Sjoerd van Tuinen

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.

Abstract: Whereas in the past, the left often used common language to maximize its contrast to the polished jargon of official politics, it now finds itself explicitly codifying and designing social and linguistical behavior. Are politeness and manners only superfluous ornaments that distract from much more pressing ‘real’ issues such as, in the words of Žižek, ‘the problems and fears of ordinary workers and farmers’? Or is the anti-idealist gesture of critique not itself part of a spectacle of provocations, denunciations, and raw actions that are quickly consumed and forgotten, simply because they circulate in a system that has already subsumed the substance of public life long ago? And does this suspicion leave room for a more affirmative stance towards the new consciousness of manners, albeit one that simultaneously resists the limitations of demands for recognition within liberal coordinates?
In my contribution I set out from Agamben’s Benjaminian observation that a culture that is going through a crisis of gestures and manners is necessarily also obsessed with their formalization. I draw a parallel between the European court and church life of the sixteenth century, the general mechanization of behavior during the fin de siècle, and the contemporary spectacle of politics feeding on the spectacle of its disintegration. As an alternative to today’s insatiable thirst for good representation, I turn to anarcho-communist tracts (from The Invisible Committee to Moten and Harney), but also to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘mannerism’ in ‘Of the Refrain’. My aim is to make a foray towards a general theory of political mannerism. Deleuze famously honors Bergson for having turned the notion of the multiple into a substantive, while equally emphasizing that the multiple ‘must be done’. Instead of a politics of identity, political mannerism is precisely this strategy of multiplication, where what is at stake is the coherence of the modes of existence through which our subjectivities and worlds are inherited and transformed.

In his Cartesian Meditations (1929), Edmund Husserl proposes a monadological solution to the epistemological problem of transcendental solipsism. At the basis of intersubjectivity lies the lived body (Leib). After the famous bracketing of the empirical validity of experience, Leibniz is invoked for a second reduction, meant to determine the sphere of appurtenances that originally belongs to each subject and that accounts for communication with the Other. Husserl thus grounds the constitutive lifeworld in body integrity and possessive individualism, i.e. the ontological distribution of physical properties based on the identity of self-consciousness.
By contrast, Deleuze in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) discovers in Leibniz a “crisis of property” that reflects the first great crisis of capitalism. Unlike Husserl, who raises the organic intentionalities by which humans are inserted into the world to a transcendental level, Leibniz never managed to find a final solution to the problem of the union of body and soul, precisely because he held the body itself to be a world teeming with non-human others. The problem of the Other refers to a micropolitics of mobile and non-localizable captures rather than individual closures, such that intersubjective monadology is inseparable from an animal monadology with its twin components of animism and totemism.
In my contribution I demonstrate how Leibniz’s metaphysical account of composite substances and its 20th century ramifications could contribute to a contemporary yet non-phenomenological understanding of the transindividual constitution of communities. By contrasting Deleuze’s later reading of Leibniz with Balibar’s critique of Leibniz, I demonstrate how the monstruous animality of the baroque socius remains a possibility endemic to the present.

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: (1) It is no longer necessary to justify his tactlessness through the exceptional context of the objectively recognized lived experience of victimhood. (2) It shows that Améry’s assumption of his “authentic ressentiment” is not just “anti-Nietzschean” (Jameson, Žižek) but first of all anti-pastoral. (3) Beyond the question of (in)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.

Philosophy already has a long history of coming to terms with AI. But if the future of the concept is indeed inseparable from artificial languages and ubiquitous computing, then philosophy must also be able to understand and rewrite its own history in this unnatural light. To this end, I distinguish two manners in which modern philosophy has pursued the artificial cultivation of intelligence. The first is Hegelian. Recently, Yuk Hui and Reza Negarestani have pointed to the affinity between the Hegelian notion of absolute spirit and the functioning of intelligence found in cybernetics and systems theory, as well as in cognitive science. As technology has become our destiny, this leads them to the problem of the continued relevance of humans to the history of a general self-authorizing intelligence. By contrast, I propose to bluntly identify intelligence itself with a rather different sense for relevance, that is, for singularity. Philosophically speaking, this identification reaches back to the proto-structuralist system of Leibniz, which aims for universal communication. Leibniz’s many inventions of formal languages, from the binary system and the universal characteristic to magic and mechanical calculating devices, constitute a proto-AI that functions as the operative code of an inclusive civility. My thesis is the following: if Hegel offered the first grand narrative of the recursive self-critique of common sense immediacy in the form of artificial good sense, Leibnizian cosmotechnics instead bet on a proto-cybernetic reason that contributes to the distributive composition of an unnatural common sense, all the while protecting multiplicity against its collectivization by a self-naturalizing good sense.

My aim here is to reconnect the systematic sense of mannerism with its art historical sense. After a brief discussion of how philosophy intervenes in art historical debates surrounding mannerism, we will first revisit the paradox of what Jean-Luc Nancy has called ‘the singular plural of the essence of the arts’. Well before the beginning of the historical era of Art and its alleged modern end, mannerism already discovered that the vestige of art, once we leave behind its claim to an essence or dominant style, is a plurality of manners, each of which marks ‘art’s beginning’ – or becoming – ‘otherwise than art’ . Moreover, while mannerism is a concept of becoming specific to art, occurring in the 16th century qua historical ‘style,’ it is not limited to art. For both Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, it describes a general economy of use. As we will see, however, their interpretations (lateness versus novelty) and evaluations (alienation versus naturalization) nonetheless diverge, such that, with Agamben, mannerism remains bound by the classical opposition of style and manner, whereas with Deleuze, it explodes into modernism.

Polemicizing with Deleuze, Mireille Buydens has opposed a mannerist aesthetics based on representation and form to a vitalist aesthetics based on presence and formlessness. By contrast, I draw on Bergson's Matter and Memory to relativize this opposition by arguing that 1) representation is itself an organic modality of the presence of images and 2) that mannerist art explores other manners or possibilities of passing from presence to representation. To conclude, I pave the way for a vitalist understanding of mannerism, in which form and presence are no longer opposed. At stake is the literality of images as opposed to any metaphorical quality.

Today we appear to ourselves under new, immunological premises. We must learn to actively take responsibility for what we passively undergo. Plasticity, according to Malabou, forms the condition of the very coherence of thought and life. But is the concept of plasticity enough to learn from the brain? While it is clear that plasticity compels thought, it is not clear how thought matters in the becoming of the brain, nor how we can learn from the risks to which the brain is exposed. Drawing on Deleuze's concept of 'vis elastica' and two concepts in the recent work of Sloterdijk, 'elastic conservatism' and 'vertical tension', I supplement Malabou’s concept of plasticity with the concept of elasticity. To supplement plasticity with elasticity is to supplement the question ‘what to do?’ with the question ‘why here (and now)?’. While the former question belongs to knowledge and action, only the latter is capable of reorienting thought itself.

In metamodern culture, handicraft is everywhere. As I argue, the ‘artisanal turn’ is not just a symptom of postmodern nostalgia, i.e. past ‘options’ or ‘instances’ allowed to make a second appearance. Rather, it is our very experience of time that has changed. What seemed old can appear authentically new again. Today's interest in crafts and craftsmanship thus has less to do with the idolisation of pre-industrial handicrafts by John Ruskin or the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts movement founded by William Morris than with Bauhaus. Ever since, craft has been emancipating itself from the intimacy of the studio and the corresponding closed guild mind that values only the specifics of its metier and its skills. This transformation marks less the disappearance of craftsmanship after the end of art than its development into a general media literacy. Given a certain material, what is it capable of? It was perhaps in this metamodern sense that Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, proposed the concept of the modern artist as “cosmic artisan”. I offer a mannerist genealogy for metamodern crafts and craftsmanship. Starting from tensions brought about in matter-form relationships by contemporary digital design practices, I retrospectively problematise the division of labor between design and craft at the very moment it first appeared. In this way I expose an informal or cosmic dimension in both mannerist and metamodern craftsmanship, characterized by an infinite and continuous variation of manners rather than forms. I will then develop some of the ontological, epistemological and political implications of this dimension in the light of recent developments in Theory such as New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and the care for the plastic relationality of the Self, which themselves are interpreted as expressions of a metamodern sensibility.

This article offers a critique of a widespread political discourse that distinguishes 'resentment' from 'ressentiment', legitimating the former and dismissing the latter. This distinction not only incorporates some reactive sentiments at the cost of the depoliticisation of others, but also obscures the conditions of political action and judgement as such. Why is it necessary to protect the socio-political order from the risk of moral corruption in these terms, and for whom? First, a historical distinction is made between three problems that play a key role in the evaluation of the reactive attitudes: those pertaining to their rationality, their authenticity, and their justness. It is then argued that the first two problems are ill-posed. These problems concern differences in degree, and are therefore prone to the relativism of what, retrospectively, can be called 'the resentment-ressentiment complex'. The true problem with retributive passions concerns a difference in kind, not between resentment and ressentiment, but between active affects and passive or reactive affects. This Nietzschean 'demoralisation' of established discourses on the reactive attitudes by means of a historico-systematic reorientation leads to the concluding claim that while moral sentiments and political actions are always entangled, only the latter constitute the ground of social justice.

How does the full weight of two centuries of discourse on ressentiment bear on those it pretends to be about, Nietzsche's 'men of ressentiment', and what are the interests of those who wield it today? In this chapter, I will put the consistency and coherence in our use of the concept of ressentiment to the test. If the moderns have always used the concept of ressentiment in a polemical fashion, as a critique of common sense based on a more exclusive good sense, my aim is to explore its relevance and irrelevance from an irenic point of view. Following the lead of Isabelle Stengers, whose project of a 'cosmopolitics' is the most profound contemporary legacy of a philosophical diplomatism stemming from Leibniz, I will develop a new conceptual framework for thinking with ressentiment, with special focus on the Leibnizian interpretation of voluntary servitude, the problem of damnation. It is not so much the truth of ressentiment that is in need of revision, but rather the purpose it serves. Its critical truth, Its critical truth, I argue, should never be an excuse for neglecting the more speculative care for its potential overcoming. Ultimately, the question is: how to situate our diagnosis of ressentiment in the collective fabrication of a common sense in which ressentiment no longer prevails?

This essay serves as an introduction both to this special issue and to the works of Peter Sloterdijk. It starts out from the opposition between critical and affirmative projects in modern philosophy. It is my intent to demonstrate how Sloterdijk displaces this opposition in favor of what I propose to call a "jovial modernity" and a post-Heideggerian philosophy of Gelassenheit or "relief." After a general outline of the Sphären-project, I discuss the shifts in Sloterdijk's development of Ernst Jünger's critical concept of "mobilization" and show how his engagement with critical theory has gradually transformed from an aesthesis of the event, through a Nietzschean "transvaluation of all values"-generosity

Filosoof Sjoerd van Tuinen pleit voor een perspectief op openbaarheid dat hij ontleent aan Peter Sloterdijk en diens ‘kritisch  atmosferenbewustzijn’. Hierin wordt intimiteit niet beschouwd als iets obsceens dat publieke interactie uitsluit, maar juist als iets dat
eindelijk publiek serieus genomen dient te worden. Voor de beeldende
kunst impliceert dat balansoefeningen tussen observatie en deelname; een socialiserende kunst, die niet gemaakt wordt voor een publiek,
maar een publiek schept.

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 by way of James, 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 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.

The War of Appearances includes brand new essays by Paul Frissen, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Willem Schinkel, Lars Spuybroek, René ten Bos, and McKenzie Wark, plus artworks by Paolo Cirio, Wim Delvoye, Tomás Saraceno, Diana Scherer. In their contributions they develop two strategies against the old Enlightenment ideal of transparency. An ideal that has been completely transformed into a global state of mediation and automation. The two strategies, opacity and radiance, initially appear to be diametrically opposed: one starts from a fundamental inaccessibility, the other one from an excess of visibility. But quickly they start to overlap and together they evolve into a kind of spook-phenomenology that opens up new ways of thinking and seeing.

Authors and artists:  Paolo Cirio, Wim Delvoye, Paul Frissen, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Tomás Saraceno, Diana Scherer, Willem Schinkel, Lars Spuybroek, René ten Bos, and McKenzie Wark.

“Each period of technological development, with its instruments and machines, brings its share of specialized accidents” (Virilio). But a reversal could also be true: accidents produce technologies. In this publication we inquire into a technology of accidents, but also into the forms of power and authority that accidents materialize. What are the specific accidents of – call them what you wish: artificial intelligence, machine learning, enhanced pattern recognition – systems? What do accidents tell us about the technology that generates them? How are these technological failures tied up with the creation and recreation of economic rationalities? And do the events that come to mind really qualify as “accidents,” or are they rather extended forms of functionality, which may be undesired, but not dysfunctional in the way that the derailment of a train appears dysfunctional?

With articles by Erik Bordeleau, Vera Bühlmann, Paolo Cirio, Florian Cramer & Elaine W. Ho, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Driessens & Verstappen, Stefano Harney, Lev Avitan, Willem Schinkel, Rogier Van Reekum, Yuk Hui, Cécile Malaspina, Jason W. Moore, Lars Spuybroek and Sjoerd van Tuinen.

Drawing upon a wide variety of authors, approaches, and ideological contexts, this book offers a comprehensive and detailed critique of the distinct and polemical senses in which the concept of ressentiment (and its cognate 'resentment') is used today. It also proposes a new mode of addressing ressentiment in which critique and polemics no longer set the tone: care.

Contemporary tendencies in political culture such as neoliberalism, nationalism, populism, identity politics, and large-scale conspiracy theories have led to the return of the concept of ressentiment in armchair political analysis. This book argues that, due to the tension between its enormous descriptive power and its mutually contradicting ideological performances, it is necessary to ‘redramatize’ the concept of ressentiment. By what right do we possess and use the concept of ressentiment, and what makes the phenomenon worth knowing? Inspired by Marxist political epistemology, affect theory, postcolonialism, and feminism, the book maps, delimits, and assesses four irreducible ways in which ressentiment can be articulated: the ways of the priest, the physician, the witness, and the diplomat. The first perspective is typically embodied by conservative (Scheler, Girard) and liberal (Smith, Rawls) political theory; the second, by Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault; whereas the standpoint of the witness is found in the writings of Améry, Fanon and Adorno; and the diplomat’s is the author’s own, albeit inspired by philosophers such as Ahmed, Stiegler, Stengers, and Sloterdijk. In producing a dialectical sequence between all four typical modes of enunciation, the book demonstrates how the first three reinterpretations of ressentiment are already implied in the theater set up in Nietzsche’s late polemical books, while the fourth proposes a line of flight out of it.

The Dialectic of Ressentiment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in critical theory, social and political philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, history, literature, political science, anthropology, and Nietzsche scholarship. It will also appeal to anyone interested in the politics of anger, discourse ethics, trauma studies, and memory politics.

Sjoerd van Tuinen argues for the inseparability of matter and manner in the form of a group portrait of Leibniz, Bergson, Whitehead, Souriau, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers, and Agamben. Examining afresh the 16th-century style of mannerism, this book synthesizes philosophy and aesthetics to demonstrate not only the contemporary relevance of artists such as Michelangelo or Arcimboldo but their broader significance as incorporating a form of modal thinking and perceiving.

While looking at mannerism as a style that spurned the balance and proportion of earlier Renaissance models in favour of compositional instability and tension, this book also conceives of mannerism a-historically to investigate what it can tell us about continental modal metaphysics. Whereas analytical metaphysics privileges logical essence and asks whether something is possible, real, contingent, or necessary, continental philosophy privileges existence and counts as many modes as there are ways of coming-into-being.

In three main parts, van Tuinen first explores the ontological, aesthetic, and ethical ramifications of this distinction. 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.