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Abstract

One challenge for the humanities is to articulate subjectivities able to reach across national and regional divides without reestablishing the “cosmopolitan” or “ironic” sensibilities at the core of our ideological predicament. This article is such an attempt in a re-reading of Baudelaire, the writer who gave us “modernity” at the same moment he offered us a discourse on the “flâneur.” In such re-reading we answer his call to countersign his text, achieving thus the very subject position he is purportedly describing, in his, and our, search for modernity. While many commentators have suggested the flâneur aristocratically uses the masses as means to enjoyment (purportedly finding cause for this critique in the Baudelairean text itself), we will, in contrast, gesture toward a more fundamental ambiguity surrounding the figure—and modernity itself.

Keywords

flâneur modernity Baudelaire gift cosmopolitanism enjoyment deconstruction

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The Jouissance of the Flâneur: Rewriting Baudelaire and Modernity

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