The first chapter of The Sympathy of Things published in Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011). It develops the notion of a “gothic ontology” which inverts Deleuze’s baroque ontology of the fold. Where in the universe of the fold continuity precedes singularity, in the gothic singularity precedes continuity. The reversal is based on the Ruskinian notion of the rib, which is the source of “changefulness”, expressed through “millions of variations” of figures. Figures move and change only to interact with or (...) connect to other figures, i.e. to build configurations. Ruskin’s notion of savageness, which is always categorized as an ethics-over-aesthetics, now becomes a notion of craft that is inherent to matter, not to humans. (shrink)

This essay developed out of the final chapter of The Sympathy of Things where I related beauty to a notion of radical generosity. Tracing generosity back to the ancient Greeks brought me to a whole new world of grace and “charis”, the etymological root of words like charisma and charity. The essay establishes a fundamental connection between grace and beauty, deeply interrelating movement and object. In the second part the argument develops into an ontology based on the concept of radiance, (...) which we encounter in Aglaia, the first of the Three Graces, in fireworks, jewelry, makeup and in fashion, but also in acts of bravery, kindness and friendship. Radiance is subsequently defined as “thickened appearance”, where phenomenology and ontology become continuous in a “presence beyond the present”. (shrink)

An essay, which I wrote for the catalog to the exhibition “ARCHESCAPE: the Piranesi Flights,” organized by the Dutch Piranesi scholar Gijs Wallis de Vries. The text, which is necessarily kept short, uses notions of the magnificent and the tragic that I discovered in Hartshorne’s Aesthetic Diagram as discussed in “The Ages of Beauty.”.

This transcription of a keynote for the Speculative Art Histories conference in May 2013 is a mixture of the main argument of The Sympathy of Things and some new insights. The text might be helpful for those who have not read the Sympathy book, which has been sold out for a number of years. This essay will appear as a chapter in Sjoerd van Tuinen's Speculative Art Histories, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

This long essay was published in Vital Beauty, a collection including Wendy Steiner and Tim Ingold, which investigates the possibility of new ways toward beauty. This is my first encounter with Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values, a mandala-like structure explaining the relations between aesthetic experiences. The essay looks into the awkward history of the diagram in Hartshorne’s philosophy, its connection to Max Dessoir’s work, to Whitehead’s chapter on beauty in Adventures of Ideas and the notion of creativity in Schelling.

This chapter is a rethinking of my earlier “The Ages of Beauty” which investigated Charles Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values. The argument is placed in a long history of beauty being considered as the middle between extremes. It slowly develops into a structure not merely of aesthetic experience but of existence itself, making it a competitor of Heidegger’s fourfold.

A number of essays and interviews published between 1997 and 2008, revised for this publication with V2_.

A shortened version of the second chapter of The Sympathy of Things as it was published in The Politics of the Impure (V2_NAI Publishers, 2010). It relates John Ruskin’s “Wall-Veil” to the better-known “Wall-Dress” (Gewand) of Gottfried Semper by understanding both as occurring at the intersection of matter and force. Matter tends to generate patterns in two ways, either downward or upward in dimensions. The first relates to tessellated ornament (cf. Owen Jones); the second to the ribboned ornamentation as we (...) find it in Morris’s work. (shrink)

This transcription of a keynote for the Speculative Art Histories conference in May 2013 is a mixture of the main argument of The Sympathy of Things and some new insights. The text might be helpful for those who have not read the Sympathy book, which has been sold out for a number of years. This essay will appear as a chapter in Sjoerd van Tuinen's Speculative Art Histories, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

The revised and expanded edition of The Sympathy of Things with Bloomsbury Academic, which appeared in 2016. The pdf sample contains the new preface to the second edition and the foreword by Brian Massumi.