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The World, the Mind and the Body: Psychology after cognitivism (edited book)Imprint Academic. 2007.
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46. Image-Politics: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Ontological Rehabilitation of the ImageIn Sanja Dejanovic (ed.), Nancy and the Political, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 139-163. 2015.
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26Walter Benjamin’s communismThesis Eleven 166 (1): 16-39. 2021.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 of ‘communist society’ refers to a specific type of experience rather than a type of social organization. The paper discusses the conceptual backgroun…Read more
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26Acting Through Inaction: The Distinction Between Leisure and Reverie in Jacques Rancière’s Conception of EmancipationJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 27 (2): 76-94. 2019.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 of emancipated life, as purposively driven, fulfilling and meaningful activity. Aspects of this adapted definition undermine the classical leisure/wo…Read more
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712The Problem of the Image: Sacred and Profane Spaces in Walter Benjamin’s Early WritingCritical Horizons 14 (3): 355-379. 2013.From the comparative framework of writing on the meaning of ritual in the field of the history of religions, 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 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…Read more
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737Revolution and History in Walter Benjamin: A Conceptual AnalysisRoutledge. 2019.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 experience further aggravates the problem. Benjamin himself understood the problem of revolution to be primarily that of the conceptualization of coll…Read more
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454The Errors of HistoryAngelaki 23 (2): 139-154. 2018.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.
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7The Ethics of Embodiment (review)Cultural Studies Review 10 (1): 223-225. 2004.A review of Rosalyn Diprose's Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas.
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306Practices of Form: Art – Philosophy – Life – HistoryCritical Horizons 18 (4): 289-294. 2017.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.
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714Between Luxury and Need: The Idea of Distance in Philosophical AnthropologyInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (3): 378-392. 2017.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…Read more
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354Walter Benjamin's Critique of the Category of Aesthetic Form: 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility' from the Perspective of Benjamin's Early WritingIn Nathan Ross (ed.), The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory : New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno, Roman and Littlefield. pp. 83-97. 2015.
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183The Ambiguity of Ambiguity in Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence'In Brendan Moran & Carlo Salzani (eds.), Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 39-56. 2015.
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27Introduction to Monique David-Ménard on Kant and MadnessHypatia 15 (4): 77-81. 2000.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 tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system.
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13The Agamben EffectDuke University Press. 2008.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 some of the most pressing issues in recent history and politics. His work explores the relationship between the sovereign state and the politically marg…Read more
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209Historical Citation and Revolutionary EpistemologyJournal of the Philosophy of History 9 (2): 258-283. 2015.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 distinc…Read more
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2Tamar Japaridze, The Kantian Subject: Sensus Communis, Mimesis, Work of Mourning (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8 (3): 411-412. 2000.
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24The Work of the Art-Work: Art After Heidegger's Origin of the Work of ArtJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37 (2): 199-215. 2006.
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21Equality in the Romantic Art Form: The Hegelian background to Jaques Ranciére's 'Aesthetic Revolution'In Jean-Philippe Deranty & Alison F. Ross (eds.), Jacques Ranciere and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 87-98. 2012.
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76Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the ImageRoutledge. 2014.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 194…Read more
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10Michelangelo Antonioni: Aestheticising Time and Experience in The PassengerIn James Phillips (ed.), Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema, Stanford University Press. pp. 40-51. 2008.
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72The Aesthetic Fable: Cinema in Jacques Rancière’s “Aesthetic Politics”Substance 38 (1): 128-150. 2009.Jacques Rancière relies on references to theatre and literature to articulate the modes in which meanings are communicated. It is because they are displaceable from bodies and dis-incorporable from things that these patterns of meaning are available to being picked up. But this also means that meaning occurs as a pattern of communication that is not entirely rational. Meaning, we might say, moulds as it communicates. Such references to theatre and literature are more than allegorical. The gene…Read more
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541This 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 presumption of an exclusionary relation between truth and power in works such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Does…Read more
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31The Kantian Sublime and the Problem of the PoliticalJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 32 (2): 174-87. 2001.
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79Introduction to Monique David-Ménard on Kant and madnessHypatia 15 (4): 77-81. 2000.: 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 tendency to madness functions in these early works as a motivational principle for the mature, critical system
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136Derrida's Writing-Theatre: From the Theatrical Allegory to Political CommitmentDerrida Today 1 (1): 76-94. 2008.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…Read more
Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Aesthetics |
European Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Jacques Rancière |