The Arcades Project - Operi

The figure of the lesbian woman belongs among Baudelaire's heroic exemplars.
[He himself gives expression to this in the language of his satanism. It would be
no less comprehensible in an unmetaphysical critical language.] The nineteenth
century began opeuly and without reserve to include the woman in the process
of commodity production. The theoreticians were united in their opinion that
her specific femininity was thereby endangered; masculine traits must necessarily
manifest themselves in women after a while. Baudelaire affirms these traits. At
the same time, however, he seeks to free them from the domination of the
economy. Hence the purely sexual accent which he comes to give this developmental
tendency in woman. The paradigm of the lesbian woman bespeaks the
ambivalent position of "modernity" vis-it-vis technological development. (What
he could not forgive in George Sand, presumably, was her having profaned,
through her humanitarian convictions, this image whose traits she bore. Baudelaire
says that she was worse than Sade.)266 [J49a,1]
The concept of exclusive rights was not so widely accepted in Baudelaire's day as
it is today. Baudelaire often republished his poems two or three times without
having anyone take offense. He ran into difficulties with this only toward the end
of his life, with the Petits Poemes en prose. [J49a,2]
From his seventeenth year, Baudelaire led the life of a . One cannot
say that he ever thought of himself as an "intellectual" or engaged himself on
behalf of "the life of the mind." The registered trademark for artistic production
had not yet been invented. (In this situation, moreover, his imperious need to
distinguish himself and withdraw worked to his advantage.) He refused to go
along with the defamation of the bourgeois, under the banner of which there was
mobilized a solidarity of artists and men of !etters that he considered suspect.
Thus, in the "Musee classique du Bazar BonneNouvellen (Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 61), he writes: "The bourgeois, who
has few scientific notions, goes where the loud voice of the bourgeois artist
directs him.-If this voice were suppressed, the grocer would carry E. Delacroix
around in triumph. The grocer is a great thing, a divine being whom it is necessary
to respect, homo bonae valuntatis! ,, 267 In more detail a year earlier, in the
preface to the "Salon de 1845." [J49a,3]
Baudelaire's eccentric individuality was a mask under which he tried to conceal-out
of shame, you could say-the supra-individual necessity of his way of
life and, to a certain extent, his life history. [JSO,l]
To interrupt the course of the world-tbat was Bandelaire's deepest intention.
The intention of Joshua. [Not so much the prophetic one: for he gave no thought
to any sort of reform.] From this intention sprang his violence, his inlpatience,
and his anger; from it, too, sprang the ever-renewed attempts to cut the world to
the heart [or sing it to sleep] . In this intention he provided death with an accompaniment:
his encouragement of its work. [JSO,2]