Michaela Fiserova

This article introduces the aesthetics of posthumanism as a genuine trend in philosophical aesthetics that emerged in the early decades of the 21st century. Engaging with an innovative imagination of the cohabitation of various life forms, the aesthetics of posthumanism rethinks interspecies encounters across both cultural and natural environments, prompting us to consider ethically motivated images of environmental awareness and creative adaptation. Building on phenomenological, deconstructive, and schizoanalytic methodological insights, this article aims to highlight a turning point in contemporary aesthetic research that questions our anthropocentric, speciesist prejudices and presents them as obsolete in a world shaped by the global environmental crisis. To address the complexity of this topic, the article presents contributions that map various approaches to the ‘posthuman situation’ in the artistic and philosophical imagination of contemporary human identity. The first set of referred texts targets the multifaceted – environmental, social, and technological – disaster caused by the speciest, self-centred humanism of the modern era, and the subsequent rupture of posthumanist art from it. This aesthetic perspective gives rise to resistance through posthumanist engagement. The second set of references addresses various problems related to anthropocentrist aesthetics. By introducing thinkers who articulate distinct viewpoints on the politics of aesthetic imagination, this article presents two contrasting approaches to contemporary visuality: while one group welcomes the environmentally caring approach of post-anthropocentrism, the other advocates preserving the anthropocentric one.

The paper focuses on the aesthetic frames of gardening. I propose understanding plant cultivation as an aesthetic framing of divided hospitality and hostility. Following Derrida’s critical reading of Kant’s thoughts on beautiful frames and Austin’s thoughts on performative fails, I argue that the gardener’s performativity delimits the beautiful and cultivated order of his garden from the wild and chaotic ‘outside’ he cannot govern. Progressively, by resisting the ‘outside’ through inner rituals of framing, the gardener encloses himself ‘inside’ his locally performed order of cultivation. Based on my deconstructive revision of gardening genres, I conclude that environmentally engaged aesthetics might overcome the traditional gardener’s cultivation of hostility towards otherness.

The article presents a new reading of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, redefining the concept of ornament as a sensible outcome of a desiring, ruminating mindset. The article examines the role of stylisation in the immanent processes of organisation of chaos in everyday life. The authors argue that such stylising desire leads to a repetitive maintenance of various everyday territories, such as human bodies, households, and gardens. These three areas of everyday stylisation are compared to Deleuze’s distinction of three artistic styles – Masoch’s, Kafka’s, and Proust’s – understood as different ways of producing artistic animality through writing and maintaining artistic territories through repetition. Finally, the article distinguishes the artistic and everyday ways of stylisation as two similar means of maintaining territories by ornamental repetition.

Le présent livre tente de contribuer à la recherche d'une réponse complexe à la question de savoir comment penser le visible aujourd'hui, et comment penser son partage. Pour élaborer cette réponse, le problème a été resitué dans le débat autour de la représentation et mis en corrélation avec un questionnement de la visualité ; cette dernière étant entendue comme l'un des enjeux de la philosophie politique contemporaine. La méthode mise en oeuvre consiste à repenser la conception philosophique de la représentation formulée par Michel Foucault et reprise par Jacques Rancière. L'enjeu principal est de proposer un nouveau mode d'analyse des énoncés (textes expliquant les images légitimement visibles) et des visibilités (images sélectionnées en tant qu'illustrations pertinentes des textes) au niveau des archives. L'étude d'un cas particulier - celui d'un double traitement officiel des photographies documentaires prises au cours la période de la normalisation en Slovaquie - révèle le fait que ni à l'époque du régime autoritaire de normalisation ni à l'époque contemporaine dite de démocratie, le partage légitime du visible n'est possible sans fixer certaines normes de représentation qui fonctionnent comme les limites politiques de la vision. Dans le cadre d'une visualité, aucun partage du savoir par l'intermédiaire de l'image n'est possible sans intervention de la parole et sans production des représentations.

This introduction presents the rationale for the special issue and outlines the main motives discussed in the following essays. The special issue redefines the concept of ornamentation based on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. It presents ornaments as potent instruments for forming social bonds through repetition and a ruminative mental mindset. Essays by various authors explore the connection between ornaments, social bonds and affective integration, drawing on Deleuze's concepts of repetition and folds. This reinterpretation offers new insights into the aesthetic and social attributes of ornamentation, shedding light on their role in shaping individual and communal becomings.

Based on Deleuze’s understanding of creative productivity as an expression of one’s mental desiring-machine, the paper proposes an innovative insight into the ambiguous – constructive and destructive – human need to repeat. To philosophically grasp the aesthetic and material results of such repetitive activity, I propose to complete the Deleuzian concept of assemblage with the concept of ornament, defined as a material result of a repetitive mindset generating arrangements of regularly returning acts and items. I argue that Deleuze’s immanent repetition generates two kinds of ornament: the individual one, such as a personal collection or an artistic style, and the social one, such as an avant-garde movement or subculture fashion. Both ornaments are explained through Deleuze’s concepts of negative and relational deterritorialisation and are further defined by a new reading of Deleuze’s revision of repetition in Freud and Nietzsche. Both kinds of immanent repetition produce ornamental compositions which are threatened by the danger of ornamental decomposition.

The paper invites us to revise the anthropocentric foundation of the philosophic distinction that is made between the concepts of human and animal. Following Derrida’s deconstruction, the author uncovers the systematic philosophic degradation of animals that helped to build modern humanism: human beings gave themselves the right to master non-human beings by comparing animal to man and defining it as an unequal, subordinated, and inferior being. The author suggests taking the concept of animal out of such an asymmetrically constructed binary opposition. By revising “animal” idioms burdened by the anthropocentric prejudice of human sovereignty, the author calls for a biocentric ethical position of interspecies mutuality. Firstly, she questions metaphysical presuppositions that make the philosophic conception of symbiosis between human and nonhuman beings impossible. Secondly, she suggests a philosophic solution, which opens inventive ways for an ethical approach to animals, both by means of a focus on nonverbal communication and by offering new idioms related to biocentric images of animality.

Event of Signature formulates a new philosophical problem which focuses on the handwritten signature as sign of legal identification. Author Michaela Fišerová works with three metaphysical expectations, which are shared in discourses of graphology and forensic analysis. The first expectation tends to reveal the signer's soul: a handwritten signature "naturally" mirrors the unique psychological qualities of the signer. The second expectation tends to guarantee the originality of the signer's trace: a handwritten signature proves physical contact between the signed document and the writing tool "authentically" moved by the signer's hand. The third expectation tends to recognize the signer's legal identity: a handwritten signature is expected to reproduce the signer's personal style, which enables identification by legal authorities. In a methodologically inventive and semiotically-based dialogue with Derrida's deconstruction, Fišerová situates this triple expectation in the interval between life and law. Challenging coverage of this topic finally shows that none of the metaphysical expectations will ever be fulfilled in the event of manual signing. Legal uses of handwritten signature are characterized by the complex aporia of repeating the unrepeatable.

The paper proposes to grasp handwritten signature as a metaphysical invention of the so-called “Western” civilization, where the signature is supposed to make possible juridical identification of the person who wrote it. However, despite this expectation of reliability, the Western handwritten signature is an aporetic sign, which is considered to be authentic (unrepeatable) and conventional (repeatable) at the same time. Because the signature is a sign of juridical identification and its authenticity can always be forged, Jacques Derrida tries to deconstruct the contradictory functioning of Western metaphysics, which leads to confusion in our expectations of authenticity and identity in our uses of signatures. By proposing a new reading of Derridean texts concerning writing, the paper focuses on the pragmatical paradox that grounds our contradictory legal politics of signing: because the exact manual reproduction of a line is impossible, no one can satisfy the legislative obligation to sign conformably to the model signature. That’s the aporia of trace’s recognition, which establishes the signature as a sign: on the one hand, the signature is supposed to represent the juridical identity of the person who traced it; on the other hand, the signature, which constantly changes its graphical form, makes every certain identification impossible. In order to question the juridical identity traditionally guaranteed by the signature, this paper invites to grasp the legal practice of signing as a subversive performativity, which is produced during the passage between recognition of juridical identity requested by the law and its simultaneous and inevitable transgression. Finally, the paper proposes a new approach to the signature as a visual performance of the self, based on a reevaluation of the altercation between Jacques Derrida and John Searle concerning the iterative character of traces and performatives.