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 vol. XXV (2025) – Eco-Phenomenology
Editor: Mădălina Diaconu Argument: Eco-phenomenology is a recently emerged discipline that aims to constructively rearticulate the relationship of phenomenology with natural sciences based on the assumption of a situated and embodied subject. The concept of...