Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence - Paperback

by Joseph Acquisto (Author)

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaire's 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 Baudelaire's reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaire's 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 Baudelaire's 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.

Author Biography

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), Poetry's 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).