By Aaron Brice Cummings
Publisher: Lexington Books / Bloomington Academic
Date: 09/12/2024
Description:
Baudelaire’s Bitter Metaphysics: Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre reconstructs a philosophical trialogue that might have been expected to take place between Benjamin Fondane, Walter Benjamin, and Jean-Paul Sartre over their philosophical readings of Charles Baudelaire, an exchange preempted by the untimely deaths of two of the interlocutors during the Nazi holocaust. Why did three of Europe’s sharpest minds respond to the terror of 1933-45 by writing about a long-dead poet? Cummings argues that Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre turned to the poet of nihilism’s abyss because they recognized that philosophy continues to confront (even if to deny) the two-century window forecast by Nietzsche as the age of cultural and existential nihilism. By examining the bitter metaphysics latent in Baudelaire’s motifs of the abyss, clocks, brutes, streets, and bored dandies, this book follows poetry into an apparent void in (post-? meta-?) modern aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology.