Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Jul 2022)
The Logic of Survival and the Inheritances of Aby Warburg
Abstract
Taking as starting point a review of David Freedberg's recent critical reading of Warburg's experience with the Pueblo Indians (in which an update of the old classicist "exorcism" is confirmed), the paper proposes to update the distribution of Warburg’s inheritance and demonstrate that, thanks to the persistence of the conservative heritage, what is indirectly illuminated is the presence of significant ramifications still in the other branch of that heritage, the authentic actuality of Warburg. For this reason, the analysis of the recent controversy between Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio Agamben allows us to demonstrate that the Warburg inheritance has as one of its fundamental differences the logic that is assigned to the Nachleben, that is, that inheritance and its distributions are explained in the tension between persistence on one side (Didi-Huberman) and, on the other, the jumps and interruptions that make the first disappearance and redemption later (Agamben) logically necessary. What emerges from the study is less the need to determine who is (philologically, philosophically) right, than to determine what is at stake for a work like Warburg's that, in one way or another, admits and includes that hesitation and that tension.
