Introduction 1. Saving Nothing: Baudelaire, Benjamin, de Man, Agamben 2. Veil over the Abyss: From Walter Benjamin to Benjamin Fondane 3. Coming to an End: Agamben and Baudelaire 4. The Order of Impossible Salvation: From Baudelaire to Cioran 5. The Eternal Fall: Cioran 6. Asoteriological Ethics: Baudelaire, Audi, Nancy Bibliography Index
Analyzes the literary and philosophical consequences of refusing a notion of salvation as a theological, esthetic, or political framework in authors and critical theorists from Baudelaire to our own day.
Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author of Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature (2012) and French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (2006) and the editor of Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (2013).
Acquisto presents Baudelaire's poetry as having been formed 'both
by and against Christianity.' Baudelaire is both a modern and a
theological. Although Christian tenets are present in his writing,
he views the redemption as impossible. This rejection of a
traditional aspect of Christian philosophy, Acquisto argues,
demonstrates Baudelaire's acceptance of a productive nihilism in
which a shared human experience is possible without redemption ...
This is a challenging, thoughtful work, and Acquisto makes a
convincing case for the shared experience of these authors outside
faith and linear time. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- F. E. Nicholson,
North Central College * CHOICE *
This is a powerful, complex, and fascinating book ... Acquisto is
mentally agile and writes consistently and with clarity about
thinkers who are themselves less engaging and rarely as clear. The
great success of the book is the way in which he makes a range of
very different voices speak across the centuries and the decades in
a dialogical feast of commentary and counter-commentary. * French
Studies *
Joseph Acquisto is a leader in the new generation of interpreters
for whom poetry and philosophy, together, provide foundational
ethical and religious insights both beyond and against traditional
theology or faith. Baudelaire's recognition of impossible
redemption is the germinal insight. Surpassing Walter Benjamin's
doxa of modernity and Paul de Man's deconstruction, Acquisto
lucidly applies Benjamin Fondane's interpretation of Baudelaire's
abyss and post-theological reflections of Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc
Nancy, and others, to map out positive meaning that can be achieved
by facing despair, beyond nihilism, as exemplified by Emil Cioran.
Acquisto provides compelling insights into esthetics and ethics,
despair and transcendence, nihilism and survival. Original and
truly interdisciplinary. * Edward K. Kaplan, Kevy and Hortense
Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities, Brandeis University, USA,
and author of Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical,
and the Religious in "The Parisian Prowler" and Spiritual Radical:
Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1973 *
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