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Kieran Aarons, Nicolas Schneider: Reiner Schürmann’s Philosophy of Broken Bonds
Reiner Schürmann’s Philosophy of Broken Bonds
(p. 261 – 294)

Kieran Aarons, Nicolas Schneider

Reiner Schürmann’s Philosophy of Broken Bonds

PDF, 34 pages

  • politics
  • ontology
  • art
  • art theory

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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

Nicolas Schneider works on issues in post-Kantian philosophy, critical theory, and phenomenology. He obtained his PhD in philosophy from Kingston University London, UK and has taught at Humboldt-University Berlin. He currently works at the University of Lüneburg.
Other texts by Nicolas Schneider for DIAPHANES
Kieran Aarons (ed.), Reiner Schürmann, ...: The Place of the Symbolic

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.