Andrew Benjamin

A concern with a philosophical thinking of life continues to have a predominate place within contemporary philosophy. That concern figures most usefully when refracted through terms such as ‘biopolitics’ and ‘political theology’. Both of these domains of inquiry can be seen as forming an important part of the history of philosophy’s continual engagement with life. Indeed, the broader claim would be that life – present as a necessarily plural term and thus always understood as devolving into an engagement with forms of life set within differentials of power – has always had a central role within the philosophical. The project of this lecture is to sketch out a number of instances that indicate the ubiquity of the interplay of life and power in reards to both place and the polis and then to trace some of the consequences.

Andrew Benjamin

Andrew Benjamin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University and was Anniversary Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Kingston University London as well as Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney. His recent publications include: Towards a Relational Ontology. Philosophy’s Other Possibility (SUNY Press 2015); Art’s Philosophical Work (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) and Virtue in Being (SUNY Press 2016). He is currently completing two books: Law as Political Theology and On Gesture: Classical and Renaissance Expressions.