Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Re-Framing Modernity -- Luhmann and Autopoietic Forms of the (Neo) Baroque Modern: Or, Structure, System, and Contingency -- Folds of Desire’s (Dis)contents: Orson Welles, Lacan, and Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1606) -- The Monad of Deleuze’s Many-Tiered High Baroque Leibniz -- Folds of an Autopoietic and Unconscious Monad: Henry James, Benjamin, and Blanchot -- (Neo) Baroque Intersections: Finnegans Wake (1939), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and L’Écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster) (1980) -- Neobaroque Fingerprints: Artistic Authority, Interpretation, and Economic Power/Un-power of Finnegans Wake -- Deleuze’s Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) (1988) with Joyce’s “stohong baroque” Finnegans Wake -- Autopoietic Baroque Energies: Finnegans Wake -- Folding Blanchot onto Pynchon: Enlightenment Reason, the Global Technical System, and World Citizenship -- Catastrophe, Allegory, and the Philosophical Baroque: A Quartet of Benjamin-Lacan and Joyce-Pynchon -- Conclusions -- Select Bibliography -- Index of Premodern and Modern Authors -- Index of Sources -- Index of Names and Subjects.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

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 modernity—indeed, all who recognize that “modernity” was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on May 04, 2017).