Spiritual Folds and the Upper Level of the Baroque House
Spiritual Folds and the Upper Level of the Baroque House
This chapter follows Deleuze’s metaphor of the Baroque House, which runs throughout The Fold, from the lower level of matter and organisms, to the upper level of reasonable souls. It shows how Deleuze uses concepts from Paul Klee to present a new theory of singularities or singular points as points of inflection or folds. Inflection gives us a topological model for understanding the inclusion of predicates within individual monads. The chapter then turns to the most complicated theme of the book: the ideal curve or Fold which Deleuze locates between the two levels of the Baroque house itself. This Fold separates matter from souls, while simultaneously relating them to each other: in Leibnizian terms, they are really distinct but inseparable. What is actualised in individual monads is thus simultaneously realised in matter. Deleuze turns to Mallarmé to explain this complicated relationship between the visible and the intelligible.
Keywords: Deleuze, Leibniz, Paul Klee, Bernard Cache, Mallarmé, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Baroque painting, Inflection, Monads
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