase, “hides in the details” was for Warburg nor the guardian spirit of art history but the dark demon of an unnamed science whose contours we are only today beginning to glimpse. ### 91 - Tito Vignoli. In his Myth and Science, Vignoli had argued for an approach to the study of the problems of man that combined anthropology, eth­nology, mythology, psychology, and biology. - is meaningful only if understood as a uni­fied effort, across and beyond art histOry, directed toward a broader sci­ence for which he could not find a definite name but on whose configu­ration he tenaciously laboured until his death. - “collection of documents referring to the psychology of human expression.” - ::10. See Gombrich, Aby Warburg, p. 222.:: - Warburg writes, cannot grasp the image’s biological necessity as a product **“between religion and artistic production.”** - 10. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, p. 89 ### 92 - “By the method of my interpretation of the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, I hope to have shown that an iconological analysis, which, in refusing to submit to petty territorial restrictions, shies away neither from recognising that antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern age are in fact one interre­lated epoch, nor from examining the works of the freest as well as the most applied art as equally valid documents of expression. - ::12. Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,” in German Essays on Art History, ed. Gert Schiff ( New York: Continuum, 1988), pp. 252-53.:: - Warburg’s use of iconography always transcends the mere identification of a subject and its sources; from the perspective of what he once defined as “a diagnosis of Western man,” **he aims to configure a problem that is both historical and ethical**. - “historical semantics,” in which the history of a word becomes **both the history of a culture and the configuration of its specific vital problem**. - 아비가 영향 받은 한사람 ➡︎ Once again, Warburg’s method and concepts are clarified if one compares them to the ideas that led Spitzer, in his research into semantic history, to accentuate the simultaneously “conservative” and “progressive” character of our cultural tradition, in which apparently **great changes are always in some way connected co the legacy of the past** (as is shown by (he striking continuity of the semantic patrimony of modern European languages, which is essentially Graeco-Roman-Judaeo­ Christian) . - 커다란 변화는 언제나 어떤 식으로 과거의 유산과 관계있다. - why Warburg ultimately concentrated all his at­tention on the problem of symbols and their life in social memory. ### 94 - 와버그에게 심볼과 이미지는 같은 롤을 가지고 있다 ➡︎ **engram** ➡︎ 개인의 신경 시스템에 - they are the crystallisation of an energetic charge and an emotional expe­rience that survive as an inheritance transmitted by social memory and that, like electricity condensed in a Leyden jar, become effective only through contact with the “selective will” of a particular period. - Leyden jar - ![[LeydenJarHP-85009256.jpg]] - **For Warburg, the attitude of artists toward images inherited from traditions** was therefore conceivable in terms neither of aesthetic choice nor of neutral reception; rather, **for him it is a matter of a confrontation**—which is lethal(치명적인) or vitalising, depending on the situation—with the tremendous energies stored in images, **which in themselves had the potential either to make man regress into sterile subjection(지배) or to direct him on his path toward salvation(구원) and knowledge.** - For Warburg, the symbol thus belongs to an intermediary domain be­ tween consciousness and primitive reactions, and it bears in itself the pos­sibilities of both regression(후퇴) and higher knowledge. ### 97 - In the wake of Nietzsche, Warburg was the first to affirm this polarity in the domain of art history, which in his time was still dominated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s model. - Warburg’s hermeneutic circle can thus be figured as a spiral that moves across three main levels: 1. the first is that of iconography and the history of art; 2. the second is that of the history of culture; 3. and the third and broad­est level is that of the “nameless science” to which Warburg dedicated his life and that aims to diagnose Western man through a consideration of his phamasms. - The circle that revealed the good God hidden in the de­tails was not a vicious circle, even in the Nierzschean sense of a circolus vitiosus deus. ### 99 - 파노프스키가 3개의 모멘트로 해석의 단계를 구분했는데 1. “Natural or primary subject,” corresponds to pre-iconographic description 2. The second, which is that of the “secondary or conventional subject, constitutive of the world of images, of stories and of allegories,” corresponds to iconographic analysis. 3. The third stratum, the deepest, is that of the “intrinsic meaning or content, constitutive of symbolic values.” “The discovery and interpretation of there ‘symbolical’ values…is the object of what we may call ‘iconology’ as opposed to ‘iconography.” - ::Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 31.:: - but if we try to spec­ify the nature of these “symbolic values,” we see that Panofsky oscillates between considering them as “documents of the unitary sense of the con­ception of the world” and considering their interpretation as “symptoms” of an artistic personality. - 결국 두가지로 파놉스키도 흔들린다. 하나는 유니터리 센스의 conception of the world - 그리고 아티스트의 personality의 ‘증상’ 이란 두개 - 그래서 그의 미켈란젤로에 대한 에세이에서 - he thus seems to understand artistic symbols as **“sympto­matic of the very essence of Michelangelo’s personality.”** - The absence of a broader theoret­ical perspective in which to situate “symbolic values” thus makes it ex­tremely difficult to widen the hermeneutic circle beyond art history and aesthetics (which is not to say that Panofsky did not often succeed bril­liantly within their borders).31 - 워버그가 죽은후 누구도 그의 후계자를 자청하지 않았고 그의 인스티튜션을 물려받지도 않았다. - **As to Warburg, he would never have considered the essence of an artist’s personality as the deepest content of an image.** - **For War­ burg, the significance of images** instead lay in the fact that, being strictly speaking neither conscious nor unconscious, **they constituted the ideal terrain for a unitary approach to culture, one capable of overcoming the opposition between history**, as the study of “conscious expressions,” and anthropology, as the study of “unconscious conditions,” which Levi- Strauss identified twenty years later as the central problem in the relations between these two disciplines . ### 100 - 그의 리서치는 매우 anthropology of western culture와 근접해 있다. - a study of the *Zwischenraum* incessant symbolic work of social memory is carried out. - His works allow his name to be inscribed alongside those of Mauss, Sapir, Spitzer, Kennyi, Usener, Dumezil, Benveniste, and many-but nOt very many-others. - 아감벤 주장: Perhaps the fracture that in our culture divides poetry and philosophy, art and science, the word that “sings” and the word that “remembers,” is nothing other than one aspect of the very schizophrenia of Western cul­ture that Warburg recognised in the polarity of the ecstatic nymph and the melancholic river god. ### 101 - The itinerary of linguistics that in Benveniste’s generation had already exhausted the grand nineteenth-century project of comparative grammar can serve as an example here. - Benveniste가 비교문법을 역사학계의 인식론적 카테고리의 그 한계까지 끌고 온것이 흔들린 것처럼 보이지만 - Benveniste의 enunciation 이론은 언어 과학을 전통적 테레토리의 철학으로 데려왔다. - In borh cases, this coincided with a movement by which science (which includes linguistics, the so­ called “pilot science” of the human sciences) was forced to confront a limit, which, in being recognised, seemed to allow for the delimitation of a field on which it would be possible to conStruct a general science of the human freed from the vagueness of interdisciplinarity. - 워버그나 벤베니스트 둘 케이스 모두 과학(which includes linguistics, the so-called “pilot science” of the human sciences)이 강합적으로 그 한계점을 마주했었어야 하는 것에 부합된다. 인식되고 그러므로, 필드의 한계설정(delimitation) 으로 하여금 to construe general science of the human freed from the vagueness of interdisciplinary에서 무엇이 가능할 것인가 ### 102 - 워버그의 작업이 아직도 relevant한것은 - **the decisive(결정적인) [[Gesture and Thought|gesture]] with which he withdraws the artwork (and also the image) from the study of the artist’s consciousness and unconscious structures.** - 그가 아트워크를 아티스트의 의식과 무의식의 structure라는 것에서 벗어나게 한 결정적인 제스처이다. - Here, once again, it is possible to draw analogies with **Benveniste**. While phonology (and, in its wake, Lévi-Straussian anthropology) turned to the study of unconscious structures, Benveniste’s theory of enuncia­tion, **treating the problem of the subject and the passage from language (lingua) to speech (parola)**, opened linguistics to a field that could not be properly defined through the conscious/unconscious opposition. - conscious/unconscious opposition의 한계점에서 벗어난것 - In Warburg, precisely what might have appeared as an unconscious structure par excellence—the image—instead showed itself **to be a decisively historical element**, the very place of human cognitive activity in **its vital confrontation with the past**. What thus came to light, however, was neither a kind of diachrony(통시태, 역사적 변화) nor a kind of synchrony but, rather, **the point at which a human subject was produced in the rupture of this opposition.** - the status of the image and, in particular, the **relation between image and speech**, imagination and rule, which in [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] had already produced the aporetic situation of the transcendental imagination. - 그의 가르침에서 가장 큰 레슨은 ➡︎ image is the place in which the subject strips it­ self of the mythical, psychosomatic character given to it, in the presence of an equally mythical object, **by a theory of knowledge that is in truth simply disguised metaphysics**. - In this sense, Warburg’s “nymph” is neither an external object nor an intrapsychical(정신내부의) entity but instead the **most limpid figure** of the historical subject itself. ### 103 - perhaps, as W. Kemp has sug­gested, we should look to heterodox(이단적) research, such as [[Walter Benjamin|Benjamin]]’s studies of the dialectical image. It continues to be imperative(긴급한), in the meantime, that Warburg’s unpublished papers in the London Institute appear in print.