Marcel Broodthaers’s A Film by Charles Baudelaire was produced in lieu of a research paper for a seminar on Baudelaire run by Lucien Goldmann in Brussels during the winter of 1969–70. The film and the seminar serve as points of departure for this article’s pursuit of three interrelated aims: first, to establish specific discursive coordinates for one of the most mystifying aspects of Broodthaers’s work, namely its pervasive and seemingly anachronistic references to nineteenth-century poetic modernism in general and to Baudelaire (...) in particular; second, to take on the figure of the world for Broodthaers, both in his use of the world map in the Baudelaire film and several other works to be discussed and in the question of his stance regarding the world-shaping catastrophe of colonialism; and finally, to investigate the prominence of the concept of reification in Broodthaers’s theoretical lexicon in relation to its first formulation by Georg Lukács, its revival and dissemination by Goldmann, and Aimé Césaire’s account of colonialism’s “reification of the world.”. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century the philosophical theory of Positivism informed most intellectual, political, and cultural endeavors, permeating private and public discourse. People lived in t...

FramesIn 1934 the Belgian artist René Magritte painted a room with a view. On an easel in front of the window stands a painting depicting the very piece of landscape blocked from sight. Magritte named his painting La Condition Humaine (“The Human Condition”), which is quite apt, for the life of everyone is determined by windows, doors, mirrors and many other frames. Indeed, to avert anxiety, one actually cultivates social behavior born of the fear of being “outside the frame.” Because (...) of this apprehension, we organize all reality into a series of preestablished frames. (shrink)

The article intends to retrace, from a historical-philological point of view, the main steps of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished research and works, conducted during his later years, dedicated to Charles Baudelaire. Setting Benjamin’s translation of the Ta-bleaux parisiens as the first result of his interest for the poet, the text delves into the composition process of The Arcades Project, from which the idea of a book on Baudelaire then takes shape. The article examines the crucial stages of this second project’s development (...) through the correspondence between Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer especially: from the 1935 exposé for The Arcades Project to The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, to the 1939 essay On some Motifs in Baudelaire. The focus is set, in particular, on the dialectical-constructive method that guides Benjamin in the composition both of the Passagen-Werk as of the Baudelaire-Buch and the essays. Finally, the article looks back over the transmission history of the project on Baudelaire, intimately bound to the one of the Passagenarbeit: the vicissitudes and findings of various manuscripts, of which the complete restitution of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe is soon expected. Therefore, the peculiar relationship between philology and philosophy of Benjamin’s experimental method is then examined further in depth; the configuration of the research object’s monadic structure according to a historical perspective, albeit in the context of a work that remained unfinished. (shrink)

The final volume of Marcel Proust's novel _ la Recherche du Temps perdu (Recherche)_ presents a striking puzzle. In this volume, the narrator Marcel proposes a literary theory which is supposed to provide the theoretical basis for the whole book, such that the _Recherche_ can be considered a novel which contains its own theory. However, the _Recherche_ as a whole does not seem to comply with this literary theory. I suggest in this paper that this puzzle (...) can be solved by appreciating that Marcel's theory of literature, and his understanding of the way literature relates to his own life, is based on a Hegelian notion of teleology. (shrink)

The approach by the rhythms better captures the temporal organization and temporal movement in understanding the process of professionalization. Differentiation time macro / meso time / micro time gives the conceptual framework for interpreting the variation rhythms in the construction of formative and professional activities. In order to operationalize this approach, the results of previous work will be re-interviewed in terms of a rhythmic base. By entering the singularity singularity professionalization process, temporal rhythms highlight the possible links between individual and (...) institutional rhythms rhythms. (shrink)

Nei dintorni di Paul Celan e Ingeborg Bachmann.

Este texto desea captar la paradójica consustancialidad de modernidad y decadencia que configura la singularidad lírica de Charles Baudelaire. En una primera parte, intentaremos demostrar que lo moderno en Baudelaire es una manera de conjugar el tiempo y la belleza que resulta heterogéneo respecto a la forma de conformación que de ellos hace tanto la estética clásica como la romántica. En una segunda parte, una vez visualizado el vínculo entre lo moderno y la decadencia, buscaremos circunscribir el modo en que (...) la poética de Baudelaire se singulariza a partir de una crítica respecto de las posiciones heredadas. Para este fin, desarrollaremos tres tópicos a partir de los cuales se nos haba visible aquello que, al devenir fundamental para Baudelaire, lo distancia al mismo tiempo y de forma definitiva, respecto de sus antecesores. (shrink)

Ruth is one of the first examples of literary decadence in Estonian literature, a manifestation of the discourse of decadence that dominated the fin-de-siècle period. The function of this discourse was on the one hand the expression of the experience of modernity, and on the other, its critique. Just as in the majority of examples of literary decadence, Ruth is a ”studied composition”, relying more on cultural intertexts than on direct observation of the world of experience. Many of the explicit (...) or implicit allusions latent in Ruth can be traced back to the texts of writers who generated syntheses of decadent sensibility: T. Gautier, C. Baudelaire, P. Bourget, F. Nietzsche, and O. Weininger. This article focuses on traces of the idea of affirmative aesthetic decadence in the Gautier-Baudelaire tradition, and Bourget’s ambivalent treatment of decadence as these are made visible in Ruth. Ruth exhibits the idea of affirmative aesthetic decadence of the German variety, though the negative connotations of decadence come to overwhelm the positive at the end of the 19th century. Negative nuances are mediated through Bourget’s ambivalent renderings of decadence, and specifically through his model of the decadentdilettante. While Bourget admired the decadent-dilettante as a symbol of European culture’s high level of refinement, it also signals overripeness and cultural decline. The veiled opposition to the decadent-dilettante attitude to life is carried in Ruth both by the narrator and the protagonist Ruth herself. The function of the opposition is to critique both the negative concept of decadence and more broadly, an overmodernized, therefore declining Europe. (shrink)