Sjoerd van Tuinen

In his lectures from 1987, Deleuze draws an analogy between Michelangelo's figures and Leibnizian substances by claiming that neither are essences but rather sources of modifications or manners of being. The best way to explore this analogy, I argue, is by focusing on Michelangelo's preference for serpentine shapes. By putting key passages from The Logic of Sensation, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and What is Philosophy? in resonance with the Leibnizian accounts of corporeal aggregates and possible worlds on the one hand and art history on the other, I will try to develop a Deleuzian concept for the typically Mannerist ideal of the serpentine figure. Although Deleuze usually prefers to speak in musical terms of refrains and counterpoints by which various blocs of sensation resonate with each other, in the visual arts it is the serpentine figure that renders visible sensory becoming as a rhythmic counter-positioning of possible worlds within a single body without organs

This paper addresses Peter Sloterdijk’s optimistic ‘attitude’. I show that it is a philosophical posture based on pragmatic speculation and spiritual exercise. By situating it in a tradition that passes from Leibniz’s meliorism to Whitehead’s ecology of propositions, I argue that optimism is an essential component of a public use of reason of which the finality is no longer the good sense of critique but of the care for common sense. At stake is the cosmological and cosmopolitical care for the possibility of rationalization processes in a ‘monstruous world’ of ever denser feedback mechanisms.

Following Nietzsche, we can discern two types of therapeutical voice on ressentiment, which find themselves in a polemical relation to one another: The philosopher and the priest. In this paper, I turn to a third polemical voice, embodied by Jean Améry, namely that of the victim who bears witness to his own ressentiment. A dialectical reconstruction of this standpoint within the polemical triangle contributes to the Améry reception in three ways: It is no longer necessary to justify his tactlessness through the exceptional context of the objectively recognized lived experience of victimhood. It shows that Améry’s assumption of his “authentic ressentiment” is not just “anti-Nietzschean” but first of all anti-pastoral. Beyond the question of authenticity, this also implies that the political significance of Améry’s testimony lies in its literary and conceptual systematicity no less than as a description of lived experience.

Situated at the interface of philosophy, aesthetics, and art history, this collection brings together a series of creative responses to the recent speculative turn in Continental philosophy. It gives you both a genealogy of speculative art history and a provocatively experimental counter-discourse of new speculative art histories. The contributors include philosophers, art historians, architects and art practitioners who go beyond the mere complementarity of philosophy and art history. They are generous with the types of art they examine, including architecture, cinema, dance, and new media, and the philosophical trajectories they engage with.

The body is at the heart of critical and phenomenological concerns, yet it is the soul that is increasingly under pressure. As we are being stripped of our structures of commonality, we need a renewed concept of political spirituality. My aim is to enrich Simondon’s concept of spirituality as transindividuality through Souriau’s transmodal architectonics. My argument proceeds in two steps: (i) I emphasize the precarious and communal modality of «having a soul», defining it as a possession without ownership and demonstrating its inseparability from the problems of intensive variation and discontinuity. (ii) I then argue that Souriau is inspired by Leibniz’s disjunction between the ontic soul and the relational body, which holds the key to an account of spiritual commitment that exceeds the union of corporeal and psychical existences insofar as it invents a new common use for them.

In recent years the humanities, social sciences and neuroscience have witnessed an 'affective turn, ' especially in discourses around post-Fordist labor, economic and ecological crises, populism and identity politics, mental health, and political struggle. This new awareness would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze, who replaced judgment with affect as the very material movement of thought: every concept is an affective experience, a becoming. Besides entirely active affects, the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without passive affects or passions. Instead of a calm and rational philosophy of passions, Deleuzian thought is therefore inseparable from "isolated and passionate cries" that deny what everybody knows and what nobody can deny: "every true thought is an aggression." This inseparability of reason and passion is by no means an anti-intellectualist or irrationalist stance. Rather, it is critical, since it protects reason from its self-imposed stupidity (betise) by relating it to the unthought forces that condition it. And it is clinical, because thought becomes possessed by a power of selection. The purely active, i.e. free-floating, unrecorded desire, is never enough to produce a consistent relation to the future, which is why we need the passions to give us an initial orientation, to force and enable us to think. Passions are the beliefs, perceptions, representations, and opinions that attach us to the world; they make up the very material of which our lives and thoughts are composed. Instead of truth as the ultimate criterion of judgment, the only principle according to which affective becomings can be selected and evaluated is the extent to which they proliferate joy. Spinoza and Marx show how the recruitment of desire traditionally takes place through the tyrants and priests who inspire sad passions in us. Similarly, the work of Deleuze and Guattari on capitalism and schizophrenia can be read as an encyclopedia of the passions that constitute the affective infrastructure of the socius of contemporary capitalism. If it takes a lot of inventiveness or imagination to be able to diagnose our present becomings, this is because becomings are always composites of joyful and sad passions. Capitalism could not exist if it did not also inspire happiness, love, courage, and perhaps even beatitude. That is why, today, we witness "the spectacle of the happily dominated" (Frederic Lordon) of the self-entrepreneur, the managerial class, the flex worker, the citizen-consumer, the bean-roasting hipster, and the self-managed team. It is within this field of contradictory and heterogeneous passions that the authors of this volume pursue the diagnosis of our past and present becomings. Their contributions add up to a systematic taxonomy of the passions and indicate their importance for a thinking that reaches beyond itself.

Examining afresh the 16th-century style of mannerism, Sjoerd van Tuinen synthesises philosophy and aesthetics to demonstrate not only the contemporary relevance of mannerism but its broader significance as a form of modal thinking. Beyond a style of art that spurned the balance and proportion of earlier Renaissance painting in favour of compositional instability and tension, this book looks a-historically at mannerism to investigate what it can tell us about continental modal metaphysics, focusing in particular on its artificial and what Van Tuinen calls 'secondary' nature. In three main parts, Van Tuinen first explores the ontology, aesthetics and ethics of mannerism. He then develops this through an extended study of Leibniz as a modal and indeed mannerist philosopher, before outlining in the final part a (neo)-mannerist aesthetics that incorporates diagrammatics, alchemy and contemporary technologies of speculative design. Drawing on Bergson, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers and Agamben, together with artworks from Lomazzo to Arcimboldo, The Philosophy of Mannerism uncovers the rich new pathways created by the combination of philosophy, art history and contemporary theory.