Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaires oeuvre including verse poems, prose poems, and critical writings in dialogue with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, for whom the autonomy of the artwork critically resists any attempt to view it merely as a product of its socio-historic context. Joseph Acquisto analyzes Baudelairean duality through the lens of dissonance, arguing that the figure of the subject as a dissonant chord provides a gateway to Baudelaires reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaires dissonance depends on older models of subjectivity in order to define itself via the negation of romantic conceptions of a unified lyric subject in favor of one constituted simultaneously as subject and object. This new understanding of subjectivity reconfigures our relationship to the work of art, which will always surpass conceptual attempts to know it fully. Acquisto offers a fresh take on some familiar themes in Baudelaires work. Dissonant subjectivity in Baudelaire, rather than cancelling esthetic transcendence, points to a different way forward that depends on a new and dialectical relation of subject and object.

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In this masterful book, Acquisto provides an original perspective on the thought of both Baudelaire and Adorno. Focusing on the notion of esthetic dissonance, Acquisto draws on the resonances between Adornos criticism and Baudelaires poetic practice, forming a constellation that enriches our understanding of art, music, politics, subjectivity, and modernity. * Patrick Bray, Professor of French Literature, University College London, UK *
Effecting a rigorous and sophisticated encounter of Adorno and Baudelaire, Acquisto demonstrates convincingly the potential of philosophically informed readings of poetry in general and of Baudelaire in particular. With careful and sustained attention to configurations of subjectivity in dissonance, fluidity and incompletion, and introducing, through the question of dissonance, complications to such concepts as totality, unity, and transcendence, Acquisto raises both poetry and philosophy to higher powers of analysis and interpretation and offers some remarkably original readings of some of Baudelaires most fraught and complex poetic works: 'A Celle qui est trop gaie,' 'Le Rve dun Curieux,' 'Le Crpuscule du Soir,' 'LHautontimouromnos' 'Le Confiteor de lArtiste' and many others. A brilliant and compelling study. * Alain Toumayan, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA *

Author Bio

Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France (2021), Poetrys Knowing Ignorance (Bloomsbury, 2019), Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche (2017), The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury, 2015), and French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (2006).