The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Poetics of Form (review)

The Violence of Modernity makes an eloquent plea for the reassessment of critical paradigms that foreground trauma in the reading of modernity’s texts. These influential models, differently inflected according to their parentage in Benjamin or de Man, have positioned Baudelaire (mutatis mutandis the origins of modernity) in ways that occlude historical contexts and reduce history to “a monolithic force that works through passive texts and psyches” (27). Without dismissing traumatropic criticism, Sanyal proposes the alternative trope of violence as “point of entry into Baudelaire’s poetry and the dynamism of its modernity. For whereas trauma designates an internal dislocation of which the psyche is the victim, violence is an operation that involves agents and recipients” (21). Instead of focusing on language or psyche or representation as “victims” of modernity, Sanyal broadens our vision to include “executioners” and “witnesses” in that unstable circulation of meanings constitutive of Baudelairean irony.

Three of the book’s five chapters foreground Baudelaire. The second section includes a chapter on “bad girls” (Rachilde and the novelist/filmmaker Virginie Despentes) and one on Albert Camus. The inclusion of Camus, his reputation still impaired by his stance on Algeria, may seem surprising but proves justifiable in light of Sanyal’s argument for the centrality of the vulnerable body and the “irreducible reality” of individual suffering in his work (191). Yet the core of The Violence of Modernity remains the sections on Baudelaire and his legacy. One might go farther and claim that the price of the book is justified by the last eight or ten pages of its superbly reasoned first chapter, with its significant correction of Paul de Man’s use of Baudelaire’s comique absolu to produce the famous formula of “irony as a traumatic structure of repetitive blindness” (44). Sanyal patiently maps de Man’s reading of Baudelaire’s “L’essence du rire” onto de Man’s own “investment in the necessary self-difference or discontinuity of a subject emerging in language” (47). She shows conclusively how de Man’s “incomplete reading” (46) of Baudelaire’s essay privileged the comique absolu over the comique significatif. The ensuing disappearance of “material realities and interpersonal relations” truncates Baudelaire’s sense of the comic in favor of de Man’s view of irony as “abyssal reflexivity,” thereby locking ironic texts into “an infinitely reiterated trauma with no exit” (48). Without abandoning the notion of a traumatizing irony, Sanyal suggests that “the shock of Baudelaire’s irony” also “discloses language’s power to shape a reality that is both semiotic and singularly material” (52).

Chapter Two, “Passages from Form to Politics,” interrogates Baudelaire’s prose poems, with special attention to the “textualization of violence” (55) in “Une Mort héroïque” and “La Corde.” Sanyal intends to revise “the familiar story of Baudelaire’s exorcism of politics from poetry and his subsequent retreat into the austere conservatism of Joseph de Maistre and the logic of Edgar Allan Poe” (59). Her arguments are not entirely new (substantial portions having appeared previously) but remind us that the prose poems do indeed conduct a “powerful interrogation of the mythic autonomy of political and aesthetic constructions” (78, concerning “Une Mort héroïque”) and likewise insinuate that “the logic of the market, in the service of superstition, fosters its own species of terror” (91, concerning “La Corde”). Sanyal’s readings are illuminated consistently with references to intertexts, whether Baudelaire’s or Robespierre’s, and helpful critical insights from Linda Orr, Richard Terdiman and others.

Chapter Three situates Baudelaire’s women, along with Gautier’s and Balzac’s, as explorations of “the human body’s contradictory status as vulnerable materiality and as cultural sign” (97). In this brief but densely written chapter the strengths and weaknesses of Sanyal’s revisionist project show clearly. The notion of the prostitute as a commodity fetish can certainly be found in Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire, and Sanyal is right in...