Baroque, Modernity, subjectivity, and desire

Abstract

Hansen (2013) supports the idea that the literature produced by what is conventionally called Baroque must be understood first of all from the “rhetorical institution” and the “mimesis that emulates models of authorities” (p. 53), artistic procedures that prevailed throughout the 15th and 16th centuries and that served as the foundation for both poetic creation and its valuation. The critic accuses Romanticism of having anachronistically conditioned our understanding of the Baroque to an aesthetic-subjective condition from which we intuit that the origin of the Baroque form would be the existence of a Baroque subject. Without disregarding the fact and importance of these procedures, we start, like Riegl (2014), from the idea that different artistic forms reveal different artistic wills. As artistic and creative as we are, we understand everything that involves an era and culture in its most complex sense. The compression of a style and its contrasts with its predecessor reveal specific subjective and existential conditions and culture; different concepts of art, form, and culture; and complex individual, social, political, and philosophical intentions. They exist because the subjects and cultures that engendered them also differ. The work of art expresses the artist’s spiritual attitude towards the world and his time. The objective of this work is to demonstrate that baroque aesthetics, in addition to being the first artistic manifestation of a modern condition, individuality, can be taken as a movement specifically explicitly located in history but also as an aesthetic-subjective paradigm capable of formally mimicking this new subjective and modern condition of an individualized subject, structured simultaneously from lack and desire.