In this chapter I seek to re-embody semiotics for film studies and for the baroque. This is because the contact that is exchanged between the film's body and the viewer is a source of semiotic as well as sensuous significance in baroque cinema. Rather than perpetuating a split between the word and the world, studies of the skin and properties of signification, I prefer to think of language and experience as always being in chiasm in an encounter with baroque flesh. As Merleau-Ponty tells us, in this ‘baroque world […] although meaning is everywhere figurative, it is meaning which is at issue everywhere’ (‘The Philosopher’, p. 181). Alternatively, we might approach the forms and figurations of the baroque from their reverse, such that ‘[w]hen we say that the perceived thing is grasped “in person” or “in the flesh” […] this is to be taken literally’ (Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosopher’, p. 167). Baroque flesh revels in figurative possibilities (the copy or artifice of construction) as well as physical contact to achieve the art of entanglement.

Throughout this chapter, then, we will be returning to the importance of analogy for the baroque and tracing its roots back to seventeenth-century poetics. In this regard, I consider the close connection between ideas of the infinite and the development of baroque poetic language. Given the broad preoccupation with the infinite in seventeenth-century arts, language, science, and philosophy, the historic baroque has often been conceived as a world of shifting, scattered fragments that were unmoored from any grounding ‘centre’. By contrast, I argue that an urge towards connectivity and connection on the part of the baroque spurs the creation of new artfully or artificially constructed wholes.