Aby Warburg and the Cosmic Philology

Abstract

Is it possible to delimit, under some kind of critical outline, the foundations of what Aby Warburg’s unnamed science sought to address? Certainly the varied attempts to name his enterprise, placed between a Science of Culture, a General Science of the Human (Agamben) and a Demonology of the Technological Age (Ludueña Romandini) allow us to glimpse an underlying Ethics in Warburg’s thought, especially readable in the files, texts and images of the Atlas Mnemosyne. This intellectual and visual monument operates as a witness of a heuristic nucleus, through which an unprecedented epistemological desire continues to swell. Far from trying to resolve or close these problems, which remain as fundamental questions for Warburgian scholars, this paper suggests that the idea of ​​a cosmic philology can help in tracing the scientific goals that, fortunately, increasingly emerge and multiply around the unspeakable aesthetic that this idiosyncratic art historian bequeathed as a living legacy.