Erwin Panofsky: Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927–) [DE, ES, EN]

“Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art-historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in the last century. This unrivaled example of Panofsky’s early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change. Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of ‘archaeology’ of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.

Perspective in Panofsky’s hands becomes a central component of a Western “will to form,” the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world. Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.”

First published in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-1925, Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1927, pp 258-330.
Reprinted in Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, eds. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen, 1974; Berlin 1992, pp 99-167.

English edition
Translated by Christopher S. Wood
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 1991
ISBN 0942299523, 9780942299526
196 pages

Review: E.H. Gombrich (NY Review of Books 1997).

Publisher (EN)

Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’ (German, 1927/1980)
La perspectiva como forma simbolica (Spanish, trans. Virginia Careaga, 1973/2003)
Perspective as Symbolic Form (English, trans. Christopher S. Wood, 1991, no OCR)

Pierre Klossowski: Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969–) [FR, ES, EN]

“Long recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is made available here for the first time in English. Taking a structuralist approach to the relation between Nietzsche’s thought and his life, Pierre Klossowski emphasizes the centrality of the notion of Eternal Return (a cyclical notion of time and history) for understanding Nietzsche’s propensities for self-denial, self-refutation, and self-consumption.

Nietzsche’s ideas did not stem from personal pathology, according to Klossowski. Rather, Nietzsche made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche’s belief that questions of truth and morality are at base questions of power and fitness resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.”

Publisher Mercure de France, Paris, 1969
Revised edition, 1978
367 pages

English edition
Translated by Daniel W. Smith
Publisher by University of Chicago Press, 1997
ISBN 0226443876, 9780226443874
282 pages

Publisher (EN)

Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (French, 1969/1978, 5 MB, added on 2015-3-7)
Nietzsche y el circulo vicioso (Spanish, trans. Roxana Páez, 1995)
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (English, trans. Daniel W. Smith, 1997, 4 MB, updated on 2019-11-22)

See also Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corps/e (1996).

Robert Donald Romanyshyn: Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989)

“The development of linear perspective in the 15th century represented a radical transformation in the European’s sense of the world, the body and the self. Robert Romanyshyn’s book examines the claim that the development of linear perspective vision was and is indispensable to the emergence of our technological world. It does so by telling the story of how an artistic technique has become a cultural habit of mind.”

Publisher Routledge, 1989
ISBN 0415007879, 9780415007870
254 pages

Publisher

PDF (17 MB, updated 2020-2-18)