The Arcades Project - Operi

Itis a very specific experience that the proletariat has in the big city-one in many
respects similar to that which the inmligrant has there. [J66a,5]
To the flaneur, his city is-even if, like Baudelaire, he happened to be born
there-no longer native ground. It represents for him a theatrical display, an
arena. []66a,6]
Baudelaire never wrote a whore-poem from the point of view of the whore. (But
compare Brecht, Lesebuchfor Stiidtebewohner, no. 5.)353 []66a,7]
Preface to Dupont's poems in 1851; essay on Dupont in 1861. [J66a,8]
In the erotology of the damned-as that of Baudelairc nlight be called-infertility
and impotence are the decisive factors. They alone are what give to the cruel and
ill-famed moments of desire in sexual life a purely negative character-something
that is lost, it goes without saying, in the act of procreation, as in relations de­
signed to last an entire lifetime (that is, in maniage) . These realities instituted for
the long tenn-children, marriage-would lack all assurance of longevity, had
not the most destructive energies of the human being entered into their creation,
contributing to their stability not less but more than many another energy. But
these relations are legitimated, through this contribution, only to the extent that
this is really possible for decisive libidinal movements in present-day society.
[]66a,9]
The social value of marriage rests decidedly on its longevity, insofar as this latter
holds within it the idea of an ultimate and definitive-if continually defened­
"confrontation" of the spouses. From this confrontation the couple are preserved
so long as the marriage itself lasts-which is to say, in principle, for the rest of
their lives. [J67,1]
Relation between commodity and allegory: "value," as the natural burning-glass
of semblance in history, outshines "meaning." Its luster is more difficult
to dispel. It is, moreover, the very newest. In the Baroque age, the fetish character
of the cOlmnodity was still relatively undeveloped. And the cOlmnodity had not
yet so deeply engraved its stigma-the proletarianization of the producers-on the
process of production. Allegorical perception could thus constitute a style in the
seventeenth century, in a way that it no longer could in the nineteenth. Baude­
laire as allegorist was entirely isolated. He sought to recall the experience of the
coil1ll10dity to an allegorical experience. In this, he was doomed to founder, and
it became clear that the relentlessness of his initiative was exceeded by the relent-
1essness of reality. Hence a strain in his work that feels pathological or sadistic
only because it nllssed out on reality-though just by a hair. [J67,2]
It is one and the same historical night at the onset of which the owl of Minerva
(with Hegel) begins its flight and Eros (with Baudelaire) lingers before the empty
pallet, torch extinguished, dreanling of bygone embraces. []67,3]