“Where Angels Fear to Tread” in Deleuze and Bateson: On a New Baroque of Plateaus and the Ecology of Non-Human Ecstasy

This article attempts to offer a new mode of the baroque by juxtaposing Bateson’s notion of plateaus and ecology with the Deleuzian neo-baroque. Inspired by Bateson’s plateaus, this paper defines the Deleuzian baroque as the baroque of plateaus and examines how Deleuze grounds the possibility of non-human ecstasy in the sacredness of immanence at the heart of the seventeenth-century Christian baroque. Drawing on Naess’s ecological reading of Spinoza’s Ethics in the context of Bateson’s immanence, “plateaus” can be defined as an ecological assemblage of the non-human ecstasy of immanence. The philosophy of plateaus features the profound art of avoiding the obsessive and excessive fixation on the orgasmic climax and “the exterior and transcendent ends” in Occidental thought. Informed by the logic of plateaus, this paper then examines how Deleuze converts Leibnizian baroque folds and harmony into the ecological cosmology of immanence, which features the magnificent and smooth waves of plateaus orchestrated by the graceful concertation of an infinite number of monads. In this cosmological space of immanence, this paper explores how Deleuze excavates the non-human ecstasy that dynamically flows into the texture of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by concentrating on the process of defacializing the facialized human-based Christian ecstasy.