The Arcades Project - Operi

a thousand splendors, / Is a sumptuous table where the many sup and take their
fill, / An inexhaustible wellspring of never failing waters, / Yes, of love's sweet
milk; and from a hundred conduits / cThe luscious nectar runs" (Daniel Caspers
von Lohenstein, Agrippina [Leipzig, 1724], p. 33). The "beyond" of the choice
governing relations between mother and child, and the here and now of the
choice governing relations between prostitute and client, make contact at a single
point. This point defines the situation of Baudelaire's libido. (Compare X2,1:
Marx on prostitution.) [J75a]
The lines from "Selige Sehnsucht"-"No distance can weigh you dowu, / You
come flying, fascinated"424-describe the experience of the aura. The distance that
is there in the eyes of the beloved and that draws the lover after it is the dream of
a better nature. The decline of the aura and the waning of the dream of a better
nature-this latter conditioned on its defensive position in the class struggle-are
one and the same. It follows that the decline of the aura and the decline of sexual
potency are also, at bottom, one. [J76,1]
The formula of L'Etemite par les astres-"The new is always old, and the old
always new"425-corresponds most rigorously to the experience of spleen regis­
tered by Baudelaire. [J76,2]
A passage from L'Eternite par les astres-"The number of our doubles is infinite
in time and space .... These doubles exist in flesh and bone-indeed, in trousers
and jacket, in crinoline and chignon" -may be compared with "Les Sept Vieil­
lards":
Doubtless to you my dread seems ludicrous,
unless a brotherly shudder lets you see:
for all their imminent decrepitude,
these seven monsters had eternal life!
I doubt if! could have survived an eighth
such apparition, father and son of himself,
inexorable Phoenix, loathsome avatar!
-I turned my back on the whole danmed parade.
The "monstrous shoreless sea,"·126 which the poen1 evokes in the closing line, is
the agitated universe of L'Eternite par les astres. [J76,3]
"The houses seemed to be stretched upward by the mist / and looked like the two
quays of some swollen river."427 An image reminiscent of Meryon. There is some­
thing similar in Brecht. [J76,4]
With gloomy irony, Blanqui demonstrates what a "better humanity" would be
worth in a nature which can never be better. [J76,5]