The Warburg Institute, founded in the 1920s in Hamburg by art and cultural historian Aby Warburg, is a pioneering institution that has greatly shaped the fields of art, myth, religion, medicine, philosophy, and intellectual history. When, in 1933, the institute was moved to London to escape the Nazis, its research and legacy were protected and further developed by a network of researchers dispersed throughout the UK, the US, and Canada. The first interdisciplinary study of the Warburg network as an arena (...) of intellectual transmission, transformation, and exchange, this volume reveals the dynamics, agencies, and actors at play in the development of the Warburg Institute's program and output, with a specific focus on the role of Raymond Klibansky in the institute's major ventures. Among these collective projects of the institute are the famous Saturn and Melancholy, which blends art history with philosophical and cultural history, and the Latin and Arabic Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi series, which contributed to research on the continuity of Platonic thought. Consulting published and unpublished sources including correspondences, memories, and diaries of affiliated scholars, the essays explore the history of the Warburg Library as a vital cultural institution and the personal and intellectual relationships of the researchers devoted to it. From Hamburg to London to Montreal, Raymond Klibansky and the Warburg Library Network takes readers on a journey into more than forty years of intellectual life at one of the most prestigious cultural research institutes. Contributors include Philippe Despoix, Georges Leroux, Eric Méchoulan, Elisabeth Otto, Elizabeth Sears, Davide Stimilli, Jillian Tomm, Martin Treml, Jean-Philippe Uzel, Regina Weber, Claudia Wedepohl, and Graham Whitaker. (shrink)

Philippe DespoixThis essay focuses on the interaction between the new reproduction media and corresponding reconfiguration of research fields in anthropology using the case of the “techniques of the body” – a concept developed by Marcel Mauss. For Mauss, the initiator of this discipline in France, body skills constituted the most important anthropological entity resulting from the confrontation of technical images and his interest in walking techniques. Three scenarios are especially significant for Mauss’s formulation of “body techniques” as a genuine concept: (...) the front during the World War I, a New Yorker hospital in 1926, and an ethnographical field study conducted in Africa during the late 1920s. Both, the photographic media as well as the Abyssinian expedition of his student Marcel Griaule, whose research publication Mauss co-authored in 1933, take centre stage here. (shrink)

Dans le fragment sur la musique, Max Weber réduit l'objet musical empiriquement descriptible au « médium technique » utilisé par chaque culture, dans la mesure où son analyse reste hétérogène aux valorisations esthétiques. Weber souligne que la reproduction phonographique du son constitue la condition de possibilité d'une analyse empirique du matériau musical, le point de départ d'une musicologie comparée moderne. Approche empirique et comparaison culturelle apparaissent ainsi reliées dans un chiasme « empirico-transcendental » qui fait du médium technique à la (...) fois un objet et un a priori. L'article explicite ce choix méthodologique et ses conséquences pour une sociologie comparative de l'art. (shrink)

Aby Warburg’s research on the heritage of Antiquity can be seen as an investigation into the hybrid forms through which it has been transmitted to us. This inquiry into Western cultural memory is constructed by a unique oeuvre, at the heart of which is the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the physical library Warburg created in Hamburg, which he saw as a medium for new modes of research. The organization of the library aimed to orient scholars to the modalities of the “afterlife” (...) of the representations and gestures associated with pathos that derive from ancient paganism. We also know that Warburg sought to situate his work in the context of a Kulturwissenschaft—a science of culture seen as a “third”.. (shrink)