Baudelaire's Other Passer-by

One of the more unsettling aspects of Baudelaire's poetry concerns its treatment of others. It was especially this feature that drew the attention of Walter Benjamin when he famously characterized Baudelaire's modernity in terms of a shock experience. To encounter the other in Baudelaire is to undergo a loss of self. But in what does such a loss consist, and might it entail a merely provisional loss that allows for an even greater measure of self-possession and understanding in its wake? These are the questions that orient this essay's consideration of a text unlike any other, "Les sept vieillards."