The Monad Next Door

Abstract

“The Monad Next Door” returns to The Fold's Leibnizian protagonist to celebrate the monad as an interiority, or soul: a private reading room in which to contemplate the cosmos that the monad enfolds. But monads' neighbors constitute our homes and our very bodies, folding class politics into our very being, exacerbating the monad's upstairs-downstairs relationship with its body. When our material supports become toxically entwined with information (i.e., the monad's mortgage), it may be time to find a way to live more lightly on the earth. With Alain Gomis' Félicité (Senegal, 2017), Ephraim Asili's The Inheritance (U.S., 2020), Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky (U.S., 2017), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (U.S., 2014) by Alejandro González Iñárritu, and especially Neighboring Sounds (Brazil, 2012) by Kleber Mendonça Filho.