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.
CfP Studia Phaenomenologica vol. 23 (2023): Phenomenologies of the image
Editors: Emmanuel Alloa and Cristian Ciocan The 2023 issue of Studia Phaenomenologica will be dedicated to the question of the image and its phenomenologies. Images have been a remarkably constant preoccupation for the phenomenological tradition. From Husserl’s...