Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking

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.