This dissertation re-examines three canonical works: Cervantes’s romance/adventure novel Persiles (1617), Góngora’s long, unclassifiable poem Soledades (1613), and Sor Juana’s long, philosophical poem Primero sueño (1692). This study builds on the baroque paradigm of excessive self-invention as satirized in Don Quixote’s imitation of outdated chivalric figures in his effort to become a knight errant. I elucidate the possibility of participating in the voluntaristic culture implied in this satire without identifying with it—an approach I refer to as the “aesthetics of exhaustion.” This negative self-fashioning entails resituating and reconfiguring available modes of self-cultivation to evade the emergent society of control. I focus on how my selection of texts models an emergent modern subjectivity that aestheticizes failure by redeploying mystic figures of “humility” as exemplified in the metaphor of garden cultivation as a spiritual exercise in Teresa of Avila’s Vita and Fray Luis de Leon’s poem “Vida retirada.” Through three case studies that thematize new tendencies in Counter-Reformation marriage, imperial navigation, and natural philosophy, I analyze the reconfiguration of institutionalized, compulsory desires.
Instead of displacing an exhausted desire with another iteration of "greed" within the libidinal economy, the main characters in these texts reiterate exhaustion itself as a relatively autonomous identity. I develop this understanding of exhaustion by adapting Deleuze's figure of the exhausted, by which desire becomes the endless playing with the possibilities of the same habitual, limited situation without asserting any preference. I analyze plots that dramatize how similar figures emerge in baroque literature. In Persiles, I focus on Auristela’s performance of escape from arranged marriage through identification with Marian figures from the Bible, early modern painting, and theological debates on the immaculate conception. The novel critiques the free will to marry by comparing it to sacrificial scenes evoking colonial chronicles and minorities evoking picaresque literature and other Cervantine works. In Soledades, I focus on the pilgrim’s material and emotional “shipwreck” in dialogue with the tradition of Petrarchan masculine desire as eroticized and elaborated in early modern Spain by Garcilaso de la Vega and Francisco de Quevedo. In Primero sueño, the soul’s renunciation of its flight toward impossible absolute knowledge, inspired by St. Teresa’s double bind of humility, redeploys the trope of the mystical unknowability of the divine as a gendered iteration of Icarus and Phaeton against sexual and epistemic violence.
If the Renaissance paganized Christianity and emphasized individual passions, I identify a Baroque tendency to reconfigure mystical desire as care of the self without a religious community. This displacement shows that the baroque anticipates and satirizes, in its thematization of the failure of desire, the neoliberal instrumentalization of “care of the self” as Foucauldian human capital. In my conclusion, I foreground how my dissertation has established that baroque desire does not aim at modeling self-control but rather at theorizing complex degrees of community identification and exclusion. The differential accessibility to alternative narratives of self-exhaustion depending on social categories leads to a consideration of how the baroque questions the capacity of established genres—the picaresque, the pastoral, colonial chronicles, and encyclopedism—to represent new social needs. I demonstrate that the aesthetics of exhaustion in baroque literature, while situated in the upper classes, mirrors the survival strategies of characters excluded from the baroque economy of desire, such as the pícaros, pícaras, Jews, Muslims, and the so-called barbarian worlds. I end up proposing ways of complementing the synchronic baroque approach to exhaustion in this dissertation by focusing on those identities only considered in these texts through exclusive inclusion. By way of the mediating concepts of mestizaje, black performance, and generalized prostitution, I suggest how this project can be supplemented by genealogical approaches situated on specific exhausted identities. In turn, these approaches situated in marginal identities are supplemented by the perspectives baroque approach to exhaustion within the field of the libidinal economy.
