Of Jews And Animals

Andrew Benjamin is an Honorary Professor in the School of Communication and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has held posts in a number of UK and Australian universities. He started his career at the University of Warwick rising to the position of Professor of Philosophy and until 2022 taught for one semester each year at Kingston University in London where he was associated with the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. He is the author of numerous books including Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy (2013) and Of Jews and Animals (2011) both published by Edinburgh University Press.

• Opening; 1. Of Jews and Animals; Part 1; 2. Living and Being: Descartes' 'Animal Spirits' and Heidegger's Dog; 3. The Insistent Dog: Blanchot and the Community without Animals; 4. Indefinite Play and the 'Name of Man': Anthropocentrism's Deconstruction; Part 2; 5. What if the other were an animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals and Disease; 6. Agamben on 'Jews' and 'Animals'; 7. Force, Justice and Jews: Pascal's Pensées 102 and 103; 8. Facing Jews; Another Opening; 9. Animals Jews.

Andrew Benjamin has written an original and provocative meditation on the place of the 'figure' of the animal in modern philosophy and culture. The book is remarkable for its sensitivity to the issue of visibility and the use of visual material. The engagement with the philosophical history of art is beautifully sustained and serves not only to work through the theme of figuration but also to make the philosophical narrative available to a wider range of readers