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The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.4 (2006) 118-121


Reviewed by
Dylan Trigg
Department of Philosophy, University of Sussex
The Aesthetics of Ruins, by Robert Ginsberg. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2004, xx+ 538 pp., $144.00 cloth.

The recent resurgence in the trend toward architectural restoration has meant that the subject of ruins has undergone something of a revival. Against the vaguely postmodern inclination to render the past kitsch, the term heritage has had the effect of conferring value upon place. If the antihistoric rhetoric of modernity (and to some extent postmodernity) has lost favor, then there is no smaller danger than that buildings are restored merely by dint of their age despite their aesthetic attributes. What is at stake in this restorative trend is the loss of a ruin's original vitality, thereby reducing the artifact to an artifice.

Professor Robert Ginsberg's The Aesthetics of Ruins presents a comprehensive account of the ruin's vitality understood through aesthetic experience. In contradistinction to the restorative reconstruction of ruins, Ginsberg sets out to celebrate ruins in themselves, fragmented and incomplete. It is a broad work, both in its size and scope, and it does not conceal its ambitions: "I bring ruin onto center stage in this book. Make way for ruins!" (xvii), he writes at the outset. Ginsberg is not without experience. The book surveys an extensive range of ruins, each of which is distinct in their own right. As a diffuse subject, the treatment of ruins is appropriately discursive, in its content and in its style, without ever being oblique. Avoiding the limits of a detached (and "personless") tone, Ginsberg has been faithful to the topic of ruins by employing a first-person narrative that maintains the intimacy of understanding ruins experientially and phenomenologically; anecdotal evidence is as central as philosophical persuasion.

The central thesis of Ginsberg's book is that through their gradual erosion, ruins generate a new unity, vital in their spontaneity and growth. For Ginsberg, aesthetic satisfaction is coupled with the epistemic rewards this experience entails: "Matter builds its own unities amid ruin" (1). As a result of this creative destruction, the ruin creates a reciprocal relationship with the viewer in which "something substantial" is awoken (1). Ginsberg's aesthetical framework, then, falls somewhat into the Kantian tradition of the sublime. This model is especially evident in how the account of ruins is charged not with passive inertia but with outright vigour. Through establishing the ruin as an active force, aesthetic experience is determined by a resistance to this violence. "The matter has more than survived," he writes early on, "it strikes back" (2).

This Kantian position is put forward very effectively through the first two chapters of the book; Ginsberg makes certain that the reader is aware of the ruin's potential to undermine boundaries through disrupting our habitual relationship with the built environment. In the course of this subversion, the ruin undergoes a loss of function, thereby allowing, Ginsberg suggests, [End Page 118] the aesthetic form to disengage from its previous use. "Indifferent to their former life" (17), the ruin proceeds to harvest a new life. The suspension of the past serves to emphasize the integral quality of the ruin. Despite this temporal split, the ruin maintains an aspect of its former life, and thus places ambiguity at the center. Ginsberg remains heedful of the ruin's potential "incongruity" in its "out-of-placeness" (51). By considering the uncanny nature of the ruin, the author draws the reader's attention to how the ruin implicates a broader context concerning place and the home: "We are at home in strange circumstances . . . the strangeness of the ruin becomes familiar" (52). Ginsberg's handling of the ruin's uncanny aspect is nuanced and insightful. Leading the reader from abbeys to churches and then to Egyptian temples, the author negotiates a dialectical account of the ruin that shifts between familiarity and unfamiliarity, repulsion and attraction, and finally being and becoming (70).

The tactility of Ginsberg's approach, its focus on the...

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