Thursday 8 March 2012

Spleen and Modernity: Baudelaire and ‘alternative’ consumption

In his Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire encapsulates the attitude of the practitioner of “spleen” in his ‘The Dog and the Vial’, where the dog rejects the vial of perfume in favour of faeces, to which Baudelaire likens it to ‘the public’ who are worth of only carefully chosen dung for their sensibilities would be exasperated if present with beauty or genial and vital experience of senses; only ‘shit’ will do. Baudelaire’s relationship with his readership, the ‘general public’, therefore marks his the function of spleen: it is evidence of melancholy without real cause, direct and projected onto everything that passes over its gaze, dismantling it in all its pretensions and ridiculing it for all its worth. It seeks to take all authority as merely phenomenal, fleeting and ‘mere opinion’, to which it gives us, and him, a leftover – suffering and despair. Baudelaire’s work is a testament to such cold hearted sentiments and desires:

For I have from each thing extracted its quintessence,
You have given me mud and I have made of it gold.

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