Historical Time, Cultural Time, and Biological Time in Baudelaire

Abstract

Baudelaire’s poetics of modernity is the expression of a historical consciousness: beauty is composed of “an eternal, invariable element” and of “a relative, circumstantial element” (Le Peintre de la vie moderne). In Baudelaire’s poetic texts, the duality of beauty, pertaining to a historical order of time, is realized by a tension between two other orders of time, namely the order of biological time, which implies that humans are mortal, and the order of cultural time, whose function is to transcend individual death. This contribution analyses the interrelations between these three orders of time.