Conference – The Same Nothing in Everything: The Baroque Torsion of the Gaze and the Disenchantment of the World

How can we think about nothingness within the excess we usually associate with the Baroque? Revisiting a common operation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this lecture proposes a détour through torsion to approach what hides before our eyes — in anamorphosis — in the ingenious works of that period. As Monteverdi wrote, “there is another point of view to consider,” and the Baroque allegorical strategy reveals that everything is always something else. Rather than superficial decoration, the Baroque is approached as a worldview — a way of perceiving and positioning oneself in the theatre of the world — marked by tensions between bodily seduction and spiritual persuasion, sensuality and transcendence, revelry and lament, and between attention to fleeting reality and the desire for the infinite. Might this Baroque rhetoric, in its refusal of classical order and serenity, help us comment on the present?

This lecture takes place within the context of the concert Da Desordem das Paixões, by Os Músicos do Tejo and Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz, on June 26 and 27, at 8 pm and 7 pm respectively.