Corpse Without Organs

Corpse without Organs: A Schizoanalytic Deconstruction of Baudelairean Aesthetics

Brian Rose HUM324

Davis 19 Nov 2009

Corpse Without Organs: A Schizoanalytic Deconstruction of Baudelairean Aesthetics

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Beyond all things, the artist yearns to escape the construction of identity – to leap

outside the limiting chamber of the organism. One finds this drive manifest itself in the

means by which we contextualize our desire – through drug use, mystical fervor,

madness, suicide. To escape territorialized construction, the Body-without-Organs

ultimately asserts itself through a disassociation of consciousness and body in what is

termed ‘death’. Death therefore represents the penultimate consequence of desire – its

quintessence, its apex, its limiting variable. Schizoanalytic deconstruction of Charles

Baudelaire’s poetry reveals it as the projection of a Body without Organs – an ascending

desire perpetuated to this most literal extremity, as exemplified by a thematic

disassociation or retreat from modernity (Romanticism) and ultimately a retreat from

himself (anti-Romanticism) which permeates all modes of expression that Baudelaire

utilizes as a vehicle to convey his aesthetic force. This paper will seek to underwrite the

line Baudelaire traces between Romanticism and Anti-Romanticism through this

aesthetic activity of escape; this critique will be accomplished a schizoanalytic

deconstruction of this escape insofar as it constitutes a spatio-temporal disruption within

the general themes of sex, drugs, imagination and, ultimately, death.

Baudelaire associates a plethora of thematic imagery with imagery of horror

primarily because these themes constitute a fulfillment (or termination) of desire, thus

imposing limit and containing him within a fixed locality. This principle of aesthetic

association (transgression of boundaries) thus constitutes a response to a paradigm of

locality. Principles of aesthetic association thus perpetuate themselves toward the abstract

multiplicity of warped or deferred desires (as in necrophilia, drug usage, suicide, etc.), all


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of which assume a relation of escape from the imposition of limits on these desires (i.e.

an immanent resistance against a transcendental ideology of pursuit).

Baudelaire associates sex (and, consequently, women) with imagery of horror

because sex constitutes a fulfillment of desire, and thus imposes a limit and contains him

within a fixed locality. This principle of aesthetic association (transgression of

boundaries) thus constitutes a response to principles of locality and an ironic parallel to

the existential disassociation (dissolution of boundaries) of the artist. This transgression

of boundaries represents a schizoanalytic multiplication of subjectivity that produces

beauty itself; Eugene Holland states, “The decoded referentiality of metonymic allegory

frees or strips real things of preconceived value in order to make them more beautiful, or

less hideous: what counts is not their ‘essence’ but the degree to which their beauty can

be enhanced poetically and these effects of beauty multiplied indefinitely.”1

There is a tension that operates within the text of Baudelaire that subverts all

aesthetic conceptualizations of the body that he provides. In his analysis of Baudelairean

theatrical texts, Roland Barthes maintains:

Baudelaire had an acute sense of the most secret and also the most disturbing theatricality, the kind that puts the actor at the center of the theatrical prodigy and constitutes the theatre as the site of an ultraincarnation, in which the body is double, at once a living body deriving from a trivial nature, and an emphatic, formal body, frozen by its function as an artificial object.2

Barthes’ ‘ultraincarnation’ articulates obvious parallels with Deleuze and Guattari’s

concept of the Body without Organs – the desiring limit or plane of consistency upon

which subjective desire is structuralized into organs. In a review of Lisa Downing’s book

Desiring the Dead, Peter Cryle reports the possibility of necrophilia as serving as a self- 1 Eugene W. Holland, Baudelaire and schizoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67. 2 Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, Critical Essays (Northwestern University Press, 1972), 28.


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reflective fetishism for Baudelaire; Cryle writes, “Downing argues that the 'destructive

erotic themes' which lie at the heart of necrophilia are turned by Baudelaire, somewhat

paradoxically, to self-representation.” Following Downing, he suggests the ‘real subject’

of Baudelaire’s necrophilia “is the poet himself: 'the beloved is an internalized, highly

idealized object that forms part of the poet's psyche and with which there is strong

identification.’”3

Any given conception of sexuality is predicated upon a genital association, to

which Baudelaire imposes a further association with the vulgarity of the corpse. He

confuses (transgresses) the boundaries of mutilation and copulation so as to underwrite

the vulgarity of structuralized organs – deferring himself instead to the Body without

Organs. Simultaneously he manages to associate revulsion with relation, thereby

disassociating himself from others concurrently as he disassociates himself from himself.

Cryle continues, “Baudelaire borrows the identity of the dead woman, in fact, so as to do

to her ‘what he cannot do to himself’. In necrophiliac representation, Downing suggests,

there is a desire to ‘enjoy a vicarious recognition of one's own death.’”4

In “Le Mort joyeux,” Baudelaire addresses worms as inhabiting an almost sexual

relation to his corpse. He writes:

Ô vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux, Voyez venir à vous un mort libre et joyeux; Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture, À travers ma ruine allez donc sans remords, Et dites-moi s'il est encor quelque torture Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts!5

3 Peter Cryle, “[Review:] Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature by Lisa Downing,” The Modern Language Review 100, no. 2 (April 2005): 506. 4 Ibid. 5 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Oxford University Press, USA, 2008), 142.


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Worms catalyze decay and usher forth deterritorialization through the activity of their

own nourishment. Such nourishment is not static but dynamic insomuch as it constitutes

an insatiable consumption – it disintegrates the subject into its skeletal infrastructure and

then disburses into a stasis until it communicates itself to the dissolution of another

subject.

Holland undertakes an extensive schizoanalytic deconstruction of the section

“Tableaux Parisiens” insomuch as the poems articulate a spatio-temporal representation

of the city in which Baudelaire’s iconic flâneur wanders aimlessly. He identifies, in these

poems, a diurnal and nocturnal cycle that is disrupted by the reincarnating element of the

dawn. He writes, “In the poems of the ‘diurnal’ cycle, the urban flâneur appears lost and

mystified amidst the teeming cityscapes he en-counters, unable to derive stable meaning

from them. In the poems of the ‘nocturnal’ cycle, conversely, the urban night-owl

feverishly evokes scenes of lust and passion in a vain attempt to re-kindle his own world-

weary desire.”6

Victor Brombert undertakes a semiotic deconstruction of the poem “La

Chevelure,” attempting to reconcile Baudelaire’s unique utilization of the French

vernacular in order to aesthetically articulate his project. Brombert writes, “Two striking

features of line 21 cannot be quickly dismissed. The first is the tense of the verb—‘Je

plongerai’: a noteworthy use of the future in an evocative context stressing the past

(‘souvenirs dormant,’ ‘presque défunt’).” Baudelaire thus uses clever linguistic trickery

in order to express love while simultaneously subverting its order; Brombert continues,

“The other, even more remarkable, is the metaphorical inversion ‘amoureuse d’ivresse’

6 Eugene W. Holland, “Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization": From the "Anti-Oedipus" to "A Thousand Plateaus",” SubStance 20, no. 3 (1991): 61.


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which reverses the expected order of priorities, making not of love but of intoxication the

ultimate end. The adjectival form ‘amoureuse’ in fact relegates love to a desiderative

attribute.”7 One may thus conceive of Baudelairean sexuality as a vehicle into other

deterritorializing activities (i.e. death and intoxication, as we have demonstrated

previously).

If, as Brombert suggests, Baudelaire is subverting the order of sex and love in

service to intoxication, we find that sexual deterritorialization ultimately becomes an

unsatisfactory vehicle for Baudelairean escape, that he must propel himself to new

heights with a feverish thirst of the soul. Brombert writes:

[T]he specific inebriation is linked to a figurative notion of drinking: it is the soul that wants to drink (line 16)—a notion that is delicately summed un [sic] in the concluding line, when the verb humer, applied not to a banal libation but to the very essence of memory, serves as an intermediary between the image of drinking and the more abstract one of breathing in. Baudelaire focusses [sic] immediately on the man who drinks genius (“l’homme qui boit du genie”), will of necessity make a further link between intoxication and the experience (or activity) of art.8

In the essay On Wine and Hashish, Baudelaire explores the effects of intoxication, and

ultimately arrives at a notion of drugs that transcends mere modernity. Modernity could

be said to conceive intoxicants as precluding innate potentiality through their subversion

of rationality; and while Baudelaire does recognize this trait, he does not recognize it as

the ultimate failing of intoxication as a form of experience. He suggests an almost

schizophrenic valuation in the subversion of the rational faculty.

If intoxicants paralyze rational understanding, what is the source of value they

possess within the context of human experience? “The subtitle of ‘Du Vin et du hashish’

7 Victor Brombert, “The Will to Ecstasy: The Example of Baudelaire's "La Chevelure",” Yale French Studies, no. 50 (1974): 55. 8 Ibid., 56.


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refers to intoxicants as ‘moyens de multiplication de l’indivìdualité’: multiplication, but

also dispersal, evanescence.”9 Intoxicants render the subject ambiguous, simultaneously

multiplying it and evaporating it. Baudelaire himself writes:

From time to time your personality disappears. The objectivity that makes certain poets pantheists and produces great actors becomes so profound that you merge with external beings. You are turned into a tree soughing in the wind and spinning out vegetable melodies to nature. Now you are hovering in the azure heights of an immensely vaster sky. All pain has disappeared. You are no longer struggling, you are carried away, you are no longer master of yourself and you are not in the least bothered by this.10

Art reflects the tension between the constitution of order and the deconstitution of

dissolved boundaries of selfhood. Brombert maintains, “[T]he lyric mode exists for

Baudelaire in terms of a structured depersonalization: the poem functions as a specular

system allowing for the subject to disappear in the object.”11 This notion is to be found as

Baudelaire echoes the words of the philosopher Barbereau, writing, “The great poets, the

philosophers, the prophets are beings who by the pure and free exercise of their will reach

a state in which they are once cause and effect, subject and object, hypnotist and

sleepwalker.”12 As Paul de Man writes, “The distinctive character of literature thus

becomes manifest as an inability to escape from a condition that is felt to be

unbearable.”13

Imposing such ambiguity upon the constructed subject entails immense

consequence for that subject insomuch as it an entity with will. What is to be said of

intoxication as it pertains to the subjective will? Brombert concludes that the “will is

lessened (‘amoindrie’); the subject becomes unfit for action (‘incapable de travail et

9 Ibid., 57. 10 Charles Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish (Hesperus Press, 2009), 22. 11 Brombert, “The Will to Ecstasy,” 58. 12 Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish, 28. 13 Paul De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Daedalus 99, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 400.


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d’énergie dans l’action’); time disappears; the mind suffers from inexorable

‘évaporation.’”14 Writing of the experience of smoking hashish, Baudelaire scintillates as

he writes: “Before long the idea of time will completely vanish. From time to time a short

period of awakening still intervenes. It seems to you that you are emerging from a

wonderful, fantastic world.”15

Intoxication, in a Baudelairean context, is precursory to imagination. By an

exploration of imagination I seek to be inclusive to memory and artistic imagery, as both

activities constitute some sort of representational ‘imagining’ within the mind. Holland

postulates a new sort of aesthetics that arises in Baudelaire – a schizophiliac aesthetics, if

you will; he writes, “In the modernity that Baudelaire was among the first to diagnose,

value—religious, economic, libidinal, poetic value—does not inhere in objects, but is

subjectively (and even schizophrenically) bestowed.”16

The final poem of Le Fleurs du mal, “Le Voyage,” expresses this aesthetic notion

most diligently. Holland maintains, “Here the blank wall of meaningless experience and

the black hole of tragic subjectivity are both left far behind, as an indeterminate ‘we’ of

collective enunciation embarks on a voyage ‘to plumb the depths of the unknown in

search of the new.’”17 Holland, in his analysis of “Le Voyage,” suggests that the poem

relies upon an “(absent) guarantor or guarantee of stable meaning, its only resource and

solace being the delusion of individual subjectivity.” Considering the implicit

possiblities, he continues:

14 Brombert, “The Will to Ecstasy,” 58-9. 15 Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish, 22. 16 Eugene W. Holland, “A Schizoanalytic Reading of Baudelaire: The Modernist as Postmodernist,” Postmodern Culture 4, no. 1 (1993), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v004/4.1holland.html. 17 Holland, “Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization",” 61.


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Desire is either blocked, as by the meaninglessness of existence in the Sartrean “Absurd,” bouncing off the blank wall back onto the desolate subject; or surrendered, as in the Lacanian metonymy of desire for the lost object, falling into the black hole of tragic subjectivity . . . OR . . . or it refuses both extremes (and the exclusive disjunction promoting them as the only alternatives), re-surfaces from the black hole of subjectivity to inscribe or pierce the blank wall of social existence, forms a rhizome of collective enunciation, criss-crosses the deterritorialized earth on an endless voyage of exploration and discovery.18

Thus Baudelaire, in “Le Voyage,” engages in the dissolution of horizons and underwrites

the futility of the individual subject.

Patrick McHugh articulates Foucault’s ethos of modernity as being derived from

Baudelairean and Kantian roots. McHugh maintains that Baudelaire engages in “a

practice of liberation accomplished not through the free use of reason but through art, not

in the complacent analysis of the transcendental limits to the subject but in the artistic

capacity to transgress subjective limits and create a new subject.”19 Nevertheless,

Baudelaire’s perpetual escape from the territory that confines him is (as Foucault

maintains) self-defeating insomuch as it the territory reproduces itself through his

transgression thereof. McHugh continues:

Baudelaire's analysis of the subject is thoroughly historical, and he conceives liberation as the transgression of the historical limits of subjectivity; but he remains consistent with Kant in that he seeks to establish new limits to subjectivity, a new identity, even if it is not a rationally produced, transcendental and necessary limit but a creative, historical and contingent limit.20

Foucault thus rejects Baudelaire as directly informing his ethos of modernity insomuch as

he maintains that the transvaluation of limits is, for Baudelaire, the reiteration of limits.

18 Ibid., 61-2. 19 Patrick McHugh, “Dialectics, Subjectivity and Foucault's Ethos of Modernity,” boundary 2 16, no. 2/3 (Winter - Spring 1989): 104. 20 Ibid., 105.


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There is indeed a sort of futility portrayed in the act of boundary transgression in

“Le Voyage,” as though imagination and experience both remain insufficient to the

fulfillment of desire that reconstitutes the subjective. Baudelaire himself writes:

Les plus riches cités, les plus grands paysages, Jamais ne contenaient l'attrait mystérieux De ceux que le hasard fait avec les nuages. Et toujours le désir nous rendait soucieux!21

Kaplan comments, “Several voyages verify this double premise: absolute desire feels

infinite in the inner world and helplessly finite in the outside. The poem's eight sections

rehearse several unsuccessful attempts to find ultimate meaning.”22 It is this failure to

derive meaning, however, that Holland posits as evidence of a latent postmodern

Baudelaire. Holland argues, “Deterritorialization becomes absolute and positive only

when the search for meaning is abandoned in favor of experimentation, and when such

experimentation intersects and connects with the experiments of others in a

depersonalized, collective form of enunciation, such as is suggested by the indeterminate

‘we’ of Baudelaire's final ‘Voyage’.”23

Baudelaire’s schizotypal aesthetics are reliant upon immediacy in order to contain

their force. As Paul De Man reports of The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire views the

present as a “constitutive element for all esthetic experience.”24 De Man later continues,

“Baudelaire remains faithful throughout to the seduction of the present; any temporal

awareness is so closely tied for him to the present moment that memory comes to apply

more naturally to the present than it does to the past.”25 Memory imposes a linear

21 Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 286. 22 Edward K. Kaplan, “The Courage of Baudelaire and Rimbaud: The Anxiety of Faith,” The French Review 52, no. 2 (December 1978): 296-7. 23 Holland, “Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization",” 62. 24 Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 396. 25 Ibid.


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consistency upon the subject’s being by delivering the subject into a locality which is

simultaneously interior (cerebral) and exterior (event). Baudelaire combats this

consistency with the conceptualization of memory as remorse, as consuming the subject

within the present – remorse being the refusal of the cerebral event thus abstracting the

interior and exterior within a unilateral framework of denial.

Baudelaire appropriates remorse within the image of the corpse through the

deterritorializing element of worms, insomuch as the image informs the locality of

memory with a force of deterritorialization. The worms are an eternal entity (event)

which consume from a position of interiority outward, digesting all ordered form and

metabolizing it into the abstraction of desire. The intensity of this process lends itself to a

nihilification – a self-destruction, a becoming-into-nothingness.

Baudelaire, as poet, bears witness to the world and imbues himself within it (and

vice versa) through complex modes of expression. In bearing witness to the world, he

likewise bears witness to Modernity and rejects it via Romantic modes of expression.

Holland argues:

Taken to the extreme, each of these tendencies courts serious danger: desperate interpretation bounces off the blank wall of the meaningless city, relegating the flâneur to private interiority (“Le Cygne,” “Les Sept Vieillards”). Monadic subjectivity itself, in turn, disappears into the black hole of hopeless desire whose only true end is death (“Danse Macabre,” “Rêve Parisien”).26

Romanticism provides a vehicle by which he may escape and disassociate himself from

Modernity, ultimately arriving at the Self (the Romantic centrality). In horror at being

delivered unto yet another zone of territoriality, he seeks escape from himself through the

perpetuation of desire as a self-deterritorializing catalyst.

26 Holland, “Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization",” 61.


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Such an exponential retreat compels him into a space of abstract nihilification, a

transient netherworld of amorphous desire emerging through imagination and memory,

yet punctuated by the insistence of limit. Deleuze and Guattari write:

There is no longer a Self that feels, acts, and recalls; there is ‘a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist’ that has affects and experiences movements, speeds. . . . For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: ‘The tonal must be protected at any cost.’27

Baudelaire is therefore left only with an obsessive self-destruction, and it is this obsessive

intensity that syllogistically propels him from a Romantic escape into an anti-Romantic

escape. The confluence of this syllogistic retreat, nevertheless, is revealed as an impotent

solipsism, once the pursuit of escape cycles inward upon itself in an act of proto-

postmodern self-recognition (a recognition that is also a destruction). Above all else,

Baudelaire rejects Modernity as well as any fixed rejection thereof, and in this sense one

may see him as heralding the genesis of postmodern relativism.

Kaplan identifies Baudelaire’s section on death as pursuing a notion thereof into

the notion of rebirth – it is the final limit that desire may reach, and somehow Baudelaire

still maintains hope of transcending that boundary. Kaplan writes:

The final section, “La Mort,” accepts finitude as a radical rebirth. The liminary poem of Les Fleurs du mal, “Au lecteur,” represented ennui as leading to self-annihilation (“Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka,”). The final poem reinterprets “La Mort” and asserts that ennui, when resolved courageously, becomes the source of true creativity. The poet lucidly faces the death of his absolute wishes, and despite the impossible, or perhaps because of it, he continues to seek, to discover, and to write.28

27 Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 180. 28 Kaplan, “The Courage of Baudelaire and Rimbaud,” 296.


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It is the notion of death, that final assurance of territoriality that is universally

inescapable, which provides Baudelaire with the meaning he sought to forego for

experimentation – thus what he avoids (the territorialization of desire) is ultimately that

with which he is most preoccupied.

In the article Baudelaire’s Philosophy of Dandyism, S.A. Rhodes quotes an 1860

letter from Baudelaire to his mother:

“It will be my farewell to modern stupidity,” he writes. “Perhaps, I shall be under stood then. I shall express patiently all the reasons for my loathing of the human race. And when I shall be absolutely free, I shall seek a religion (Thibetan or Japanese), for I despise the Koran too much; and at the moment of death, I shall abjure it in turn, in order to show my utter disgust with human folly.”29

This, perhaps better than anything, articulates how conceptions of Baudelaire as

Romantic, Modernist, etcetera are all somehow incomplete. For Baudelaire, it is not so

much about being delivered unto a locality as it is about a perpetual escape and

consequential reterritorialization – for it is only insomuch as the territory is reconstituted

that it may once again be escaped. He reiterates this escape aesthetically through the

themes of sex, intoxication, imagination, and death. It is this perpetual motion, this

immediacy, that allows us to justify this postmodern reading of Baudelaire; for he seems

to earn the prefix ‘post-’ through his continual rejection of structures.

29 S. A. Rhodes, “Baudelaire's Philosophy of Dandyism,” The Sewanee Review 36, no. 4 (October 1928): 388.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland, and Richard Howard. Critical Essays. Northwestern University Press,

1972. Baudelaire, Charles. On Wine and Hashish. Hesperus Press, 2009. ———. The Flowers of Evil. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008. Brombert, Victor. “The Will to Ecstasy: The Example of Baudelaire's "La Chevelure".”

Yale French Studies, no. 50 (1974): 54-63. Cryle, Peter. “[Review:] Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French

Literature by Lisa Downing.” The Modern Language Review 100, no. 2 (April 2005): 505-506.

Deleuze, Gilles, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Holland, Eugene W. “A Schizoanalytic Reading of Baudelaire: The Modernist as

Postmodernist.” Postmodern Culture 4, no. 1 (1993). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v004/4.1holland.html.

———. Baudelaire and schizoanalysis. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. “Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization": From the "Anti-Oedipus" to "A

Thousand Plateaus".” SubStance 20, no. 3 (1991): 55-65. Kaplan, Edward K. “The Courage of Baudelaire and Rimbaud: The Anxiety of Faith.”

The French Review 52, no. 2 (December 1978): 294-306. Man, Paul De. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Daedalus 99, no. 2 (Spring

1970): 384-404. McHugh, Patrick. “Dialectics, Subjectivity and Foucault's Ethos of Modernity.”

boundary 2 16, no. 2/3 (Winter - Spring 1989): 91-108. Rhodes, S. A. “Baudelaire's Philosophy of Dandyism.” The Sewanee Review 36, no. 4 (October 1928): 387-404.

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