Baudelaire Contra Benjamin

Beibei Guan assistant professor of English at Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen.Wayne Cristaudo is professor of political science at Charles Darwin University.

• 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.