Angoisse, mélancolie et individuation : une généalogie du sujet moderne entre histoire de l’art et philosophie

By focusing on the link between individuals and forms, Aby Warburg’s science of art (Kunstwissenschaft) allows the development of a unique genealogy of anxiety, which underlines the crucial role of this affect in understanding modern subjectivity. Entering into a dialogue with Ernst Cassirer on the need for a philosophy of “symbolic forms”, Warburg postulates that a shift from phobia to anxiety takes place through artistic creation. In this sense, anxiety reflects the subject’s relationship to being only because it more originally implies a relationship of the subject to form and to the absence of form. Thus, starting from an understanding of individuation as an ontogenetic taking of shape, we propose to articulate the relationship to being and the relationship to form, from a perspective that gives right to becoming. Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation can then shed light on the Warburgian enterprise. Anxiety appears as a particularly significant affect, as it marks a stop in the individuation of the subject and reveals to him the vertigo not of the nothingness of being but of his own taking shape. Simondon, however, enigmatically indicates that anxiety can mark a new “beginning of being”, an idea that Aby Warburg’s art history and Cassirer’s philosophy of culture can, in turn, help to clarify.