Abstract
The catalog of the Warburg Institute Library in London is a thesis in itself, a veritable vision of knowledge. The catalog is organized into four categories: image (or art history), word (literature and ancient texts), orientation (Western thought, from magical beliefs to religion, science and philosophy), and action (history and the social sciences). What's remarkable here is the coincidence of an intellectual classification and a library geography: moving from one floor to the next means moving from image to word, then from word to orientation, and finally from orientation to action. In this way, the entire substratum of Western consciousness is mapped out in a library building: we start with the crudest mental representations (images), purify them through language, elaborate representations of the world, and finally build a society. The Warburg library is thus the dynamic representation of evolving human consciousness. As for the Mnemosyne atlas, it is also a representation of Aby Warburg's own brain.
The Warburg Library is an extreme example of a library organized on the model of a mind, on the model of a representation of the world. It merely illustrates the general case: all book classification proceeds from a mental vision.
This affinity of the library with the functioning of memory was clearly affirmed by Gabriel Naudé, one of the greatest names of the French and European library tradition in the classical age, and a familiar figure in libertine circles. Above all, Naudé rejected the librarian utopias of his predecessors. The most astonishing of these librarian utopias is that of François Grudé La Croix du Maine, who in 1524, in his Bibliothèque française, proposed to King Henri III the utopia of a library that we would describe today as panoptic. La Croix du Maine's approach is empirical, not theoretical. And yet, the empirical nature of knowledge goes far beyond the announced ideal of regularity; it's the triumph of the singular. La Croix du Maine's failure to build up its library in a regular, orderly fashion is a symptom of an era overwhelmed by singularities.
