K.B.W. La Bibliothèque Warburg, Laboratoire de Pensée Intermédiale

P. Despoix’s book K.B.W. La Bibliothèque Warburg, laboratoire de pensée intermédiale marks a point in Warburg studies, not only for its erudition of primary sources in German, but also for its innovative approach to Warburgian studies. The importance of P. Despoix’s work lies in its refusal to reduce Warburg’s thought to the iconological approach of art history. Instead, it delves into the complex foundations of Warburg’s heuristic science in his Library. P. Despoix’s study frees Warburgian scholarship from the semantic and visual paralexia largely caused by a small number of theoretical publications by the author by himself. P. Despoix’s book, for the first time, presents an in-depth investigation into the Warburg archives, to uncover unexplored conceptual dimensions of the Warburg Library. P. Despoix interprets Warburg’s library for cultural sciences through the lens of intermedial thought, examining the dynamic interplay between images, words, and symbols across diverse media: photography, image, iconology, advertising, arts, archaeology, literature, journalism, astronomy and sciences. The book is a precious guide for revealing the genealogy of the epistemic knots that structure Warburg’s intermedial science of images between mnemonic symbols and words.