Spinoza gezien als filosoof van de barok, maar ook de barok van de Nederlandse Republiek was anomaal

Recent verscheen

Frans-Willem Korsten, A Dutch Republican Baroque: Theatricality, Dramatization, Moment and Event. Amsterdam University Press, 06-11-2017 - 248 pp. - € 95,00 - PDF van Inoud en Introduction - Cover illustration: Gerard van Honthorst, Laughing violinist, 1624

Korsten behandelt de ‘Dutch republican baroque’ als een ‘anomaly’ in het kielzog van hoe door Negri Spinoza een anomaliteit werd genoemd: “It is no surprise, then, that the Republic, or one of its iconic figures, Benedict de Spinoza, has been defined as an ‘anomaly’.” Kunstenaars als Vondel, Vos, Hals en Rembrandt werden altijd al met barok in verband gebracht. “Others are not at all, or less well, known as baroque (eg. Spinoza, Rumphius).” [p. 22] Opvallend is dan dat hij een van de weinigen die Spinoza uitdrukkelijk als een filosoof van de Barok zag, Carl Gebhardt, niet noemt.

De uitgeverstekst: Though the baroque worldliness of the Dutch Republic was, in some aspects, deeply religious, it was also radically material or empirical, as in the work of Spinoza. In the Dutch Republic, in its Baroque forms of art, two aesthetic formal modes, theatre and drama, were dynamically related to two political concepts, event and moment. The Dutch version of the Baroque is characterised by a fascination with this world regarded as one possibility out of a plurality of potential worlds. It is this fascination that explains the coincidence in the Dutch Republic, strange at first sight, of Baroque exuberance, irregularity, paradox, and vertigo with scientific rigor, regularity, mathematical logic, and rational distance. In giving a new historical perspective on the Baroque as a specifically Dutch republican one, this study also offers a new and systematic approach towards the interactions among the notions of theatricality, dramatisation, moment, and event: concepts that are currently at the centre of philosophical and political debates but the modern articulation of which can best be considered in the explorations of history and world in the Dutch Republic.”” 


Bij zo'n cover hoort een lachende Spinoza. Die wordt ons geleverd in tweets van Martin O'Neill