Baudelaire's Objects - by Joseph Acquisto (Hardcover)

About the Book

Examines Baudelaire's multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry and the ways his poems reconfigure subject-object relations.

Book Synopsis

Examines Baudelaire's multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation.

Charles Baudelaire's representation of objects in the natural world establishes a relation that is neither one of identity between human subject and nature nor a relation of domination; he reveals both the natural world and the human subject to be characterized by an irreducible doubleness and nonidentity to itself. Likewise, everyday domestic objects in his poems overflow their boundaries as simple metaphors; their often uncanny aspect highlights their quasi-agency as they define and shape the subject who interacts with them.

Baudelaire's poems-as-objects also take on this kind of agency, acting upon readers in ways that both require and surpass attempts to grasp the poems conceptually as art objects for analysis. This reshaping of subjectivity and objectivity acquires increased intensity in his urban poetry, where city objects are at the intersection of the mythic, the historical, the esthetic, and the commercial.

Baudelaire's Objects shows how paying attention to objects differently, as Baudelaire's poems impel readers to do, is to reorient ourselves in the world by giving objects their due, recognizing the mediating qualities both of objects and of the language with which we represent or create them. We can thus reinvent our understanding of the limits and potential of human subjectivity as it is inextricably intertwined with the world around us.

Review Quotes

"In probing how Baudelaire's poetry situates us in a field of relations that are infinitely more complex, nuanced, and impactful than that of subject-object dichotomy, Acquisto's incisive study brings to light poetry's transformative power that has us ceaselessly become with the world." --Claire Lyu, Associate Professor of French, University of Virginia, USA

About the Author

Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. His books include Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset (Bloomsbury, 2024), Reading Baudelaire with Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2023), Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France (2021), Poetry's Knowing Ignorance (Bloomsbury, 2019), and The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury, 2015).