Book, Baudelaire and modernity[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. “Modernity in Baudelaire is an achievement”, this is Benjamin’s definition. In the first poem of The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire calls on the reader to break apathy. Benjamin points out the method of adventure, the capture of the present, the poet's intention to retaliate against the stunning shocks in the big city. In order not to become an inanimate receiver or an automated actor, Baudelaire exchanges the office for the streets, with great difficulty, physical and spiritual, and moves between two instances, flânerie and fencing. By taking the experience to the collective and voluntary spheres, it interferes with the gap in the distribution between conscious and unconscious. Conjures the dangers of absorption by the murky depth or reflection by the dazzling surface. Before the stimulus burns out as an immediate response, the experience, or is lost as a memory that is difficult to access, inserts poems, counterattacks, in the interval space. The modus is in verse: “stumbling over words like on the sidewalk”. It is total exposure to the present, with an alert mind and body, and full understanding that it is not a natural process: “This is the nature of the experience to which Baudelaire attributed the importance of an experience. He set the price at which one could acquire the sensation of modernity: the destruction of the aura in the experience of shock.” Beatriz de Almeida Magalhães