Living in a Folded Cosmos

Abstract

This chapter gives a top-down cosmology, an open, immanent model of the cosmos in which every entity is a microcosm. Marks synthesizes from monadologists G.F.W. Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze, and the relatively enfolded philosopher H. Wildon Carr. She extends this model with twentieth-century physicist David Bohm's concept of the implicate order. Martinican philosopher-poet Édouard Glissant's decolonial theories of relation deepen the politics of the microcosm that enfolds the world. Marks introduces the concept of enfolding-unfolding aesthetics in discussions of Tali Yankelevich's Meu Querido Supermercado (My Darling Supermarket) (Brazil, 2019) and the Otolith Collective's INFINITY minus Infinity (UK, 2019). Introducing the tripartite cosmic model of image-information-infinite, Marks argues that the goal of life in the folded cosmos is to unfold more of what lies enfolded in the infinite, both singly and collectively.