Baudelaire Contra Benjamin

A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

Av Beibei Guan, Wayne Cristaudo, Lee Trepanier

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This book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. More broadly, it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure. Cristaudo and Beibei argue that Baudelaire was not mistaken in refusing to subject aesthetics to morality and politics. Baudelaire’s refusal was based on the recognition that existential matters, such as sickness, evil, death, sexual longing, melancholy, and beauty itself—all themes at the center of his poetry—are by nature intrinsically supra-political. By contrast, Benjamin’s faith in political redemption, while breaking with the enlightenment’s faith in progress, nevertheless conforms to another core element of faith of the enlightenment, via faith in the ability of morals and politics to liberate humanity. The authors make the case that Benjamin’s understanding of politics is severely deficient because it is not sufficiently versed in an understanding of economics or the nature of class interests, and that Marx’s own theory of economics is fundamentally deficient and creates an insurmountable problem for those deferring to a future industrial society free from capitalism.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2019-05-23
Mått163 x 230 x 23 mm
Vikt531 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SeriePolitics, Literature, & Film
Antal sidor234
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781498595070

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Chapter One Political and Artistic Divides in Baudelaire.Chapter Two The Diabolical Character of Modern Political Redemption.Chapter Three Benjamin’s Politicized Aesthetics.Chapter Four The God’s Eye View of the Historical Materialist.Chapter Five Paris, Melancholy and Phantasmagoria: Economic Determinations or a Human Soul-scape?Chapter Six Flâneurs – Baudelaire’s Urban Self-Makers, Benjamin’s Accomplices of Commodity Capitalism, and Redeeming Rag-pickers.Chapter Seven Baudelaire’s “Depraved” View of Women and Benjamin’s Redemption of Commodified Fallen Women.

The authors show how the politicized approach to literature that dominates the academy today, bolstered by Walter Benjamin as tutelary genius, strips the mind and heart of their deepest and most necessary resources (starting from empathy) for understanding literature and human affairs in general. Unquestioning belief in one’s own idea of what is right – in a political ideology rather than in humanity and its unfathomable complexity – demonstrably leads to the gulags and genocides that have blighted contemporary history since Benjamin. On the basis of a deeper understanding of the workings of politics in history, grounded on analyses by Weber and Tocqueville rather than on slogans taken from Marx, this book pleads for restoring to their place of honor poetic insight and aesthetic vision, which have been tragically forsaken for political ideology in so much contemporary criticism. The book has a sharp, specific, and topical focus in diagnosing Benjamin’s (mis)reading of Baudelaire, but it also has broad scope and relevance in touching the nerve of what is vitiating literary studies and the humanities across disciplines in their present crisis.