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The Musurgia Universalis as Epistemic Fold The Musurgia Universalis as Epistemic Fold
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Mimesis and the Magical Force of Affect Mimesis and the Magical Force of Affect
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The Body and the Cosmos: Magical Cartographies The Body and the Cosmos: Magical Cartographies
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Affective Combinatorics: Music, Affect, and Emotion Affective Combinatorics: Music, Affect, and Emotion
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From Affect to Representation: Back to the Fold From Affect to Representation: Back to the Fold
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Notes Notes
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14 Mimesis and the Affective Ground of Baroque Representation
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Published:April 2021
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Abstract
Athanasius Kircher’s 1650 Musurgia universalis has a singular place in the history of musical theories of the affections. One of the first articulations of the Affektenlehre, the Musurgia bridges Renaissance cosmology (based on magic and resemblance) with Cartesian mechanicism (based on representation) acting as a baroque fold between the two. Through readings of Michael Taussig and Anna Gibbs, I relate Kircher’s deployment of sympathetic magic to mimetic theory to show various interpretations of mimesis—as contagion, imitation, and representation—at play with the emergence of modern notions of subjectivity and representation. Approaching Kircher’s account of musical affect through Deleuze’s and Massumi’s philosophy of virtuality, I argue that Kircher conceives the body as a site of affect—potential interactions with the cosmos (the virtual)—where individual emotions signal particular arrangements of affective components (actualizations), which are later associated with musical examples or “paradigms.” The classification of modes and affections that constitutes later Affektenlehre emerges from a process of exemplification—a production of images of the body organized in discrete, exemplary musical fragments, as copies that incorporate the affective power of the bodies that produced them.
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