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Baudelaire and the Trauma of Modernity

unravels knowledge, identity, and meaning: “...absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself”.¹²

Although working within an epistemological paradigm of blindness and insight rather than a psychoanalytic model of repression and repetition, de Man’s reading offers striking paral-lels between irony and trauma as modes of knowing and experi-ence. Irony locks the text into an infinitely reiterated trauma from which there is no exit. Its self-reflexive eddies foreclose the pas-sage ffom a text to extratextual determinations such as intersub-jective relations, historical conditions, or materiał reality. Both trauma and irony are analytic structures of displacement, repetition and undecidability that disclose a loss of origins and a disso-lution of reference. Both modes open up a vision of history as figural and recalcitrant to temporal emplotment rather than as a transparent, developmental narrative.

The interpretive tradition that has addressed Baudelaire’s modernity in terms of trauma is thus considerable. In the after-math of deconstruction, influential critics such as Shoshana Felman, Leo Bersani, Cathy Caruth, and Kevin Newmark have retumed to Benjamin’s theory of the shock experience through a de Manian reflection on language.¹³ In keeping with deconstruction’s focus on rhetoric, these readings have tended to introject the

¹²    Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1977), 216.

¹³    Leo Bersani, for instance, rereads Freud’s theory of narcissism to argue that Baudelaire’s poetry conveys the self-shattering jouissance of primary narcissism, through which the ego itself is formed. See Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1981) and The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harward UP, 1990), 47-102.

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