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: ‘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 …). ‘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 ‘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 ‘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, ‘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 ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts',  38 (Spring 2012): 467 82; hereafter abbreviated ‘P'. · 2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, ‘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, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst', Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1009 18; ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens',Deutschsprachige Aufsåtze, 2: 1019 34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder under the title ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition', Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 17 33; and ‘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 ‘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, ‘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, ‘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, ‘"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, ‘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.