Andrew Benjamin
University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, Department Member
- Monash University, Philosophy, Emeritusadd
- Philosophy of Art, Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Ancient Philosophy, Hegel, Jewish Philosophy, and 6 moreJohann Gottlieb Fichte, Translation Studies, Eliot Wolfson, Laocoon, Politics of Secularism, and Hans Blumenberg(Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Translation Studies, Eliot Wolfson, Laocoon, Politics of Secularism, and Hans Blumenberg)edit
- Andrew Benjamin lives in Melbourne. He is a graduate of the Australian National University, Université Paris 7 and t... moreAndrew Benjamin lives in Melbourne. He is a graduate of the Australian National University, Université Paris 7 and the University of Warwick. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University.(Andrew Benjamin lives in Melbourne. He is a graduate of the Australian National University, Université Paris 7 and the University of Warwick. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University.)edit
This book tries to develop the implications for ethics of the arguments of my earlier book Towards a Relational Ontology.
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This is a collection of papers some of my papers on architectural history/theory published over the last 10 years.
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This is an unpublished lecture that tried out some of the ideas that came to be included in my Virtue in Being (SUNY Press 2016). It creates the framework for linking a relational ontology to questions of the ethical.
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Where are we with God? The question gives rise to a set of complex concerns. What would it mean to allow for a relation to God and, as a consequence, to pose the question of human being as being-with-God? Where is finite being with the... more
Where are we with God? The question gives rise to a set of complex concerns. What would it mean to allow for a relation to God and, as a consequence, to pose the question of human being as being-with-God? Where is finite being with the infinite? While the project of this paper is an engagement with the Hymn to Zeus by Cleanthes of Assos (331—232 B.C.E.) the student of Zeno of Citium and the teacher of Chrysippus, informing that engagement is the question of finitude and its relation to the infinite.
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This article offers an analysis of the implicit conception of translation at work in Malebranche's Entretien d'un philosophe chrétien, et d'un philosophe chinois (1708).
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Connection entails relationality. Aby Warburg's Atlas project is a staging of connections and relations. The question to be addressed at the outset concerns the grounds of connectivity. And thus, what structure and maintains the differing... more
Connection entails relationality. Aby Warburg's Atlas project is a staging of connections and relations. The question to be addressed at the outset concerns the grounds of connectivity. And thus, what structure and maintains the differing modes of relationality and connection at work within it. While it will be essential to explore detail, the response in Warburg's case is delimited by the body or more specifically by different positionings of the body. Within the context of Warburg's Atlas they are differences that allow for the types of generality or forms of abstraction entailed by his conception of the pathosformel. Excluded from these formal delimitations are the ways bodies are always already the enacted presence of ethnicity, gender, ability, social positioning, etc. Bodies are informed from the start. And yet, those connections are increasingly problematic. As populism as a political position becomes both normalized and naturalized, those forms of enactment are either resisted or refused in the name of abstractions. These abstractions have a double quality. Their power to exclude cannot be disassociated from the absence of any content other than an empty idealization. Hence the counter point-the adumbration of other modes of thinking connection and relationality-cannot be dissociated from the activation of grounds of judgement. Part of that activation is the positioning of "works of art" in public spaces such that their mediation of the everyday cannot be disassociated from their work as art. These positions will be developed within the openings created by the work of the Australian artist Peter Drew.
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Form is presentation. 1 And yet, presentation is not mere expression. 2 Presentation is informed form. While there are fundamentally diff erent accounts of this confi guration of form, all of which need to be understood, fi rst, as diff... more
Form is presentation. 1 And yet, presentation is not mere expression. 2 Presentation is informed form. While there are fundamentally diff erent accounts of this confi guration of form, all of which need to be understood, fi rst, as diff ering accounts of the informing of form, and then secondly in terms of how the means of presentation are themselves conceived, the essential point is that there cannot be simple presentation. Moreover, any systematic account of presentation, which has to be understood as form's presence, needs to include within it the external registration of that presentation. Again, there cannot be pure receptivity; as though presentation simply occurs and is received as such. (Even if it were assumed, even if pure givenness were allowed, it would have been produced and thus marked by an already present form of impurity, namely the mark of that production.) Th at there can be the history of criticism, and thus that there has always been a recognition of the necessity for judgement (with a corresponding necessity to adduce criteria of judgement) means that when that history and the ensuing recognition are taken together, they underscore the presence of a complex reciprocity of relations defi ning both presentation and reception. Any one specifi c conception of presentation and thus equally any one specifi c process through which form is informed has an important eff ect on how that the reception of that presentation is then understood. Equally, diff ering positions within reception engender and attempt to sustain their own ways of understanding processes of presentation. Reciprocity, while having neither a singular designation nor an already fi xed modus operandi , is central. Presentation and its reception, equally, reception and its own conception of presentation (thus also expression) create their own settings. Th is is neither to naturalize nor to historicize the reciprocity of presentation and reception. Another opening occurs. What is identifi ed is the locus of criticism when thought philosophically. Th is thinking is philosophical since what is at stake is not the simple content of presentation and types of reception, but what grounds them and thus makes each one possible (a possibility with a sense of the historical that is to be diff erentiated from the equation of history with the chronology). Th inking criticism philosophically creates the conditions for an investigation of the politics of form. Politics within such a formulation concerns the implicit and explicit ways that the interplay of presentation and reception are always situated. Moreover, it can never be just a politics of form as though form were a stable, already completed and determined entity. Indeed, it can be added that were form to be attributed such a quality then interpretation would be unnecessary. Th ere is, however, a more signifi cant consequence, namely, that the promulgation of the singular and thus already
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The project of this paper is to stage a critical engagement with Adriano Fabris’Etica del mangiare. While Farbris, importantly, is a thinker of relationality, the argument developed is to show that relationality is a concept that also... more
The project of this paper is to stage a critical engagement with Adriano Fabris’Etica del mangiare. While Farbris, importantly, is a thinker of relationality, the argument developed is to show that relationality is a concept that also pertains between human and non-human animals. In addition, what counts as an animal within the human/animal relation is complicated by arguing that in the case of eating, the animals in question are ones that are produced to be killed. The ethics of eating has to be taken up in relation to this conception of the animal, and not the animal as an abstract generality. In the end the question of the human/animal relation is reposed – via the work of Levinas – in terms of the possibility of livingin peace with animals.
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The aim of this paper is establish the difference between aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Part of the argument is that only a philosophy of art can give an adequate philosophical account of works of art. The argument is advanced... more
The aim of this paper is establish the difference between aesthetics
and the philosophy of art. Part of the argument is that only
a philosophy of art can give an adequate philosophical account of
works of art. The argument is advanced drawing on the writings of
Immanuel Kant and Gunter Figal.
and the philosophy of art. Part of the argument is that only
a philosophy of art can give an adequate philosophical account of
works of art. The argument is advanced drawing on the writings of
Immanuel Kant and Gunter Figal.
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Kant and Hegel have diametrically opposed views concerning the relationship between colour and drawing. For Hegel colour is all; while for Kant drawing is central. Through an analysis of both these positions the conclusion that is drawn... more
Kant and Hegel have diametrically opposed views concerning the relationship between colour and drawing. For Hegel colour is all; while for Kant drawing is central. Through an analysis of both these positions the conclusion that is drawn is that colour and drawing have a necessary interrelation. One cannot be thought other than in relation to reach other. Taken together they are integral to the development of a philosophy of art.
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Lighting, Colourings, Working; Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger Paints. In Bracha L. Ettinger, And My Heart Wound-Space. Wild Pansy Press. 2015
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A critical engagement with Jean-Luc Nancy on representation and the Shoah.
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Allowing Function Complexity Notes on Adorno's 'Functionalism Today'
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Reflections on the relationship between philosophy and architecture within a setting dominated by the climate crisis.
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While there are references within the last speech by the Chorus in Sophocles' Antigone to both the Gods and a self-referential concern with age, the speech can be read and heard as recasting a number of the play's defining elements.... more
While there are references within the last speech by the Chorus in Sophocles' Antigone to both the Gods and a self-referential concern with age, the speech can be read and heard as recasting a number of the play's defining elements. Perhaps the most insistent, and in this instance the most significant, occur in the speech's opening lines. Pursuing the opening provided by the speech as a whole provides the means for tracing an important link between Sophocles, Hölderlin, and Walter Benjamin in regards to a philosophical thinking of life. What is at stake here turns around a number of interrelated question. What is 'life' and thus the 'living' thought philosophically? Moreover, what would it mean to act for the sake of the living and thus in the name of life? How would such actions be understood philosophically? This chapter responds to these questions.
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The possibility of the future, linked though perhaps too often to the unac-knowledged positing of the new, endures as a continuing refrain. 1 Hence, there is the inevitable repetition of the problem posed by the need to begin again and... more
The possibility of the future, linked though perhaps too often to the unac-knowledged positing of the new, endures as a continuing refrain. 1 Hence, there is the inevitable repetition of the problem posed by the need to begin again and anew. Starting with what could have been an epigram-a note taken and recorded during a voyage-allows for an opening to be staged. "The smallest circumstances awaken in the depths of the heart childhood emotions, though always with a new attraction." (Les plus petites circonstances réveillent au fond du coeur les emotions du premier age, et toujours avec un attrait nouveau.) 2 The choice of these lines is far from arbitrary. What they indicate is that here in Chateaubriand, the "new" will have been other than mere novelty. (As such, his formulation would seem to gesture towards the acknowledged truth that accompanies any sustained encounter with the state of affairs opened up by the new's evocation.) This initial articulation fi nds the new positioned within a form of repetition. As such a different question arises, and it should be noted that the question is not adduced, it emerges from the formulation itself. The question is straightforward: What is the new once it can no longer be identifi ed with novelty? If a conclusion can be drawn from the possibility of posing this question, then it involves the need to return, continually, to the question of the new. A return occasioned by the impossibility of conflating a concern with the new with mere invention.
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ABSTRACT: This article seeks to show that, in Walter Benjamin, the destruction does not occur for its own sake, it occurs for the creation of 'ways' thus openings, moments of inauguration. However, once this claim is made, what has to be... more
ABSTRACT: This article seeks to show that, in Walter Benjamin, the destruction does not occur for its own sake, it occurs for the creation of 'ways' thus openings, moments of inauguration. However, once this claim is made, what has to be taken up is the 'moment' (Augenblick) of destruction. While the project of epistemology may have been distanced, since the 'moment' does not 'know', what is not distanced is what might be described as the question of judgment. Destruction as way-making is a motif that occurs throughout the text. The activity of the destructive character is further described as 'space making' (Räumen) (BENJAMIN, SW 1.541/ GS.IV.1.397). Recalled here is the centrality of what has already been identified as the link between destruction, release and the creation of spaces. Way-making and space creation combine.
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This paper is a critical engagement with Derrida's interpretations of Artaud and Atlan.
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ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political theology that take both God and law as central. Rather than operate abstractly, the paper works closely on passages from Exodus and Genesis that are... more
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political theology that take both God and law as central. Rather than operate abstractly, the paper works closely on passages from Exodus and Genesis that are themselves linked directly to what is at stake in “listening to God”. The transformation of the immediacy of listening to the necessarily mediated response to the law is the move that the passages from the Torah entail. Within that setting, listening breaks the hold of immediacy and thus the possibility of any immediacy of reception. What is opened as a result, the argument continues, is an importantly different hermeneutic register and philosophical anthropology.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political theology that take both God and law as central. Rather than operate abstractly, the paper works closely on passages from Exodus and Genesis that are themselves linked directly to what is at stake in “listening to God”. The transformation of the immediacy of listening to the necessarily mediated response to the law is the move that the passages from the Torah entail. Within that setting, listening breaks the hold of immediacy and thus the possibility of any immediacy of reception. What is opened as a result, the argument continues, is an importantly different hermeneutic register and philosophical anthropology.
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The aim of this paper is to develop a conception of God that works with the identification of being-before-the-law and being-with-God. In addition, it argues that developing a rethinking of God along such lines necessitates, equally, the... more
The aim of this paper is to develop a conception of God that works with the identification of being-before-the-law and being-with-God. In addition, it argues that developing a rethinking of God along such lines necessitates, equally, the development of the con-comitant political theology and philosophical anthropology that such a repositioning of God envisages. Processes of subject creation have to be thought in relation to any philosophical engagement with the law.
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The aim of this paper, which more generally is a contribution to political theology, is to show in what way the conception of peace in Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei is dependent upon a specific philosophical anthropology. Within it any... more
The aim of this paper, which more generally is a contribution
to political theology, is to show in what way the conception of peace in
Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei is dependent upon a specific philosophical anthropology. Within it any link between human being and law is replaced by the subject of faith. Central to the argument is demonstrating the ways in which this anthropological position is necessarily interarticulated with the larger metaphysical positions that are advanced across a range of Cusanus’ texts.
to political theology, is to show in what way the conception of peace in
Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei is dependent upon a specific philosophical anthropology. Within it any link between human being and law is replaced by the subject of faith. Central to the argument is demonstrating the ways in which this anthropological position is necessarily interarticulated with the larger metaphysical positions that are advanced across a range of Cusanus’ texts.
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This paper investigates the role of oikonomia in the writings of St John of Damascus and how that role is integral to the construction of the figure of the Jew. The published version is edited and does not contain the Greek. If anyone... more
This paper investigates the role of oikonomia in the writings of St John of Damascus and how that role is integral to the construction of the figure of the Jew.
The published version is edited and does not contain the Greek. If anyone wants the complete version they should contact me and I will send a Word document.
The published version is edited and does not contain the Greek. If anyone wants the complete version they should contact me and I will send a Word document.
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The project of this paper is part of a larger attempt to develop a philosophy of art. Integral to that project is the distinction between aesthetics and a philosophy of art. It is always possible to consider affect as an end in itself if... more
The project of this paper is part of a larger attempt to develop a philosophy of art. Integral to that project is the distinction between aesthetics and a philosophy of art. It is always possible to consider affect as an end in itself if what is at stake involves a series of psychological claims. Equally, it is possible to engage with such claims philosophically. However, there is no clear connection between either possibility and a philosophy of art. In the latter the presentation of affect is always located within images. Images are produced by the work of materials. Images have to be understood in terms of that production. They have a material presence. If there is a failure to insist on the complex materiality of art's work as comprising a locus of philosophical inquiry, then any subsequent theory of the image is unable to contribute to the development of a genuine philosophy of art. Moreover, within the history of art images are informed form. The informing of form has two elements. Form is informed firstly by the history in which those images are located, and secondly by their capacity to be reworked. The latter can be understood as a futural coming-into-relation and thus the possibility that images and the elements from which they are comprised are able to have an afterlife. The afterlife is forms' capacity to continue to be informed. It is this latter possibility which necessitates that hermeneutic concerns supplant aesthetic ones in the creation of a philosophy of art.
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This article examines Hannah Arendt's contribution to a philosophical anthropology that twists free of what Martin Heideg-ger criticized as a " metaphysics of subjectivity. " In this, it considers how her approach to philosophical... more
This article examines Hannah Arendt's contribution to a philosophical anthropology that twists free of what Martin Heideg-ger criticized as a " metaphysics of subjectivity. " In this, it considers how her approach to philosophical anthropology allows us to conceive of being human not with reference to a subject but, more originally, in terms of the relationality of self, other, and place. To demonstrate this, the article first develops Arendt's philosophical anthropology with reference to her notion of power, suggesting that power is best understood as a matter of potentiality or the realization of what is necessarily contingent, singular, and inexhaustive. This, in turn, provides a platform to understand her notions of judgment , action, worldliness, and worldlessness in terms of what may be described as " the necessity of contingency. " The second part of the paper further develops this as a rejoinder to Heidegger, suggesting that for Arendt, proper human life—or the achievement of being an authentic self—is not a matter of separation from others but, on the contrary, a matter of relationality, which is to say, of being with others in place.
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Abstract: The aim of the paper is to investigate the role of allegory in Philo and spe-cifically in his text On the Migration of Abraham. This involves the twofold move of arguing that even though Philo remains a Platonist and that his... more
Abstract: The aim of the paper is to investigate the role of allegory in Philo and spe-cifically in his text On the Migration of Abraham. This involves the twofold move of arguing that even though Philo remains a Platonist and that his language is Platonic in orientation what occurs is a transformation of seeing, which is an immediate activity, into reading, which is always mediate. The second elements stems from this insistence on mediation. It results in freeing allegory from the hold of the allegorical/literal op-position. Allegory is transformed as a result in the name of an ineliminable allegoresis.
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The aim of the paper is to examine the limits of Aristotles and Arendt's contributions to a philosophical anthropology. By focusing on the concept of 'poten-tiality'—and thus the 'good life' as a potentiality awaiting actualization—the... more
The aim of the paper is to examine the limits of Aristotles and Arendt's contributions to a philosophical anthropology. By focusing on the concept of 'poten-tiality'—and thus the 'good life' as a potentiality awaiting actualization—the limit emerges from the way Aristotle understands 'life.' His discussion of slavery is pivotal in this regard.
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I F THERE IS A GENERAL PROJECT that orientates these notes then it can be located in what can be described as the question of the ethical subject and the way it is thought in Arendt's encounter with Stoicism.
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Research Interests: Algorithms, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, and 14 moreTechnology, Media Studies, Globalization, Race and Racism, Immigration, Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy, Colonialism, Medical Ethics, Capitalism, Biopolitics, Temporality, Public Policy, and COVID-19 PANDEMIC
This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of... more
This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university. The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial condition fundamental to life, and demonstrate new relationships between knowledge and the city. The design of the proposed ‘open university space’ responds to two simultaneous and interrelated challenges: that posed to architecture, and that posed to science. The university would embody the meeting of these at the intersection of the urban infrastructure and the knowledge infrastructure. The purpose is thus also to develop the notion of knowledge, embodied in institutions, as urban infrastructure.
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The paper both connects and disassociates the work of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. There are two interrelated undertakings. The first involves the relationship between philosophy and art history and thus how art history figures within... more
The paper both connects and disassociates the work of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. There are two interrelated undertakings. The first involves the relationship between philosophy and art history and thus how art history figures within the philosophical. The second pertains to the status of the image. Part of the argument to be advanced is that an engagement with philosophical approach to art history yields a concern with the image in which it is the image's material presence that proves decisive. Indeed, it is by insisting on the object's materiality that it then becomes possible to locate the effective presence of the gesture as integral to the work of art. The contention is that gesture is the intersection of art's material presence and the concerns of meaning. The paper us develop via an engagement with works by Edgar Degas and Luca Signorelli.
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A collection of essays on the definition of "Filipinism" in the Asian context, its dynamics and evolution as well as its distinguishing features, Romulo's Identity and Change: Towards a National Definition is not only a... more
A collection of essays on the definition of "Filipinism" in the Asian context, its dynamics and evolution as well as its distinguishing features, Romulo's Identity and Change: Towards a National Definition is not only a welcome addition to the Filipiniana presently being published but of vital importance in its relevance to and timeliness for the Philippine scene.
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The aim of this paper, which more generally is a contribution to political theology, is to show in what way the conception of peace in Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei is dependent upon a specific philosophical anthropology. Within it any... more
The aim of this paper, which more generally is a contribution to political theology, is to show in what way the conception of peace in Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei is dependent upon a specific philosophical anthropology. Within it any link between human being and law is replaced by the subject of faith. Central to the argument is demonstrating the ways in which this anthropological position is necessarily interarticulated with the larger metaphysical positions that are advanced across a range of Cusanus’ texts.
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The project of this paper is present a specific engagement with Kant’s account of genius in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Genius is a theory of production. Moreover, once genius is linked to production (and not to a personified... more
The project of this paper is present a specific engagement with Kant’s account of genius in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Genius is a theory of production. Moreover, once genius is linked to production (and not to a personified agent) the philosophical moves way from the centrality of both the given and the subject and thus towards the produced. Such a possibility locates Kant’s engagement with genius at the threshold between aesthetics and a philosophy of art. The latter only emerges when centrality is attributed to the object: the object as the locus of presentation. This necessitates a move beyond the cognitive. Kant on genius is therefore at that threshold, on the other side of which is Hegel.
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Abstract Critique as a philosophical concept needs to be recast once it is linked to the possibility of a productive opening. In such a context critique has an important affinity to destruction and forms of inauguration. Working through... more
Abstract Critique as a philosophical concept needs to be recast once it is linked to the possibility of a productive opening. In such a context critique has an important affinity to destruction and forms of inauguration. Working through writings of Marx and Walter Benjamin, specifically Benjamin's "The Meaning of Time in the Moral World", destruction and inauguration are repositioned in terns of othering and the caesura of allowing.
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The paper both connects and disassociates the work of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. There are two interrelated undertakings. The first involves the relationship between philosophy and art history and thus how art history figures within... more
The paper both connects and disassociates the work of Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. There are two interrelated undertakings. The first involves the relationship between philosophy and art history and thus how art history figures within the philosophical. The second pertains to the status of the image. Part of the argument to be advanced is that an engagement with philosophical approach to art history yields a concern with the image in which it is the image's material presence that proves decisive. Indeed, it is by insisting on the object's materiality that it then becomes possible to locate the effective presence of the gesture as integral to the work of art. The contention is that gesture is the intersection of art's material presence and the concerns of meaning. The paper us develop via an engagement with works by Edgar Degas and Luca Signorelli.
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On Machines (F. Guattari) The Complexity of Language (J. Lecercle) The Table and the Field Drawing Broad, Contruction Site (B. Cache) n-Molecular Sexes: The Problem of Becoming-Woman (K. Jones) Blobs (G. Lynn) Rehearsing Complex Painting... more
On Machines (F. Guattari) The Complexity of Language (J. Lecercle) The Table and the Field Drawing Broad, Contruction Site (B. Cache) n-Molecular Sexes: The Problem of Becoming-Woman (K. Jones) Blobs (G. Lynn) Rehearsing Complex Painting (A. Benjamin & F. Marcaccio) Images of Absence (C. Buci-Glucksmann) Woman as Objet a Between Phantasy and Art (B. Ettinger) The Politics of Complexity in Architecture (C. Girard) Responding to the Question of Complexity (B. Tschumi) Housing Complexity (A. Gins & M. Gins) Madeline Gins: Helen Keller or Arakawa (M. Caws).
Stressing the "sensuous handling of image and paint" that characterizes the series "Banquo's Funeral" (1994-1996), Antaki presents Scherman's work as a mega-text featuring characters from "Macbeth".... more
Stressing the "sensuous handling of image and paint" that characterizes the series "Banquo's Funeral" (1994-1996), Antaki presents Scherman's work as a mega-text featuring characters from "Macbeth". Benjamin compares the series to a painting by Poussin and demonstrates how a painting essentialy differs from a literary work in narrative terms (reprinted text). Biographical notes. Bibl. 2 p.
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Beginning with the seminal role of Joseph Beuys, the authors focus on questions of representational strategies and subject matter in the work of several contemporary German artists. Statements by and interviews with the artists punctuate... more
Beginning with the seminal role of Joseph Beuys, the authors focus on questions of representational strategies and subject matter in the work of several contemporary German artists. Statements by and interviews with the artists punctuate the text. 50 bibl. ref.
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Les lecons de Fichte sur la destination du savant posent la question fondamentale de la non-identite du savant et de la societe qui est a la source de la mission universitaire a l’egard de l’Etat democratique. C’est en effet a la... more
Les lecons de Fichte sur la destination du savant posent la question fondamentale de la non-identite du savant et de la societe qui est a la source de la mission universitaire a l’egard de l’Etat democratique. C’est en effet a la condition que se maintienne un espacement entre differentes formes d’utilite dans ce qui nous definit comme vie en commun, que nous pouvons envisager de parfaire celles-ci et d’eviter la reduction des unes aux autres. Il faut donc envisager les contre-mesures qui permettent de «tenir ouvert» cet espace¬ ment du commun grâce auquel l’universite peut se reinventer comme forme specifique d’utilite sociale.
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The relationship between the hand and the eye and thus between touch and sight is the mark of a founding instability; an instability, it can be argued that accompanies the history of aesthetics. Integral to that history is the attempt to... more
The relationship between the hand and the eye and thus between touch and sight is the mark of a founding instability; an instability, it can be argued that accompanies the history of aesthetics. Integral to that history is the attempt to control, or at the very least to assert control over that which is inherently unstable namely the domain of sensation. This is a state of affairs that accompanies the emergence of aesthetics and which finds its most exact formulation in the distinction between sensation and cognition.
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Foreword Opening Resisting Forms Loose Fit Early Work Solid-State Architecture PROJECTS Cardiff Bay Opera House Yokohama Port Terminal Kansai Library Bucharest 2000 Water Garden Chronology of Works and Bibliography.
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Skip to content Skip to navigation Accessibility Using a modern browser that supports web standards ensures that the site's full visual experience is available. Consider upgrading your browser if you are using an older... more
Skip to content Skip to navigation Accessibility Using a modern browser that supports web standards ensures that the site's full visual experience is available. Consider upgrading your browser if you are using an older technology. ...
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Tony Davies/Robbie B. H. Goh: Introduction: Britishness and the Construction of Postcolonial Identities - Andrew Benjamin: Modernity and the Subject of National Identity - James N. Brown/Patricia M. Sant: Settling Identities: Britishness... more
Tony Davies/Robbie B. H. Goh: Introduction: Britishness and the Construction of Postcolonial Identities - Andrew Benjamin: Modernity and the Subject of National Identity - James N. Brown/Patricia M. Sant: Settling Identities: Britishness Abroad - John Phillips: British Soil: Repeat, Multiply, Address - Sue Thomas: Jean Rhys, "Human Ants," and the Production of Expatriate Creole Identities - Desmond Allison: English Language Teaching Today: Are "British Identities" Relevant? - Tony Davies: Imported Identities: The Making of a British Ruling Class - David Punter: Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Reconstructing An Absent Nation - Bernice Schrank: Staging John Bull: British Identity and Irish Drama - Robbie B. H. Goh: Subversive Modernity: Coleridge, Gothic Imagery, the "Body Politic," and the Contestation of the Romantic Nation-State - Barnard Turner: Edwin Morgan, Contemporary British Poetry Publishing and British Multiculturalism - Edna Lim/Valerie Wee: Industry and Identity: Filming the British Action Hero - Lauren M. E. Goodlad: Three (More) Women's Texts and a Critique of New Historicism: Self-Disciplinary Soul-Making in Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale and Charlotte Bronte - Robin Loon Seong Yun: Rewriting Shakespeare and Englishness: George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra - Gwee Li Sui: The Religion of the English Bible: From Wycliffe to James I - Julie K. Eberly: Reading the Motif of Captivity: Fragmentation or Unity in Remembering Babylon - Axel Kruse: Patrick White's Early Work: An Introduction to a Literary Puzzle - Shanthini Pillai: Beadless in a Foreign Land, or a Jouti of a New Kind: David Dabydeen's Turner - Janet Wilson: The Abject and Sublime: Enabling Conditions of New Zealand's Postcolonial Identity - Judith Dale: Interrogating Identity in New Zealand Stage Plays - Chitra Sankaran: Nirad C. Chaudhuri's A Passage to England: A Site of Colonial Anxiety.
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Abstract: Colour plays a fundamental role in the philosophical treatment of painting. Colour while it is an essential part of the work of art cannot be divorced from the account of painting within which it is articulated. This paper... more
Abstract: Colour plays a fundamental role in the philosophical treatment of painting. Colour while it is an essential part of the work of art cannot be divorced from the account of painting within which it is articulated. This paper begins with a discussion of the role of colour in ...
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Walter Benjamin’s writings on fashion need to be read as engagements with the problem of historical time and a related politics of time. The aim of this article is to develop this position. Its point of orientation is Thesis XIV from the... more
Walter Benjamin’s writings on fashion need to be read as engagements with the problem of historical time and a related politics of time. The aim of this article is to develop this position. Its point of orientation is Thesis XIV from the Theses on the Philosophy of History. What is argued is that close attention to the temporality of change and novelty within fashion may allow an insight into a conception of interruption and the ‘new’, however, it cannot yield a politics. Moreover, the link between fashion and utopianism allows for the development of a critique of the utopian dimension of Benjamin’s thought. The basis of that critique is the inherent politics of time in his own writings.
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Page 1. South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 doi 10.1215/00382876-2007-056 © 2007 Duke University Press Andrew Benjamin Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals ... Page 2. 72 Andrew Benjamin enactment of a specific... more
Page 1. South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 doi 10.1215/00382876-2007-056 © 2007 Duke University Press Andrew Benjamin Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals ... Page 2. 72 Andrew Benjamin enactment of a specific economy in respect to the animal. ...
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Research Interests:
This paper connects the question of modem architecture to the general problematic of appearance. Apperance, itself, arises as a result of the debate on ‘style’ that marked architectural theory and practice in Germany in the first part of... more
This paper connects the question of modem architecture to the general problematic of appearance. Apperance, itself, arises as a result of the debate on ‘style’ that marked architectural theory and practice in Germany in the first part of the nineteenth century. The problematic status of appearance should play a fundamental role in any assessment of claims about the autonomy of architecture. The project of the paper is to draw together these threads and thus delimit a specific locus of research.
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I opening Death will interrupt life. However, that interruption opens up a complex of concerns. On one level, it is the life of the individual that is interrupted. And yet, of course, precisely the individual’s death while occurring in... more
I opening Death will interrupt life. However, that interruption opens up a complex of concerns. On one level, it is the life of the individual that is interrupted. And yet, of course, precisely the individual’s death while occurring in relation to a singularity – the individual in question – interrupts the lives of others. That interruption is incorporated, and yet there is a form of continuity through discontinuity. What this can be taken as signalling is the presence of a more complex relation between death and singularity than that which would have been given by defining death simply in relation to a generalized form of human being who would then be the subject of death. The question of who dies cannot be automatically severed therefore from death’s registration. The shift in register is then from the individual – whether it is as an empirical singularity or as a generalized abstraction – to the complex of commonality. The latter is a state of affairs defined in terms of the common or the shared. It is precisely this predicament that is positioned by Heraclitus in fragment 27: ‘‘What awaits men (anthrôpous) at death they do not expect or even imagine.’’ What the fragment suggests is the proposition that while it is always possible to position death in relation to the individual, as important as death is what it indicates about structures of anticipation or expectation (elpontai) on the one hand, and those of imagining or conjecturing (dokeousi), on the other. Rather than a concern with death, it is more germane to ask: what, now, is it that is anticipated or imagined? However, this ‘‘now’’ needs to be understood as much as the temporal instant that can bear a date as it is as a marker of the present. (The latter is the temporal designation that opens up structures of expectation and the imagined, and which positions individuals within them.) Hence, what has to be taken up is the subject of the present as provided by these structures. Note, however, that Heraclitus’s formulation is not the singular term, as though it identified only one individual, or just the abstract individual. The subject in question is plural. As such, it can be argued that by using the plural, the subject is defined by a form of address that takes commonality as the point of departure. What is significant, therefore, is not what is there with death but that the subject of what is happening now – the ‘‘now,’’ or the present, as the locus of that which happens and thus as the continual site in which activity and its potentiality play themselves out – is structured by commonality. Precisely because it is commonality andrewbenjamin
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Page 1. South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 doi 10.1215/00382876-2007-056 © 2007 Duke University Press Andrew Benjamin Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals ... Page 2. 72 Andrew Benjamin enactment of a specific... more
Page 1. South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 doi 10.1215/00382876-2007-056 © 2007 Duke University Press Andrew Benjamin Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals ... Page 2. 72 Andrew Benjamin enactment of a specific economy in respect to the animal. ...
Research Interests:
... the ways in which "without relation" is intertwined with a logic of sacrifice. ... Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (SUNY 2005), Time for the ... She has published numerous articles on... more
... the ways in which "without relation" is intertwined with a logic of sacrifice. ... Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (SUNY 2005), Time for the ... She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, feminist ...