Towards a meta-baroque : imagining a "fantastic reality"

Abstract

In her book, "Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space", Elizabeth Grosz (2001: 6) argues for the possibility of philosophy constituting a means, or a vehicle, for the "construction" of architecture: "[t]he notion of philosophy as a making, building, production, or construction, a practical construction, is a really interesting idea, one worth developing in the future." Whilst this is not a philosophical text, it is, nonetheless a text that seeks to understand a philosophical thought process on the basis of particular ideas taken from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, such as the montage of the Baroque House, as an allegory, which the French philosopher developed from the principles of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in "Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque)". In addition to seeking to understand a thought process, this paper also seeks place the Baroque – as an imagined Baroque, a meta-Baroque – in a discussion of contemporaneity, seen through the prism of the inter-relations between the "obscure" worlds of artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois, and Bernini's bel composto, and through the gaze of the allegoric Baroque model proposed by Deleuze.