Alison Ross

Monash University (Australia) · Philosophy

This article gives a critical account of the prevailing interpretation of Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" essay. It argues that the position Benjamin's essay defends regarding violence is not cogent within the terms of the essay itself and that the opaque formulations of this essay can be explained only when more substantial works of Benja...

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 Blumenbe...

In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamins concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamins approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kants treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues that Benjamins thinking on the image undergoe...

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 sophisticate...

This book places Benjamin’s writing on revolution in the context of his conception of historical knowledge. The fundamental problem that faces any analysis of Benjamin’s approach to revolution is that he deploys notions that belong to the domain of individual experience. His theory of modernity with its emphasis on the disintegration of collective...

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...

The classical distinction between leisure and work is often used to define features of the emancipated life. In Aristotle leisure is defined as time devoted to purposeful activity, and distinguished from the labour time expended merely to produce life’s necessities. In critical theory, this classical distinction has been adapted to provide an image...

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 unders...

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 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...

Nancy's writing on the image may be understood as a critical engagement with the traditions of modern aesthetics and classical theories of art. However, the starting point for his approach to the image indicates that his writing on this topic has much wider ambitions than the treatment of a regional aesthetic topic. Nancy defines the image as a mod...

Book review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

A review of Rosalyn Diprose's Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (SUNY Press, Albany, New York. 2002).

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 thi...

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, Jar...

The book forms the first critical study of Jacques Rancière’s impact and contribution to contemporary theoreticaland interdisciplinary studies. It showcases the work of leading scholars infields such as political theory, history and aesthetic theory; each of whom areuniquely situated to engage with the novelty of Rancière’s thinking withintheir res...

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...

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 c...

A provisional description of the concept of “literarity” needs to bring out Ranciére's distinctive intermeshing of the fields of aesthetics and politics. As we shall see in the first section, the concept of “literarity” is what the political term “equality” would do were it to become an aesthetic principle of analysis. It is not that “literarity” t...

Politics resembles art in one essential point. Like art, politics also cuts into that great metaphor where words and images are continuously sliding in and out of each other to produce the sensory evidence of a world in order. And, like art, it constructs novel combinations of words and actions, it shows words borne by bodies in movement to make th...

This introduction places the key themes of Giorgio Agamben's suite of works on biopolitics next to some of the concerns and problems that motivate the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy. It considers the interrelation between Agamben's ontological mode of approach to political problems and his claim that a new vocabulary is needed for polit...

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 particular...

For the purposes of analytical clarity it is possible to distinguish two ways in which Nancy's ontology of sense appeals to art. First, he uses 'art' as a metaphorical operator to give features to his ontology (such as surprise and wonder); second, the practice of the contemporary arts instruct the terms of his ontological project because, in his v...

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben—whose work has influenced intellectuals in political theory, political philosophy, legal theory, literature, and art—stands among the foremost intellectual figures of the modern era. Engaging with a range of thinkers from Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger to Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, Agamben considers so...

This article is a critical examination of the approach to truth in Foucault’s late writing on the topic of ‘parrhesia’. I argue that his 1983 Berkeley seminar on ‘Discourse and Truth’ approaches the topic of truth as a positive value and that this approach presents, at least prima facie, a problem of continuity with his earlier critique of the pres...

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-Labar...

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 et...

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 ten...