This two-day symposium explores Warburg’s ideas and their adumbrations, e.g., his preoccupations with - and intuitions about - memory, both in relation to different forms of artistic creation and in anticipation of concepts related to neuroplasticity and neuroesthetics; the significance and fluency of the image - its elliptical and metaphoric functions - and of affect for the phenomena and qualia of chronology and memory, in concert with contemporary understanding of the dynamic unconscious; and the interdisciplinary mode of thought - the philosophical and art historical, cosmographic and historical - at the heart of Warburg’s atlas. Schedule for Sunday, October 13th: 9:30 am - 11:15 am: Psychosis & Creativity: Binswanger & Warburg roundtable: François Ansermet, Peter Loewenberg, Spyros Papapetros, Robert Penzer, and Louis Rose; 11:30 am - 1:15 pm: Mnemosyne: Memory & Unconscious roundtable: Cristina Alberini, Siri Hustvedt, Christopher Johnson, Joseph LeDoux, and Pierre Magistretti; 1:15 pm - 2:45 pm: Lunch break; 2:45 pm - 4:15 pm: Additional questions/comments regarding both Sunday roundtables and wrap-up
Free and open to the public.
All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!
Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.
This is a past event that happened on Sunday, October 13th 9:30 - 4:15PM.
Participants
Cristina Alberini
Professor in the Center for Neural Science, New York University
Cristina Alberini, Professor in the Center for Neural Science, New York University, has been studying the biological mechanisms of long-term memory for the last 20 years. Her studies explore the biological mechanisms of memory consolidation and reconsolidation, the processes by which newly learned information become long-lasting memories, and how memories are modulated and integrated into... read more! »
François Ansermet
Vice President, Agalma Foundation; Chair, Department of Psychiatry, University of Geneva; Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Children's Hospital of the University Hospitals of Geneva
François Ansermet practices as a psychoanalyst in Geneva, and is a member of the School of the Freudian Cause, the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. He is currently Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Geneva and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Children’s Hospital... read more! »
Siri Hustvedt
Author, Essayist
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, Reading to You; seven novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American, The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, and Memories of the Future, as well as five essay collections, Women, Mothers, Fathers, and Others; A Plea... read more! »
Christopher Johnson
Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA
Christopher D. Johnson, when he is not meandering on Warburg’s Wanderstrassen, teaches Spanish early modern literature at UCLA. Previously he taught comparative literature at Harvard University and early modern English literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought(Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, with Harvard University Press,... read more! »
Joseph LeDoux
Professor of Neural Science, New York University
Joseph LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University. His work, which has spanned the topics of emotion, memory, and consciousness, and their interaction in the brain. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received a numerous awards... read more! »
Peter Loewenberg
Professor Emeritus of Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History and Political Psychology, UCLA
Peter Loewenberg is a Professor Emeritus of Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History and Political Psychology at UCLA. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst and former Dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. He is former Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association [IPA] China Committee and currently teaches Psychoanalysis in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Beijing.... read more! »
Pierre Magistretti
President, Agalma Foundation; Professor, Brain Mind Institute and Professor, Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience, University of Lausanne Medical School
Pierre Magistretti received his M.D. from the University of Geneva in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California at San Diego in 1982. He is Professor and former Director (2005-2012) of the Brain Mind Institute and Professor at the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience at the University of Lausanne Medical School. His laboratory... read more! »
Spyros Papapetros
Associate Professor of Art and Architectural Theory and Historiography, Princeton University
Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural Theory and Historiography, a member of the executive committees of the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Program in Media and Modernity, and a Behrman Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University. He studies the intersections between art, architecture, historiography, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. He is... read more! »
Robert Penzer
Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Weill-Cornell Medical College; Faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute
Robert Penzer, M.D. is Associate Director of the Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation. A graduate of Queens College of the City of New York and Harvard Medical School, he completed his residency and fellowship training at New York-Presbyterian/Weill-Cornell Medical College, where he is Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, and his psychoanalytic training at the New... read more! »
Louis Rose
Professor of Modern European History, Otterbein University; Editor, American Imago
Louis Rose is Professor of Modern European History at Otterbein University in Ohio, a member of the Trustees of the Sigmund Freud Archives, Library of Congress, and the Editor of American Imago. His book, The Freudian Calling: Early Viennese Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Cultural Science (Wayne State University, 1998) received the 1999 Austrian Cultural Institute Prize for Best... read more! »
What should we make now, after our seminar? What kind of reflection afterward? Some routes to follow:
1. The “Warburgian” unconscious
The reflection on memory and unconscious seems to me a very important route to follow; Warburg’s concepts – Nachleben, Pathosformel, Mnemosyne – suggest a “Warburgian unconscious” that does not fall into the concept of the Jungian collective unconscious.
Warburg, as with his Mnemosyne, is more within a “montage” perspective, associations of ideas that always converge on the same ‘real at stake’, elusive, but which the work of art tries to grasp.
The work of art can be seen in terms of what it expresses, in terms of what it strives to grasp, that which escapes it, but which remains present as an enigma.
The work of art touches on a “real” that cannot be represented but which is contained within it and which operates through it.
The work of art makes it possible to access something that is hinted at through it’s absence and which is precisely what is at work in the work of art.
The image according to Warburg holds an enigma (like the Ninfa Fiorentina). It implies something invisible – an unknown (unbewußt) – at the heart of the visible.
An unknown at work in the work of art…
2. Unconscious and Memory
This unknown conjures up memory (continuity and discontinuity of memory processes through reconsolidation) as much as unconscious.
Warburg referred to the biology of his time to try to conceptualize this memory (for example with Richard Semon’s idea of the engram). The discussions that took place makes one want to ‘recreate’ Warburg’s questioning but working with current theories of memory, between re-association of traces and reconsolidation (Cristina Alberini and Joseph LeDoux’s work).
3. Psychosis and scientific thinking
This is the roundtable I took part in. There is the influence of Warburg and of his “madness” on the thinking of Binswanger and on psychoanalysis. Of course what was discussed around psychoanalysis and scientific thinking opened up routes to follow.
Thus: Should there be a call for papers on the themes that came out of our discussions and should this be followed by the preparation of a publication? At any rate there is much to be learnt from Warburg for psychoanalysis… inviting more discussion after this fascinating beginning.
Now what? The question is open!
Further Reading
Warburg’s autobiographical sketch edited by Christoper Johnson and Claudia Wedepohl: ‘From the Arsenal to the Laboratory’ West 86th, 19, 1. 2012
English translation of Warburg’s published writings:
The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, Los Angeles 1999
Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Martin Warnke, Berlin 2000
Selected Studies
Freedberg, David, ‘Warburg’s Mask: A Study in Idolatry’, in Anthropologies of Art, ed. M. Westermann Williamstown 2005
Didi Huberman, Georges, L’image survivante : histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris 2002
Gallese, Vittorio, ‘Aby Warburg and the Dialogue among Aesthetics, Biology and Physiology’ Ph, 2. 2012
Gombrich, Ernst H., Aby Warburg: an Intellectual Biography, London 1970 and Edgar Wind’s review in The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, Oxford 1983
Johnson, Christopher, Memory, Metaphor and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca 2012
Michaud, Philippe Alain, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, New York 2004
Papapetros, Spyros, On the Animation of the Inorganic, Chicago 2012
Pinotti, Andrea, Memorie del neutro: morfologia dell’immagine in Aby Warburg, Milan 2001
Rampley, Matthew, ‘From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of Art’, The Art Bulletin, 79, 1. 1997
Rose, Louis, ‘Interpreting Propaganda: Successors to Warburg and Freud in Wartime,’ American Imago, 60.1. 2003
Wood, Christopher, ‘Aby Warburg, Homo victor’ Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 118, 2011-12
I was fascinated by the discussion among the neuroscientists of the multi-modal – or overdetermined – nature of brain functioning. I still see neuroscience as providing in this way a crucial theoretical and practical foundation for interdisciplinary work. It was new to me that psychoanalysts and neuroscientists in Europe had re-discovered Warburg as a stimulus to this type of thinking, especially regarding the connection between art and movement and the link between the dynamicity of thought and sensory-motor brain activity. As a historian, I was very interested further to hear that experiential, including historical, contexts are beginning to draw greater attention among neuroscientists and that psychoanalysis is playing a critical role in that regard. Finally, for me, the methodological discussions and examples were just as important as the theoretical ones. Interdisciplinary work, I think, will grow only from an understanding of each other’s methods. In that regard, too, I think the conference was of great benefit: it’s important, for example, to hear how a historian-psychoanalyst like Peter [Loewenberg], a Lacanian analyst, a neuroscientist, and a philosopher approach similar material, especially when the n is 1.