What is the work of art? How does art work as art? Andrew Benjamin contends that the only way to address these questions is by developing a radically new materialist philosophy of art, and by rethinking the history of art from within that perspective.A materialist philosophy of art starts with the contention that meaning is only ever the after effect of the way in which materials work. Starting with the relation between history, materials and work (art’s work), this book opens up a...

An original philosophical account of relational ontology drawing on the work of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger.In this original work of philosophy, Andrew Benjamin calls for a new understanding of relationality, one inaugurating a philosophical mode of thought that takes relations among people and events as primary, over and above conceptions of simple particularity or abstraction. Drawing on the work of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger,...

A radical rethinking of ethics set within the development of a philosophical anthropology.In his last book, Towards a Relational Ontology, Andrew Benjamin provided a philosophical account of what he terms anoriginal relationality, demonstrating how this concept can be seen to be at work throughout the history of philosophy. In Virtue in Being, he builds on that project to argue for a new way of understanding the relationship between ontol...

This book explores the relationship between art and philosophy. Andrew Benjamin argues for a reworking of the task of philosophy in terms of the centrality of ontology. It is in relation to this centrality, understood through the differences between modes of being, that art, mimesis and the avant-garde come to be presented. A fundamental part of this book is the original interpretations of important contemporary painters and their paintings: Lucian Freud's self-portraits, Francis Bacon's u...

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’ meanin...

An understanding of what we mean by the present is one of the key issues in literature, philosophy, and culture today, but also one of the most neglected and misunderstood. Present Hope develops a fascinating philosophical understanding of the present, approaching this question via discussions of the nature of historical time, the philosophy of history, memory, and the role of tragedy.Andrew Benjamin shows how we misleadingly view the present as simply a product of chronolo...

Benjamin provides new and important readings of key canonical texts in the history of philosophy in his sustained philosophical reworking of ontology. Amongst texts included are Hegel's Difference Essay and the Shorter Logic and Heidegger's Time and Being and The Question of Being. The effective presence of ontology, defined as `an original difference', will be familiar to readers of his earlier writings. This book represents his most thorough and origin...

Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work.E...

Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work.E...

Libel and Lampoon shows how English satire and the law mutually shaped each other during the long eighteenth century. Following the lapse of prepublication licensing in 1695, the authorities quickly turned to the courts and newly repurposed libel laws in an attempt to regulate the press. In response, satirists and their booksellers devised a range of evasions. Writers increasingly capitalized on forms of verbal ambiguity, including irony, allegory, circumlocution, and indirection,...