liminality, words, images, Edward Sapir, Aby Warburg, Pierre Hadot
This article problematises two of the central tenets of contemporary discursive rationalism: that words don’t matter, and 3images don’t matter; what matters are rigorously defined concepts, and argumentatively sustained discourses. Instead, it argues that words and images do matter, in their concreteness, as crucial aspects of human reality and social life. Taken from a larger project on ‘Political Anthropology as Method’, the article presents some ideas from Edward Sapir, founder of linguistic anthropology, Aby Warburg, a founding figure of art history, and Pierre Hadot, a French philosopher, about the foundational role of language as a reality, and about certain originary words and images.