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In 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 modernityâindeed, all who recognize that âmodernityâ was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies
Erik S. Roraback teaches critical theory, international cinema, and U.S. literature at Charles University (est. 1348) and F.A.M.U. (The Academy of Performing Arts, Film and TV School) in Prague. He holds a degree from the University of Oxford (D.Phil.) and is the author of The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory (2007).
"Erik Roraback's The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities is a great book that will engage an energetic and important subfield of scholarship." â 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
Introduction: 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 Desireâs (Dis)contents of Orson Welles, Lacan, & Shakespeareâs King Lear (c. 1606)
§ 3 The Monad of Deleuzeâs 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), Gravityâs Rainbow (1973) &
LâÃcriture 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: Deleuzeâs Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) (1988) & Joyceâs âstohong baroqueâ Finnegans Wake (1939)
§ 8 An Autopoietic Baroque; or, the Little Experiment Orientations of
Joyceâs 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 Gravityâs 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
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 Desireâs (Dis)contents of Orson Welles, Lacan, & Shakespeareâs King Lear (c. 1606)
§ 3 The Monad of Deleuzeâs 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), Gravityâs Rainbow (1973) &
LâÃcriture 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: Deleuzeâs Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) (1988) & Joyceâs âstohong baroqueâ Finnegans Wake (1939)
§ 8 An Autopoietic Baroque; or, the Little Experiment Orientations of
Joyceâs 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 Gravityâs 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
All interested in the baroque and neobaroque, the philosophical baroque, cultural and historical modernities, systems theory, continental philosophy, literature, literary and cultural theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis.