Le temps baudelairien et la fuyance de l’art romantique: entre tempus et aeternitas

Abstract

Heavily influenced by German aesthetic ideas with respect to the transcendental perception of the artwork, Baudelairian aesthetics, which seeks to divulge the ironic fissures embedded at the core of romantic art articulated around the inescapable dialectic between self-creation and self-destruction, would seem to posit the ironic disaggregation of the aesthetic object, 'defabricated' in the moment of its fabrication. At one and the same time an affirmation and an indictment of the powers of Art in its defiance of the ravages of Time, Baudelaire's works would seem ironically to proclaim the victory of the artist at the very moment of his capitulation to the enemy. We propose to examine the manner in which German transcendental aesthetics contributes towards the fundamental ambivalence of the poet with respect to Time, to elucidate the manner in which the demiurgic poet finally succeeds in transmuting his defeat in the face of the disintegration of his work into victory by means of the absolute control exerted by the artist over the kinetic chaos of the aesthetic object, suspended, like Zeno's arrow, in its eternal impetus towrds self-realization.