The Arcades Project - Operi

p. 133 ("Equilibrium between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Composition
of Personality") .338 [J63,5]
On the "sectioning of time." ··This . . is the most adequate expression for the
aesthetic existence: it is in the moment. Hence the prodigious oscillations to which
the man who lives aesthetically is exposed. ' Kierkegaard, Entweder-Ode1; vol. 2,
p. 196 ("Equilibrium between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Composition
of Personality").339 [J63,6]
On impotence. Around the middle of the century, the bourgeois class ceases to
be occupied with the future of the productive forces it has unleashed. (Now
appear those counterparts to the great utopias of a More or Campanella, who
had welcomed the accession of this class and affirmed the identity of its interests
with the demands of freedom and justice-now appear, that is to say, the utopias
of a Bellamy or a Mollin, which are mainly concerned with touching up the
notion of economic consumption and its incentives.) In order to concern itself
further with the future of the productive forces which it had set going, the
bourgeoisie would first of all have had to renounce the idea of private income.
That the habit of "coziness" so typical of bourgeois comfort around midcentury
goes together with this lassitude of the bourgeois imagination, that it is one with
the luxury of "never having to think about how the forces of production must
develop in their hands"-these things admit of very little doubt. The dream of
having children is merely a beggarly stimulus when it is not imbued with the
dream of a new nature of tlrings in which these children might one day live, or for
which they can struggle. Even the dream of a "better hmnanity" in which our
children would "have a better life" is only a sentimental fantasy reminiscent of
Spitzweg when it is not, at bottom, the dream of a better nature in which they
would live. (Herein lies the inextinguishable claim of the Fourierist utopia, a
claim which Marx had recognized [and which Russia had begun to act on].) The
latter dream is the living source of the biological energy of humanity, whereas the
former is only the muddy pond from which the stork draws children. Baude­
laire's desperate thesis concerning children as the creatures closest to original sin
is not a bad complement to this image. [J63a,1]
He the dances of death: " Modern artists are far too neglectful of those magnificent
allegories of the Middle Ages." Ch. E., Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 257 (,"Salon de
1859")."40 [J63a,2]
It is inlpotence that makes for the bitter cup of male sexuality. From this impo­
tence springs Baudelaire's attachment to the seraphic image of woman, as well as
his fetishism. It follows that Keller's "sin of the poet"-namely, "to invent sweet
images of women, I such as bitter earth never harbors"341-is certainly not his.
Keller's women have the sweetness of cllln,eras. Baudelaire, in his female figures,
remains precise, and therefore French, because with him the fetishistic and the
seraphic elements do not coincide, as they always do in Keller. [J64,1]