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Prostitution here functions as a conceptual problem, one of desire and action, as well as freedom and the aesthetic. The leap from individualized prostitute to the economy of pros- titution as a metaphor was common in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, as Bernheimer has demonstrated.

Charles Baudelaire

This statement begins with the basic though completely internalized tenet of desire — becoming Other while simultaneously recognizing oneself — that exists as a dual, almost tyrannical psychic force. This is a form of solitary oneness drawn dir- ectly from the Romantic tradition with which Baudelaire maintains a complex rela- tionship. The one as solitary proves ultimately un- satisfactory, as does the two as mere reproduction. Something different is required: The conventional premium that Baudelaire places on genius here is rather a negative account of male sexuality much more central to a perilous modernity.

This account primarily occurs through a form of counting: The profound tension in which solitude has begun to operate in both of these comments has certain contextual roots. Elsewhere in his writings, for example in his meditation on Constantin Guys, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire reprises this sentiment: Baudelaire quickly defamiliarizes the observation in both instances by converting the purely aesthetic notion of being in the crowds into the question of numerical proliferation.

The sentiment becomes more and more exhilarating as we realize the possible incompatibility of each term: I investigate these moments in order to draw out a crucial point: In his writings, Baudelaire consistently demonstrates openness to strangeness as a singularly fem- inine strain of possibility, in an effort to liberate thought from its dependence on stale ideas of unity and universality. The particular is not necessarily a source of the general.

Burton, Baudelaire in In my reading this notion of the bizarre is beyond the realm of particularity, since particularity suggests the in- stantiation of a more general concept. But I argue that when Downloaded from http: In these instances, then, Baudelaire showcases a kind of short-circuiting that occurs when we try to move from the particular to the universal on the current of femininity. It is worth remembering that he dedicated all three poems to Victor Hugo, a paragon of the poetic 20 Karl Marx, Marx on Religion, ed.

Temple University Press, , p. Although Chambers argues that the dedication to Hugo serves to politicize these texts from a comfortable distance, I contend that the dedicatory gesture actually introduces an urgent set of angles — both social and political — to the overhaul of gender and femininity in these poems. Gallimard, , I , 81 — An Extravaganza Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, , pp. In the former, a speaker hallucinates a seemingly endless parade of aged, potentially evil men, who are indistinguishable from one another and appear out of nowhere. In the latter, a similar speaker observes a series of old women with melancholy and depth, recalling how each woman reveals a certain kind of singularity.

Gallimard, , pp. Son pareil le suivait: Yet not only is their utter sameness terrify- ing to the speaker, it also seems to generate ever-increasing numbers. Car je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute, Ce sinistre vieillard qui se multipliait! Cambridge University Press, , pp. But this world is also uncanny, self-consciously spec- tral, and deeply ironic. The old men have no value as commodities under capital but continue to proliferate, like indistinguishable products. But what is intriguing about this poem is that the circuit of repetition fails to Downloaded from http: Terrifying repeti- tion — in the form of non-reproductive and supernatural sameness — thereby signals a crucial break with Oedipal structure, as observed by Burton: The poem ends with the speaker irrevocably weakened and altered by what he has supposedly witnessed: OC, I , 89 Within the modernity Baudelaire investigates, the subject is inherently reducible to the structures that constitute and suffocate it: Within this schema, as I have mentioned, a subject appears to be the grotesque consequence of what lies beyond it: Notably, the poem does not deal with femininity, but only the denigration of Oedipal masculinity.

The opening quatrain relates the immediacy by which the speaker then encounters a woman in the street: The final tercet deconstructs the traditional situation of unrequited love within modernity's collapse of space and time, maintaining the empty locus of femininity as its anchor point:. The force of this poetic strangeness is on an entirely different plane from the statements we find in Baudelaire's personal writings, which often appear to bait the reactionary leanings of a reader through sheer rhetoric. For these reasons, femininity for Baudelaire becomes more than simply a conduit either to spiritual idealism or to calculated transgression.

In the following sections, I trace some of Baudelaire's prose observations on the self in the crowds that bear on his representation of gendered existence, and follow with a close engagement with two central poems from the Tableaux parisiens.

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That alternative ideas of feminine possibility crystallize around the figure of the woman prostitute reveals a particular vanishing point at the centre of urban capital: Here I turn briefly to some of Baudelaire's prose works to argue that this line of thinking often spills out of poetic language. In these essays and fragments contrary to what a reader might infer prostitution becomes anything but a personal issue for Baudelaire, and transforms instead into a vehicle for theoretical contemplations of the gendered individual and the social world.

As we can see, Baudelaire opens up the precarious channel of the indefinite self's relationship to a collective Other, symbolized by prostitution. Prostitution here functions as a conceptual problem, one of desire and action, as well as freedom and the aesthetic. The leap from individualized prostitute to the economy of prostitution as a metaphor was common in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, as Bernheimer has demonstrated.

Something different is required: The conventional premium that Baudelaire places on genius here is rather a negative account of male sexuality much more central to a perilous modernity. This account primarily occurs through a form of counting: The profound tension in which solitude has begun to operate in both of these comments has certain contextual roots. When we consider that the undisputed neutrality of a masculine liberal self, or a Romantic genius, might be severely pre-empted by a modern democratic sphere, Baudelaire's mention of prostitution starts to resemble more of a radical possibility: Elsewhere in his writings, for example in his meditation on Constantin Guys, Le Peintre de la vie moderne , Baudelaire reprises this sentiment: Baudelaire quickly defamiliarizes the observation in both instances by converting the purely aesthetic notion of being in the crowds into the question of numerical proliferation.

The sentiment becomes more and more exhilarating as we realize the possible incompatibility of each term: I investigate these moments in order to draw out a crucial point: In his writings, Baudelaire consistently demonstrates openness to strangeness as a singularly feminine strain of possibility, in an effort to liberate thought from its dependence on stale ideas of unity and universality. Form and figure both subsequently refract the problem of feminine subjectivity throughout the critical conversation that begins with Baudelaire and develops into the twentieth century.

Leo Bersani, for instance, in Baudelaire and Freud , makes the following compelling claim about the poet's aesthetic: The particular is not necessarily a source of the general. What we find in these celebrated works is a revelation of the underside of liberal individuality and its glorification of youth, vigour, and sexual conservatism. It is worth remembering that he dedicated all three poems to Victor Hugo, a paragon of the poetic establishment in contrast to enfant terrible Baudelaire.

Let me briefly recount what is generally well known to scholars of this period. Baudelaire claimed to be drawing on Hugo's style for all three of these poems. Although Chambers argues that the dedication to Hugo serves to politicize these texts from a comfortable distance, I contend that the dedicatory gesture actually introduces an urgent set of angles — both social and political — to the overhaul of gender and femininity in these poems.

In the former, a speaker hallucinates a seemingly endless parade of aged, potentially evil men, who are indistinguishable from one another and appear out of nowhere. In the latter, a similar speaker observes a series of old women with melancholy and depth, recalling how each woman reveals a certain kind of singularity. At first glance, we might think this is not a version of infinity, but merely a kind of expansive form of ennoblement.

But Baudelaire is not discussing a notion of infinity that has to do with Romantic vastness, as we see in his poems about the city in particular. The poem describes the old man in terms of various body parts that are shared by the man's double:. The doubling of the old men, as critics have remarked, bears the mark of the period's fascination with the fantastic. Yet not only is their utter sameness terrifying to the speaker, it also seems to generate ever-increasing numbers.

No sooner has the speaker perceived the twin old men than five more appear:. Furthermore, the literal as well as metaphorical presence of the overbearing yellow fog, and the repetition it inaugurates, tells us that we are in an industrial and capitalizing world, one in which accumulation is everywhere and nowhere, leading to the speaker's hallucinations.

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But this world is also uncanny, self-consciously spectral, and deeply ironic. The old men have no value as commodities under capital but continue to proliferate, like indistinguishable products. They hark back to a time of baroque evils but defiantly march on towards an unrecognizable futurity. Yet even if these repetitions appear out of capital, the grotesque edge of the poem speaks to the fact that its overriding logic is one geared towards infinity.

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Capital is its own infinity, its own circular transcendence: But what is intriguing about this poem is that the circuit of repetition fails to close. Instead, the poem presents the possibility of an infinity that might destroy the speaker's grounding in finite presence already tenuous in the poem:. The poem's revision of the grounds of gender is perhaps the most significant reflection of its ideological world. The kind of masculinity Baudelaire observes in the poem is merely the shadow of patriarchal authority, yet the old men certainly ironize the manner by which such authority reproduces itself largely, as Freud will put it fifty years later, through taboo, prohibition, and the law.

Terrifying repetition — in the form of non-reproductive and supernatural sameness — thereby signals a crucial break with Oedipal structure, as observed by Burton: The poem ends with the speaker irrevocably weakened and altered by what he has supposedly witnessed: Within the modernity Baudelaire investigates, the subject is inherently reducible to the structures that constitute and suffocate it: This might seem like a lofty claim, but what the poem does in its unusual set of images and ideas is nothing short of a complete overhaul of capitalism's vision: Within this schema, as I have mentioned, a subject appears to be the grotesque consequence of what lies beyond it: Notably, the poem does not deal with femininity, but only the denigration of Oedipal masculinity.

Yet the fact that femininity is absent does not mean that it does not factor into the systems the poem contorts and refracts. Certain elements remain constant in both poems: The structure of the poem suggests a clearer picture of the subjects the speaker is observing. The poem is arranged into four sections of varying number of stanzas. The four-line stanzas feature the same rhyme scheme as the previous poem abab , yet the sounds are more discordant, manifesting the disjunction between the sight of the aged women and the environment they simultaneously arise from and yet to which they do not belong.

Despite the earlier discordance, the poem makes clear that the old women manifest a specific feminine presence that appears grotesque only to the unobservant individual, yet contains an epic, near unfathomable history that deserves a specific reverence. As the poem progresses, the speaker is drawn further and further into the series precisely through differentiation. This later verse describes the women one by one:.

The stanza demonstrates, once again, a depth of understanding with regard to the old women — who have even less value than the old men in the social system — by implying that they exist outside the totalizing grip of the present, and thus remain privileged to a kind of epic humanity. But even more startling is the structural work of this poem to rethink how femininity, as individual or in a group, can be understood within a modern way of seeing. This stanza thus exemplifies what Kamuf has claimed to be Baudelaire's specific idea of femininity: The changing landscape of Paris is not simply a quiet background to the speaker's watchful gaze.

Rather, the poem casts a shrewd eye on the shifting arrangements of the Second Empire when the speaker contemplates the eventual death and burial of the old women. The speaker observes the smallness of the women and their resemblance in size to little girls:. He goes on to contemplate the size and shape of their coffins:. The image appears once again to be aggressively grotesque, one in the vein of Baudelaire's general irony towards the human condition itself.