dr. (Sjoerd) S van Tuinen

Profile

Dr. Sjoerd van Tuinen is associate professor of philosophy at Erasmus School of Philosophy.

With expertise in the full spectrum of continental philosophy, I am interested in metaphysics, aesthetics, social and political theory, and the history of modern philosophy. My research consists of commentary on classical and contemporary authors and multimedia engagements across the arts and humanities. I specialize in (speculative) pragmatism, philosophical anthropology, critical theory, and post-structuralism, as well as recent trends such as new materialism and the speculative and affective turns, focusing on questions concerning subjectivity, technology and media, art (history), political affect, commoning, and posthumanism, while drawing on authors such as Leibniz, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Adorno, and Deleuze.

I currently supervise projects on 'The Principle of Sufficient Reason: From Critique to Care' (PhD), 'Bergson, Synthetic Biology, and Neuroscience' (PhD), 'The Logic of Deliciousness: To Think Food Differently in the Case of Nordic Cuisine' (PhD), 'Reasonable Machines: Rational Paths, Models and Prospects in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence' (PhD), 'The Politics of Austerity in Europe' (PhD), 'Articulations of Desire: Populism and the Future of Democracy' (Postdoc), and coordinate a long-standing study group in post-Kantian philosophy.

Short CV

After having studied sociology and philosophy in Rotterdam, Rome and Leipzig, I received a PhD in philosophy from Ghent University (2009, chapters) for a dissertation on Deleuze and Leibniz. In 2008-9 I worked as a lecturer at Maastricht University. Among many visiting appointments, I was visiting lecturer at Stellenbosch University (2005), visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2013), research fellow at Humboldt University (2014) and Fordham University (2016), and a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University (2017-18). I have received several research grants, among them the NWO VENI scholarship, and edited over two dozen films, volumes and special issues, including a series of interdisciplinary theory books in collaboration with V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam). I am  a founding member of the Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge and editor for various journals including De Uil van Minerva. Some of my work is available here. ORCHID iD

Current writing

I am in the finishing stages of a monograph, Ressentiment: Pedagogy of a Concept. Starting from novel interpretations of Nietzsche and Améry, this book offers a comprehensive critique of academic, literary, and public discourses on ressentiment (and its cognate 'resentment'), delimiting and assessing them according to their polemical consistencies and ideological performances. It also proposes a new dialectical mode of addressing ressentiment in which critique and polemics no longer set the tone.

I am also working on a series of papers in which I develop a pedagogical practice and eco-philosophical reinterpretation of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), geared towards achieving coherence between habits and habitats. According to Kant, the ‘idea of reason’ has passed through three stages: dogmatism, skepticism, and critique. Starting from the identification of a fault line in the late 19th century empiricist and pragmatist responses to German Idealism, I elaborate a fourth stage, provisionally called care.

One of my ongoing interests is in anarchism and autonomous Marxism, with a focus on questions of constituent (or destituent) power, the soul, and decolonialism. I investigate the technical, mediatic, ritual, and semiotic fields of belonging in which the constant (re)composition of collective bodies and souls occurs. This work on our affective incorporations, conspirative bubbles, and attention grabs includes revisiting the Kantian notion of the schematism and its reception in modern philosophy, as well as modes of value production beyond the worn dualism of use value and exchange value.

Key publications

Forthcoming monograph: The Philosophy of Mannerism – From Aesthetics to Modal Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2022): A new account of modal individuation in the form of a group portrait of Leibniz, Bergson, Whitehead, Souriau, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers and Agamben. Whereas analytical modal metaphysics privileges essence (asking whether ‘it’ is possible, real, contingent, or necessary), continental modal philosophy as I see it privileges existence (counting as many modes as there are ways of coming-into-being). This book develops the ontological, ethical and aesthetical ramifications of this intuition in a historical and systematic account of the world as pluriverse of habitual uses and modes of existence. It (i) revisits the epistemological problem of style and/as newness at the interface of art history and philosophy, (ii) contributes to anarchist social ontology with a reading of Leibniz as practical philosopher, and (iii) offers an outlook on contemporary art and design through the notions of dramatization, incompleteness, diagrammatics, craftsmanship and alchemy.

Papers on critique and care: 'Elasticity and Plasticity: Immunology and the Crisis of Repetition', in: A. Radman & H. Sohn (eds). Critical and Clinical Cartographies. Edinburgh University Press (2017), 243-68. pdf  'Common Sense: From Critique to Care (Arendt beyond Arendt)' in: J. Brouwer & S. van Tuinen (eds.) To Mind is to Care (V2 Publishers, 2019), 124-57. pdf 2020 follow-up: 'Philosophy in the Light of AI: Hegel or Leibniz', in Angelaki. Journal for the Theoretical Humanities 25(4), 97-109, doi 

Papers on ressentiment: 'The Drama of Ressentiment: The Philosopher versus the Priest', in: C. Meiborg & S. van Tuinen (eds). Deleuze and the Passions, Punctum Books (2016), 79-102. pdf 'The Resentment-Ressentiment Complex: A Critique of Liberal Discourse', Global Discourse, 10.2 (2020), 237-53. doi  2021: ‘Authentic Ressentiment? The Polemics of Jean Améry’, Philosophy Today, 65.4, 807-27. doi

Papers on the PSR: 'Difference and Speculation: Heidegger, Meillassoux and Deleuze on Sufficient Reason', in: A. Beaulieu & E. Kazarian & J. Sushytska (eds.), Deleuze and Metaphysics, Lexington Books (2014), 63-90. pdf  'Deleuze: Speculative and Practical Philosophy', in: A. Avanessian & S. Malik (eds.), Genealogies of Speculation. Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism. Bloomsbury (2015), 93-114. pdf  Forthcoming 2023: 'The Principle and Function of Reason: Philosophy in a New Key' in: R. Gorny, D. Perera, A. Radman, S. Kousoulas (eds.), Design Space (Rowman & Littlefield).

Papers on anarchism and autonomist marxism: 'Biomacht en biopolitiek: de inbedding van Foucault in het autonoom marxisme', in: Krisis. Tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie 2009.3 (2009), 68-85. With A. Griffioen. pdf 2021: 'Intersubjectivity and Transindividuality: Leibniz, Husserl, Deleuze, and the Composition of Worlds (Animal Monadology)', Lo Sguardo. Rivista di filosofia, 32, doi; 2021: ‘Transparency and its Schematism’, Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 41 (2), 83-6, doi.

Papers on Deleuze’s mannerist aesthetics: 2012: ‘Cinematic Neo-Mannerism or Neo-Baroque? Deleuze and Daney’, Image and Narrative, 13 (2), 53-75. pdf  2014: ‘Mannerism, Baroque and Modernism. Deleuze and the Essence of Art’, SubStance, 43 (1), 166-90. doi 2015: ‘Brewing Dissonance: Conceptualizing Mannerism and Baroque in Music (with Deleuze)’, Diacritics 42 (3), 54-82, with C. Meiborg. doi 2016: ‘Painting versus Theatre: The Hysteria of the Hand’, in L. Schreel (ed). Pathology and Aesthetics. The Concept of the Pathological in Kant and Contemporary Aesthetics (Düsseldorf UP), 69-98. pdf 2018: ‘Mannerism and Vitalism: Bergson and the Mannerist Image’, in A. Bancoianu & L. Marin (eds.), Usages de la figure, régimes de la figuration (Bucharest UP), 187-99. pdf 2020: ‘Hermeticism instead of Hermeneutics. The History of Philosophy Conceived Of as Mannerist Portraiture’, in G. Collet (ed), Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity (Bloomsbury), 133-61. pdf

Two edited volumes on philosophy and art history: Speculative Art Histories. Analysis at the Limits (ed.) Edinburgh University Press, 2017. pdf Art History after Deleuze and Guattari (ed.) Leuven University Press, 2017. With Stephen Zepke. pdf and pdf

Two Dutch volumes on French philosophy: Deleuze compendium, Boom. (2009, 1st, 2nd, 3rd editions) With E. Romein & M. Schuilenburg. pdf en pdf And: De nieuwe Franse filosofie. Denkers en thema's voor de 21e eeuw, Boom, 2011. With B. Ieven, A. van Rooden & M. Schuilenburg. pdf en pdf

Courses taught

Graduate courses: Advanced Critical Theory: Readings in Marxism; The Principle and Function of Reason; Mannerism and Modernity; Political Affect (Nietzsche and After); Leibniz Today (Neo-Monadologies); The Expressionist Aesthetics of Deleuze and Guattari; Alfred North Whitehead's 'Process and Reality'; Art Theory and Art Criticism; Metaphysics in Spinoza and Leibniz.

Undergraduate courses: Key Concepts for Ecological Encounters; Bergson and Continental Empiricism; Ontology and Metaphysics; Dialects and Difference; Aesthetics; Plasticity of the Human; Philosophy and Rhetorics; Philosophy and Film; Philosophy of History; Ecophilosophy; Science, Culture and Technology; Thesis Writing; Culture and Identity in a Globalizing Europe; Style and Modernity; Philosophy of Language; Disenchantment and Ideology; Cultural Pluralism; Philosophical Reading.

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