Michaela Fišerová, Jakub Mácha (eds.), Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration Ornamental Thinking, Routledge, 2026.
This volume offers a fresh and timely contribution to current discussions of ornamentation, repetition, and affect in aesthetics and philosophy. It provides new insights into how ornamentation shapes artistic, philosophical, and social practices, positioning it as a dynamic force in contemporary thought.
Through interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars, the volume interrogates ornamentation’s role in structuring metaphysics, aesthetics, and interspecies relations. It challenges the traditional notion that ornament is mere decoration and reframes it as a vital philosophical and cultural concept. Drawing on thinkers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, the contributors explore how ornamentation operates as a parergon, a site of affective repetition, or a marker of epistemological shifts. From critiques of Kantian hierarchies in craft to analyses of Baroque aesthetics and animal territoriality, the chapters reveal ornamentation as both a boundary and a bridge – simultaneously peripheral and essential to meaning-making. This volume offers new and unique perspectives on ornamentation’s universal and culturally specific dimensions.
Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, metaphysics, continental philosophy, and art theory.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction: What is ornament?
Michaela Fišerová and Jakub Mácha
2 Truth in ornament: Aesthetics of repetition between Derrida and Kierkegaard
Michaela Fišerová
3 Crafting an ornament: On the craft emancipation myth
Tereza Sluková
4 Ornamental play in Deleuze’s aesthetics
Corry Shores
5 Decorum in interspecies cohabitation: Hume, Deleuze, and becoming-ornament
Michaela Fišerová
6 Ornamental representations: Exploring the interplay between aesthetics and politics
Lenka Lee
7 Foucault’s Baroque
Barry Stocker
8 Languages of ornament and art: Repetition, norm, and deviation
Peter Michalovič
9 Ornaments as frozen music
Vanda Božičević Metzger
10 Framing metaphysics: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the ornamentation of philosophical grounding
Jakub Mácha
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