The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics

Authors Preface

A u T h O r ’ s P r e f A C e The Madness of Vision was first published in 1986 and reissued in June 2002 in an expanded context based on new research on virtual reality (La folie du voir: Une esthétique du virtuel). An entire aesthetic and philosophical voyage connects the baroque to the virtual via three historical moments: the seventeenth-century baroque aesthetic; Baudelaire’s modern baroque, reinterpreted through Walter Benjamin’s work; the contemporary, technological neo-baroque of a global madness of vision. Seen from this perspective, The Madness of Vision, which followed the 1984 publication of Baroque Reason, marks a shift in the research of more than twenty years. The historical baroque centered on the themes of Narcissus and Proteus; employing new categories borrowed from the rhetoric of the sublime, and from Lacan and Benjamin; and constituting an aesthetic of thought characteristic of the arts: allegory, form-formlessness, nothingness , the marvelous, and furor. The virtual pushes the baroque to its extreme, based this time on the myth of Icarus, and develops a culture of flux, of artifacts and a new kind of image, the flux-image. In this sense, the baroque of artifice, metamorphosis, and anamorphosis continues its lineage into the present day. Because from the Vanities to the paintings of Caravaggio or the architectural structures of Bernini and Borromini , a culture of time—of ephemeral time, which is often melancholic—creates being, affects and effects. The baroque dreamed of an eye that would view itself to infinity; the virtual accomplished just that. Christine Buci-Glucksmann 2012 ...