Spencer Golub - Böcker

In The Baroque Night, authorial idiosyncrasy hybridizes the concepts of “baroque” and “noir” across the fields of film, theatre, literature, and philosophy, arguing for mental function as form, as an impossible object, a container in which the container itself is the thing contained. An experiment in thinking difference/thinking differently, an ethics of otherness and the abstract, Golub inverts the unreality of the real and the reality of fiction, exposing the tropes of memory, identity, and authenticity as a scenic route through life that ultimately blocks the view. The book draws upon materials that have not previously been included in studies of either the baroque or film noir, while offering new perspectives on other, more familiar sources. Leibniz’s concepts of the monad and compossibility provide organizing thought models, and death, fear, and mental illness cast their anamorphic images across surfaces that are deeper and closer than they at first appear. This is virtuality and reality for the phobic, making it a fascinating and viable document of and episteme for the anxious age in which we (always) find ourselves living, though not yet fully alive. This performance of suspect evidence speaks to and in the ways we are organically inauthentic, the cause of our own causality and our own worst eyewitnesses to all that appears and disappears in space and time. Key characters and situations in the book derive from the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clozot, Jean-Pierre Melville, Oscar Wilde, Georges Perec, Patricia Highsmith, Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among many others.

This is a book about what becomes of the truth when it succumbs to generational memory loss and to the fictions that intervene to cause and fill the gaps. It is a book about the impossibility of writing an autobiography when there is a prepossessing cultural and familial 'we' interfering with the 'I' and an 'I' that does not know itself as a self, except metastatically — as people and characters it has played but not actually been.A highly original combination of close readings and performative autobiography, this book takes performance philosophy to an alternative next step, by having its ideas read back to it by experience, and through assorted fictions. It is a philosophical thought experiment in uncertainty whose literary, theatrical, and cinematic trappings illustrate and finally become what this uncertainty is, the thought experiment having become the life that was, that came before, and that outlives the 'I am'.

This book applies Heidegger’s writings to experimental fictions and film genres in order to study a being-there that performs itself beyond liveness and a future that is already here.