Erwin Panofsky
         On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works_of_the_Visual
            Arts
         In the eleventh of his Antiquarian Letters, Gotthold Ephraim
            Lessing discusses a phrase from Lucian's description of the
            painting by Zeuxis called A Family of Centaurs: &lsquo;at the top
            of the painting a centaur is leaning down as if from an observation
            point, smiling' (ano de tes eikonos hoion apo tinos skopes
            Hippokentauros tis …). &lsquo;This as if from an observation point,
            Lessing notes, obviously implies that Lucian himself was uncertain
            whether this figure was positioned further back, or was at the same
            time on higher ground. We need to recognize the logic of ancient
            bas-reliefs where figures further to the back look over those at
            the front, not because they are actually positioned above them but
            because they are meant to appear as if standing behind.'1
             
            · 1. The passage is in George Lessing, Briefe, antiquarischen
            Inhalts (Berlin, 1778), p. 81. Panofsky's discussion does not note
            that the original text of Lucian (Zeuxis or Antiochus 3) makes
            clear that what is described is a copy of the original painting
            (already said by Lucian to be lost). This means that some of the
            issues of misunderstanding situated by Lessing and Panofsky in
            Lucian's court may in principle be attributable to the copyist.
            This makes no difference to the conceptual thrust of Panofsky's
            case. Trans.
Jaś Elsner, Katharina Lorenz
         The Genesis of Iconology
         Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening
            chapter of Studies in Iconology his landmark American
            publication of 1939 contains &lsquo;the revised content of a
            methodological article published by the writer in 1932',
            which is now translated for the first time in this issue
            of .1 That article, published in the philosophical
            journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks
            the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on
            how to do art history,2 that reach back, via a couple of major
            pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich
            Wölfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst
            Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky
            from 1915 on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and
            language.4 But Logos was not an art-historical review or one
            dedicated to aesthetics but a principal mainstream journal of the
            philosophy of culture. So &lsquo;On the Problem of Describing and
            Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts' has a good claim to be
            the culmination of Panofsky's philosophical thinking in his German
            period under the Weimar Republic.
             
            · 1. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the
            Art of the Renaissance (1939; New York, 1967), p. xv; hereafter
            abbreviated SI. See Panofsky, &lsquo;Zum Problem der Beschreibung
            und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst', Logos 21
            (1932): 103 19; trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz under
            the title &lsquo;On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting
            Works of the Visual Arts',  38 (Spring 2012):
            467 82; hereafter abbreviated &lsquo;P'.
            · 2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, &lsquo;From Aby Warburg
            to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method', Myths, Emblems,
            Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London, 1990), pp.
            17 59, esp. pp. 36 41.
            · 3. See Panofsky, &lsquo;Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden
            Kunst', Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, ed. Karen Michels and
            Martin Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1009 18; &lsquo;Der
            Begriff des Kunstwollens',Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, 2:
            1019 34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder under
            the title &lsquo;The Concept of Artistic Volition', Critical
            Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 17 33; and &lsquo;Über das
            Verhåltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der
            Erörterung über die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher
            Grundbegriffe', Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, 2: 1035 63,
            trans. Lorenz and Elsner under the title &lsquo;On the Relationship
            of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a
            Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of
            Art',  35 (Autumn 2008): 43 71.
            · 4. On neo-Kantianism in pre-Nazi Germany, see Michael Friedman, A
            Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago,
            2000), pp. 25 37; Éric Dufour and T. Z. R. Créteil, &lsquo;Le
            Statue du singulier: Kant et le néokantisme de l'École de
            Marbourg', Kantstudien 93 (Sept. 2002): 324 50; Edward
            Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture 
            (Princeton, N.J., 2008), pp. 22 51; and Peter E.
            Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge,
            Mass., 2010), pp. 52 86. Specifically on the Cassirerian
            Kantianism of Panofsky, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians
            of Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 181 82; Michael Ann
            Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y.,
            1984), pp. 91 92, 147 52; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer,
            Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard
            Pierce (New Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 174 77, 182 84;
            David Summers, &lsquo;Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic
            Discipline', in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the
            Outside, ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton, N.J., 1995), pp. 9 24;
            Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of
            Discipline (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 68 77; Paul Crowther, The
            Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History 
            (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 70 73; Allister Neher,
            &lsquo;"The Concept of Kunstwollen", Neo-Kantianism,
            and Erwin Panofsky's Early Art Theoretical Essays', Word and
            Image 20 (Jan. Mar. 2004): 41 51; Georges Didi-
            Huberman,Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain
            History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, Pa., 2005),
            pp. 4 6, 90 138; and Lorenz and Elsner,
            &lsquo;Translators' Introduction', 35 (Autumn
            2008): 33 42, esp. pp. 38, 40 42.
Tommie Shelby
         The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children
         How should one live? This central philosophical question can be
            separated into at least two parts. The first concerns the conduct
            and attitudes morality requires of each of us. The second is about
            the essential elements of a worthwhile life; it's about what it
            means to flourish, which includes meeting certain moral demands but
            is not exhausted by this. Answering this two-pronged question
            traditionally falls within the subdiscipline of ethics, broadly
            construed. Philosophers have also sought to explain what makes a
            society just or good, to specify the values and principles by which
            we are to evaluate institutional arrangements and political
            regimes. This is the traditional domain of political philosophy.
            This essay addresses a question that arises where ethics and
            political philosophy meet.
Mark McGurl
         The Posthuman Comedy
         According to Wai Chee Dimock, scholars of American literature
            should study it in a bigger historical context than the one
            beginning in 1776 or even 1620, freeing themselves in this way from
            the narrow-minded nationalism that has so often drawn a border
            around their research. To view American literature in light of the
            longer durée of ancient civilizations is to see Henry David Thoreau
            reading the Bhagavad Gita, Ralph Waldo Emerson the Persian poet
            Hāfez, and rediscover in these and other extensive sympathies the
            kinship of American literature with world literature. Dramatically
            expanding the tracts of space-time across which literary scholars
            might draw valid links between author and author, text and text,
            and among author, text, and the wide world beyond, the perspective
            of deep time holds the additional promise, for Dimock, of
            reinvigorating "our very sense of the connectedness among
            human beings" and of dissuading us, thereby, from the wisdom
            of war.1 At the very least we might hope that American soldiers
            wouldn't look idly on, as they did on 14 April 2003, as the
            cultural treasures of the Iraqi National Library which are
            the treasures of all humankind were looted and burned.
             
            · 1. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature
            across Deep Time (Princeton, N.J., 2006), p. 5; hereafter
            abbreviated T.
Andreas Mayer
         Gradiva's Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking_Woman
         Many patients were surprised or confused by their first visit to
            Dr. Freud's office. Lying on the famous couch, they found
            themselves surrounded by a plethora of objects and images they
            would never have associated with the business of the psychoanalytic
            cure. Statuettes, masks, and portraits from ancient times were
            arranged in showcases, on the shelves and on desks within a room
            whose walls were covered with depictions of mythological scenes and
            portraits of Freud's mentors (fig. 1). The patient's first
            impressions of this peculiar display, which has been faithfully
            preserved by Anna Freud in their last London home at Maresfield
            Gardens, were frequently strong ones. One of the most articulate of
            Freud's patients, Hilda Doolittle, herself a lover of antiquities,
            did not hesitate to tell him how "overwhelmed and
            upset" she was to find him "surrounded by these
            treasures, in a museum, a temple." During her own analysis, a
            variety of these "toys," as she called them, seemed to
            act as replicas or "ghosts" of the figures appearing in
            her dreams or memories: "We are all haunted houses."1
             
            · 1. H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], "Advent," Tribute to
            Freud (Boston, 1974), pp. 119, 146.
Fabien Locher, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
         Modernity's Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental
            Reflexivity
         We believe that a historical understanding of past environmental
            discourses is essential for contemporary social and green theory
            because the dominant narratives used to reflect upon the
            contemporary environmental crisis are too simple. There is an
            assumption shared by most postmodern thinkers today that for about
            two generations we have been experiencing a complete transformation
            of our relationship with the environment. After three centuries of
            frenetic modernism, we entered, at last, an enlightened era of
            environmental awareness. Landmark writers of social theory have
            coined new labels to name our epoch and express its radical
            novelty: risk society (as opposed to industrial society), reflexive
            modernization, second modernization, or high modernity, while
            philosophers have reflected on the recent transformation of the
            nature of human action.1
             
            · 1. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans.
            Mark Ritter (London, 1992); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self
            Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford,
            Calif., 1991); Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans.
            Rhodes Barrett (New York, 1993); and Hans Jonas, The Imperative of
            Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age,
            trans. Jonas and David Herr (Chicago, 1984).
Chris Lorenz
         If You're So Smart, Why Are You under_Surveillance?_Universities,
            Neoliberalism, and New Public Management
         Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of
            their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate
            remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of
            students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative
            reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of
            students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the
            1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along
            the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and
            the neoliberal course of the Reagan and Thatcher governments made
            the battle against budget deficits and against government spending
            into a political priority. Education, together with social security
            and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on,
            the neoliberal agenda became more radical smaller state and
            bigger market attacking the public sector itself through
            efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing
            public services and introducing market incentives. At the same time
            the societal relevance of the universities demanded by critical
            students was turned on its head to become economic relevance to
            business and industry in the knowledge society.
Hannan Hever, Lisa Katz
         The Post-Zionist Condition
         In the summer of 1991, the first issue of the Israeli
            journal Teoria Ubikoret (Theory and Criticism) published an essay
            of mine on Anton Shammas, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who
            wrote the Hebrew novel Arabeskot (Arabesques).1 In this essay I
            traced Shammas's subversion of the Jewish ethnocentrism of the
            Hebrew literary canon.2 Shammas's novel reveals how the Hebrew
            canon in Israel, in the guise of the apparently neutral term Hebrew
            Literature, which only apparently bases itself on the Hebrew
            language as the common literary language of Jews and Arabs, has in
            fact imposed an exclusionary policy. That is, in order to enter its
            realm, those who write in Hebrew must be Jewish. Shammas, I argued,
            sought to de-Judaize the Hebrew language and turn it into a
            language shared by all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike.
            Now, twenty years later, Teoria Ubikoret has published a different
            essay of mine, this time on Tuvya haholev (Tuvya the Dairyman), Dan
            Miron's Hebrew translation of the great Yiddish writer Shalom
            Aleichem's novel Tevye der Milhiker. I claim that while Miron's
            Hebrew indeed Hebraicizes Aleichem's Yiddish, it also moves in the
            opposite direction; it Yiddishizes Hebrew, giving Yiddish a
            prominent presence in the Hebrew translation and thus decentering
            Israeli subjectivity and undermining the cohesive force of Hebrew.3
             
            · 1. See Anton Shammas, Arabeskot (Tel Aviv, 1986); trans.Vivien
            Eden under the title Arabesques(Berkeley, 2001).
            · 2. See Hannan Hever, "Ivrit be-eto shel
            aravi," Teoria Ubikoret 1 (Summer 1991): 23 38,
            "Hebrew in an Israeli Arab Hand: Six Miniatures on Anton
            Shammas's Arabesques," The Nature and Context of Minority
            Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford, 1990),
            pp. 264 93, andProducing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation
            Building and Minority Discourse (New York, 2002), pp.
            175 204.
            · 3. See Hever, "Tuvia haholev beivrit," review
            of Tuvya Haholev by Shalom Aleichem, trans. Dan Miron,Teoria
            Ubikoret 36 (Spring 2010): 227 30.
Cecelia Watson
         Points of Contention: Rethinking the Past, Present, and_Future_of
            Punctuation
         The rule books, though they claimed to heed only the call of logic,
            were nonetheless bound by their historical context: punctuation
            guidelines have been heavily indebted to intellectual, cultural,
            and aesthetic trends. No matter what analytical authority rule
            books claimed, their codifications had at least as much to do with
            their historical context as with syntax. When punctuation is
            properly contextualized, it can yield insight into problems that
            transcend disciplinary boundaries: it asks us to consider how we
            communicate within the disciplines and beyond them and how
            disciplines create and maintain interpretive norms. It is this
            account of punctuation that I begin to develop here.
            I want to track the much-maligned semicolon and its fellow
            punctuation marks as rules for their usage were established and
            evolved. I consider the consequences of the nineteenth-century
            explosion of systems of grammar rules by way of the story of a
            semicolon in a statute that deprived Bostonians of late-night
            liquor from 1900 1906. The "Semicolon Law," as it
            came to be known, exemplifies problems of interpretation still live
            in legal theory. I contrast the demands of legal formalism with the
            expectations of close reading in the humanities and social
            sciences. I conclude by attending to the inheritance left to us by
            nineteenth-century grammarians' impassioned attempts to bring order
            to English: The Chicago Manual of Style. I raise some critical
            questions about our attitudes towards rules, and consider how those
            attitudes influence our approach to punctuation and our passions
            about semicolons.
