Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaire's oeuvre -
including verse poems, prose poems, and critical writings - in dialogue
with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, for whom the autonomy of
the artwork critically resists any attempt to view it merely as a
product of its socio-historic context. Joseph Acquisto analyzes
Baudelairean duality through the lens of dissonance, arguing that the
figure of the subject as a "dissonant chord" provides a gateway to
Baudelaire's reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both
esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaire's
dissonance depends on older models of subjectivity in order to define
itself via the negation of romantic conceptions of a unified lyric
subject in favor of one constituted simultaneously as subject and
object.
This new understanding of subjectivity reconfigures our relationship to
the work of art, which will always surpass conceptual attempts to know
it fully. Acquisto offers a fresh take on some familiar themes in
Baudelaire's work. Dissonant subjectivity in Baudelaire, rather than
cancelling esthetic transcendence, points to a different way forward
that depends on a new and dialectical relation of subject and object.
