Collecting goes beyond art collecting and seems to meet a more general need. Although it originally aided survival and has predecessors in the animal world, the gesture of collecting has complex motivations. After exploring the collector’s psychology and the behavioural differences between collectors and spectators, this paper analyses the logic of collecting and its principles: order, variation, attractive and meaningful display, the control of contingency, processuality and growth, seriality, and limitation. Finally, the paradoxical attempt to collect non-collectibles, such as gods, clouds or human relations will be shown to illustrate a para-aesthetics of collecting which ranges from the poetics of everyday life to aestheticism.
Call for papers: Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 28 (2028): “Phenomenology of Belonging”. Guest Editors: Bruce Bégout and Ovidiu Stanciu
While the concept of belonging does not constitute a central element of the theoretical framework of classical phenomenology, it nevertheless functions as an operative notion that several phenomenologists have drawn upon to articulate a specific dimension of our...