The Philosophy of Mannerism: From Aesthetics to Modal Metaphysics, by Sjoerd van Tuinen
In his ‘Compositionist Manifesto’, Latour argues that the Anthropocene is closer to the long sixteenth century than to the self-image of the modern world. Other contemporary thinkers such as Agamben, Stengers, Barad and Moten/Harney maintain a mannerist sensibility for the incompleteness of things. For all of them, what is at stake is the coherence of the modes of existence through which our subjectivities and worlds are inherited and transformed. In my presentation I will reconnect the historical sense of mannerism with its systematic sense. For while mannerism is a concept specific to art, occurring in the sixteenth century qua historical style, it is not limited to art – one century later, Spinoza was to analyze the entire world in terms of modi as opposed to Aristotelian substances. Rather, it is the name of a whole problematic field that includes tics and neurasthenic behavior in psychiatry, gestures and conventions in diplomacy and pandemic ethics, the modular existence of new technologies and recombinant capitalism, or intersectional and interspecies com-positioning.
The Philosophy of Mannerism: From Aesthetics to Modal Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Bio
Sjoerd van Tuinen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam (profile) and a Collaborator at CultureLab, IFILNOVA. After his PhD (Ghent 2009) on Deleuze and neo-monadological accounts of subjectivity, he has had visiting affiliations with universities in London, Berlin, Vienna, New York and Princeton. Driven by transdisciplinary affinities across the arts and humanities, van Tuinen publishes on ecophilosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics and the history of contemporary Continental philosophy. He is editor of over a dozen books, including Deleuze and The Fold. A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Speculative Art Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Art History after Deleuze and Guattari (Leuven UP, 2017), and a series of theory books with V2_Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam). Forthcoming: Deleuze’s Mannerist Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Forthcoming: The Dialectic of Ressentiment: Pedagogy of a Concept (Routledge, 2023).