Philosophy’s Literature

This work takes up and elaborates the themes set out in Benjamin’s previous book The Plural Event . While in The Plural Event Benjamin formulated a reworking of the idea of ontology through an investigation of crucial writings on the topic by Heidegger, Hegel et al, this book aplpies the insights gleaned in a systematic way to the fields of literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Adopting a thinking with rather than a critically distanced approach, Benjamin works through the cultural possibilities of the event as difference with respect to each discipline. In the process, he engages with the work of a broad diversity of thinkers, including Laplanche and Freud, Holderlin and Celan, Aristotle and Quintillian.