Ontology of Bonds Sympathy, Desire and Matter in Giordano Bruno

Abstract

This essay examines Giordano Bruno’s radical reconceptualisation of sympathy as the generative principle of being. While Renaissance thinkers such as Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, and Paracelsus conceived sympathy as the index of a transcendent order or as a derivative structure grounded in participation and analogy, Bruno transforms it into an immanent force of matter itself. In his philosophy, sympathy is not the trace of a preordained harmony but the performative act of binding—through which entities are constituted, transformed, and undone. Through a close reading of the De magia and the De vinculis in genere, the study elaborates a full ontology of the bond, showing how desire and matter converge within an infinite and living universe, where being emerges as relation-in-act. The Brunian bond is reciprocal, contingent, and temporally constructed: it does not preserve order but produces it as a provisional configuration, always exposed to vicissitude. Bruno’s operative ontology culminates in a theory of binding that operates across the natural, psychic, and political registers, positing sympathy not as the conservation of a cosmic form, but as the force through which reality ceaselessly reinvents itself.

Keywords: Giordano Bruno, Sympathy, Bond (vinculus), Desire and Matter, Relational Ontology