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xxivPreface to the English Editionagainst the subjectivist sufficiency of nondocumented interpretations,but he rather quickly became authoritative, explanatory, satisfied withhis well-constructed answers. Warburg, for his part, remained an artist,uneasy, implicative, ever in search of questions that his extraordinaryerudition never appeased. When Panofsky explained an image, itwas a signification given beyond all expressive values; when Warburgunderstood an image, it was, he said, a way of liberating an ‘‘expressivevalue’’ transcending, in anthropological terms, all signification. But itis dangerous, of course, to want to situate an analysis beyond the principleof signification (that is, at the core of a metaphysical conceptionof symptoms): a special kind of tact is required to manipulate thepharmakon of images.There are specific philosophical and historical reasons for Panofsky’sexorcism. The perpetual warnings, the many cries of CAUTIUS! emittedby the great legislator, the great Talmudist of iconology, alwayscome down to the same thing: the source of all evil is unreason. Itis as ‘‘pure unreason’’ that Panofsky, a man of the Enlightenment,experienced in particular the rise of Nazism—to which some thirtymembers of his family fell victim—and his dismissal from the Universityof Hamburg in 1933. When one has read the extraordinary bookby the philologist Victor Klemperer about the way the Nazi regimeconfiscated the German language, even its most prestigious philosophicalvocabulary, 21 one can understand how Panofsky never citedMartin Heidegger after the war as he still did in 1932. 22But it is with a whole world of thought—that of the three firstdecades of the century in Germany: that of Heidegger and Jung, butalso of Nietzsche and Freud, of Benjamin and Ernst Bloch—that Panofskyultimately broke. Significant in this regard was his extraordinaryand complete assumption of the English language and hissymmetrical rejection of his mother tongue: he agreed to return toGermany only in 1967, one year before his death, and it was in Englishthat he chose to give his lecture there. 23 He acknowledged, writesWilliam Heckscher,the momentous impact that the English language had had onthe very foundations of his thinking and on his manner of