The Philistine Controversy

In this fascinating study, Dave Beech and John Roberts develop what they call a ‘counter-intuitive’ notion of the philistine, claiming that what the philistine tells us about cultural division and exclusion is more persuasive than the theories of the popular and the ‘otherly-cultured’ in cultural studies and postmodernism. The ‘counter-intuitive’ philistine, they contest, returns the cultural debate to the problems of the persistence of power, privilege and symbolic violence. Asserting that the relations between power and art have been untheorized in recent studies, Beech and Roberts find their critical resources in the least likely place: not in the ‘best of things’, but in that which has ‘no proper place’.

The book also includes several in-depth responses to the Beech and Roberts thesis by leading scholars in the field of cultural theory, together with the authors’ replies to their critics.

John Roberts is Professor of Art and Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. His books include The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday; The Philistine Controversy (with Dave Beech), Philosophizing the Everyday, and The Necessity of Errors. He is also a contributor to Radical Philosophy, Oxford Art Journal, Historical Materialism, Third Text, and Cabinet magazine. He lives in London.

Malcolm Bull is a theorist and art historian who teaches at Oxford. His books include Seeing Things Hidden, The Mirror of the Gods, and Anti-Nietzsche. He is on the editorial board of New Left Review and writes for the London Review of Books.

Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and sits on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History.