Baudelairean Empathy and the Limits of Transcendence

Abstract

Inscriptions of empathy for other human beings, in Baudelaire's poetry, communicate an affective experience that has long outlived both the poet and its originator. His poems, which often give thematic prominence to the idea of an afterlife, tend therefore to have their own afterlife, even as they gesture towards both the possibility and the impossibility of the transcendence of physical limitations. The article, which begins with a brief discussion of both the history and meaning of empathy, will suggest that Baudelaire can be understood not only as an early theorist of empathy, but also as a very early theorist of an ethical, because unsettling, form of empathy. The poet anticipated the thinking of the first empathy theorists insofar as, like them, he conceived of an at least partial imaginary merging of self and object. However, he also went beyond these thinkers to the extent that at least some of his poetry describes a disquieting recognition of kinship with other human beings that anticipates far more recent thinking about empathy. The article considers the inscription of empathy in a number of poems that focus on non-human objects before giving more sustained attention to how empathy expresses itself in poems that foreground virtual, real, or imagined human beings. It is argued that Baudelaire's most dramatic evocations of empathy with other human beings foreground the idea of human mortality and the limits of human knowledge even as they hint at the possibility of the magical removal of limitations. While the notion of an ideal communication of souls is certainly present in Les Fleurs du mal, representations of interpersonal empathy in the verse poems tend to involve a recognition of both the possibility and the impossibility of human transcendence of physical limitations.