The Jewish Baudelaire: History Suspended Across the Abyss, from Walter Benjamin to Benjamin Fondane

• In Event: Self & Other: Thought, Theology, Art

Abstract

This paper examines two Jewish readings of temporality in the poetry of French symbolist Baudelaire, from German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin and Romanian Jewish writer Benjamin Fondane. While both began from the assumption, informed by traumatic encounters with the fascism that claimed both their lives, that teleological, linear models of historical progress had collapsed in interwar Europe, they found in Baudelaire divergent responses to this crisis of historicism.

Benjamin’s theologically inflected Marxism retained elements of a Jewish messianic pessimism about historical progress, viewing the messianic end to history as dialectically linked to the traumas of the present. This required a radically new model of temporality and the modern, which Benjamin found in Baudelaire, through the poet’s anachronistic, outdated lyrical reactions to the shock and trauma brought about by the disjointed urban landscape.

The paper then turns to lesser-known Fondane, fellow Jewish expatriate who read Baudelaire in the 1930’s before being gassed at Auschwitz in 1944, whose readings were likewise informed by Kabbalistic protests against Jewish exile and powerlessness. Fondane’s Baudelaire rejects all soteriology, offering only a model for how the individual may live within a history that culminates in no redemption. Fondane sees Baudelaire as aligned with the most nihilistic elements of Kabbalah, as both see the abyss (gouffre) beneath the world as negating all soteriological schemas dependent upon a grand metaphysical idea underlying history. Against the temptation of a dialectical logic of history, which forgets that “the contraries that it posits, surpasses, and negates are not just simple and ‘convenient’ abstractions but individual humans made of flesh and blood,” Fondane holds out the existential revolt of the individual standing in metaphysical exile from all false synthesis, a metaphysical exile for which the historical exile of the Jewish people serves as a metonymy.

Benjamin and Fondane’s competing readings of Baudelaire may be read as emblematic of competing reactions to the crisis of historicism. The paper concludes that if discursive philosophy has collapsed in the face of the Holocaust that claimed the lives of both thinkers, perhaps turning to literature offers the only path forward for the modern Jewish intellectual.

Author

• Joel Swanson, Sarah Lawrence College