Since Deleuze’s Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque , the fold and its use in Baroque art, music, and philosophy have become a leading trope for postmodern thought and culture. Deleuze describes the significance of the Baroque in opposition to the clarity of Cartesian straight lines: “The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds . . . The Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity . . . A labyrinth is said, etymologically, to be multiple because it contains many folds. The multiple is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in many ways . . . . If Descartes did not know how to get through the labyrinth, it was because he sought its secret of continuity in rectilinear tracks, and the secret of liberty in a rectitude of the soul” (3).

Samantina Dimakopoulou glosses Deleuze with these comments: “The baroque and the postmodern find their most striking manifestations in forms and experiences that articulate intermediary spaces where tensions, antinomies and opposites remain unresolved. They perform tropes of the singular, and the multiple that resist the rationalist dualities of self and world, the universal and the particular . . . .

“The movement of the fold is elusive and multiple, a “trait” where the subject/object distinction collapses, and cannot therefore be attributed unambiguously to an external agency. It does not follow a linear, teleological movement; instead, it is a temporal and spatial “trait” that proliferates in unpredictable directions, a protean category that is infinite, contingent and provisional at once. The fold is the principle that informs the inside and the outside, the internal and the external, body and soul, the sensible and the inanimate world, dualities that informed Burton’s understanding of melancholy too, we might say, even the duality between symptom and cure.”

Describing Leibniz’s understanding of the monad, Dimakopoulou notes, “The most fundamental attribute of the monad, Deleuze reminds us, is the erasing of the distinction between inside and outside. The origin of the word monad is neoplatonic, and in Leibniz, it takes on the metaphysical element of the soul or the subject: the monad denotes the oneness that envelops a multiplicity and the multiplicity that unfolds the oneness. The monad is like a constant and uninterrupted coming and going between the soul and the body, a movement that cancels out the boundary between the sensible and the intelligible world. The monad is a mirror and a perspective onto the world, yet it draws its perceptions from within itself, because it is a unity without doors nor windows. In the two-tier world of the baroque, each soul is distinct and bears its own singular viewpoint. The souls, like the monads, are at the higher tier of the world and do not act upon each other; they draw their perceptions from within an infinite set of perceptions. At the lower tier is organic and inorganic matter subject to forces that draw it into a curvilinear movement. Baroque matter is ‘porous’ and ‘spongy,’ distinct yet inseparable from the soul.”

In case that doesn’t sound perichoretic enough, Dimakopoulou describes the art of the Baroque, as explicated by Deleuze, in this fashion: “All are instances of the fold in that they open up spaces where distinctions do not cancel each other out but contain and are contained by each other.”