Reiner Schürmann

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This collection assembles key essays of Reiner Schürmann centering on the concepts of anarchy and the singularization to come. Setting out from the question of the status of practical philosophy at the end of metaphysics, these texts track the crucial role of Schürmann’s engagement with the work of Michel Foucault between 1983 and 1991. Drawing on his highly original reading of the philosophical tradition, Schürmann traces the status of identity and difference in Foucault’s conception of history to develop a radical phenomenological understanding of anarchy. The texts pose the question of the fate of philosophy after the critique of the subject and the collapse of the divide between theory and praxis, philosophy and politics. Besides making Schürmann’s seminal readings of Foucault widely available, the essay collection offers a concise and accessible introduction to Schürmann’s thought and documents a shift in his thinking during the 1980s. Taken together, these pivotal essays introduce the reader to the entirety of Schürmann’s most urgent concerns and assemble the conceptual tools for the project of his last book, Broken Hegemonies. This topology of broken hegemonies, which in many ways offers an alternative to Foucault’s genealogical strategy, takes the form of a subversive re-reading of the history of Western metaphysics that urges our present relentlessly toward the singularization to come. To the reader unfamiliar with Schürmann’s work, these texts establish him as one of the most radical thinkers of the late 20th century, whose work might eventually become legible in our present. (Source: [Diaphanes](

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In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann reads Marx’s work as a transcendental materialism. Arguing that what is most original in Marx is neither his political or sociological nor his economic thinking, but his philosophical axis, Schürmann shows that Marx conceives being as polyvalent praxis. With patient rigor, Schürmann delineates this notion of praxis from the interpretations proposed by Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School, as he traces Marx’s move beyond the dualism that has governed ontology since Descartes. Stepping out of this dualism, however, Marx does not espouse a monism either—be it an immobile one as Parmenides’, or a dynamic one as Hegel’s. On the problem of universals, Marx’s transcendental materialism is nominalistic: being as action is irreducibly manifold. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann in the course of these lectures draws out the philosophical axis in Marx’s work, which determines and localizes his theories of history, of social relations and of economy. On this view, Marx’s unique place in philosophy stems from the fact that the grounding of phenomena is seen by him not as a relation that produces cognition, as in Kant; nor as a relation of material sensitivity, as in Feuerbach; but the grounding occurs in labor, in praxis, in the satisfaction of needs. Whereas the Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis in Marx that introduces multiplicity into being. Following Schürmann’s own suggestion, this edition is complemented by a reprinting of his Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. This rupture puts an end to the epochal economy of presence and returns principles to their own precariousness. As a whole, this volume brings out one of the less appreciated facets of Schürmann’s work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri and François Laruelle.