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 anarchic 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.