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Baudelaire and the Trauma of Modernity

shock”¹ challenges traditional views of history as linear progres-sion and of consciousness as a fixed category. This Baudelaire is not a rhetorical conspirator so much as a “traumatophile” whose poetry conveys the shocks and contradictions of urban life.

Despite its apparent historical grounding, Benjamin’s account of the shock experience opens up a fundamental instability in its referential frame, an instability endemic to the psychoanalytic definition of trauma. When discussing Baudelaire’s representa-tion of the shock experience in the city, Benjamin tums to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and its separation of consciousness from memory. For Freud, consciousness and memory belong to separate systems of experience: excitatory processes leave behind traces that found the basis of memory without necessarily having entered into consciousness.² Consciousness protects the organism from the overwhelming stimuli of external reality by “parrying” or defending itself against them. Once parried, the shock is given the weight and temporal position of a lived experi-ence and thus incorporated—in mastered form—as a conscious souvenir.³ The subjectivity that emerges out of the shocks of

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1

   Walter Benjamin. “On Sonie Motifs in Baudelaire’'. Illuminations, trąd. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 194.

2

   “On the basis of impressions derived from our psychoanalytic experience, we assume that all excitatory processes that occur in the other systems (ie., other than consciousness) leave permanent traces behind in them which form the foundation of memory. Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which leff them behind was one which never entered consciousness”. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trąd. James Strachey (New York et Londres: Norton, 1961), 27.

3

   “That the shock is thus cushioned, parried by consciousness, would lend the incident that occasions it the character of having been lifted in the strict sense. If it were incorporated directly into the registry of conscious memory, it would sterilize this incident for poetic experience” (Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 162).