The aim of the paper is to examine the limits of Aristotle’s and Arendt’s contributions to a philosophical anthropology. By focusing on the concept of ‘potentiality’—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.

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.

The aim of the paper is to examine the limits of Aristotle’s and Arendt’s contributions to a philosophical anthropology. By focusing on the concept of ‘potentiality’—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.

Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the founding members of the College Internationale de philosophie. Ha has taught at Vincennes, Saint Denis and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. Several of his books have appeared in English, notable The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming and The Dirrerend. The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard's most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as (...) wide-ranging as film, painting, psychoanalysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard's work means that it can not be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise. A number of chapters in The Lyotard Reader appear for the first time in English. This is the most comprehensive collection available of Lyotard's work, work has profoundly influenced debates on the Enlightenment, on modernity, on postmodernity, on the transmission f information, on literary theory and on philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to investigate the role of allegory in Philo and spe­cifically 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 op­position. Allegory is transformed as a result in the name of an ineliminable allegoresis. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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.

This engrossing study, first published in 1989, explores the basic mutuality between philosophy and translation. By studying the conceptions of translation in Plato, Seneca, Davidson, Walter Benjamin and Freud, Andrew Benjamin reveals the interplay between the two disciplines not only in their relationship to language, but also at a deeper, cognitive level. Benjamin engages throughout with the central tenets of post-structuralism: the concept of a constant yet illusive ‘true’ meaning has lost authority, but remains a problem. The fact of translation (...) seems to defy the notion that ‘meaning’ is reducible to its component words; yet, to say that the ‘truth’ is more than the sum of its parts, we are challenging the very foundations of what it is to communicate, to understand, and to know. In Translation and the Nature of Philosophy, the author sets out his own theory of language in light of these issues. (shrink)

The presence of COVID-19 has elicited a range of philosophical responses. The aim of this paper is to engage with the position advanced by Giorgio Agamben. Part of the critique of Agamben involves critique of populism. In response to populism the paper advances a different philosophical position this time ground in the concept of solidarity. The work of Hannah Arendt provides the basis for this response.

Le visage est-il un phénomène simple ou complexe? Serait-il juste de le définir comme cet aspect de l’être humain qui dépasse tout effort de compréhension et de totalisation, ou bien y a-t-il d’autres caractéristiques de ce phénomène qu’il faut inclure dans toute définition ou description du visage? Le visage est un événement fondamental. Parmi les multiples manières d’approcher l’être, de se rapporter...

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.

The contention of this chapter is that Derrida's writings about the “dessins” (drawings) of Artaud and the “tableaux” (paintings) of Atlan remain trapped within the problems posed by ekphrasis. In addition to any attempt to identify both the place of ekphrasis and its legacy, what also needs to be established, as part of that opening move, is the limit of ekphrasis. Philostratus’ Imagines provide a way into the question of ekphrasis. As has been intimated, ekphrasis understood in the chapter not (...) only as the equation of the work of art with a form of description that depends upon the literary and the rhetorical, but also we must understand that the equation of art and description entails the privilege of meaning – with the result that work and meaning coincide. Derrida's text is extraordinary. It begins with “the dreamer” held by a work, held by its “trait de couleur”. (shrink)

The article examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to the development of a philosophical anthropology that takes relationality as its point of departure. The relations in question are to ‘others’ and to ‘place.’ The first part of the article argues that while relationality has to be understood as a descriptive of human being, the possibility of coming into relation—in Arendt’s terms ‘appearing’—needs to be understood as the actualization of a potentiality. While the potentiality has a necessary existence, its actualization is inherently contingent. (...) It is the problem of potentiality as that which demands actualization that, while fundamental to Arendt’s project, she fails to take up. The second part of the article traces the presence of this limit in Arendt’s thought through her engagement with Heidegger in her text What is Existential Philosophy? (shrink)

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. (shrink)

JPVA Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts No 6 Complexity Architecture / Art / Philosophy 'Beginning with complexity will involve working with the recognition that there has always been more than one. Here however this insistent "more than one" will be positioned beyond the scope of semantics; rather than complexity occurring within the range of meaning and taking the form of a generalised polysemy, it will be linked to the nature of the object and to its production. Complexity, therefore, (...) will be inextricably connected to the ontology of the object. What this means is that complexity, in resisting the hold of a semantic idealism on the one hand, and the attempt to give to it the position of being the basis of a new foundationalism on the other, becomes a way of thinking both the presence and the production of objects.' Andrew Benjamin The Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts has set new standards in its exploration of themes central to philosophy's relation to the visual arts, illuminating areas of art criticism, architecture, feminism as well as philosophy itself. Rather than simply reflecting current trends it provides a forum in which the real developments in the analysis of the visual arts and its larger cultural and political context can be presented. Articles by well known philosophers and theorists, as well as some lesser known, together with writings by artists and architects allow a strong interdisciplinary approach reflecting the Journal's roots in post-structural theory. Previous issues include: Philosophy & the Visual Arts (No 1) Philosophy & Architecture (No 2) Architecture, Space, Painting (No 3) The Body (No 4) Abstraction (No 5). (shrink)

Colour plays a fundamental role in the philosophical treatments 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 Schelling's conception of art. Nonetheless its primary concern is to develop a critical encounter with Jean-François Lyotard's analysis of the Dutch painter Karel Appel. The limits of Lyotard's writings on painting, which this (...) paper will attribute in part to Lyotard's ‘empiricism’, becomes most apparent in his treatment of colour. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on a 1914 photograph by Stefano Bricarelli that can be considered a visual representation of the concerns of landscape. It explores the concept of the sublime in terms of the interplay between distance, immediacy, and representation. Before considering the concept of sublimity, the question regarding entry into the scene must first be addressed. The possibility that landscape may only exist because of such an entry plays a vital role in any analysis of the photographic image. This possibility (...) also allows a conception of human presence that is not mere construction but a form of production. While there may be a process in which a form of presence comes into consideration, what is present brings with it a transformational quality. The logic of addition also suggests that human presence creates an original form of distancing. (shrink)

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 concomitant 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.

The volume shows how both the distinction and connection between literature and poetry is staged within Heidegger's thought. It offers Heidegger's perspective on a range of key themes, topics, poets, and writers, including Friedrich Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Euripides and Sophocles.

This paper pursues the way the terms exhaustion and inexhaustibility play a central role in Werner Hamacher’s critical encounter with philosophy. The argument is developed via an engagement with aspects of Hamacher’s interpretation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments. The limitations of Hamacher’s own position become an opening. What is opened up is the possibility of philosophy having become exhausted as a result of its identification with calculation and instrumentality.

This paper pursues the way the terms exhaustion and inexhaustibility play a central role in Werner Hamacher’s critical encounter with philosophy. The argument is developed via an engagement with aspects of Hamacher’s interpretation of Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments. The limitations of Hamacher’s own position become an opening. What is opened up is the possibility of philosophy having become exhausted as a result of its identification with calculation and instrumentality.

This special issue arose from a workshop on “Peace and Concord from Plato to Lessing”, organised by the editors and which took place at the University of Sydney on 18 and 19 September 2017. Central to the work of both the editors is the relationship between the concepts of ‘concord’, ‘peace’ and ‘dignity’ within a setting created by a concern with the development of a philological anthropology. Their work combines both intellectual history and philosophy, a combination that is reflected in (...) the contents of the special issue of Theoria. The importance of these terms is that they allow for another interpretation of the ethical and the political. Central to both is the location of human being within a larger cultural context. That context demands an approach in which philosophy does not exclude history, and history recognises that it is already informed philosophically. If there is a unifying term, it is ‘culture’. The approach taken within the larger project starts with the centrality of culture as that which demands to be thought. And yet culture is neither tranquil nor unified. As Walter Benjamin argued, there ‘is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’. Allowing for culture’s centrality entails a reconfiguration of both philosophy and intellectual history. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to take up the prompt in Derrida's work concerning the necessity for a deconstruction of anthropocentrism. Working through an example from Hegel's Philosophy of Right concerning animality, the paper takes up Derrida's project and connects it to the larger concern of what happens to the philosophical once it is no longer premised on the animal's exclusion but has to acknowledge the inclusion of an already present thus recalcitrant animality.

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Abstract The role of actual works of art with philosophical writing is often reduced to the status of example or illustration. As such the materiality of art work is rarely discussed let alone deployed as the basis of philosophical reflection. In this paper works by Francesco Mosca, and Bernini are used to question Heidegger's writings on sculpture. What such an approach opens up is the possibility that art may set the measure for philosophy.

That the question of identity takes on a sense of urgency, one with its own possibilities and impossibilities, the moment that identity is bound up with death, is hardy surprising. What follows are a series of reflections on the question of identity, Jewish identity, raised by Jean Améry’s remarkable text On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew. Améry’s text was of course published in the wake of his own experiences as an active member of the resistance, as having (...) been imprisoned in Auschwitz and as the victim of torture. Philosophically, rather than biographically, if there were a point of comparison, then it is to Levinas’s 1947 text Etre juif. Both pose the problem of how the question of Jewish identity, Jewish being, is to be understood in the wake of the Shoah. The meaning of the formulations - Jude zu sein, Jude sein, Etre juif, Jewish being – delimits the question to be addressed. This will be the case even if its point of address, namely what the question stages, is itself far from straightforward. Moreover, while what is demanded within that question is itself philosophically important, it is equally the case that the question of Jewish being is at work within both communities and synagogues across the Jewish world. As a consequence it is as much a philosophical question as it is one that has a structuring effect on how Jewish survival is conceived. How survival is understood is an issue that continues to exert its force. Who is the subject of survival? What is the subject of survival? Who or what has been subjected to the issue of survival? Survival is both more nuanced and complex than the brute fact of an afterlife. Jewish being as a present question – a question of the present - continues therefore. (shrink)

Painting can only be thought in relation to the image. And yet, with (and within) painting what continues to endure is the image of painting. While this is staged explicitly in, for example, paintings of St. Luke by artists of the Northern Renaissance—e.g., Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Simon Marmion—the same concerns are also at work within both the practices as well as the contemporaneous writings that define central aspects of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of this paper (...) is to begin an investigation into the process by which painting stages the activity of painting. This forms part of a project whose aim is an investigation of the way philosophy should respond to the essential historicity of art (where the latter is understood philosophically). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to develop a new theory of particularity. In so doing it redefines the concepts 'perception' and 'judgment'. The redefinition occurs once perception is understood as recognition. The move to recognition entails the centrality of repetition. Recognition, it is argued, is a form of repetition. Allowing for repetition necessitates changing the way the relationship between universals and particulars is understood. This is developed via an engagement with Hume and Plato. The article concludes with the outline (...) for a rethinking of the metaphysics of particularity. (shrink)