Baudelaire y la fantasmagoría del fin

Abstract

The poetic and critical work of Charles Baudelaire is instituted on the tension between the imaginary of the "phantasmagoria" (Walter Benjamin) that assaults the daily city life and the poetic imagination that struggles to catch it as an "outline", as a figure - even if it is just in passing ("Un éclair ... puis la nuit!") - which is available to remember, as "memory of the present" (Le peintre de la vie moderne). However, what perhaps constitutes Baudelaire's uniqueness - his own way of "awakening" - is the awareness that the work of the poet will find its purpose - and, in a certain sense, its limit and its end - in the staging (more than in the overcoming or in the confrontation) of that impasse between the hypnotic fascination of a world that can no longer be offered but as a spectacle, with its permanent power of oblivion and the desire to turn it into "experience". This article investigates some inflections of the problem, emphasizing how Baudelaire's work offers interesting features for the contemporary debate about the end of the world - and poetry.