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What does ‘communism’ mean in Walter Benjamin’s writing? It has been used in some quarters to claim that Benjamin has a quasi-Marxist theory of communist society. This paper will argue instead that Benjamin’s communism is framed by his distinctive conception of experience and that it is understandable only through that conception. Benjamin’s image of ‘communist society’ refers to a specific type of experience (‘collective experience’) rather than a type of social organization. The paper discusses the conceptual background of that image and also points out a number of the difficulties that Benjamin’s conception of collective experience faces given its genesis in a model of individual experience.

This paper critically evaluates Foucault’s relation to Bachelard and Canguilhem. It reconsiders the relevance of the concept of “influence” for treating this relation in order to register the more sceptical position Foucault adopts towards knowledge practices than either of these figures from twentieth-century French epistemology.

Ruth Leys’ Ascent of Affect is a compelling and impressive history of twentieth century interest in the emotions as an object of study in the human sciences. Leys’ interest in the topic dates from ...

This article canvases some of the issues involved in the idea of form as a practice in Kant, Blumenberg and Foucault, and it also outlines the different contexts and approaches the individual papers collected in this Special Issue use to explore this idea.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the use of the idea of distance in philosophical anthropology. Distance is generally presented in works of philosophical anthropology as the ideal coping strategy, which rests in turn on the thesis of the instinct deficiency of the human species. Some of the features of species life, such as its sophisticated use of symbolic forms, come to be seen as necessary parts of this general coping strategy, rather than a merely expressive outlet, incidental to the ultimate goal of life preservation. The paper analyses the arguments used in support of the thesis of instinct deficiency in Hans Blumenberg and considers their implications for the status of symbolic expression in species life. It contrasts the approach this thesis involves with one that proceeds by presenting and arguing from biological evolutionary evidence. The contrast is used to examine the questions: in what sense instinct deficiency is specifically anthropological, and in what precise sense philoso...

The concept of ‘the image’ can be given historical, conceptual, aesthetic and moral specifications. This essay sets out some of the scholarly issues in the dense semantic field of ‘the image’. In p...

From the comparative framework of writing on the meaning of ritual in the field of the history of religions (M. Eliade and J. Z. Smith), this essay argues that one of the major problems in Benjamin’s thinking is how to make certain forms of materiality stand out against other (degraded) forms. In his early work, the way that Benjamin deals with this problem is to call degraded forms “symbolic”, and those forms of materiality with positive value, “allegorical”. The article shows how there is more than an incidental connection with the recent approach to ritual in the field of history of religions, seeing that Benjamin too wants to set out the significance of certain material forms against those that are “ritualistic” and hence false. It is argued that he treats the latter in his essay on Elective Affinities and the former in his Trauerspiel. The key claim is that the way material forms stand out as meaningful is akin to the Kantian description of the aesthetic attitude, which identifies how certain...

Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is a modern myth. Like many ancient myths it seems to have the structure of a rite of passage analysed by van Gennep into three stages: separation, marginal existence and reintegration. Separation is precipitated by a traumatic event and the marginal state is characterized by extraordinary experiences and feats. However, Jarmusch's tale does not quite fit the ancient initiation pattern since the last stage, reintegration, is at least prima facie missing. This already undermines the social function of initiation and warps the significance of the myth. The modern town of “Machine”, where the marginal existence of Blake is sealed, looms in the background of the story of his final journey to the world of spirits whence he had come. But Blake cannot quite embrace the story in which he plays the protagonist. The story is cobbled together by the Native American called “Nobody.” Blake sceptically resigns himself to his fate. Why does Blake do this? Jarmusch manipulates the generic structur...

This paper examines the role of formal, aesthetic elements in motivating moral action. It proposes that Blumenberg’s analysis of the existential settings of myth and metaphor provide a useful framework to consider the conception and function of the aesthetic symbol in Kantian moral philosophy. In particular, it explores the hypothesis that Blumenberg’s analysis of ‘pregnance’ and ‘rhetoric’ are useful for identifying and evaluating the processes involved in self-persuasion to the moral perspective.

This paper examines the use of "pleasure" as the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience in post-Kantian philosophy. It shows how the distinctive features of aesthetic experience, such as pleasure, qualify this experience as a platform for social criticism. The key argument is that the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is not "false", rather it is paradoxical in the strong sense that the fact of its communicative efficacy, which follows from distinctive, "autonomous" aesthetic features, necessarily loads it with functions and expectations that are external to the aesthetic moment. Kant takes a complicated path to qualify aesthetic judgement as disinterested in order that it may eloquently testify for morality. He thereby sets up the cogency of the modern pattern of looking to aesthetic experience as a locus of meaningful communication for ideas that are experientially poor or remote.

Kant's moral philosophy understands the experience of moral law in two somewhat divergent ways.1 In the preface to his Critique of Practical Reason Kant defines moral law as a mere ‘fact’ of moral ...

(2006). The Work of the Art-Work: Art after Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 37, Ontology, Art and The Holy, pp. 199-215.

This paper deals with Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in his essay ‘Economimesis’. I argue that Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s aesthetics can be used to describe the aporia within Kantian politics between rebellion and progressive revolutionary acts. The focus of my argument falls on examining how the recent debate over Derrida’s ethics can be usefully considered from the background of this treatment of Kant. In particular, the analysis Derrida gives of Kant’s aesthetics commits him to a series of conceptual constraints that can be detected in his recent commentaries on ‘forgiveness’ and ‘hospitality’. I suggest that these recent commentaries on political topics also depart from his earlier practice of ethics in ‘Economimesis’ as a ‘witnessing’ of the particular. This departure can be clearly seen once the Kantian background to Derrida’s recent writing is set out.

David-Menard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's pre-critical works which attest to this tendency--"An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind" and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime--to the final form of the critical philosophy.

Ross examines the relation between thought and madness within the practical and theoretical wings of Kant's critical philosophy. She argues that the notion of critique is formulated as a guard against the tendency of thought to madness. She locates the significance of David'Ménard's essay on Kant's pre-critical works in the idea that Kant's own tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.

Jean-Francois Lyotard's writing on politics conceives of political problems principally as problems of judgment. In his now famous account of the post-modern condition Lyotard identifies the defining feature of our age as the absence of any authoritative, uncontested criterion, out of a multiplicity of contending criteria, for the judgment of events.1 Lyotard's account of the consequences of this condition is partly guided by his fascination with Kant's aesthetics. The account of reflective judgment outlined by Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment differentiates judgments of taste from determinative, cognitive judgments primarily because there is no given rule or law for beauty, and the judgment of a particular form as beautiful in "pure taste" is pleasurable only as a result of the reflective search by the faculties for such a rule. Lyotard sees in Kant's injunction against a science of the beautiful (in which particular objects would already be determined as beautiful and thus make redundant the pleasure in the feeling of reflective judgment by legislating to the subject how it should feel) a direct analogy to the absence of given criteria in political judgment. To explicate this view Lyotard cites events in which criteria of judgment accepted as given were surpassed by events they were unable to judge.2 Accordingly, the "rule" of judgment is for Lyotard the need to invent new idioms for judgment, idioms that are themselves called forth by, rather than furnishing a readymade framework to judge, particular events. The approach to politics that emerges from this account of judgment receives its most influential formulation in the work Lyotard saw as his most important: The Differend. This book sets out the inadequacy of the conception of justice as the litigable articulation of damages [dommages] by pointing to instances of damages "accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage." Such instances compound the privation of the damage adding to it "the impossibility of bringing it to the knowledge of others, and in particular to the knowledge of a tribunal."3 Lyotard defines such damages as wrongs [torts]. In The Differend he describes a differend as the particular wrong that arises from an incompatibility between discursive genres. This incompatibility results in a differend (a wrong) when one genre imposes its rules on another. What is crucial for Lyotard is that this very imposition also silences the means by which the wrong suffered could be phrased. In the examples that open the first chapter of the book, Lyotard lists the holocaust survivor whose testimony is met by the revisionist historian's demands for proofs; the assertion of the view that major pieces of literature remain unpublished and the counter demand by the press editor to name one such work; and the Ibanskian witness who has to testify before the communist authorities. From these examples Lyotard shows the differend to be the impossible task the plaintiff faces in demonstrating the existence of what is in dispute. The differend manifests itself as an "affect-phrase," or sentiment, whose defining feature is its silence. Neither able to be expressed as a mere damage nor, as a consequence, remedied in juridical processes the differend requires, on Lyotard's view, the invention of new idioms by thinking, literature and art. A number of paradoxes condition this conception of the differend and especially the way that Lyotard attaches to it an injunction for the thinker, writer, and artist to invent new idioms to "bear witness" to the silence of the differend. In particular, given the status of the differend as a wrong as yet unphrased, critics have asked whether the injunction to form new idioms for such wrongs aims to bring them into articulation as damages and thus to bring these wrongs into an economy of remediation and deny the differend its status as a differend, or whether this injunction involves "inventing idioms that express the differend as itself, as the differend itself, le differend meme"? …

This article analyses some of the shifts in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work by comparing the treatment of the topics of theatre and theatrical representation in his early writing on literary and philosophical texts with the conception of a politically committed ‘ethics’ in his late work. The topic of theatrical representation is particularly useful for a critical assessment of Derrida's later ethics because it allows us to give careful consideration to his position on different types of, and contexts for, involvement. I argue that some of the important differences in tone and argumentation in Derrida's work arise not just because of the different exigencies that distinguish readings of literary/philosophical texts from analyses of political circumstances and events. There is also a shift in his work from attempting to account for the aporetic economy that supports positions held and defended to the terms of his advocacy for ethical commitment. In the case of his early writing the emphasis falls on accounting for meaning in terms of a typology of conversion effects; positive values are aporetically joined with negative ones. In his later work aporias do not present occasions for examining conditions of meaning. Rather, they become compelling imperatives to act. Despite the differences between these perspectives they both articulate an important role for aesthetic experience in meaning. I conclude by considering the consequences that such a position on meaning imposes on Derrida's use of the vocabulary of injunctions and imperatives to ‘compel’ a response.

This paper proposes to analyse the process that makes paths of action meaningful. It argues that this process is one of "figuration". The term "figuration" intends to outline how the experience of moral meaning is one that already positively marks out a field and to identify and analyse the mechanisms used for such marking and selection. It is my contention that these mechanisms predate the persuasion to a moral path; they are the process through which this path is constructed as meaningful. This thesis is elucidated through an analysis of the tactics of meaning in Kant's moral theory. Kant turns to aesthetics as a means of corroboration for his moral theory, but he also attempts to limit the scope of the interactions between his aesthetic and moral theory. For instance, when he writes on the topic of form in aesthetic taste or outlines the technical specifications of aesthetic judgment, it is arguably the arcane peculiarities of his system that are met. For this reason, Kant insists on the merely...