Baudelaire by Walter Benjamin (review)

In the early 1980s, while working on Georges Bataille’s correspondence, the then relatively unknown scholar Giorgio Agamben discovered among the documents Walter Benjamin’s notes for a book on Baudelaire. In a new volume published by La Fabrique, Agamben and his fellow editors Barbara Chitussi and Clemens-Carl Härle reproduce all of these notes and reconstruct meticulously Benjamin’s work on what was supposed to become his opus magnum. During his work on the arcades project, Benjamin’s attention had begun to shift from the broad panorama of the capital of the nineteenth century to what would become a “model in miniature” for that project: his book on Baudelaire. Though Benjamin mentioned his ideas repeatedly in his letters to his friends, the book itself never came to see daylight. And for a long time there were not enough notes and indications for a reconstruction of Benjamin’s plan—not, that is, until Agamben discovered these precious schemes and lists of subjects to be treated in the Baudelaire-Buch.

Still, it would take thirty years before the reconstruction of the book, which in a way is also a reconstruction of the final years of Benjamin’s life, would appear in print; first in Italian and then in French translation. It was, instead, the equally extensive yet more lapidary set of notes that under the title of Das Passagen-Werk would come to define interpretations of Benjamin’s thought. For some, this collection of notes on the nineteenth-century’s arcades represents, in all its fragmentariness, the epitome of Benjamin’s epistemology. According to others, it represents nothing but a vast archive of notes, waiting to be worked into a more readable narrative. With the publication of the new Baudelaire-Buch, this question may finally be solved in favor of the latter. Baudelaire may, indeed, be taken as the very synthesis of Benjamin’s thought: it contains all of Benjamin’s major theoretical ideas, ranging from his early ideas on language and allegory up to ideas on technical reproducibility, aura, collecting, and history as Rettung.

As Benjamin expressed repeatedly, the book was supposed to consist of three parts. The first part would treat Baudelaire isolated from the historical context. Particular attention would be paid to the interpretation of the role of allegory in Les Fleurs du Mal. The second part would treat Baudelaire in virtual as well as real relations with his contemporaries (think: Poe, Meryon, Hugo). The third part would place Baudelaire in a historical configuration with Nietzsche and Blanqui. It would thus serve as a philosophical antidote to the more philologically inspired second part. With a typical Agambenian gesture the “narrative” of the book unfolds between two “thresholds”: it opens with a note on aura and ends with a few new theses on the concept of history.

What starts with lists of questions, topics, and excerpts from letters culminates after several hundreds of pages of notes and citations stemming from the Passagen-Werk into two well-known texts: “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire” and “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire.” The reader is able to follow the genesis of these essays word for word. Before these two essays, however, the editors lucidly chose to insert another text that has proven to be as enigmatic as difficult to read. “Zentralpark,” as the editors maintain, was never intended for publication. In fact, the whole text of “Zentralpark” seems to be a first stage in which passages from the Passagen convolutes are edited and turned into fragments for a larger text, namely “Das Paris.” The reconstruction in chronological order thus allows one to grasp where Benjamin’s ideas are coming from and where they are going. Furthermore, it allows for a different estimation of the relevance of well-known texts in Benjamin’s Parisian years.

With this in mind, it is interesting to note that Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s as a poetry of Chockabwehr was indeed...