The Figures and Grounds of Historical Judgment: Andrew Benjamin's Critical Practice

This essay reconstructs the notion of the ‘figure’ as it is developed in the work of Andrew Benjamin. Conventional uses of figures in historical and aesthetic judgment treat them as initial and provisional articulations of a truth to come: the task of the critic is to work through their indeterminacy or incompleteness and restore their sense on another level. Andrew Benjamin's practice, by contrast, uses figures to open up a contestatory space in which sense is held open in an ongoing process of historical argument. This use requires a new principle of reflective judgment, one that can hold the particularity of things in their particularity.