Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking (Routledge Research in Aesthetics)

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.

Michaela Fišerová is an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of J. E. Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic, and a researcher at Metropolitan University Prague. She works in the fields of contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, with specialisation in the problematics of media, arts, politics, and animality. She is the author of Sharing the Visible: Rethinking Foucault (2013), Image and Power: Interviews with French Thinkers (2015), Deconstructing Signature (2016), Fragmentary Vision: Rancière, Derrida, Nancy (2019), and Event of Signature: Jacques Derrida and Repeating of the Unrepeatable (SUNY, 2022).

Jakub Mácha is a researcher at the Metropolitan University Prague and a professor at the Department of Aesthetics, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He has published on the philosophy of language and classical German philosophy. He is the author of Wittgenstein on Internal and External Relations: Tracing All the Connections (2015). His co-edited volumes include Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language (2016), Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language (2018), Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of Difference (2019), Engaging Kripke with Wittgenstein (2024), and Platonism (2024). His most recent book is The Philosophy of Exemplarity: Singularity, Particularity, and Self-Reference (Routledge, 2023).