Gendered Spaces of the Devil: Reflecting Upon Space and Femininity in Lucifer TV Series Through Deleuze's Baroque House Allegory

Spaces And Subjects: Into Deleuze’S Baroque House

Helene Frichot, in her article Stealing into Gilles Deleuze’s Baroque House, offers an understanding of the architect as a pickpocket who gathers spoils “from the expansive oeuvre that is signed with the name Gilles Deleuze” (2005, p. 64). This closely resembles a cine-philosophic attitude towards Deleuze’s wide spectrum of concepts. Cine-philosophy is not exclusively about searching applicability of some concepts of philosophy in the visual arts and thus developing new interpretative opportunities.

As Deleuze pointed out, cinema is all about the creation of images just like philosophy is about creating new concepts (Tomlinson and Galeta, 1997, p. 15). It is not an ‘object’ of the philosophical mind but another modality of a similar intellectual praxis. Thus, rather than searching for philosophical concepts within the movies, cine-philosophy thinks through movies. It steals those images to create new concepts and further analyze existing ones. It also, concomitantly, steals concepts to take a second look at the images and pursue the possibility of alternative gazes towards them. It is a part of Deleuze’s challenge of the mainstream philosophical traditions that resolve around a systematic dialectics, through Spinoza:

“A truism of French intellectual history states that for national and philosophical reasons every postwar thinker, from Jean Hippolyte to Jacques Derrida, must contend with Hegel. Deleuze had resisted the totalizing effects of the dialectic by aligning himself al once with Cartesian and left-wing political traditions. He made moves that showed how, by way of Spinoza, a more complex, fragmented and prismatic philosophy antedated Hegel and could not be supplanted by systematic dialectics” (Conley, 1993, p. 13).

In this spirit of fragmented and rhizomatic philosophy that we intend to steal the ‘Baroque House’ of Deleuze, use it as an allegory, and transform it into an operative concept such that it paves the way for a whole new conceptual angle to look at the Lucifer TV series and the gender-space interplays within it.

Baroque House, for Deleuze, is a concept about formation of subjectivity. But rather than being a core of subjectivity, Baroque is actually the concept of a function, of continually creates curves in space that mantles and dismantles subjectivity. “Announcing Baroque,” says Benjamin (2015), “does not refer to an essence, whole area of philosophical inquiry is put to one side immediately. We are concerned with the Baroque understood as an operative function.” As Deleuze notes, Baroque “endlessly creates folds. It does not invent the thing: there are all kinds the folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds. (…) [Yet the Baroque trait] twists and turns the folds, takes them to infinity, fold upon fold, fold after fold. The characteristic of the Baroque is the fold that goes on to infinity” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 3).