Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image - Review

Instead, these authors contradict humanist or Enlightenment assumptions that there are criteria for judgment and ethical action that transcend the individual interpreter, such as Wuttke and Morrison might find even through cultural history. Beliefs that the interpreter can transcend his or her racial or ethnic group are denied. No other ethical or rational checks replace them (indeed deconstruction has posed direct challenges to such notions). The question thus remains: why should one not assume Heidegger's or De Man's or Strzygowski's political position?(32) To paraphrase a question Holly asks in reference to Schapiro's critique of Heidegger in regard to his politics, what is her book trying to do (p. 143)? In the light of such problems at the end of the millennium, Warburg's words are more relevant than ever: "Athen will eben immer wieder neu aus Alexandrien zuruckerobert sein" (Athens surely wants [needs] to be conquered back again and again anew from Alexandria).(33)

THOMAS DACOSTA KAUFMANN Department of Art and Archaeology Princeton University Princeton, N.J. 08544-1018

Notes

1. Robert S. Nelson, "At the Place of a Foreword: Someone Looking, Reading, and Writing," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Nelson and Richard Shift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xi, states that in the United States "critical reflections on art, its history, and its (re)presentation also appeared in the early 1970's." This is also my recollection, but I would not agree that this development began to occur "only at the margins of art historical discourse."

2. See Heinrich Dilly, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker: 1933-1945 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1988), which is also pertinent for other aspects of this review.

3. See, for example, Werner Hofmann, Georg Syamken, and Martin Warnke, Die Menschenrechte des Auges: Uber Aby Warburg (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlaganstalt, 1980); Martin Jesinghausen-Lauster, Die Suche nach der Symbolischen Form: Der Kreis um die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1985); Dorothee Bauerlee, Gespenstergeschichten fur Ganz Erwachsene: Ein Kommentar zu Aby Warburgs Bilderatlas Mnemonsyne (Munster, 1988); Peter Schmidt, Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie: Mit einem Anhang unbekannten Quellen zur Geschichte der Internationalen Gesellschaft fur Ikonographische Studien (Bamberg: Stefan Wendel, 1989); Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds., Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990 (Hamburg: Weinhelm, 1991); Tilmann von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Architektur, Einrichtung und Organisation (Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1992); Uwe Fleckner, Robert Galitz, Claudia Naber, and Herwart Noldeke, eds., Aby M. Warburg Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde im Hamburger Planetarium (Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1993); Michael Diers, ed., Portrat aus Buchern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute: Hamburg-London 1933 (Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz, 1993). Books by Michael Diers, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and Karen Michels are in press.