The Fall Out of Redemption

Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy

Joseph Acquisto

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628926538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theorists who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce that framework from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress or redemption through art. Through a series of "interhistorical" readings that put literary and critical writers from the last 150 years in dialogue, Acquisto shows how these authors struggle to articulate both the metaphysical and esthetic consequences of attempting to move beyond a logic of salvation. Putting these writers into dialogue with Baudelaire highlights the way both literary and critical approaches attempt to articulate a third option between theism and atheism that also steers clear of political utopianism and Nietzschean estheticism. In the concluding section, Acquisto expands metaphysical and esthetic concerns to account also for the ethics inherent in the refusal of the logic of salvation, an ethics which emerges from, rather than seeking to redeem or cancel, a certain kind of nihilism.

1

Saving Nothing: Baudelaire, Benjamin, de Man, Agamben

Philosopher John Gray has claimed that “if anything defines ‘the West’ it is the pursuit of salvation in history. It is historical teleology—the belief that history has a built-in purpose or goal—rather than traditions of democracy or tolerance, that sets western civilization apart from all others” (Black 73). Both capitalism and communism “were messianic movements, using the language of reason and science, but actually driven by faith” (1). When the object of that faith is progress, and when the stakes involve war and bloodshed, lucidity when we are tempted to take our guiding myths as fact is particularly important, and for Gray, “belief in progress has become a mechanism of self-deception that serves only to block perception of the evils that come with the growth of knowledge” (Heresies 5). This critique of self-deception leads Gray back to a more accurate foundational myth, that of original sin, fully acknowledged in its mythical status but nonetheless operative and useful as a corrective to more potentially dangerous modern myths of progress. There is much is Gray’s diagnosis of our contemporary world that is expressed in sometimes similar ways in Baudelaire; as I will show in this chapter, Baudelaire’s own refusal of the idea of historical, scientific, or technological progress leads to an emphasis on original sin that is not simply a vehicle for a poetry steeped in devils and the macabre but rather a complex vision that seeks to articulate the intersection of metaphysics with lived experience, in a way that both belongs to his particular historical moment and transcends it, allowing us to establish a dialogue between Baudelaire and thinkers from other key moments when the shape and nature of modernity was called into question.

This first chapter lays the Baudelairean groundwork for exploring these issues, concentrating in particular on the critique of progress, its relation to original sin, the implications of the critique of knowledge, the status of the theological, and, most importantly, the consequences of removing redemption from this nexus of ideas. It is this last aspect of Baudelaire’s thought which is his most original: Baudelaire is the first to attempt to push to its limit a refusal of redemption; this results in what is perhaps the most radically heretical variation on Christian thought, cutting as it does at the very heart of the Christian faith. While Baudelaire’s pessimism and antimodernity will figure in our analyses throughout the book, his effort to draw all the consequences from a refusal of redemption, and other thinkers’ travels on that path, will be the most important guiding thread. In answer to the all-too-easy alternative of simply substituting a different kind of redemption for the traditional theological one, whether that be revolutionary political dreams or the estheticism of either art for art’s sake or its later nineteenth and early twentieth-century manifestations, Baudelaire challenges us to consider how we might think unredemptively, or rather a-redemptively.

Let us begin by considering Baudelaire’s characterization of the modern in light of his critique of progress. While he is often evoked as the first “modern” poet and his characterization of the “painter of modern life” has become canonical, there is also a deeply antimodern strain in Baudelaire. We must resist the urge to see the two in simple opposition, however, and recognize that, as Antoine Compagnon has remarked, “the antimoderns are not just any adversaries of the modern, but indeed the thinkers and theoreticians of the modern” (Compagnon 24). Modernity is thus defined and even constituted by antimoderns, if we take care to avoid making this term simply synonymous with vituperative cultural and political reactionaries.¹ Part of being antimodern is positing a critical relationship to history, but what makes the case of Baudelaire unique is that while working out ideas on history, he is also working through new notions of time, a question inextricably interwoven with theological and moral considerations. Hence the particularly modern kind of antimodernism that the Baudelaire of the 1850s and 1860s espouses: not simply ahistorical or antihistorical nor a critique of progress or revolution but a deeper pessimism that is worked out through a new relationship to writing, and to theological discourse, that finds one of its best expressions in the fragmentary writings of the Journaux intimes [Intimate Journals].

To be antimodern is, at the very least, to posit a critical relationship to history. As far as revolutionary intervention into history is concerned, we can trace a shift in Baudelaire’s views, from the young man eager to go to the barricades in 1848 to the older man who claimed in a now-famous remark in a letter that the 1851 coup d’état by Napoléon III “m’a physiquement dépolitiqué” [“physically depoliticized me”] (Corr 1: 188). Beyond the political engagement of Baudelaire the man, the writings themselves accomplish a shift from the consideration of history to the consideration of the notion of time more generally. And it is a certain divided relation to time that marks, for theorists such as Matei Calinescu, the concept of modernity in its broadest outlines. Calinescu asserts that modernity “is reflected in the irreconcilable opposition” between “objectified, socially measurable time of capitalist civilization” and “the personal, subjective, imaginative durée, the private time created by the unfolding of the ‘self’ ” (Calinescu 5), and recognizes that “although the idea of modernity has come to be associated almost automatically with secularism, its main constitutive element is simply a sense of unrepeatable time,” a view he affirms as “by no means incompatible” with Judeo-Christian eschatological views of history (Calinescu 13). The question of modernity, a historically minded attempt at periodization, is thus complicated from the outset by a set of temporal considerations that expand questions of “history” to include more far-reaching philosophical and theological notions. And it is important to note that Calinescu’s conceptual framework establishes a continuity between modernity and Judeo-Christian notions of time through the category of the eschatological. This is the very continuity that Baudelaire’s own vision will question by canceling the possibility of redemption.

An important step toward articulating an antimodern notion of time is the adaptation of theological discourse that Baudelaire accomplishes in both his poetry and the Journaux intimes. This is not, however, a simple transposition of terms from the theological to the secular realms. Hans Robert Jauss cautions against such a simplistic reading, claiming that if such were the case, “the modernity of the Fleurs du Mal would not be essentially different from the experience of ‘empty transcendence’ already discovered long before by the romantic poetry of solitude” (Jauss 177). Jauss underscores that Baudelaire instead “radicalized the Christian theology of original sin itself when he legitimated the antinaturalism of his aesthetics against the nature religion of romanticism,” producing a “provocative secularization” that deepens Christian notions of the fall into original sin without retaining any notion of salvation or grace. This shift emerges quite explicitly in the Journaux intimes in passages such as the following:

Une fois il fut demandé devant moi en quoi consistait le plus grand plaisir de l’amour. Quelqu’un répondit naturellement: à recevoir,—et un autre: à se donner.—Celui-ci dit: plaisir d’orgueil!—et celui-là: volupté d’humilité! Tous ces orduriers parlaient comme l’Imitation de J-C.—Enfin il se trouva un impudent utopiste qui affirma que le plus grand plaisir de l’amour était de former des citoyens pour la patrie. Moi, je dis: la volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal.—Et l’homme et la femme savent de naissance que dans le mal se trouve toute volupté. (OC1: 651–2)

[One time it was asked, in my presence, in what the greatest pleasure of love consisted. Someone naturally responded: in receiving, and another: in giving oneself. The latter said: selfish pleasure of pride!—and the former: voluptuousness of humility! All these filthy people were speaking like the Imitation of Christ.—Finally there was an impudent utopian who affirmed that the greatest pleasure of love was to form citizens for the fatherland. As for me, I said: the only and supreme voluptuous pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil.—And man and woman know from birth that it is in evil that all voluptuousness is to be found.]

Here, Baudelaire marks the passage from utopian political projects to a simultaneously wider and more pessimistic evaluation of the human condition in ways that go beyond narrow considerations of historical particularities to consider evil as the source of human motivation and pleasure. Such a discussion removes us from the specificity of the city while at the same time reminding us that it is only in a modern city that such an exchange of ideas among a variety of representatives of various kinds of human stupidity can occur.

The historical and geographical moment thus becomes the condition of the speaker’s self-removal from that specificity; the modern and antimodern conjoin, as progress in the latter is facilitated by the conditions generated by the former. If there is no redemption from the depths of evil to which we are all condemned to descend, Baudelaire’s vision nonetheless reinterprets theological discourse in political terms. In a fragment which resembles the prose poem “Assommons les pauvres!” [“Let’s Beat up the Poor!”], the speaker imagines the following scenario:

Si, quand un homme prend l’habitude de la paresse, de la rêverie, de la fainéantise, au point de renvoyer sans cesse au lendemain la chose importante, un autre homme le réveillait un matin à grands coups de fouet et le fouettait sans pitié jusqu’à ce que, ne pouvant travailler par plaisir, celui-ci travaillât par peur, cet homme,–le fouetteur,–ne serait-il pas vraiment son ami, son bienfaiteur? (655)

[If, when a man takes on the habit of laziness, reverie, inaction, to the point of always putting the important thing off until the next day, another man would wake him one morning with big lashes of the whip and beat him pitilessly until, no longer able to work from pleasure, he would work from fear, that man—the one whipping-would he not truly be his friend and benefactor?]

The speaker concludes: “De même en politique, le vrai saint est celui qui fouette et tue le peuple pour le bien du peuple” [“The same goes in politics, the true saint is the one who whips and kills the people for the good of the people”] (655). One cannot speak, then, of a simple removal of theological vocabulary and notions of redemption nor of a simple turn away from politics. Baudelaire reintwines political and theological discourse here, even more so than in the prose poem which shares certain features of this anecdote, and which I shall analyze in the last chapter. Rather than secularizing sainthood by emphasizing a political utopia, the speaker imports religious discourse into the political by reinvesting violence with a kind of (negative) redemptive value and seeming to give moral value to tyranny.

If humanity is eternally the same, the speaker in the Journaux intimes demands that we change our perspective in order to remind ourselves that we have not in fact progressed beyond the savage state:

Quoi de plus absurde que le Progrès, puisque l’homme [ … ] est toujours semblable et égal à l’homme, c’est-à-dire toujours à l’état sauvage. Qu’est-ce que les périls de la forêt et de la prairie auprès des chaos et des conflits quotidiens de la vie? Que l’homme enlace sa dupe sur le Boulevard, ou perce sa proie dans des forêts inconnues, n’est-il pas l’homme éternel, c’est-à-dire l’animal de proie le plus parfait? (663)

[What is more absurd than Progress, since man [ … ] is always like and equal to man, that is, always in the savage state. What are the perils of the forest and prairie next to the everyday chaos and conflicts of life? Whether man embraces his dupe on the Boulevard or skewers his prey in unknown forests, is he not the eternal man, that is, the most perfect animal of prey?]

If we have not progressed beyond the savage stage, then time and space can be compressed and flattened so that it no longer makes sense to conceive of them according to a linear model, and the modern city becomes not so much a copy of the wild forest as its eternally equivalent substitute, an eternal repetition of the same space wherever humanity finds itself. Seen in this light, I would argue that the form in which the Journaux intimes survives for us, as a de facto set of fragments and aphorisms, itself negates the notion of progress, inviting us to begin anew with each fragment and to see the work as a whole whose parts do not and cannot pretend to suggest progression, coherence, or systematic exposition. Baudelaire here carves out an antimodernist literary space of negation without redemption, the work of a speaker who could be any of us, representative of “l’homme, c’est-à-dire chacun” [“man, that is, every one”] “naturellement dépravé” [“naturally depraved”] (665).

Baudelaire’s radicalization of original sin is at the heart of his antimodernism and catalyzes not only the removal from linear notions of time but also what he calls a “joie de descendre” [“joy of descending”] (683), an irremediable and eternal tendency to revel in evil. Such a reversal of the good is fully consonant with traditional theology, but Baudelaire pushes the boundaries of this assertion to arrive at new consequences of the logic of the fall:

La Théologie.

Qu’est-ce que la chute?

Si c’est l’unité devenue dualité, c’est Dieu qui a chuté. (688)

[Theology.

What is the fall?

If it is unity become duality, it is God who has fallen.]

This assertion blurs further distinctions, pressing the logic of duality which governs humanity (Baudelaire’s famous “double postulation” toward God and Satan) and extending it to God himself who, with Satan’s fall from grace, himself falls into duality and thus becomes the mirror of humanity and erases the distinction between divinity and humanity. Depravity is, for Baudelaire, inscribed in all of creation: “En d’autres termes, la création ne serait-elle pas la chute de Dieu?” [“In other terms, would creation not be the fall of God?”] (689). This realization then allows a reimagination of different notions of progress: “Theorie de la vraie civilisation./Elle n’est pas dans le gaz, ni dans la vapeur, ni dans les tables tournantes, elle est dans la diminution des traces du péché originel” [“Theory of true civilization./It is not in natural gas, nor steam, nor turbing tables, it is in the diminution of the traces of original sin”] (697). Baudelaire borrows and extends ideas of Joseph de Maistre, for whom history is synonymous with the Fall because human time is inaugurated by it.² Even the fall into time itself is double in structure, as Elissa Marder has argued: “The ‘ancient fall’ is conceived as a fall both into time and out of it. One falls into time by becoming conscious of it, but the moment one becomes conscious of time, one falls out of it because consciousness of time prevents one from being able to live in it” (20). This problem is at the heart of Baudelaire’s supposed celebration of the modern, which canonical readings see in his call to represent the contemporary. But as Gérald Froidevaux has shown, representing the present implies just that kind of removal from the present that Marder signals, since one would have to be simultaneously in the present and outside it in order to represent it:

The apparently tautological formula of the “representation of the present” expresses the Baudelairean desire to establish the present in an intemporal duration [ … ]. The modern beautiful liberates the present from its alienation from Time, gratifies it with a sort of ontological solidity and confirms it as a Same that escapes incessant chronological subversion. [ … ] Situated at the opposite of History, the Baudelairean idea of the present sets itself up in the negation of the historical present, of the present that defines itself by its place in temporal continuity. (Froidevaux 54)

Progress could only be attained by canceling duality, including the paradoxical duality of existing within and outside the present moment, and reestablishing lost Unity, but whereas the earlier Baudelaire held out the possibility of such unity at least at the level of esthetic perception, the later Baudelaire cancels any such hope and plants humanity firmly in the changelessness of duality and the fragmentation of which the Journaux intim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Note on Translations
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1. Saving Nothing: Baudelaire, Benjamin, de Man, Agamben
• 2. A Veil Over the Abyss: From Benjamin to Fondane
• 3. Coming to an End: Agamben and Baudelaire
• 4. The Order of Impossible Salvation: From Baudelaire to Cioran
• 5. The Eternal Fall: Cioran
• 6. Asoteriological Ethics: Baudelaire and Nancy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Imprint