Baroque aesthetics abandoned the pursuit of summarizing the world into essential harmonies

Evidence

This historically determined rerouting generated a new heroism in the approaeh to knowledge, a stubborn renouncement ofany ambition to sumrnarize the world’s matter in sets of imitative harmonies that would approach sorne essence. Baroque art mustered bypasses, proliferation, spatial redundancy, anything that flouted the alleged unicity of the thing known and the knowing of it, anything exalting quantity infinitely resumed and totality infinitely ongoing. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 428

Categorization

• QUESTION: This description of baroque as renouncing ‘unicity’ of the known and the knowing maps intriguingly onto Glissant’s poetics of Relation — is he reading baroque as an early anti-essentialist, proto-rhizomatic mode of knowing?
• XREF: connects to: Baroque arose against a rationalist Nature presumed harmonious and fully knowable — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 423; Baroque art countered rationalism by making knowledge’s incompleteness its value — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 427; Allegory suits the fragmented material world of baroque courts — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 317 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Baroque art countered rationalism by making knowledge’s incompleteness its value #corroborates (0.82) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 427
• Allegory suits the fragmented material world of baroque courts #exemplifies (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 317
• Baroque allegory confronts history as a petrified landscape of decline #exemplifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 358