Overview

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaire’s oeuvre – including verse poems, prose poems, and critical writings – in dialogue with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, for whom the autonomy of the artwork critically resists any attempt to view it merely as a product of its socio-historic context. Joseph Acquisto analyzes Baudelairean duality through the lens of dissonance, arguing that the figure of the subject as a “dissonant chord” provides a gateway to Baudelaire’s reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaire’s dissonance depends on older models of subjectivity in order to define itself via the negation of romantic conceptions of a unified lyric subject in favor of one constituted simultaneously as subject and object. This new understanding of subjectivity reconfigures our relationship to the work of art, which will always surpass conceptual attempts to know it fully. Acquisto offers a fresh take on some familiar themes in Baudelaire’s work. Dissonant subjectivity in Baudelaire, rather than cancelling esthetic transcendence, points to a different way forward that depends on a new and dialectical relation of subject and object.

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In this masterful book, Acquisto provides an original perspective on the thought of both Baudelaire and Adorno. Focusing on the notion of esthetic dissonance, Acquisto draws on the resonances between Adorno’s criticism and Baudelaire’s poetic practice, forming a constellation that enriches our understanding of art, music, politics, subjectivity, and modernity. * Patrick Bray, Professor of French Literature, University College London, UK * Effecting a rigorous and sophisticated encounter of Adorno and Baudelaire, Acquisto demonstrates convincingly the potential of philosophically informed readings of poetry in general and of Baudelaire in particular. With careful and sustained attention to configurations of subjectivity in dissonance, fluidity and incompletion, and introducing, through the question of dissonance, complications to such concepts as totality, unity, and transcendence, Acquisto raises both poetry and philosophy to higher powers of analysis and interpretation and offers some remarkably original readings of some of Baudelaire’s most fraught and complex poetic works: 'A Celle qui est trop gaie,' 'Le Rêve d’un Curieux,' 'Le Crépuscule du Soir,' 'L’Héautontimouroménos' 'Le Confiteor de l’Artiste' and many others. A brilliant and compelling study. * Alain Toumayan, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA *

In this masterful book, Acquisto provides an original perspective on the thought of both Baudelaire and Adorno. Focusing on the notion of esthetic dissonance, Acquisto draws on the resonances between Adorno's criticism and Baudelaire's poetic practice, forming a constellation that enriches our understanding of art, music, politics, subjectivity, and modernity. * Patrick Bray, Professor of French Literature, University College London, UK *

Author Information

Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France (2021), Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance (Bloomsbury, 2019), Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche (2017), The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury, 2015), and French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (2006).

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