Our working hypothesis is as follows : under the cover of a pact of falsehood and play, Baudelaire implements the passage toward a poetry which, in order to deeply question itself henceforth with regard to its groundings, referents, metamorphoses, essence, and necessity, requires and incessantly engenders its own center-of-truth beyond any system. Thus, as distinct from his predecessors, the poet no longer aims his attention, efforts, doubts and suspicions at the readably and socially constructive import of what he writes, but at the relation between a poetic or artistic appearance that holds together (the figure, the image) and the inmost depths of humankind, that is, a certain dejection or collapse. The esthetic and moral perspective we seek thus to define in Baudelaire’s work questions the connection between the word and the person emitting it on the one hand, and those receiving it on the other: hence the calling into question of language as an actual vector as well as the anxious research that accompanies it are posed. At once born of and already distanced from Romanticism, this new focus and reflexivity free, exacerbate, and threaten the poetical: thus, by way of the motifs of hypocrisy, lying, the mask and art itself, the poet challenges this ideal in the very process of initiating it, all the while living a veritable poetic passion in which he invests and consumes himself, body and mind, not without a form of integrity. Such are the paradoxes envisioned. In what terms can one speak of poetic truth in Baudelaire’s work? Does he extract the idea of it toward an unfolding and assuredly fertile posterity or else does he stifle the upsurge with his characteristic clairvoyance ? Can such lucidity work against the authenticity of the artistic gesture? Where, when, and how does trueness come into play in a poem ? Why and with a view to what? In what manner does the work, by way of this strand, find a particularly illuminating coherence as initiator of modernity? But equally, within what limits? How, why, can and must poetic meaning escape dialectical concerns and hence deceive, likewise, all travesties and systematic adherence — and especially faithfulness to all obvious facts of solemnity? It’s about attempting to understand in what way the poetical, starting with Baudelaire, and as a result of his work, within the transfers and substitutions it presupposes, in its unprovability and its mystification, but equally in the rigor that characterizes it, may be placed in relation with the true, not according to constant external and pre-existing systems, but according to access-ways, perspectives interacting with creative speech, namely with the experience of inspiration, composition, and the reading of symbols. Since such a truth obviously cannot be posed as a theorem or axiom positively proven and applicable, it will therefore not be envisioned through a precise theoretical and philosophical prism, but rather confronted methodically with the literariness of the text, with the poem, in that it presents and initiates an intrinsic form of existence whose originality and paradoxy would be precisely not to be positive, in the sense of supported by anything pre-judged whatsoever, or tending by design toward any prescribed objective.
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