Baudelaire's Shadow

Baudelaire’s Shadow explores the complex and multifaceted work of Baudelaire, whose fame and notoriety have often been reduced to simplified profiles: the poet of the modern city, of erotic obsession, of Satanic revolt, of colonial fantasies, of mystical correspondences, and of corporeal decay. But what binds these facets of his work together? Is there a logic that underpins the proliferation of themes, styles, and personae in The Flowers of Evil, while connecting content and form?

Baudelaire’s Shadow contends that at the core of Baudelaire’s poetic project is the problem of determination—a contradiction between determining and being determined, a dialectic of agency intertwined with its negation. This perspective allows for a new understanding of the conceptual, formal, and figurative challenges within The Flowers of Evil, including the interplay between writing and reading, the anticipation of death, the negativity of the void, the portrayal of race, the poetics of ekphrasis, the uniqueness of the aesthetic, the reality of the social, the uncertainty of meaning, and the materiality of the signifier.

With philosophical precision and poetic elegance, one of Baudelaire’s finest translators reconstructs our understanding of The Flowers of Evil from the ground up, unveiling the dialectical logic at the heart of this significant work of modern literature.