The poetic thinking of energy in Charles Baudelaire

Abstract

I propose, in this brief reflection, that a good part of the unavoidably current character of Charles Baudelaire’s work is due to a singular association made by the French poet between the themes of energy and poetry, projected in the tension between social inclusion and exclusion. Some poems from Les fleurs du mal will be put in dialogue with proposals by Georges Bataille, in order to explore this vision of energy that indicates, through the mise en scène of expenditure and its consequences, the importance of reflection on potency as a necessary step to the deconstruction of the “official” vision of the poet-in-society, herald of the values of the expanding capitalist productivity mentality. This deconstruction, articulated through dialectical images with force of present, reveals its relevance to our recent present, when work in the field of the so-called humanities, which includes literature and its surroundings, is faced with the periodic return of conservative flows and with the devaluation of its results in the face of a unilaterally determined notion of productivity from the point of view of the grossest accumulation.