Rhuthmos

F. Mason, The Viscous : Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures

2026-07-31T06:00:00Z

F. Mason, The Viscous : Slime, Stickiness, Fondling, Mixtures,‎ Punctum Books, 2020, 274 p.

Slime, goo, gunge, gloop, gels, sols, globules, jellies, emulsions, greases, soaps, syrups, glues, lubricants, liquid crystals, moulds, plasmas, and protoplasms – the viscous is not one thing, but rather a quality of resistance and flow, of stickiness and slipperiness. It is a state of matter that oozes into the gaps of our everyday existence, across age groups, between cultures and disciplines.Since the large-scale extraction of petroleum in the 19th century, the viscous has witnessed a proliferation in the variety of its forms. Mechanized industry required lubricants and oil distillation produced waste products that were refined to form Vaseline. From this age, new viscous forms and technologies emerged : products from plastic (and plastic explosives) to cosmetics, glycerine, asphalt, sexual lubrication, hydro- and aero-gels, and even anti-climb paint.Based on unique and wide-ranging research, The Viscous is the first major investigation of encounters with and possibilities of the viscous over the course of the last century, not simply as a material state, but also as an imaginative event. We enter into a story of matter at its most wayward, deviant, hesitant, and resistant.From asphalt lakes to industrial molasses tanks, from liquid crystals squirming in our screens to milk fetishes, The Viscous discloses gooeyness as a peculiarly modern phase of matter. « Everything oozes, » as Beckett's Estragon famously proclaims in Waiting for Godot. Viscous dynamics are exposed as not only hugely various in a post-industrial age, but particularly useful ways of thinking, feeling, writing, and making in a time of ecological anxiety.

Freddie Mason is a writer, researcher, and filmmaker living in London. He received his doctorate from the Royal College of art in 2019, on the history and futures of semi-states. Before The Viscous, he published Ada Kaleh (Little Island Press, 2016).

Mason develops a rheological perspective on viscosity as a contemporary material imagination, identifying key dynamics of viscous matter as they manifest across urban disasters, ecological philosophies, digital media, and colloidal technologies. By tracing these dynamics through material culture rather than reducing them to physical properties alone, Mason demonstrates how the viscous operates as a relational mode of contemporary imagination, rendering situated rhuthmoi of fluidity articulable through rheological vocabulary.

Johanna Kirschbauer, « Rhuthmoi of Fluidity:Rethinking Stability in Liquid Modernity », The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, 76-1, 2026, p. 312.

Rhythms of Artwork and Beyond, The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, Nr 76/1

2026-07-31T06:00:00Z

Sommaire

Rhythms of Artwork and Beyond, The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, Nr 76, Kraków, 2026 — I thank Ineta Kivle and Maja Bjelica for their kind words in their introduction. I also wish to thank the contributors to this issue who have used and extended my work, adapting it to their own needs.

Rhythm and Rhuthmos : Introducing the Special Issue by Ineta Kivle & Maja Bjelica

The philosophical search for new forms of rhythm attends to the inner constitution of subjectivity and its entanglement with natural, cultural, and more-than-human worlds, thereby resisting limitation to measurable systems alone. Flow of rhythmic movements render the dynamic changes that shape societies, bodies, environments, and artistic practices. It articulates transitions rather than fixed states, allowing us to perceive how continuity persists within flow and how disruption itself may take on patterned, meaningful forms. In this sense, rhythm offers an alternative to linear or cyclical narratives, opening a conceptual space in which transformation can be understood as neither purely restorative nor deconstructive, but as an immeasurable and recurring flow of elements. For such a flow, as has been shown by the French philosopher and historian Pascal Michon, the concept of rhuthmos is more appropriate than that of rhythm. Michon's rhythmanalysis, studies in rhythmology, and philosophical search for rhuthmos as an unmeasurable chain of recurring elements have an echo in a number of the contributed papers in this volume.

The seed for the idea for this special issue grew from the international interdisciplinary philosophical conference “Transformed Humanity in Search for Stability : Rhythms in Philosophy, Nature, Art”, held at the University of Latvia in Riga, in May 2024, to which both editors and some of the contributors participated. The conference was conceived as a space for philosophical dialogue in which rhythm was approached as a fundamental structure shaping contemporary transformations of human existence and art. Scholars were brought together by a shared concern : how rhythmic processes mediate human life under conditions of instability, acceleration, technological pressure, and ecological vulnerability. The guiding intuition shared by the conference participants that inspired this special issue is that rhythm reveals a field in which stability and transformation are not oppositional terms, but mutually implicated dimensions of lived existence.

As we stated in our call for papers for this issue :

The search for new philosophical and aesthetic theoretical approaches is driven by today's fluid and transformative processes occurring not just in art and society but also impacting the inner constitution of each individual and our surrounding environments. A focus on rhythm offers a common dimension shared by art, humans, sociality, and nature.

[…]

The issue aims to explore profound questions surrounding the nature and implications of rhythm : What is the essence of rhythm itself ? How do the natural rhythms that govern human life differ from the rhythms found in art, constructed rationalities, and technologies ? What alternate conceptions challenge the currently dominant metric paradigm of rhythm ? How does the individual self exist amid the rhythms of technologies, reason, nature, and global processes ? How does disruption of natural rhythms deform and transform human experience and being ? How does our sense of individuality shift as human social positions change rhythmically ? In what ways does the power of nature's rhythms impact the human world and artistic expression ? How can art contribute to maintaining a rhythmic, healthy existence ? How are humanity's bodily and rational dimensions transformed through the effects of changing rhythms ? How does the revived analysis of rhythm concern the realms of aesthetics, ethics, politics, literature, and art ?

To this list of questions, we kept adding new ones, always interrelated and interlaced : What is rhythm beyond metric repetition and calculable recurrence ? How does individuality change as human beings are repositioned within shifting social and planetary rhythms ? And how might renewed approaches to rhythmanalysis illuminate various dimensions of contemporary existence ?

Many dominant philosophical diagnoses of the present—whether articulated through posthumanism, hypermodernity, liquid modernity, or the Capitalocene—tend to privilege technological acceleration, rational abstraction, and systemic disruption. In doing so, they often overlook the more silent yet pervasive rhythmic forces that organize perception, bodily experience, social relations, artworks, and modes of meaning-making.

The issue extends into a sustained scholarly inquiry, treating rhythm as a transversal category that links aesthetics, philosophy, and art. Within this context, rhythm functions as a shared dimension that transforms through rational reflection as well as rhythmic forces, and corporeal engagements. By foregrounding rhythm, the volume affirms the inherently interdisciplinary orientation of contemporary aesthetics and opens it to dialogue with wide spectrum of other humanities.

Several contributions foreground elemental and environmental rhythms, thereby challenging anthropocentric frameworks of aesthetic experience. Essays addressing honey-making, sound ecology, water cosmologies, salt-working and breathing show how rhythm operates as a mode of attunement to more-than-human temporalities. Through practices of listening, care, and embodied engagement, these studies articulate alternative epistemologies grounded in reciprocity rather than domination. Here, rhythm emerges as an ethical practice—one that resists acceleration and instrumentalization by cultivating attentiveness to slow, fragile, and often overlooked processes.

Other contributions focus on artistic practices—ranging from dance, performance art, and painting to cinema, literature, and AI-generated images— in order to examine how rhythm structures aesthetic experience and mediates transformations of perception. Analyses of Marina Abramović's endurance-based performances, Edgar Degas's dancers, James Benning's minimalist cinema, audio art in the field of sound ecology, and contemporary AI imagery reveal rhythm as both a compositional principle and an experiential force. These studies show how artistic rhythms can interrupt dominant temporal regimes, expose concealed structures of power, and cultivate alternative modes of attention and care.

A recurring theoretical motif throughout the issue is the recovery of non-metric or pre-modern conceptions of rhythm (rhuthmos), understood not as fixed recurrence, but as a manner of flowing, a flow, a fluctuation, that with its reoccurence in various variations bring only temporary allusion to the stability of movement, which in reality is always ongoing. Drawing on thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Emile Benveniste, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, John Dewey, Pascal Michon, and others several authors conceptualize rhythm as a principle that resists reduction to calculable or measured time. Although rhythm reveals itself differently for each of them, even when they do not focus explicitly on the theme of rhythm itself—as is the case, for example, in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl—all of these diverse approaches nevertheless affirm the presence of rhythm, whether directly or indirectly, across a broad spectrum extending from subjectivity and the flow of inner time-consciousness to the pulsation of being itself. Within this framework, rhythm becomes a way of thinking stability without fixity, and order without repetition, in sense of continuity, constant movement.

Literary and poetic analyses further extend this inquiry by showing how rhythm destabilizes semantic certainty and fixed identities, while revealing rhythm as a sonic and temporal force that reconfigures place, memory, and belonging. Here, rhythm functions as an echoic structure, linking individual experience to geological, historical, and mythical temporalities that exceed the human scale.

Across these diverse contributions, rhythm emerges as a concept capable of bridging phenomenological descriptions of lived time with posthuman and ecological perspectives that decentre the human subject. Humanity appears not as a sovereign agent imposing order upon the world, but as a participant in complex rhythmic assemblages involving bodies, technologies, environments, and nonhuman agencies. In this sense, the issue responds directly to the question : what does it mean to be human amid the rhythms of art, nature, body, technology, and global processes ? Importantly, this issue also opens space for non-traditional academic forms, including reflective texts, acknowledging that rhythm itself often resists rigid disciplinary boundaries and standardized scholarly tempos. This editorial decision reflects the conviction that philosophical engagement with rhythm must remain sensitive to form, style, and pacing, allowing thought itself to move rhythmically rather than merely thematizing rhythm as an object.

The structure of the volume is shaped by the themes explored in the individual contributions as well as by the diversity of their theoretical approaches. The articles span a wide spectrum, ranging from analyses of rhythm in specific artistic expressions to more essayistic and broadly philosophical reflections.

The volume opens with theoretical, philosophically grounded analyses of rhythm, in which Thérèse Gräff, Branko Klun, and Ineta Kivle relate rhythm to human existence, experience, the phenomenological time, and the fluid manifestations of rhythm in the contemporary world, thereby moving to-ward the rhythms of liminality and introducing the theme of performance.

This is followed by contributions from Valda Vidzemniece and Agata Sitko, who examine rhythm in contemporary dance and performance art. The volume also includes two articles that address the presence of rhythm in film and its impact on human experience : Pedro Florêncio writes on rhythm in cinema as a form of kinetic therapy, while Magdalena Vassileva analyses the philosophy of kata as a self-organizing rhythm in Japanese film.

Extending the territories shaped by rhythm, Jakub Zdebik explores rhythm and structures in relation to painting and artificial intelligence, while Lenka Lee observes the territories of interspecies art having honeybees as prime artistic actors. In addition, Artur Szarecki presents the rhythmic assemblage based on the life rhythms of bees and exposes its importance for developing an affective ecopolitics. To this field is connected also the contribution by Małgorzata Dancewicz-Pawlik who takes us on a path of the development of the phonocene as a conceptualization of sound art and sound ecology.

Several contributions turn to rhythm in relation to elemental philosophy : Anne Sauka and Kārlis Lakševics write on the rhythms and temporalities of water ; Maja Bjelica examines salt-working in connection with elemental listening ; Petri Berndtson focuses on the elemental poetics ; Lenart Škof dedicates his philosophical insight to air and exposes breathing as a rhythmic, organic connection between the human and the cosmos.

The volume then turns to articles devoted to the rhythm of language and literature. Chiara Gianni, Raivis Bičevskis, and Elvīra Šimfa demonstrate how rhythm becomes a significant concept within modern (anti)reductionism, bringing together philology, poetics, philosophy, and literature. Pier Francesco Corvino analyses the echoes of the rhythms of life and death in detective fiction The Hollow by Agatha Christie.

The concluding articles move away, to some extent, from the philosophical analyses of specific manifestations of rhythm and turn toward more general reflections. Johanna Kirschbauer focuses on fluid rhythms and the search for new, alternative, even “unstable” forms of stability in contemporary life ; Māris Kūlis relates rhythm to the aesthetics of disruption and the notion of “ugly truth” ; and Maija Kūle considers rhythm in the con-text of her own original conceptualization of the Age of Will.

Taken together, the contributions to this special issue do not propose a single, unified theory of rhythm. Instead, they form a polyphonic field of inquiry in which multiple rhythms and rhuthmoi coexist, intersect, and at times clash. This plurality is not a weakness but a strength, as it reflects the relational and context-dependent nature of rhythm itself. By engaging rhythm across philosophy, art, nature, and social life, the issue contributes to ongoing debates as well as to the future orientations of the humanities, while also demonstrating through its individual articles that rhythm cannot be reduced to periodic recurrence or metric regularity alone. Rather, it appears as relational, processual, and often liminal, emerging at thresholds between stability and chaos, silence and sound, repetition and difference, as well as between human and more-than-human worlds.

Summary

Ineta Kivle and Maja Bjelica, Rhythm and Rhuthmos : Introducing the Special Issue

Thérèse Gräff, Deleuze, Phenomenology and the Rhythms of Experience

Branko Klun, Repetition and Stability within Human Temporality : An Existential-Phenomenological Approach

Ineta Kivle, Rhythms of Liminality : An Example from Performance

Valda Vidzemniece, Life Force and the Flow of Energy : Rhythm in Dance and Dance Performance

Agata Sitko, Rhythms of Marina Abramović

Pedro Florêncio, Kinetic Therapy in the Age of the Capitalocene : Finding a Horizon of Possibility in James Benning's Pig Iron (2010)

Magdalena Vassileva, The Disrupted Rhythms of Life and the Philosophy of Kata in Japanese Film

Jakub Zdebik, Rhythm and Chaos : Deleuzean Aesthetic Structures in Painting and AI Generated Images

Lenka Lee, Territories of the Hive : Rhythm, Care, and Interspecies Art in Jan Karpíšek's Practice

Artur Szarecki, Affective Ecopolitics in Rhythmic Assemblages : Wolfgang Buttress's The Hive

Małgorzata Dancewicz-Pawlik, Phonocene : Moving Toward the Rhythms of Naturecultures

Anne Sauka, Kārlis Lakševics, Rhythms of Life and Death : Fluid Temporalities of Water in Latvian Folklore

Maja Bjelica, Rhythms and Silences of Salt-Working : An Essay on Elemental Listening

Petri Berndtson, The Reversible Enchantment of the Rhythmical Knot of the Elemental Poetics

Lenart Škof, Rhythms of Breath, Rhythms of Love

Chiara Gianni, Raivis Bičevskis, Elvīra Šimfa, Rhythm and Non-reductionist Thinking : Poetry, Literature, and the Overcoming of Nihilism

Pier Francesco Corvino, The Echoic Rhythm of Life and Death : A Philosophical Reading of The Hollow by Agatha Christie

Johanna Kirschbauer, Rhuthmoi of Fluidity : Rethinking Stability in Liquid Modernity

Māris Kūlis, Ugly Truths and the Aesthetics of Disruption

Maija Kūle, The Possibility of Social Rhythm in the Age of Will : A New Socio-Political Meditation

Acknowledgements

Pobierz tom w całości / Download the entire issue

S. Chiffoleau, Une histoire du temps dans le monde arabe

2026-07-29T05:00:00Z

S. Chiffoleau, Une histoire du temps dans le monde arabe, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2026, 384 p. – EAN : 9782271159731

Les cultures, les religions et les hommes façonnent le temps, déterminent les heures et les calendriers. En retour, le temps informe et oriente le devenir des sociétés. Dans l'espace arabe, multiethnique et où l'islam coexiste avec d'autres communautés confessionnelles, l'histoire du temps a connu une trajectoire particulière, différente de celle de l'Europe. Mais contrairement à des stéréotypes répandus, les sociétés du monde arabe ne sont aucunement indifférentes au temps, elles savent au contraire se mouvoir dans la pluralité de ses expressions.

Embrassant la longue durée, cet ouvrage évoque leur contribution majeure à l'art de la mesure du temps. Il s'attache à rendre compte des rythmes sociaux qui ont orchestré la vie quotidienne des individus et des groupes, durant la période ottomane et dans les contextes coloniaux, jusqu'au moment où les processus de modernisation sont venus bouleverser le régime rythmique traditionnel.

Sylvia Chiffoleau, historienne, directrice de recherche CNRS au LARHRA de Lyon, est spécialiste des sociétés arabes depuis le XIX^e siècle.

V. Viehöver, Henri Meschonnic. Eine Denkbiografie

2026-07-09T05:00:00Z

V. Viehöver, Henri Meschonnic. Eine Denkbiografie, Berlin, Matthes & Seitz, 2025, 286 S. – ISBN : 978-3-7518-2070-7

Das vielgestaltige Werk des Sprachtheoretikers, Übersetzers und Dichters Henri Meschonnic (1932–2009) ist im deutschsprachigen Raum noch weitgehend unentdeckt. In dieser Denkbiografie stellt Vera Viehöver ihn vor und situiert sein Denken im Kontext der französischen Theoriegeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Meschonnics »Poetik des Rhythmus« erweist sich dabei als eine lebenslange Praxis, die Sprache, Ethik und Politik als ein Kontinuum begreift und das im Strukturalismus suspendierte Subjekt als »Subjekt des Gedichts« rehabilitiert. Sein Selbstverständnis als Jude und sein erinnerungspolitisches Engagement werden ebenso beleuchtet wie die Korrespondenzen seiner Poetik mit anderen Künsten und die vielfältigen Beziehungen seines Werks zur deutschsprachigen Literatur, Sprachtheorie und Philosophie.

Vera Viehöver, 1969 geboren, studierte Germanistik, Romanistik und Philosophie in Aachen, Brüssel und Düsseldorf. Sie ist Professorin für Deutsche Literatur an der Université de Liège in Belgien und beschäftigt sich u. a. mit Theorie und Praxis der literarischen Übersetzung, mit Übersetzerinnen und Autorinnen im langen 18. Jahrhundert sowie mit Formen des autobiografischen Schreibens.

Leseprobe

Plato's Laws (Books III & IV) : Freedom, Collapse, and the Rhythms of Political Order

2026-07-01T05:00:00Z

Plato's Laws (Books III & IV) : Freedom, Collapse, and the Rhythms of Political Order, trans. Jason Kassel, Recursive Publishing, 2025, 118 p. – ISBN : ‎ 978-1968044695

What causes great cities to fall ? What rhythm must a lawgiver follow to build a state that will last ? In this poetic-structural translation of Plato's Laws, Books III and IV become a drama of memory, collapse, and political rebirth. Where Book I staged the war within the soul, and Book II examined education through rhythm and imitation, these books turn outward—to history, empire, and the fragile emergence of law.

Book III follows the Athenian stranger as he recounts the downfall of ancient regimes—from the mythical floods to the real-world failures of Sparta, Persia, and Athens itself. These are not just historical episodes, but ontological collapses : each regime forgets the rhythm that made it possible. Laws are no longer preambles ; they become reactionary weapons. The metaphor of the Oversailed Ship warns against regimes driven by appetite and untrained courage—states that cannot be steered when winds of freedom grow too strong.

Book IV opens a new possibility : the founding of a colony. Here, the Lawgiver must emerge—not as an authoritarian, but as one who tunes the new city's pulse in accord with both divine rhythm and human need. The city must be free, but also formable. The first laws are not restrictions but invitations : they begin with prayers, mythic memory, and persuasive rhythm.

This translation is not a paraphrase. It rebuilds Plato's dialogue using :

Short poetic lines
Capitalized conceptual metaphors (e.g., Lawgiver, Golden-Cord, Oversailed-Ship)
Rhythmic transitions between historical logic and philosophical creation
Structured movement from collapse to construction

Designed for students of political theory, literature, classics, education, and those seeking a lived philosophy of law, this edition brings Laws III–IV into the rhythm of now. It invites readers to walk beside the founders as they ask not “What rules should we write ?” but “What tone should law begin in ?”

Part of the Poetic Philosophy Presents series, this volume continues the mission of restoring ancient texts as structures of rhythm, soul, and offering—not as abstractions, but as lived forms of judgment.

Jason Kassel (PhD) writes classical philosophy and political thought for young readers, families, and thoughtful adults.

Plato's Laws (Books V & VI) : Freedom, Virtue, and the Rhythms of Political Soulcraft

2026-06-29T05:00:00Z

Plato's Laws (Books V & VI) : Freedom, Virtue, and the Rhythms of Political Soulcraft, trans. Jason Kassel, Recursive Publishing, 2025, 128 p. – ISBN : 978-1968044701

In Books V and VI of Plato's Laws, the dialogue shifts from broad philosophical inquiry to the precise formation of soul, city, and law. In this poetic-structural translation, Plato's vision of lawful freedom is rendered not as a list of rules, but as a rhythm—a balance of desire, memory, courage, and restraint, shaped across generations.

Book V begins with a declaration : soul is older and more divine than body or wealth. The Lawgiver must now guide a city whose citizens are in constant motion, pulled by pleasure, fear, ambition, and forgetfulness. The goal is not obedience, but virtue. Through a series of laws paired with preambles, Plato offers a new kind of education : one that speaks to the soul's rhythm, inviting alignment rather than submission. Laws on theft, violence, dishonor, drinking, and desire are preceded by poetic reasoning—meant to persuade, not only punish.

Book VI transitions from the personal to the civic. Plato's Athenian Stranger outlines the architecture of governance : the selection of magistrates, the sacred number 5040 for civic divisions, and the distribution of land and labor. Law, in this context, is no longer reactive. It is ontological design. Justice, property, and worship are all expressions of a single metaphysical truth : that harmony must be built into the very pattern of life.

This translation preserves Plato's metaphors—Golden-Cord, Soul-Rank, Preamble-Law, Geometric Constitution, and Lawgiver as Composer—while expressing them in a format that modern readers can feel and follow. Sentences are recast as short poetic lines. Concepts are capitalized and structurally arranged to trace Plato's internal logic.

Ideal for students of philosophy, law, politics, classical education, literature, or rhythm-based ethics, this volume invites readers into the lived structure of judgment. This is not law as statute—it is law as soul-training.

Part of the Poetic Philosophy Presents series, this edition reveals Plato's Laws not as an abstract system, but as a spiritual-political experiment—one that still speaks to the balance between freedom and form, soul and system, memory and creation.

Jason Kassel (PhD) writes classical philosophy and political thought for young readers, families, and thoughtful adults.

Ch. Strosetzki (Editor, Contributor), & 18 more, Harmony and Rhythm of the Universe : Interdisciplinary Explorations from 1500 to the Present

2026-06-27T05:00:00Z

Ch. Strosetzki (Editor, Contributor), & 18 more, Harmony and Rhythm of the Universe : Interdisciplinary Explorations from 1500 to the Present, Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2026, 352 p. – ISBN :

An interdisciplinary journey through history, science, and art—exploring how harmony and rhythm have shaped our understanding of the cosmos and ourselves.

What do a medieval board game, a mystic dancer, a stroke survivor, and the orbit of Jupiter have in common ? All are part of the long human search for harmony and rhythm - principles that have shaped music, mathematics, architecture, medicine, theology, and cosmology across millennia.

Harmony and Rhythm of the Universe : Interdisciplinary Explorations from 1500 to the Present brings together physicists, astronomers, neuroscientists, mathematicians, musicians, historians, and theologians in a richly interdisciplinary dialogue. From Pythagoras and Plato to Kepler and Einstein, from Renaissance Europe to modern neuroscience, this volume traces how two deceptively simple concepts have proven endlessly generative—capable of connecting the movements of celestial bodies to the rhythms of the human heartbeat, and the proportions of a cathedral façade to the intervals of a musical scale.

Rather than offering a linear history, the book demonstrates that harmony and rhythm are living, contested, and evolving ideas. Past and present speak to one another here : ancient intuitions illuminate new discoveries, and contemporary science casts fresh light on centuries-old thought. For anyone curious about the deep connections between art, science, and the human experience of the universe, this volume is an invitation to listen more carefully—to the world, and to ourselves.

Christoph Strozetzski is Professor of Romance Literature at the University of Münster, Germany, and specializes in the history of ideas – Maria Victoria Curto Hernandez is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.

M. Dickson, V. Dominguez-Guillaume, M.-L. Haack, D. Paris-Poulain et Ph. Sénéchal (dir.), L'œuvre en mouvement de l'Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle

2026-06-10T01:00:00Z

M. Dickson, V. Dominguez-Guillaume, M.-L. Haack, D. Paris-Poulain et Ph. Sénéchal (dir.), L'œuvre en mouvement de l'Antiquité au XVIII^e siècle, Pessac, Ausonius, 2022, 391 p. – ISBN : 978-2-35613-525-4

Les 22 essais qui constituent le présent ouvrage analysent le mouvement dans un ensemble varié d'œuvres littéraires, iconographiques et musicales, de l'Antiquité au XVIII^e siècle. Après un cadrage philosophique et historique de la notion au moyen du rythmos, compris comme temps, forme, ou mesure, la réflexion est déclinée en trois moments. “Figures du mouvement” s'intéresse aux formes du mouvement restituées par la tradition textuelle médiévale, inscrites dans les portails romans d'Aquitaine, les Annonciations flamandes et les extases baroques, ou gravées dans des objets du quotidien, vaisselle ou jetons. “Objets en mouvement” considère les œuvres dans leur matérialité, et examine la circulation des parfums antiques et des objets votifs médiévaux, le mécanisme des “marionnettes sacrées” du Christ et de la machinerie théâtrale, ou le fonctionnement des processions, rituelles ou profanes, en Italie et dans l'espace franco-bourguignon. Enfin, avec “Mouvements du corps”, entre iconographie étrusque, rondeaux latins et acrobates des chapiteaux romans, la gestualité est décrite et analysée dans la musique et dans la danse, réelle ou sculptée. Le mouvement apparaît ainsi comme l'une des modalités les plus accomplies de l'œuvre d'art, qu'elle soit texte, tableau, sculpture, dispositif ou monument.

W. Jordan, Flow under Constraint : Music between Metron and Rhuthmos in Western Thought

2026-03-22T06:00:00Z

W. Jordan, Flow under Constraint. Music between Metron and Rhuthmos in Western Thought, Paris, Rhuthmos, 2026, 254 p. – ISBN : 979-10-95155-48-5 – VIENT DE PARAÎTRE

A bold rethinking of time, music, and human experience, Flow under Constraint argues that what cannot be measured may be most real. Tracing the long history of imposed order on musical experience—from ancient proportional movement to clocks, counting, and algorithms that render time legible to machines—it uncovers rhuthmos : the perception of lived, unquantized flow as a form of resistance to metric control. In an age that counts everything, this book defends the intelligence of unmeasured experience and shows how freedom, creativity, and consciousness can persist beyond the machinery of metron.

William Jordan is a Canadian composer whose work ranges from songs and choral music to chamber, orchestral, and operatic scores. His compositions are informed by the history of Western music together with modernist influences, and has been performed across North America, Europe, and Asia.

A. Sueur, Les Oreilles de Luther. En écoutant la Passion selon saint Jean de Bach

2026-03-15T06:00:00Z

A. Sueur, Les Oreilles de Luther. En écoutant la Passion selon saint Jean de Bach, Paris, Rhuthmos, 2026, 404 p. – ISBN : 979-10-95155-47-8 – VIENT DE PARAÎTRE

La Passion selon saint Jean, ce chef-d'œuvre de Jean-Sébastien Bach composé en 1724, est-elle une œuvre théâtrale, comme on la joue de nos jours ? Non, répondent Bach et ses proches, qui tous connaissent l'Évangile et ce qu'en a dit Martin Luther, l'instigateur de la Réforme au XVI^e siècle : elle est un récit, et même, une prédication en musique, à méditer collectivement. Luther peut-il dès lors être notre conseiller musical ? Outre le texte complet de la Passion selon saint Jean en allemand et en français, ce livre propose aux mélomanes, musiciens et simples curieux des réflexions novatrices sur l'histoire de l'œuvre, son interprétation, sa structure, ses tons, son rythme, ses silences, son éloquence, les pratiques et les conflits esthétiques de l'époque. Comment découvrir ou redécouvrir ce chef-d'œuvre de la culture luthérienne ? C'est très simple : écoutons ce que nous indiquent, par-delà les siècles, les oreilles de Luther.

Agathe Sueur enseigne les lettres en CPGE à Paris. Elle consacre ses recherches à l'éloquence musicale de la Renaissance aux Lumières. Traductrice et spécialiste du théoricien allemand Joachim Burmeister (1564-1629) (Poétique musicale, 2017 et Vie de Joachim Burmeister, 2019, aux éditions Rhuthmos), elle travaille sur l'éloquence du rythme : Le Frein et l'Aiguillon. Éloquence musicale et nombre oratoire (XVI^e-XVIII^e siècle) (Classiques Garnier, 2013). Elle écrit aussi de la poésie.