Emotions as argumentative programmers

At the beginning of the twentieth century the scientific community used the tools available to them at the time to thoroughly investigate those permanent recurring and transcultural elements that were variously called “motivemi” (by narratologists), archetypes (by psychoanalysts), or Pathosformeln, as Aby Warburg defined them. This contribution redefines the concept of unconscious memory or mneme in Warburgian thought and the medical- scientific roots of many of his reflections, before moving on to the contributions that neuroscience, since the end of the twentieth century, has made to redefining the way in which man conventionally represents emotions. Today, the architecture of the limbic brain detected through neuroimaging allows us not only to offer a more analytical explanation of Warburg’s intuitions, partly through a computational rereading offered by Franco Moretti.