We are no strangers today to visual representations of human suffering at sea: the refugee crisis that continues to play out in the seascape between Europe and Africa (and not only there) yields an ever-growing archive of humanitarian tragedy. As both a visual backdrop and a lethal medium of unequal mobility, maritime space and landscape play a significant role in mediating the ethical demands of this crisis. Yet there has been little exploration of the longer history of morality’s role in ...

Exploring experimental attitudes in music.

Experimental Affinities in Music brings together diverse artistic, musicological, historical, and philosophical essays, enhancing a broad discourse on artistic experimentation, and exploring various experimental attitudes in music composed between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries.

The golden thread running through the different chapters is the quest for inherently experimental musical practices, a quest pursued from interrogating, descriptive, ...

Religion and science on paranormal events.

Described as 'the hand of God', as 'pathological' or even as 'a clever trick', exceptional corporeal phenomena such as miraculous cures, stigmata, and incorrupt corpses have triggered heated debates in the past. Depending on their definition as either 'supernatural', 'psycho-somatic' or 'fraudulent', different authorities have sought to explain these enigmatic occurrences by stimulating inquiries and claiming jurisdiction over them. As a consequence,...

‘Dora’ is one the most important and interesting case studies Sigmund Freud conducted and later described. It constitutes a key text in his oeuvre and finds itself at the crossroads of his studies in hysteria, the theory of sexuality and dream interpretation. The Dora case is both a literary and theoretically ground-breaking text and an account of a ‘failed’ treatment. In Dora, Hysteria and Gender renowned Freud scholars reflect on the Dora case, presenting various innovative and cont...

In 1790, between the birth of America (1776) and the creation of the French National Assembly (1789), nine provinces nestled between the French and Dutch borders declared themselves a new free and independent country: the United States of Belgium. Before then, the provinces had been part of the vast Austrian Habsburg Empire ruled by Joseph II. In 1789 revolutionaries from Brussels to Ghent to Namur recruited a grass-roots army that, to the surprise of many, successfully chased imperial forces...

The degree to which the late colonial era affected Europe has been for long underappreciated, and only recently have European countries started to acknowledge not having come to terms with decolonisation. In Belgium, the past two decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the controversial episodes in the country’s colonial past. This volume examines the long-term effects and legacies of the colonial era on Belgium after 1960, the year the Congo gained its independence, and calls into qu...

Aberrant Nuptials explores the diversity and richness of the interactions between artistic research and Deleuze studies. “Aberrant nuptials” is the expression Gilles Deleuze uses to refer to productive encounters between systems characterised by fundamental difference. More than imitation, representation, or reproduction, these encounters foster creative flows of energy, generating new material configurations and intensive experiences. Within different understandings of artistic research,...

It is a major challenge to write the history of post-WWII architectural theory without boiling it down to a few defining paradigms. An impressive anthologising effort during the 1990s charted architectural theory mostly via the various theoretical frameworks employed, such as critical theory, critical regionalism, deconstructivism, and pragmatism.

Yet the intellectual contours of what constitutes architectural theory have been constantly in flux. It is therefore paramount to ask what kind of ...

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), Pope Leo XIII expressed the conviction that the renewed study of the philosophical legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas would help Catholics to engage in a dialogue with secular modernity while maintaining respect for Church doctrine and tradition. As a result, the neo-scholastic framework dominated Catholic intellectual production for nearly a century thereafter.

This volume assesses the societal impact of the Thomist revival movement, with particular atten...

Transparency is the metaphor of our time. Whether in government or corporate governance, finance, technology, health or the media – it is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly a current debate that does not call for more transparency. But what does this word actually stand for and what are the consequences for the life of individuals? Can knowledge from the arts, and its play of visibility and invisibility, tell us something about the paradoxical logics of transparency and mediation? This O...