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Une Machine Penser

Carlo Ginzburg

Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 1, Winter 2012, pp. 79-85 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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UNE MACHINE PENSER

Carlo Ginzburg

An engine that helps you to think; an engine to think with, to think about. But what else, one could ask, are research libraries or? May we say that there is some-thing special about the Warburg Library?

I

I entered the Warburg or the rst time in the summer o 1960 . My mentor, DelioCantimori, who was spending some time in London doing research, o ered me atour o the Library, commenting upon its peculiar arrangement. Be ore leavingthe building we met Gertrud Bing (at the time, she was the Institutes director), who exchanged a ew words with Cantimori.

They were old riends. Cantimoris connection with the Warburg went back to the thirties. In 1937 he had published an essay (Rhetoric and Politics inItalian Humanism) in the rst issue o the Journal o the Warburg Instituteandhad contributed to the Bibliography o the Survival o the Classics , also publishedby the Institute. 1 For many years he had been traveling across Europe, visiting

Common Knowledge18:1

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1456890

2012 by Duke University Press

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1. A Bibliography o the Survival o the Classics , vol. 2, The Publications o 1932 1933(London: Warburg Institute,1938 ). Cantimori contributed orty entries, which are not included in the bibliography o his writings ound in Gio-

vanni Miccoli, Delio Cantimori. La ricerca di una nuova crit-ica storiografca(Torino: G. Einaudi, 1970 ). See also DelioCantimori, Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism,trans. Frances Yates, Journal o the Warburg Institute 1.2

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(October 1937 ):83102 . A longer, unpublished Italian ver-sion is included in Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinque-cento, ed. Adriano Prosperi (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1992):485 511. Prosperis pre ace is the best available introduc-tion to Cantimori.

2. Carl Schmitt, Principii poli tici del nazionalsocialismo,ed. Delio Cantimori (Florence: Sansoni, 1935 ), 1 42 ;Note sul nazionalsocialismo, Archivio di studi corpora-tivi 5 (1934 ): 291 328. See also Cantimori, Politica e sto-ria contemporanea. Scritti 1927 1942, ed. Luisa Mangoni(Torino: G. Einaudi, 1991 ); Mangonis introduction,Europa sotterranea, is o undamental importance. Thedebate over Cantimoris politics in the thirties is still very much alive.

3. Delio Cantimori, Appunti sulla propaganda, Civilt ascista 7 (1941): 3756. C . Cantimori, Politica, 683 99 .

4. Gertrud Bing, A. M. Warburg, Journal o the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1965 ): 299 313 (intro. to Aby

Warburg, La rinascita del paganesimo antico, trans. E. Can-timori Mezzomonti [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966 ]).

5. Annales E. S.C. 15.3 (May June 1960 ): 556 68 . A longer, unpublished Italian version is included in Canti-

mori, Eretici , 551 62.6. Cantimori, Eretici , 555 56.

libraries and archives, looking or traces le t by sixteenth- century Italian heretics. The outcome o this long, painstaking work was an epoch- making book ( Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, 1939). It is not surprising that this highly impressive younghistorian (he was born in 1904 ) attracted the attention o the Warburgians (Ger-

trud Bing as well as, I presume, Edgar Wind). But Cantimoris allegiance toascism in the thirties would have made this relationship complicated, i not utterly impossible. It must be noted that Cantimoris writings dealing with con-temporary Italian and German politics, including his deep interest in the work o Carl Schmitt (whom he introduced to the Italian public), were not unrelated tohis scholarly work.2 Cantimoris essay Rhetoric and Politics, or instance, wasobviously inspired by his interest in contemporary propaganda, and vice versa. 3 A ter a tortuous and pain ul trajectory, he became close to, then a member o ,the Italian Communist Party, which he le t in 1956 . His wi e, Emma Cantimori Mezzomonti, had been an underground member o the Communist Party in thethirties. She later translated into Italian a selection o Aby Warburgs essays, withan introduction (her last essay) by Gertrud Bing. 4

This relationship with the Warburg a largely unexplored chapter o Can-timoris controversial biography would repay closer scrutiny, but my concernhere is di erent. Retrospectively, I am inclined to think that my rst encounter with the Warburg Institute and its Library oriented (in many ways, mostly uncon-scious) my later involvement with them. At that time (May June 1960), Cantimori

had just published in Annales a long review o Au coeur religieux du XVIme sicle: acollection o essays by Lucien Febvre, the journals ormer director and co ounder. 5 Cantimori opened his review with some autobiographical recollections, ollowedby a series o remarks, one o which drew a parallel between Febvre and Aby Warburg. Those two scholars and their respective scholarly traditions were (Can-timori noted) very di erent and nearly ignored each other, but they shared arejection o traditional disciplinary boundaries, an impulse to convey the mean-ing o larger historical realities through signi cant details, and the art (larte)o rescuing articulate human voices rom apparently marginal documents. 6

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9. Fritz Saxl, Ernst Cassirer, in The Philosophy o Ernst Cassirer , ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 2nd ed. (1949 ; New York: Tudor, 1959 ), 47 51, esp. 48; Cassirer, Der Beg-ri der symbolischen Form im Au bau der Geisteswis-senscha ten, Vortrge der Bibliothek Warburg 1 (1921 22):11 39, esp. 11 12. This and other versions o Cassirers visit to the Library are discussed in Salvatore Set tissessential essay, Warburg continuatus : Descrizione di unabiblioteca, Quaderni storici 58 (1985): 5 38, esp. 7 11.

10. The title continues as ollows: Erster Band. Die Erschei-nungen des Jahres 1931 in Gemeinscha t mit Fachgenossenbearbeitet von Hans Meier, Richard Newald, Edgar Wind,herausgegeben von der Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig: Teub-ner, 1934 ). Fritz Saxl, The History o Warburgs Library

(1886 1944 ), in Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography,ed. Ernst Hans Gombrich (London: Warburg Institute,1970 ), 336 , mentions an attack (which I have not seen) inthe Nazi magazine Vlkischer Beobachter on Edgar Windsintroduction to the Kulturwissenscha tliche Bibliographie.

11. See Michael Baxandalls remark in Allan Langdale,Art History and Intellectual History: Michael Baxan-dalls Work between 1963 and 1985 (PhD diss., Uni- versit y o Cali ornia, Santa Barbara, 1995 ), 358. On thetension within Warburgs thought, see Settis, Warburgcontinuatus , as well as (with respect to a speci c issue)my introduction to Peur, rvrence, ter reur. Quatre essais diconographie politique(Dijon: Presses du Rel, 2011 ).

highly rational salamanders, able to pass through re without burning them-selves. But Warburg himsel got burned.

III

Any interaction with reality (as I learned most e ectively rom Ernst Gombrichs writings) implies lters. My encounter with the Warburg Library had been medi-ated by Cantimori and, more indirectly, by his relationship with the Warburg-ians rst o all, Bing. Cantimori and Bing were responding to Aby Warburgsown work (and Bing, to his personality as well). Moreover, both were responding,as so many others have done since then, to the Library and its arrangement.

Ernst Cassirers comment a ter his irst visit to the Library is amous. According to Fritz Saxl, who had walked him through the Library (at that time Warburg was a patient in Binswangers clinic in Kreuzlingen), Cassirer said:This library is dangerous. I shall either have to avoid it altogether or imprisonmysel here or years. The philosophical problems involved are close to my own,but the concrete historical material which Warburg has collected is overwhelm-ing.9 Some years later, Cassirer pointed out that the historical problem addressedby the Warburg Library was the survival ( Nachleben) o antiquity. Philosophicalperspective and historical speci city come together in the title o the bibliogra-phy published in Germany in 1934 , immediately a ter the trans er o the War-

burg Bibliothek rom Hamburg to London: Kulturwissenscha tliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike.10 In the title o the second volume ( A Bibliography o theSurvival o the Classics ), the adjective Kulturwissenscha tlichdisappeared a symp-tom o the Institutes e ort to adjust to the English intellectual landscape andalso, perhaps, to overcome an unresolved tension within Warburgs own think-ing.11 But that tension did not a ect the physiognomy o the Warburg InstituteLibrary, whose scope includes not only the survival o the classics in a broadsense, but also the much broader space that Aby Warburg regarded as his own,

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12. See Settis, Nota nal. 1995 , in Warburg continu-atus: Descripcin de una biblioteca(Barcelona: Ediciones deLa Central, 2010 ), 71 88.

13. Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti (Torino: G. Einaudi,1966 ). The paragraph in question is on pp. 52 53 o theEnglish translation: The Night Battles , trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (London: Rout ledge and Kegan Paul ,1983 ).

de ned by image and word and their relationship. 12 In this sense, the current Library, notwithstanding its continuous expansion, still preserves the skeleton o Warburgs private library. This biological metaphor might convey the continuity with Warburgs original project, legitimizing his claim that the Library, through

its arrangement, would o er, hidden on a shel , a book that would provide ananswer to a vital question related to the readers research project.

IV

Many scholars rom di erent disciplines and various parts o the world haveundergone this experience. What ollows is my own limited testimony.

In the summer o 1964 , I was invited to spend one month at the WarburgInstitute. To my great surprise, I was given a key to the building, which allowedme to spend extra hours in the Library. It was an un orgettable time. Some yearsbe ore, I had begun to work on a research project based on a group o sixteenth-and seventeenth- century Inquisition trials I had come across rst in Venice, thenin Udine. They dealt with men and women who called themselves benandanti ,good- walkers. The men claimed to ght in spirit, our times a year, during theEmber Days, against the witches; the women claimed to see in spirit, our timesa year, also during the Ember Days, the procession o the dead. All o this lookedlike a de nite Friulian phenomenon: even the trial I came across by chance in the

State Archive in Venice involved a Friulian cowherd. My attempts to put the trialinto a larger comparative perspective had not gone beyond vague parallels. The Warburg Library seemed to be the ideal place to deepen my search.

Indeed it was. Besides a large amount o evidence related to my project,the Library o ered me the opportunity to make a real breakthrough, condensedinto one page and a hal o the book I ultimately wrote: I benandanti (1966 ).13 The evidence which bears the closest resemblance to the Friulian is Bavarian,my paragraph began. What ollowed relied upon an o print rom a local Bavar-ian journal, Oberstdor er Gemeinde- und Fremdenblatt . Even the title o the essay,by Karl Ho mann, conveyed some local favor: Oberstdor er Hexen au demScheiterhau en: Ein nsteres Kapitel aus der Geschichte unserer Heimat mit einem kurzen Ueberblick ber den Verlau der Hezenprozesse im Allgemeinen( Witches rom Oberstdor at the stake: A dark chapter rom the history o ournative country, with a short overall view o the history o witch- trials in general),

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14. Ginzburg, Night Battles , 191 n. 59.

15. Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna. Una deci razione del sabba(Torino: G. Einaudi, 1989 ), translated into Englishas Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath, trans. Ray-mond Rosenthal (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990 ).

16. Ginzburg, Night Battles , 191 n. 59.

17. Wol gang Behringer, Shaman o Oberstdor : Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms o the Night , trans. H. C. Erik Midel ort (Charlottesvi lle: University o Virginia Press,1998 ).

Oberstdor 1931 . The documents discovered by Ho mann dealt with a shepherdnamed Chonradt Stcklin. In 1586 , Chondradt told the Oberstdor judges that,some years be ore, a dead person rom the same town had appeared to him. Sincethat time, Chonradt would all periodically into a swoon, ollowed by a journey

in spirit into the beyond. He denied being a witch: as a member o the nocturnalband, he was asked to pray 30,000 Ave Marias during the Ember Days. Later,pressed hard by the judges, he con essed that he had gone many times to the witches sabbath. He died at the stake with the women he had accused o being witches.

Ho manns essay is unsatis actory. 14 But the case he discovered provides apiece o precious evidence a nearly per ect parallel with the women benandanti put on trial by inquisitors in the same years on the other side o the Alps. For me,this was the beginning o a long comparative journey rom Friulian benandanti to Siberian shamans. 15

V

Could I have come across Ho manns essay in another library? To the best o my knowledge, I wrote in my book, [these Oberstdor documents] have not been analysed, or even cited, by other scholars. 16 I had no clues whatsoever that would have directed me to Ho manns essay. Today, checking the word Hexenin

the online catalog o the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, I would indeed come acrossthe title o Ho manns essay: a precious (although, at rst sight, not especially promising) needle buried in a haystack amounting to 1,463 entries. But in 1964 ,online catalogs did not exist. Only an open- stack library would have o ered methe opportunity to come across that essay, and even then only a library whoseshelves included one or more labeled Witchcra t or Witch trials or, perhaps,Magic.

Today, Ho manns o print (classmark FDB 125) is located in the WarburgLibrary near Wol gang Behringers more recent book (FDB 125.B23), puttingChonrad Stoeckhlins case in a di erent, and much broader, perspective, as isclear even rom the title o the English translation: Shaman o Oberstdor .17 On thesame shel , one can nd other books some o them bearing Aby Warburgs exlibris related to witchcra t and witch persecution. Only a short walk separatesthe section on Magic rom the section on Science: a contiguity that played a

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18. Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl (1890 1948): A Biographical Memoir . . . Reprinted on the Fi tieth Anniversary o His Death (London: Warburg Inst itute, 1998 ), 12; Karen Michels,Ein Versuch ber die K. B. W. als Bau der Moderne,in Portrt aus Bchern. Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute, Hamburg-1933 London(Hamburg: Dlling undGalitz, 1993), 71 81.

central role in Warburgs approach. It was marginal, however, in mine. But that di erence did not impede my research: any library will interact with its readers,and also the other way around. In the case o the Warburg Library, the inter-action, both conscious and unconscious, with its arrangement is a undamental

part o the readers experience.Une machine penser : it was not by chance that Fritz Saxl dreamt o LeCorbusier (or Gropius) as a possible architect or the Warburg Library in Ham-burg.18