Madness, ethnography and cultural crisis in Warburg and Artaud

an essay in approximation

Abstract

In The Surviving Image, Georges Didi-Huberman suggests an approximation between the experience and the work of Aby Warburg and Antonin Artaud, following the trajectory and reading of Nietzsche. They share the German philosopher's experience of psychic collapse and, among themselves, the catastrophe of the war. This dual tragedy was traversed, in both cases, by the experience of displacement to the "other": travel and contact with the indigenous cultures of the Pueblos and the Tarahumaras, respectively. These displacements profoundly marked their works, their diagnoses of the crisis of Western culture, and the very experience of psychic breakdown. Immersed in collapse, both continuously retraced their journeys through remembrance and writing - a scriptural exercise that suggests a dual therapeutic function, both personal and collective. In this sense, this study seeks to establish the problem of the decomposition of identity not merely as a clinical symptom but as a common intellectual problematic, linking them to ontological conceptions of life derived from Nietzschean readings.