Emplotting madness: the "dialectic of the monster" in Aby Warburg's Art History

• Autor(a) principal: Damas, Naiara
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: História da Historiografia
• Texto Completo: https://www.historiadahistoriografia.com.br/revista/article/view/1683
• topic: Aby Warburg; Art History; Autobiography; Aby Warburg; História da Arte; Autobiografia

In the year of his death, 1929, German historian Aby Warburg wrote in his diary about the connection he believed existed between his personal life and his research on the Nachleben der Antike. According to him, an “autobiographical reflex” caused him to project his condition as a schizophrenic onto his diagnosis of the “schizophrenia of the West”. This specular effect allows us to see his work not only as an intellectual endeavour but also as a therapeutic space built from the essential interweaving between subject and object. By transforming his psychic drama into a collective cultural drama, Warburg establishes the conditions for his academic research to emerge as a front in his “battle with the monster”. This article seeks to explore this autobiographical reflex analysing three moments of his work as a psycho-historian: the essay on Luther and astrological imagination, the lecture on the Serpent Ritual, and the seminar on the dangers of the historian’s vocation.