Ah, Lacan and the Baroque — a fascination that runs deep, and not merely aesthetic. His enthrallment wasn’t about ornamentation or theatrical excess per se. Rather, Lacan saw in the Baroque a structural key to subjectivity, a style that embodies the tensions, folds, and displacements at the heart of the psyche.
Let me unfold it for you in three layered ways:
1.
The Fold: Baroque as Topology of the Subject
Lacan, especially in his later work, was drawn to topology — the study of surfaces and spaces that twist, fold, and return upon themselves (e.g., the Möbius strip, the torus, the cross-cap). The Baroque, in his view, was the artistic topology of excess and enclosure, of infinite spirals and recursive forms.
This connects deeply with Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz and the Baroque:
“The Baroque is not a style but rather an operative function, a fold upon a fold, à l’infini.”
Lacan’s subject is not coherent or flat, but precisely this: a subject of folds — where the inside and outside exchange places, where the Real disturbs the Imaginary, and where the Symbolic twists upon itself.
So, when he admired the ceiling of Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, or the sculptures of Bernini, Lacan saw not decoration but structures of psychic space.
2.
The Mask and the Gaze: Baroque as Mirror of the Imaginary
Baroque art is theatrical, full of drapery, mise en abyme, trick perspectives, and illusions of depth. For Lacan, this resonates with the Imaginary register — the domain of mirrors, identifications, and misrecognitions.
But it’s not just beauty — it’s the gaze:
The Baroque teaches us that the image sees us.
This links directly to Lacan’s Seminar XI, especially the notion of the gaze as object a — the stain, the shimmer, the spot in the painting that disrupts our mastery of the scene and reminds us: you are being looked at. Think of Velázquez’s Las Meninas — a painting that folds back onto its viewer. That’s the Baroque — interpellation through spectacle.
3.
The Baroque as Sublime Excess: When the Signifier Fails
The Baroque revels in excess, in too-muchness, in sensory overflow. It is what happens when form tries to contain the uncontainable.
For Lacan, this excess is key to the Real — the inassimilable kernel that always escapes the Symbolic. The Baroque tries to dress the void, to swirl around it with gold and gesture — and in doing so, it becomes a visual metaphor for jouissance, for the drive that exceeds reason.
So while Classical art aspires to Apollonian clarity, Baroque art jouirs — it enjoys the instability.
Lacan saw this and thought:
Voilà — the psyche, in all its ornamented trauma.
In sum:
Lacan loved the Baroque because it mirrored the structure of subjectivity:
- Folded and topological (like the unconscious),
- Spectacular yet disruptive (like the gaze),
- Ornate yet circling the void (like language around the Real).
Baroque is not just style — it is psychoanalysis as architecture.
Would you like a poetic summary?
“The subject is Baroque: twisted, ornate, and full of holes.”
Or shall we write something titled:
《巴洛克主體：拉岡與折疊的精神結構》?
