Alison Ross

In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin’s approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant’s treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues that Benjamin’s thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ and his work on The Arcades Project from 1927 up until his death in 1940. The two periods of Benjamin’s writing share a conception of the image as a potent sensuous force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function attracts Benjamin’s critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. The book gives a critical treatment of the shifting assumptions in Benjamin’s writing about the image that warrant this altered view. It draws on hermeneutic studies of meaning, scholarship in the history of religions and key texts from the modern history of aesthetics to track the reversals and contradictions in the meaning functions that Benjamin attaches to the image in the different periods of his thinking.

This book examines the ways that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy adopt and reconfigure the Kantian understanding of "aesthetic presentation." In Kant, "aesthetic presentation" is understood in a technical sense as a specific mode of experience within a typology of different spheres of experience. This study argues that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy generalize the elements of this specific mode of experience so that the aesthetic attitude and the vocabulary used by Kant to describe it are brought to bear on things in general. The book goes beyond documenting the well-known influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment, however, to open up a new way of approaching some of the central issues in post-Kantian thought—including why it is that art, the art work, and the aesthetic are still available as a vehicle of critique even, or especially, after Auschwitz. It shows that a genealogy of contemporary theory needs to look at the question of presentation, which has arguably been a question that has worried philosophy from its very beginning.

This paper examines the significance of Kant's particular phrasing of sublime presentation for politics. Does the feeling of the sublime comport a political reference? And if so what does it tell us about the relation of the image to the political and the relevance of the Kantian problematic of the schematism to political concerns?
The paper consists in a brief examination of the three issues I take to be
pertinent to the question of the coherence of a political reference in the
sublime. First I will examine the Kantian doctrine of the schema and the
place allotted to it by the image; second I will discuss the sense in which a
schema or image can be understood as political; and finally, I will offer a
brief discussion of the Kantian sublime to ask in what sense it carries a
correction to the 'schematisation' of the political.

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 article gives a critical account of Agamben's contention that the camp is the paradigm of 'bio-politics' in the west. It analyses the deficiencies of this paradigm by means of comparison with other approaches to juridical topics and political theory (e.g., the treatments of the topics of force and state power in liberalism and Foucault). First, I ask about the features Agamben ascribes to the camp space and in what respects they support his contention that the camp has general significance. Second, I question the reasons he gives for his view that the camp situation discloses the general tendencies of legal codes and practices in the West. In particular, I ask whether, as Agamben contends, his approach allows tendencies in the West that would otherwise be obscure to be identifiable, or whether his approach is too speculative to be useful as political theory.

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.

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 formations warrant and attract reflective attention and underpin (the) moral orientation. The point is significant since Kantian aesthetics is an object of polemical attention across Benjamin's heterogeneous corpus. Moreover, the approach shows the main difficulty in Benjamin's treatment of sensible forms: what are the criteria he uses to distinguish the "bad" way a sensible form has of being meaningful from the "good"?

For the purposes of analytical clarity it is possible to distinguish a number of different ways that Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ uses the term ‘ambiguity’ [Zweideutigkeit]. Whereas in Benjamin’s late work,‘ambiguity’ can mark an equivocal value, as in the formula he uses in ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’(1935) to describe the components of the dialectical image as ‘ambiguous’(AP10), the ‘Critique of Violence ’typifies the way the term is used in the early work to confer an exclusively pejorative meaning. In general, ambiguity in the early work is used to condemn the lack of clarity and absence of truth that Benjamin defines as attributes of ‘myth’. The position is put in stark terms in the 1924 essay, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’. In this essay Benjamin links ambiguity to guilt, fate and ritualistic life. One of the significant theses in this essay is Benjamin’s critique of ritualistic life. Empty rituals do not provide adequate orientation for human beings; they proffer ambiguous forms, which condemn human beings to a fateful existence. The key to Benjamin’s position in this essay is the contrast he draws between mythic life and theological perception. The thesis that mythic life is a life which founders in ambiguity is supported in the essay through the opposition between mythic ambiguity and the clarity of theological perception. In general, the opposition is marked by references to the ambiguous mysticism of word use or silence in the case of myth, and the clarity of logos in the case of theology. The functions of the lack of clarity that is the defining feature of mythic ambiguity in the ‘Critique of Violence’, however, are ambiguous. This article explores the consequences of this ambiguity for Benjamin's position in his 'Critique of Violence'.

This article examines how Rancière connects reverie to emancipation. It focuses on two questions: the nature of the relation between his definition of reverie and the classical, Aristotelian concept of action; and, whether, given the constitutive non-relation between reverie and action that he outlines, Rancière’s position can address the persistent problem in critical theory of the motivation for the emancipated life. It is argued that his highlighting of the potential communicative significance of modes and scenes of emancipated life is relevant to this problem. The key argument is that rather than developing a ‘theory’, his approach to emancipation focuses on and values communicable experiences of emancipation, and that states of reverie are one such type of valued 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.

This paper analyses the diverse references involved in Walter Benjamin's idea of revolution. Despite its significance for his philosophical outlook, the concept of revolution seems to receive no systematic or perhaps even consistent treatment in his heterogeneous writings. But what is clear is that, in contrast to the way the term is usually understood in political philosophy, Benjamin conceives of revolution primarily as a category of experience, a type of emphatic experience of meaning. The paper defends this interpretation against some of the recent treatments of Benjamin's notion of the dream and the wish. It shows that an adequate account of Benjamin's idea of revolution must grapple with his peculiar idea of an articulated wish that is fulfilled in history. And it defends the thesis that this idea of a fulfilled historical wish provides the most robust formulation of the different references involved in Benjamin's idea of revolutionary experience as well an instructive point of contrast between Benjamin's treatment of this idea and other well-known conceptions of revolution.

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 philosophical anthropology is ‘philosophical’.

The category of the image is generally understood in terms that emphasise its connection with visual perception. And yet, even in those intellectual traditions that make this connection all important, it is clear that an image cannot adequately be defined as a perceptible visual form. Furthermore, one consequence of relating the image to visual perception is to render the term ubiquitous and deprive it of analytical utility. Other ways of defining the image have a similarly devaluing effect: among them, the reduction of the image to the technological media that communicate it, or the framing of the image as a component in ontological dualism.

This paper argues for the general analytical value of the term outside of these influential, regional definitions. It defends the thesis that the image is a tool for the communication of meaning. Through an analysis of the treatment of ‘form’ in works from the German tradition of philosophical anthropology (Jonas and Blumenberg), it is argued that the category of the image presupposes a subject who is engaged by it. In their experience of images human beings step outside their ordinary experience and even rework that experience in reference to categories that must be understood as artificial. In this regard, the meaning communicated in an image provides sensible intuition for ideas that would not otherwise have existential resonance, such as the idea of post-mortem life. In its heightened mode of communication, the image relays artificial contexts of meaning that provide human beings with enhanced frameworks for action.

This article defends the thesis that there are multiple points of exchange between the categories of " word " and " image " in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Benjamin describes the truth of the articulate wish of the past as " graphically perceptible " and the image as " readable. " In this respect the vocabulary of " word " and " image " that Benjamin's early work had opposed are not just deployed in concert, but specific features of the vocabulary of " word " and " image " become exchangeable. The distinctive features of this exchange can be used to expound on Benjamin's peculiar understanding of revolutionary experience and the significance of the break that it marks with his early way of opposing the word and the image. In particular, the exchange of features between word and image can explain the mechanics and intended effect of his idea that the meaning of history can be perceived in an image. The study of this exchange also shows that although the framework of " graphic perception " entails an experience of motivating meaning that is epistemologically grounded, the citation model of history is unable to secure the extension of the sought after legibility of the nineteenth century to a recipient.

In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin’s approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant’s treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues
that Benjamin’s thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ and his work on The Arcades Project from 1927 up until his death in 1940. The two periods of Benjamin’s writing share a conception of the image as a potent sensuous force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function
attracts Benjamin’s critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. The book gives a critical treatment of the shifting assumptions in Benjamin’s writing about the image that warrant this altered view. It draws on hermeneutic studies of meaning, scholarship in the history of religions, and key texts from the modern history of aesthetics to track
the reversals and contradictions in the meaning functions that Benjamin attaches to the image in the different periods of his thinking. Above all, it shows the relevance of a critical consideration of Benjamin’s writing on the image for scholarship in visual culture, critical theory, aesthetics, and philosophy more broadly.

This paper gives a critical account of problems in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ essay. It focuses in particular on his treatment of the distinction between divine and mythic violence. It shows that the position the essay defends is not cogent within the terms of the essay itself and that its opaque formulations can be explained only when Benjamin’s position on myth in his more substantial, contemporaneous essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ is taken into account. In particular, his essay on Goethe’s novel elucidates the reasoning behind Benjamin’s view that divine violence provides an escape from myth’s forces of totalisation. This point is significant because in recent scholarship on Benjamin’s essay on Violence the category and functions of divine violence are replaced with an amorphous conception of language. Recent commentators defend under the category of ‘infinite language’ the very characteristics of formless totality that the Violence essay excoriates; and they do so as if these characteristics were the objects of Benjamin’s veneration.