Twenty-First Century Baudelaire? Affectivity and Ecology in “Le Crépuscule du soir”

Abstract

In the heated debates that followed the publication of Sur Racine (1960), Roland Barthes was accused of many sins, not least that of dehistoricising Racine. One of Barthes' responses was to dedramatise: 'We should not be surprised that a country should periodically review in this way the things which come down from its past and describe them anew in order to find out what it can do with them: such activities are and ought to be normal assessment procedures'. 1 This article takes its cue from Barthes' sentence and considers what we can do with Baudelaire today: how does Baudelaire's poetry speak to the present? Formulated in this manner, the question is likely to set off alarm bells. It seems reductive to look for something like the contemporary use value of Baudelaire, because it invites an instrumental approach to literature whose limitations have been pointed out by many -Baudelaire and Barthes included. Furthermore, this guiding question is politically suspect: the singular form of 'present' necessarily simplifies a much more complex set of circumstances, violently excluding many other relevant aspects of the contemporary situation(s). It is therefore appropriate to begin by setting out which particular version of the 'present' this article will be referring to.During the last fifteen to twenty years, a plethora of new theoretical approaches has emerged in literary studies as well as in the humanities and social sciences more widely. Labels such as 'affect theory', 'new materialism', 'objectoriented ontology', 'animal studies', 'ecocriticism', 'post-humanism', 'cyborg theory' and 'speculative realism' have been coined. Even if this proliferation of labels also testifies to well-known logics of fashion and the marketable, it is difficult to deny that