Reiner Schurmann Selected Writings and Lecture Notes #: The Place of the Symbolic

- Blurb -

This book weaves together Reiner Schurmann' s work on art and politics, drawing on a range of the most important thinkers and poets of the twentieth century and beyond. The Place of the Symbolic gathers Reiner Schurmann' s essays on the nexus of art and politics. In keeping with his translation of the destruction of metaphysics into an an-archic philosophy of practice, Schurmann develops a radical theory of the place of symbols, irreducible either to idealist theories of symbols or structuralist accounts of the symbolic. Symbols, Schurmann argues, 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 Schurmann' s theory of symbols, the collection includes essays on the relation between metaphysics, tragedy, and technology; on the "there is" in poetry; as well as on judgment. Throughout these characteristically lucid interventions, Schurmann' 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.