Del centro a la periferia:

las cartografías parisinas de Charles Baudelaire y Annie Ernaux

Abstract

If Benjamin was interested in the Baudelairean flâneur, who mimicked the urban spectator of modernity, Annie Ernaux in Diario del fuera and La vida exterior deviates from that idle walker. The short fragments, with the aesthetics of the annotation that are proposed to build a photographic writing of the reality of an era from a collection of snapshots about the city, with a narrator that is part of what narrates but also external, doesn’t respond any more to the poet's gesture, to the wandering of the stroller, but to the rhythms of the RER in the working day, and resume the daily routines of the contemporary city (shopping, resting spaces on holidays). They are the same inhabitants of Baudelaire, but in another time, it is no longer the “Paris capital of the 19th century”, but its outskirts, those marginal cities built to absorb the excess population of what was the imperial metropolis. And the subjects also situate themselves in the margin of the consumption: the beggars that populate its pages -structural accident of the capitalist logic- are the caricature of the idle walker and they don’t preserve anything of the aesthetic enjoyment. They are the subjects of difference, of otherness, - "a black man", "an Asian woman" - whose origins lose center (or are decentralized), although nevertheless the place of enunciation does not lose its centrality and his ethics inherited from modernity and which finds its values in the declarations of the French Revolution.