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Kieran Aarons (ed.), Reiner Schürmann, ...: The Place of the Symbolic

Reiner Schürmann, Kieran Aarons (ed.), Nicolas Schneider (ed.)

The Place of the Symbolic
Essays on Art and Politics

Softcover, 300 pages

PDF, 300 pages

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.

  • politics
  • art
  • art theory
  • ontology

“In this collection, Schürmann compellingly shows how the place of symbols, or what he calls the ‘symbolic difference,’ is the inaugural and inexhaustible site of the presencing or letting-be of being, the site of possibility (the ‘not-yet’). With these essays, Schürmann significantly develops his thinking on how we think and act in our present moment of ‘broken bonds.’ The volume is beautifully edited by Kieran Aarons and Nicolas Schneider, who provide a nuanced and beautiful concluding essay on Schürmann’s thinking of the symbolic difference in the light of his theory of broken hegemonies.” 

—Peg Birmingham, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University; author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (Indiana University Press, 2006)

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Kieran Aarons

teaches political philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His articles have appeared in Theory & Event, Mute Magazine, Hostis, and elsewhere. He is the translator of François Zourabichvili’s Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, as well as many other articles in French and Italian philosophy. He is currently completing a book on the concept of destituent power, linking the philosophies of time and festivity in Furio Jesi and Giorgio Agamben to contemporary social and ecological movements.

Nicolas Schneider

teaches philosophy and cultural theory at Humboldt University Berlin. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London, and an MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Other texts by Nicolas Schneider for DIAPHANES
Reiner Schürmann

Reiner Schürmann

(1941–93) was a German philosopher. He was born in Amsterdam and lived in Germany, Israel, and France before immigrating to the United States in the 1970s, where he was professor and director of the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of three books on philosophy: Heidegger on Being and Acting, Wandering Joy, and Broken Hegemonies. Origins is his only work of fiction. He never wrote nor published in his native German.
Other texts by Reiner Schürmann for DIAPHANES
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