KBW - THE WARBURG LIBRARY, LABORATORY OF INTERMEDIATE THOUGHT

The Warburg Cultural Library operated in the 1920s as a real research laboratory on the forms of transmission of images since Antiquity. If its founder Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was the central figure, this pioneering library was always imagined as a collective enterprise, and would be unthinkable without the essential contribution of others personalities (Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing in particular) whose importance begins finally to be recognized. A laboratory at the crossroads of disciplines, the KBW was also and above all a space of intermedial thought, where so many are combined technical gestures: photographing and collecting, mapping and putting into series, build neighborhoods, project, finally exhibit. Only these modes of visualization allows us to understand the full scope of Warburgian concepts known (“pathos formula”, “posthumous life”, “migration of images”...). It is the dynamic articulation of these operations, at the heart of which lies photographic reproduction, which distinguishes the Library and its collection of images as a multi-media device of knowledge. Its reconstruction detailed here explains the conditions of possibility of the “space of thought” opened by the Warburgian instrument, the singularity of his anthropology visual, as well as its ever-critical potential.