Aaron Brice Cummings

Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics (eBook, PDF)

Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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? Aaron Brice Cummings argues that Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre turned to the poet of nihilism's abyss because they recognized a fact of cultural history that remains relevant today: until sometime in the 2080s, the literary world will have to confront (even if to deny) the two-century window forecast by Nietzsche as the age of cultural and existential nihilism. Accordingly, the author examines the bitter metaphysics latent in Baudelaire's motifs of the abyss, clocks, brutes, streets, and bored dandies. In so doing, this book confronts the nothingness which modern life encounters in the heart of art, ethics, ideality, time, memory, history, urban life, and religion.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 342
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. September 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798216251705
• Artikelnr.: 74834570

Autorenporträt

Aaron Brice Cummings is adjunct instructor of history at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations in Citations
Chapter One: Baudelaire the Moralist
Chapter Two: Nietzsche's Problem of Socrates, or the Abyss of Absurdity
Chapter Three: Three Experiences of the Abyss: Fondane, Benjamin, Sartre
Chapter Four: "Le Gouffre" from Pascal to Baudelaire
Chapter Five: Geometric versus Poetic Method, or Baudelaire versus
Descartes
Chapter Six: Fondane and Sartre Listen to the Objections of the Abyss
Chapter Seven: Cultural Nihilism: The Transvaluation of Experience
Chapter Eight: Of Turtles, Dogs, and Dandies: Metaphors for Splenetic,
Poetic Trauma
Chapter Nine: Existential Failure: From Kierkegaard to Baudelaire
Chapter Ten: Restoring Memory to Experience: From Baudelaire to Bergson
Chapter Eleven: Repetition and Recurrence: The Meaning of a Moment
Chapter Twelve: Materialities of Urban Nihilism in Baudelaire's Paris
Chapter Thirteen: Ennui: The Religious Experience of Modernity
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author