Abstract
If the work of Baudelaire, Melville and Dostoyevsky seems indelibly marked by an experience of aporia and loss, it is because they are finally unable to escape the confines of a degraded social world; their texts bear the traces of that world, even as they curse, repudiate and try to transcend it. The failure of metaphysical values destroys the hope that a coincidence between self and world might be achieved through sociality and a shared language. As we have seen, the alternative often canvassed by these writers is some kind of intense solitariness which might make the connection between self and world realisable without the intermediary forms of the social. But, as each writer discovers in a different way, this cultivation of the solitary stance is both ambivalent and dangerous, threatening to produce precisely the narcissistic atomism which characterises a degraded social sphere.
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