Inhuman Beauty: Baudelaire’s Bad Sex

Abstract

This essay explores how Baudelaire’s insistence on perverse forms of nonreproductive sexuality (what is here called “bad sex”) exposes critical aspects of his poetics and his relation to the question of aesthetics. It takes up two of Baudelaire’s most famous poems (“To the Reader” and “Beauty”) in light of Walter Benjamin’s insight that the significance of Baudelaire’s poetry is linked to the way sexuality becomes severed from normal and normative forms of love. Following Benjamin, the essay argues that Baudelaire appeals to beauty to undo the damage done by the so-called natural order, to bear witness to the world that is left out of familiar cycles of production and reproduction, and to remake the world by other means. For Baudelaire, the motif of “bad sex” becomes a kind of gestural language, a poetic medium, and a form of theatricality that conjures up actions, events, and figures that escape other modes of representation. Beauty’s work is neither presentation nor representation, but something like an artificial alternative to birth.