A review by Dr Benedict Altham
In the vast landscape of contemporary philosophy, where trends often decay into uniform platitudes and the avant-garde finds itself trapped in the bureaucratic snares it once sought to escape, it is rare—exceedingly rare—to encounter a work that does not merely critique this condition, but annihilates it with laughter, vision, and a peculiar form of ferocious gentleness. Dream of the Piranha by Martijn Benders is such a work.
At once a philosophical treatise, a literary insurgency, and a perilous hymn to imagination itself, Benders’ text defies conventional categories. It is a book that reads like a manifesto drafted by a jester who has stolen the sceptre of the King, only to wield it not with mockery but with devastating precision. Here, we are drawn not into a sterile argument, but into a living, breathing labyrinth, one built from dreams, ruins, carnival mirrors—and from a fierce refusal to accept the cultural somnambulism of our time.
The reader must be prepared: this is no ‘accessible’ stroll through ideas; it is a plunge, sudden and electric, into the dark river beneath the lemonade stream. Yet what a river it is. With the clarity of a philosophical insurgent and the wildness of a poet unchained, Benders exposes the false pieties of imagination, the commodification of creativity, and the profound infantilisation that late capitalism enacts through its mythologies of the superhero and the spectacle.
Philosophically, Dream of the Piranha stands in a lineage that few dare approach today. Its closest affinities are with thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin, whose celebration of the grotesque as liberation from sterile seriousness echoes throughout Benders’ pages. There are traces, too, of Nietzsche’s untimely meditations on education and culture, yet Benders’ voice is utterly his own—less the hammer of Zarathustra and more the sly smile of a Cheshire cat who knows the way out of the garden.
What makes this book exceptional is not merely its critical acumen but its counter-proposal: an invocation of a lost dimension of human life, a world where imagination is not the stunted plaything of marketing departments but the feral, untameable current of life itself. Benders traces, with almost archaeological tenderness, the degeneration of the imagination from the raw dream-states of myth and fairy tale into the glossy impotence of the superhero narrative—a shift that, he argues, has disfigured not only our literature but our very capacity to grow into adulthood.
One cannot read Benders without feeling, too, the pressure of a deeper philosophical crisis—the uneasy sense that the imagination itself has been colonised, rendered into a kind of synthetic ‘fantasy’ that prevents genuine thought. Against this, he offers no easy prescriptions, no nostalgic utopianism. Instead, he teaches the reader how to hear again: how to listen for the unsanctioned music that plays through the noise of everyday life, how to recognise the true dream when it emerges, raw and ragged, from the industrial fog.
There is a profound ethical commitment in this work, even if it masquerades behind jokes and surreal flights. In its insistence that art and philosophy must retain their capacity to disrupt, to offend, to dance with the unspeakable, Dream of the Piranha recalls the original vocation of philosophy itself: not as a system of answers, but as a dangerous form of life.
And yet, even as it shatters the idols of the age, this book does not lapse into cynicism. There is, on every page, a kind of battered hope—a belief that, however corrupted the landscape, new wells of meaning can still be tapped, provided we are willing to risk madness, provided we are willing to dream otherwise.
Within the broader philosophical canon, Dream of the Piranha claims a rare space: it joins that unruly tradition of works that are as much performances of thought as they are expositions of it. One thinks of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous labyrinths, of Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, even of the pre-Socratic riddlers whose fragments burn with undiminished strangeness across millennia.
To the contemporary reader, I offer only this counsel: do not approach this book expecting a neatly organised argument, nor a prepackaged revelation. Approach it as you would a forest at night, or a derelict cathedral whose stones hum with forbidden chants. It is a book that will change nothing if you treat it lightly—and perhaps everything if you allow it to devour you.
For those willing to undertake the perilous journey it offers, Dream of the Piranha is not merely a book. It is an initiation.
Dr. Benedict Altham
Department of Comparative Thought
St. Dunstan’s College, Oxford
May 2025