Baudelaire Contra Benjamin: A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism(Politics, Literature, & Film)

About the Book

This book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. More broadly, it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure. Cristaudo and Beibei argue that Baudelaire was not mistaken in refusing to subject aesthetics to morality and politics. Baudelaire’s refusal was based on the recognition that existential matters, such as sickness, evil, death, sexual longing, melancholy, and beauty itself—all themes at the center of his poetry—are by nature intrinsically supra-political. By contrast, Benjamin’s faith in political redemption, while breaking with the enlightenment’s faith in progress, nevertheless conforms to another core element of faith of the enlightenment, via faith in the ability of morals and politics to liberate humanity. The authors make the case that Benjamin’s understanding of politics is severely deficient because it is not sufficiently versed in an understanding of economics or the nature of class interests, and that Marx’s own theory of economics is fundamentally deficient and creates an insurmountable problem for those deferring to a future industrial society free from capitalism.

Table of Contents:

Chapter One Political and Artistic Divides in Baudelaire.

Chapter Two The Diabolical Character of Modern Political Redemption.

Chapter Three Benjamin’s Politicized Aesthetics.

Chapter Four The God’s Eye View of the Historical Materialist.

Chapter Five Paris, Melancholy and Phantasmagoria: Economic Determinations or a Human Soul-scape?

Chapter Six Flâneurs – Baudelaire’s Urban Self-Makers, Benjamin’s Accomplices of Commodity Capitalism, and Redeeming Rag-pickers.

Chapter Seven Baudelaire’s “Depraved” View of Women and Benjamin’s Redemption of Commodified Fallen Women.

About the Author :

Beibei Guan assistant professor of English at Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen.

Wayne Cristaudo is professor of political science at Charles Darwin University.

Review :
The authors show how the politicized approach to literature that dominates the academy today, bolstered by Walter Benjamin as tutelary genius, strips the mind and heart of their deepest and most necessary resources (starting from empathy) for understanding literature and human affairs in general. Unquestioning belief in one’s own idea of what is right – in a political ideology rather than in humanity and its unfathomable complexity – demonstrably leads to the gulags and genocides that have blighted contemporary history since Benjamin. On the basis of a deeper understanding of the workings of politics in history, grounded on analyses by Weber and Tocqueville rather than on slogans taken from Marx, this book pleads for restoring to their place of honor poetic insight and aesthetic vision, which have been tragically forsaken for political ideology in so much contemporary criticism. The book has a sharp, specific, and topical focus in diagnosing Benjamin’s (mis)reading of Baudelaire, but it also has broad scope and relevance in touching the nerve of what is vitiating literary studies and the humanities across disciplines in their present crisis. To present a reading that goes against the grain of the critical orthodoxies relating to any major figure is a brave undertaking indeed, so to do this in relation to not one but two such figures in a single volume is surely foolhardy to say the least. When each of those figures has transmogrified into something resembling a brand behind which there lays an entire scholarly industry invested in the maintenance of that brand identity, such an endeavour is tantamount to a declaration of war. Yet such is precisely the project of Guan and Cristaudo here, knowing that such a move is justified only if the stakes are high enough. Their argument is as compelling as its ramifications are damning for any who tow the party line in relation to Baudelaire or Benjamin and crucial for anyone wishing to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Walter Benjamin sees Charles Baudelaire as a touchstone for the zeitgeist of Paris during the rise of the bourgeoisie, and indeed Benjamin strives to recruit the poetry of Baudelaire to the Marxist project of revolutionary transformation. Beibei Guan and Wayne Cristaudo, however, demonstrate that the “artistic” sovereignty in the aesthetic values of Baudelaire might, in fact, resist such “priestly” recruitment to the political causes of Benjamin. Guan and Cristaudo offer their own spirited defenses of l’art pour l’art, and they rescue Baudelaire from the apparatchiks of literature, arguing that Benjamin has spawned an academic industry of critics, who assess the merits of poetry, based upon its devotion to an agenda of popular, leftist salvation (even though much of poetry argues for the “evil” of its own freedom in defiance of such crusades). Guan and Cristaudo strive to give poetry back to the poets, like me. In this book, Guan and Cristaudo undertook a heroic effort in critiquing and exposing the shortcomings of one of the patron saints of modern critical literary criticism. And in reading Guan and Cristaudo, as in reading all good literary critics, we might also grow in our understanding of Baudelaire and Benjamin. Baudelaire Contra Benjamin is most warmly to be welcomed as an incisive and nuanced exploration of Baudelaire’s work, one with the ultimate aim of rescuing it from the long shadow of Benjamin’s ideological reductionism. With time the book may also go some way to liberating Benjamin from the intellectual straitjacket placed on him by his legions of uncritical admirers.