The Place of the Symbolic - Essays on Art and Politics

The Place of the Symbolic brings together Reiner Schürmann's essays on the nexus between art and politics. In keeping with his translation of the destruction of metaphysics into an an-archic philosophy of practice, Schürmann here develops a radically immanent theory of the place of symbols, irreducible to both Idealist theories and structuralist accounts of the symbolic such as Jacques Lacan's. Symbols, Schürmann argues in some of his earliest texts, may provide a bridge between ontological difference and politics. They resist being grasped metaphysically, in terms of representation. Instead their understanding requires a specific way of existence: attending to the coming-to-presence of phenomena. As such, the understanding of symbols discloses a form of praxis that abandons ultimate grounds and opens onto the manifold.

Alongside Schürmann's theory of symbols, the collection includes essays on the interaction of metaphysics, tragedy and technology, on the "there is" in poetry, as well as reflections on judgment. Throughout these characteristically lucid interventions, Schürmann's most urgent concern remains a consideration of singular and finite practices that enact a release from universal principles. Art and politics appear here as the unworking of ultimate grounds; that is, as practices attuned to a truly groundless form of life.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

7 - 42 Symbolic Difference (Reiner Schürmann)43 - 76 Symbolic Praxis (Reiner Schürmann)77 - 104 Situating René Char: Hölderlin, Heidegger, Char and the "There Is" (Reiner Schürmann)105 - 134 Political Thinking in Heidegger (Reiner Schürmann)135 - 162 The Ontological Difference and Political Philosophy (Reiner Schürmann)163 - 186 On Judging and its Issue (Reiner Schürmann)187 - 212 Technicity, Topology, Tragedy: Heidegger on That Which Saves in the Global Reach (Reiner Schürmann)213 - 232 Conditions of Evil (Reiner Schürmann)235 - 242 Interview with Reiner Schürmann in La Croix (Reiner Schürmann)243 - 256 On the Philosophers' Release from Civil Service (Reiner Schürmann)257 - 260 Abstraction that Makes the Viewer Think (Reiner Schürmann)261 - 294 Reiner Schürmann's Philosophy of Broken Bonds (Kieran Aarons, Nicolas Schneider)295 - 300 Acknowledgments