Ur-Words of the Affective Language of Gestures: The Hermeneutics of Body Movement in Aby Warburg

Abstract

The article deals with the question of the relationship between visual memory and the literary and aesthetic transfer of high-potential emotional experiences in gestures as an immanent element of cultural creativity. Against that background the article focuses on the work of the German art- and cultural historian Aby Warburg, especially his lecture and picture series entitled “Urworte leidenschaftlicher Gebärdensprache” (Ur-Words of the Affective Language of Gestures), which Warburg presented in January - February 1927 in Hamburg’s Cultural Library (Kulturwissenschftliche Bibliothek). Warburg was mainly interested in the processes by which the antiquity has suirvived in visual elements. He observed that especially high-potential emotional experiences were transferred into later cultures, mainly preserved in ancient artworks, but also in literature, and the “Metamorphosis” by Ovid was one of the most important transmitters. The ancient art and literature created “ur-words”, that is, original significant visual elements as gestures preserved in concepts and in cultural artefacts, which have been transferred to the later cultures and were finally one of the most important impulses for the overcoming of superstition and paganism. In the above-mentioned lecture and picture series, Warburg discusses that topic in the composition and ordering of pictures from Ovid’s stories, among others “Daphne and Actaeon”, “The Rape of Proserpina”, “The Death of Orpheus”, or “Medea killing her Children”. Warburg’s lecture, but especially the picture series were a methodological tool destined to present his highly complex reflections, rooted less in rhetoric than in psychology, anthropology and linguistics ca. 1900. The text is a result of a broader investigation made on the relationship between humanism and sciences, particularly psychology and anthropology in the context of Warburg’s understanding of cultural and individual image memory and the role of gestures in that context.

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