Of Baroque aesthetics and affects: the Weird Sisters’ war machine in Macbeth

This paper traces the Baroque as articulated by Heinrich Wölfflin and developed by Deleuze and Guattari, with its aesthetic and affective contours embodied in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Viewed through Wölfflin’s painterly texturing and Deleuze and Guattari’s molecular ontology of the Baroque, the Weird Sisters emerge as Baroque agents of becoming. These aesthetic registers converge into a proto-political diagram that anticipates the affective force of the Deleuzo-Guattarian war machine: an embodied assemblage of lines, movement, and transformation. By placing Wölfflin’s painterly beside Deleuze and Guattari’s molecular mode, the paper explores how the Weird Sisters offer a Baroque configuration of the Deleuzo-Guattarian war machine – one that unsettles sovereign fixity through spatiogeographic turbulence, affective contagion, and algebraic collapse. This machinic force dismantles Macbeth himself, compelling the state’s enthroned soldier to enact the very undoing it inscribes and to be transformed by the line of flight it unleashes. Still, this line of flight extends beyond Macbeth’s fate, projecting sovereignty into a smooth space where painterly aesthetics and political intensities converge, where figuration bleeds into abstraction, and where becoming is incessantly folded into becoming.