The Arcades Project - Operi

Les Fleun du mal may be considered an arsenal. Baudelaire wrote certain of his
poems in order to destroy others written before him. [J59a,3]
No one ever felt less at home in Paris than Baudelaire. Every intimacy with things
is alien to the allegorical intention. To touch on things means, for it, to violate
them. To recognize things means, for it, to see through them. Wherever the
allegorical intention prevails, no habits of any kind can be formed. Hardly has a
thing been taken up than allegory has dispensed with the situation. Thing and
situation become obsolete for allegory more quickly than a new pattern for the
milliner. But to become obsolete means: to grow strange. Spleen lays down
centuries between the present moment and the one just lived. It is spleen that
tirelessly generates "antiquity;' And in fact, with Baudelaire, modernity is noth­
ing other than the "newest antiquity;' Modernity, for Baudelaire, is not solely
and not primarily the object of his sensibility; it is the object of a conquest.
Modernity has, for its armature, the allegorical mode of vision. [J59a,4]
The correspondence between antiquity and modernity is the sole constructive
conception of history in Baudelaire. With its rigid armature, it excludes every
dialectical conception. [J59a,5]
On the phrase, "I have little to do with such things;'324 in the draft of a preface to
Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire, who never founded a family, has given the word
"familiar" in his poetry an inflection filled with meaning and with promise such
as it never before possessed. It is like a slow, heavily laden haywagon in which the
poet carts to the barn everything which throughout his life he had to renounce.
Compare "Correspondances," "Bohemiens en voyage," 'Obsession:' [J60,1)
The passage "where everything, even horror, turns to magic"325 could hardly be
better exemplified than by Poe's description of the crowd. [J60,2]
Concerning the opening line from "La Servante au grand coeur": on the words
"of whom you were so jealous11326 falls an accent that onc would not necessarily
expect. The voice, as it were, draws back from ')ealous;' Therein lies the frailty
of this already long-past situation. [J60,3]
On "Spleen I": through the word "mortality;' the city with its offices and its
statistical registers lies embedded in spleen, as in a picture puzzle .
[J60,4]
The whore is the most precious booty in the triumph of allegory-the life which
signifies death. This quality is the only thing about her that cannot be bought,
and for Baudelaire it is the only thing that matters. [J60,5]
Around the middle of the century, the conditions of artistic production under­
went a change. This change consisted in the fact that for the first time the form of
the commodity imposed itself decisively on the work of art, and the form of the