The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley by Matthew Potolsky (review)

This book makes a welcome contribution to the understanding of the cultural politics of late nineteenth-century decadence. Its major claim lies in the assertion of a new understanding of the role which “decadents”—so named by themselves or by others (friend or foe)—assume in relation to European political and social history, variously in Victorian England and post-1848 France. If decadence is represented customarily as a sensibility “associated with isolation, withdrawal, and nihilistic repudiation” (10), Matthew Potolsky reclaims the existence of a “broader counterculture,” which “partici-pated in … efforts to imagine new forms of affiliation and sociality” (6). In this understanding, the withdrawal which individual decadents perform “is always collective, a ritualized performance” (6) of what Regenia Gagnier calls “creative repudiation,” a negation which works in the service of a community subtler and profounder than those forms of sociality offered by the established values of individualist liberalism in capitalistic democracies (qtd. in Potolsky 6). Coherently positioning himself against the clichéd formulations of decadents as solitary representatives of hedonistic retreat or stylish despair, then, Potolsky claims the existence of a virtual society of books, a sort of elsewhere community of letters, one which is consolidated in the imaginations of its contributory authors and readers. Theorized convincingly in exchange with Michael Warner’s ideas of the “counterpublic,” Potolsky’s model of literary sociality posits the bonding operation of epideictic language. If, for Aristotle, the epideictic mode of oratory features either praise or blame, these opposing responses are joined in the rhetoric of a decadent affirmation of the negation of existing systems which other deca-dents (Charles Baudelaire, originally and formatively) have authored. The literary history that results from this understanding reveals hitherto unexamined channels of communication in some of the major authors associated with a pan-European decadence. Writing to and for each other, these authors are not providing some cogent conversation on the emergent issues of their political day. They are consolidating their existence as an alternative society, a separate communality; they come into existence in ways as various as the circulation of texts and the formation of libraries; most importantly, they provide both an alternative canon to the nationalized canons of European nation-states and a bibliography of alternative social possibility.

Given the political motives within the initiatives which Potolsky is locating, there is a legitimate question about the political identity of this imaginative energy. Is it integral, is it classifiable? There is of course an antinomian quality to a politics of possibility, and the available labels of existing political partisanships are rightly of no avail. “Civic humanism”—not so much a political position as an attitudinal predisposition—recurs as a descriptor for the values which the authors of these texts are serving, which are determined to “oppose liberal individualism to broadly imagined collective ideals” (71). The “imagined” character of this social possibility is consonant with a sense of visionary futurity, and a kind of utopian millenarianism provides a valueadded rhetoric in Potolsky’s account. This special pressure begins with the title of his introductory chapter: “Workers of the Final Hour” (Les Ouvriers de la dernière heure) is taken from the title of an unwritten essay which Baudelaire proposed (among many others) for a prospective monthly review in 1861. While the end-of-days feeling routinely associated with literary and artistic decadence is clearly marked in this phrase, Potolsky’s introduction is framed by the countervailing sense of efficacious labor, so converting the end-time in a standard understanding of decadent temporality into the possibility of productive work (while understanding, of course, that these exertions remain in the virtual dimension of imaginative possibility).

This political sensibility lies sharply to the side of the one usually attributed to the sensibility of decadence. The making of its critical case is interesting, but difficult. One of the conditions of its development is a foreshortening or indeed a...