This paper takes its inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s trope “the fold” and Susan Sontag’s description of the curious aesthetic category “camp” as “ things-being-what-they-are-not,” and uses them as keys to understanding an epistemology based solely on a way of looking that focuses on the exteriority of things.The act of looking as such has an involutedly transformative power over the object,obscuring the boundary between the artificial and natural,while firmly clinging to its thingness.The Baroque,as both an aesthetic and an epistemology,is the most typical representation of this way of looking,but this paper demonstrates that it is also pervasive in contexts other than the17~(th)-century Europe.Through readings of works by the English Baroque poet Richard Crashaw,the German writer Thomas Mann and the Chinese writer Su Shi,it is the purpose of this paper to show that the extravagance of this visual transformationis ultimately motivated by the disturbing awareness of death,emptiness,and the absence of meaning. This paper takes its inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s trope “the fold ” and Susan Sontag’s description of the curious aesthetic category “camp ” as “things-being-what-they-are-not, ” and uses them as keys to understanding an epistemology based solely on a way of looking for that focused on the exteriority of things. act of looking as such has an involutedly transformative power over the object, obscuring the boundary between the artificial and natural, while firmly clinging to its thingnessness The Baroque, as both an aesthetic and an epistemology, is the most typical representation of this way of looking, but this paper demonstrates that it is also pervasive in contexts other than the17 ~ (th) -century Europe.Through readings of works by the English Baroque poet Richard Crashaw, the German writer Thomas Mann and the Chinese writer Su Shi, it is the purpose of this paper to show that the extravagance of this visual transformationis ultimately motivated by the disturbing awareness of death, emptin ess, and the absence of meaning.