'La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie' : Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture

Abstract

To associate Baudelaire and Barthes may seem a somewhat unlikely gesture. Barthes wrote about Baudelaire in a sustained way only once and with reference to a marginal part of the poet’s work, namely his failed theatrical projects. Yet Baudelaire remains a point of reference across the entire span of Barthes’s career, in particular as the author of a frequently cited quotation from ‘Exposition Universelle’ (1855): ‘la vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie’. This phrase punctuates Barthes’s published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority. The aim of this article is to examine the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes by investigating how he deploys the quotation from the ‘Exposition Universelle’ essay and the intertwined concept of numen. Its guiding questions are: what does Baudelaire mean for Barthes? And what does that tell us in turn about Baudelaire? Answering these questions involves tracing the intersecting trajectories of quotation and concept across Barthes's work, with a particular focus on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes).