The Epistemic Advantage of Self-Analysis for Cultural-Historical Insights

Abstract

The article is devoted to analyze different versions and drafts of the 1923 Warburg’s Lecture, held in Kreuzlingen in 1923, on his travel to the United States in 1895/96, at the end of his long convalescence in the sanatorium of Ludwig Binswanger, as well as the respective lectures of 1897. This essay focuses on how the dispersion of these texts, their different dates and interferences in publications over decades had epistemological implications in the interpretation of his famous Conference. Thus, the contrast between fundamental points of these texts, both in their forms and contents – including deliberate terminological fluctuations –, raises theoretical questions that interfere with the understanding of Warburg’s work in its methodological specificity. It stands out his insertion in the style of characteristic thought identified as a movement of Kulturwissenschaft, the specificity of the relations of his work with Anthropology and Philology, but also with Psychoanalysis, especially in the process of certain Freudian formulations elaborated from a process of self-analysis.