The Arcades Project - Operi

Around the time that "physiologies" first appeared, historians like Thierry,
Mignet, Guizot were laying emphasis on the analysis of "bourgeois life:' [P5,3]
Engels on the Wuppertal region: "Excellent soil for our principles is being prepared
here; and once we are able to set in motion our wild, hot-tempered dyers
and bleachers, you won't recognize Wuppertal. Even as it is, the workers during
the past few years have reached the final stage of the old civilization; the rapid
increase in crimes, robberies, and murders is their protest against the old social
organization. At night the streets are unsafe, the bourgeois are beaten up, knifed,
and rohbed. If the local proletarians develop according to the same laws as the
English proletarians, they will soon realize that it is useless to protest against the
social system in this manner . . . and will protest in their general capacity, as
human beings, by means of communism." Engels to Marx, October 1844., from
Barmen [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel, ed. Marx-Engels-Lenin
Institut, vol. 1 « Zurich> 1935), pp. 4-5].7 [p5,4]
The heroic ideal in Baudelaire is androgynous. This does not prevent him from
writing: "We have known the philanthropist woman author, the systematic priest­
ess of love, the republican poetess, the poetess of the future, Fourierist or Saint­
Simonian; and our eyes ... have never succeeded in becoming accustomed to all
this studied ugliness:' Baudelaire, DArt romantique, ed. Bachette, vol. 3 (paris),
p. 340 ("Marceline Desbordes-Valmore")." [p5a,1]
One of the later sectarian developments of the nineteenth century is the fusionist
religion. It was propagated by L. J. B. To urei! (born in Year VIII, died 1863 [or
1868?]). The FOUlerist influence can be felt in his periodization of history; from
Saint·Simon comes the idea of the Trinity as a unity of Mother·Father to which
Sister·Brother or Androgyne is joined. TI,e universal substance is determined in
its working by three processes, in the definition of which the inferior basis of this
doctrine comes to light. These processes are: "Emanation, ... the property which
the universal substance possesses of expanding infinitely beyond itself; . . . Ab·
sorption, . . . the property which the universal substance possesses of turning
back infinitely upon itself; ... Assimilation, ... the property which the universal
substance possesses of being intimately pemleated with itself" (p. i).-A charac·
teristic passage from the aphorism "Pauvres, riches" ,
which addresses itself to the rich and speaks of the poor: "Moreover, if you refuse
to elevate them to your level and scorn to involve yourselves with them, why
then do you breathe the same air, inhabit the same atmosphere? In order not to
breathe in and assimilate their emanation . . . , it will be necessary for you to
leave this world, to breathe a different air and live in a different atmosphere"
(p. 267).-The dead are "multiform" and exist in many places on the earth at the
same time. For this reason1 people must very seriously coneenl thenlselves, dur
ing their lifetime, with the betterment of the earth (p. 307). Ultimately, all unites
in a series of suns, which in the end, after they have passed through the station of
one light (unilumiere), realize the "universal light" in the "universalizing region:'