The Arcades Project - Operi

have been under the compulsion of returning at least once to each of his main
motifs. [J55a,2]
Baudelaire's allegory bears traces of the violence that was necessary to demolish
the harmonious fa,ade of the world that surrounded him. [J55a,3]
In Blanqui's view of the world, petrified unrest becomes the status of the cosmos
itself. The course of the world appears, accordingly, as one great allegory.
[J55a,4]
Petrified unrest is, moreover,
knows no development.
the formula for Baudelaire's life history, which
[J55a,5]
The state of tension subsisting between the most cultivated sensibility and the
most intense contemplation is a mark of the Baudelairean. It is reflected theoreti­
cally in the doctrine of colTespondences and in the predilection for allegory.
Baudelaire never attempted to establish any sort of relations between these.
Nevertheless, such relations exist. [J55a,6]
Misery and terror-which, in Baudelaire, have their armature in allegorical per­
ception-have become, in Rollinat, the object of a genre. (This genre had its
"artistic headquarters" at Le Chat Noir cafe. Its model, if you will, may be found
in a poem like "Le Vin de I'assassin:' Rollinat was one of the house poets at Le
Chat Noir.) [J55a,7]
"De I'Essence du rire" contains the theory of satanic laughter. In dus essay,
Baudelaire goes so far as to adjudge even smiling as fundamentally satanic.
Contemporaries testified to something frightful in his own marmer of laughing.
[J55a,8]
That which the allegorical intention has fixed upon is sundered from the custom­
ary contexts of life: it is at Once shattered and preserved. Allegory holds fast to
the ruins. Baudelaire's destructive impulse is nowhere concerned with the abolition
of what falls to it. (But compare "Revolte;']55,.) [J56,1]
Baroque allegory sees d,e corpse only from the outside; Baudelaire evokes it
from within. [J56,2]
Baudelaire's invectives against mythology recall those of the medieval clerics. He
especially detests chubby-cheeked Cupid. His aversion to this figure has the same
roots as his hatred for Beranger. [J56,3]
Baudelaire regards art's workshop in itself [as a site of confusion,] as the "appara­
tus of destruction" which the allegories so often represent. In the notes he left for
a preface to a projected third edition of Les Fleurs du mal, he writes: "Do we show