Luxury

Luxus — Luxury — is the title of Lambert Wiesing’s most recent book, published by Surkamp in August this year.  I’ve translated the introduction, which proposes that that luxury is not a quality inherent in objects.  Luxury is rather luxury for someone, making it suitable for phenomenological inquiry.  In this book, luxury, carefully distinguished from mere extravagance or ostentation, is bound up with possession, which in turn is recognized as a relationship to the world that can be a form of self-discovery.