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Book SynopsisIn his pioneering study The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities, Erik S. Roraback argues that modern culture, contemplated over its four-century history, resembles nothing so much as the pearl famously described, by periodizers of old, as irregular, barroco. Reframing modernity as a multi-century baroque, Roraback steeps texts by Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce, and Pynchon in systems theory and the ideas of philosophers of language and culture from Leibniz to such dynamic contemporaries as Luhmann, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Žižek. The resulting brew, high in intellectual caffeine, will be of value to all who take an interest in cultural modernity—indeed, all who recognize that “modernity” was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies
Trade Review"Erik Roraback's The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities is a great book that will engage an energetic and important subfield of scholarship." – William Egginton, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University, author of The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo) Baroque Aesthetics
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Re-Framing Modernity Part I. A Philosophical & Sociological-Dramatic Baroque § 1 Niklas Luhmann & Autopoietic Forms of the Neo (baroque) Modern; or: Structure, System, & Contingency § 2 Toward another Minor Globality to Come; or, The Folds of Desire’s (Dis)contents of Orson Welles, Lacan, & Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1606) § 3 The Monad of Deleuze’s Many-Tiered High Baroque G.W. Leibniz Part II. A Literary-Philosophical Baroque § 4 A Multiplicity of Folds of An Unconscious & Autopoietic Monad of Henry James, Benjamin, & Blanchot § 5 Modern and Postmodern Baroque Conceptual Intersections & Interventions: Finnegans Wake (1939), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) & L’Écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster) (1980) § 6 Autopoietic Neobaroque Vectors: Artistic Authority, Interpretation, & Economic Un-Power of Finnegans Wake § 7 Autopoietic & Joyous Folds: Deleuze’s Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) (1988) & Joyce’s ‘stohong baroque’ Finnegans Wake (1939) § 8 An Autopoietic Baroque; or, the Little Experiment Orientations of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) § 9 Folding Blanchot onto Pynchon: Enlightenment Reason, the Global System, & World Citizenship 9.1 The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) 9.2 Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) 9.3 Mason & Dixon (1997) Part III. A Philosophical-Psychoanalytic Baroque § 10 Catastrophe, Allegory, & the Philosophical Baroque: A Spiritual Quartet of Benjamin-Lacan & Joyce-Pynchon Conclusions Works Cited Index
