The Art of Life: Foucaults Reading of Baudelaires The Painter of Modern Life

Corey McCall Elmira College

The Art of Life: Foucaults Reading of Baudelaires The Painter of Modern Life

Abstract: Michel Foucaults readers have long wondered at the curious pairing of Kant and Baudelaire in Foucaults 1984 essay What is Enlightenment? Through a reading of Foucaults essay, I examine the relationship between Foucault and Baudelaire centered on the conception of life. This essay presents a retrospective reading of Foucaults debt to Baudelaire in order to examine the relationship between the concepts of life, death, and art in Foucaults texts. I discover three senses of the term life at work in Foucaults writings, and examine how these various conceptions of life operate in Charles Baudelaires The Painter of Modern Life.

In his essay What is Enlightenment? Foucault compares the role of modernity in the work of the decadent Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire with that of the austere Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. He claims that the relationship between these two strange bedfellows can be found in the value each writer accords to the present in contrast to the past and future. Each writer claims, in his own style, that each individual must render her existence meaningful by cultivating what Foucault calls in this essay a philosophical ethos. This conception of the philosophical form of life forms the conceptual basis of Foucaults later work. I briefly interpret Foucaults discussion of Kant and Baudelaire in What is Enlightenment? in order to begin to reconsider this idea of a philosophical ethos through a reading of Baudelaires seminal essay in art criticism, The Painter of Modern Life. From this initial ethical sense of life as selffashioning, I turn next to the living body as the object of discipline (in Foucault) and custom (in

Baudelaire) in Section One Art, Ethics, and Politics: Modernity and Identity in Kant and Baudelaire before concluding with a consideration of life in its biological sense in the final section of the essay (Life and Death). I track these three senses of life in both Foucaults work and Baudelaires The Painter of Modern Life and compare the philosophical significance of these three conceptions of life in the work of Baudelaire and Foucault. In terms of the title of Baudelaires essay, the first section focuses on the figure of the painter, while the second examines the concept of life. My essay begins with a consideration Foucaults What is Enlightenment? essay of 1984 before turning to a consideration of Baudelaires essay first from a Foucauldian perspective, and proceeds by reading certain concepts from this essay (Baudelaires concept of life in particular) back onto Foucaults work. Rather than presenting biographical speculations on Foucaults motivations, I examine the philosophical relevance of the relationship between art on the one hand and life and its relationship to death on the other through a reading of Foucaults work alongside Baudelaires essay.

1. Art, Ethics and Politics: Modernity and Identity in Kant and Baudelaire The fact that Foucault turned to the question concerning the role of the Enlightenment in European modernity and endorsed a version of it himself has long been a source of some consternation among Foucault scholars and Foucault critics alike.1 After all, Foucaults work is widely thought to epitomize anti-Enlightenment postmodern thought in France. While one can perhaps sympathize with such consternation on the part of Foucaults readers, one cannot endorse it. Foucaults approval for the Enlightenment and Kants project in particular makes sense against the backdrop of the concerns Foucault was investigating in his other writings at the

same time.2 Foucault summarizes these concerns under the rubric of the aesthetics of existence, or, as he puts it in What is Enlightenment?, a philosophical ethos. Rather than construing modernity in strictly temporal terms, Foucault construes it as a question of style, i.e. aesthetically.3 My initial question is what role Baudelaires essay The Painter of Modern Life played in Foucaults formulation of this idea. I will be focusing in this section on Foucaults brief essay from 1984, but I relate the concerns of this essay to several of Foucaults other texts at the conclusion of this paper in order to begin to investigate the conceptual resonances between Foucaults treatment of Baudelaires essay and ideas of self-fashionin and the aesthetics of existence animating Foucaults thought, especially during the final period of his life. As is well known, Foucault turns to Baudelaires essay The Painter of Modern Life in order to provide an example of what he terms a philosophical ethos. In order to articulate a philosophical ethos, one must attempt to define oneself. In both Kant and Baudelaire, the term modernity comes to be understood as an ethical task of self-articulation, rather than simply a temporal designation. Foucault argues that it is the project of self-fashioning rather than a particular period in history that primarily characterizes modernity. This modern task of selfdefinition plays an ambivalent role in Foucaults thought, for this project of autonomy is an ideal that Foucault sees as increasingly difficult, or at least increasingly rare, during the modern period.4 Self-cultivation is both the essential feature of modernity and the difficult ideal which it presents to those wishing to become absolutely modern.5 In order to make sense of this ambivalent ideal of modernity both as an individual task and as the defining trait of modernity, Foucault turns first to Kant and then to Baudelaire.6

Foucault reads Kants 1784 essay An Answer to the Question What is Enlightenment? in terms of this ideal of self-fashioning. Kants call in this essay amounts to a negative appeal, and herein lies its novelty for Foucault. Kant defines Enlightenment modernity in terms of an escape or Ausgang from the present: he seeks the difference today makes with regard to yesterday.7 The present is absolutely independent from what has come before; Foucault sees this as the novelty of Kants conception of the process of Enlightenment in this brief essay.8 Past and future are judged solely in terms of the present, in marked contrast to prior ways of conceiving the present. According to Foucault, Kant presents us with neither a history of decline from a lost golden age nor with a utopian anticipation of a bright future to come. One additional aspect of Kants original essay bears mentioning here: the Kantian concept of Enlightenment as Ausgang or an escape has both ethical and political consequences bearing on both individual and collective action. The ethical and political dimensions of Enlightenment do not correspond to the distinction between the private and public use of reason that Kant elaborates in this essay. As Kant points out, the private use of reason renders individuals both submissive to external political authority and identifiable in terms of strictly definable social roles. Man, Kant says, makes a private use of reason when he is a cog in a machine, that is, when he has a role to play in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue particular ends (Ethics, 307). The private use of reason has ramifications at both the level of the individual (ethical) and that of the collective (political). What can be said and done is circumscribe by the role that one plays in society. Similarly, the public use of reason has both an ethical and a political significance, for it affects

the individuals attempt to elaborate herself as an ethical subject and attempts at collective action. The significance of Kants original answer to the question of the meaning of enlightenment lies in its definition of the present in terms of an exit or escape, one with both ethical and political dimensions. As Foucault writes, Enlightenment must be considered as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally (Ethics, 307). But how do Kants political and ethical features of the Enlightenment relate to Baudelaires concerns in The Painter of Modern Life? As a preliminary step in answering this question, I wish to show how the ethical and political aspects of Kants essay function in Foucaults analysis of Baudelaire, before turning to the themes of art and life, first in Baudelaires short essay and subsequently in Foucaults work. Foucault utilizes Baudelaire in this essay to help make sense of the voluntarism implicit in his elaboration of Kants conception of Enlightenment as escape and, more importantly, to flesh out the conception of modernity that this stylistics of existence presupposes. Foucault understands Kants conception of the Enlightenment in primarily negative terms, as a willful refusal of various political and disciplinary regimes of the present. As Foucault notes, for Baudelaire, the attitude of modernity means taking a stand with respect to the novelty and break with tradition that this modern attitude requires. Rebellion for its own sake is simply insufficient for the attitude of modernity if our modern existence is to be rendered meaningful. Hence, Kants Aufklrung understood merely as escape is a necessary condition for this modern attitude, but is itself insufficient, as is fashion (and for similar reasons): Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the heroic aspect of the

present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to heroize the present (Ethics, 310). Modern art provides an attempt to transfigure the present, for it is through the artists work the ideal and the fleeting come together. Kant sees critique as a willful act that negates the present, while the painters aim is to render the present meaningful. The painters uniquely modern task, according to Baudelaire, is to grant the stability of meaning to that most transient and ephemeral of things, fashion. According to Baudelaire, Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of

appetizing icing digestion or to a

appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature. I defy anyone to point

single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two elements.9

Baudelaire provides two examples that mark the boundaries of transient and intransient beauty. In both paintings of religious subjects prior to the modern period and the most frivolous work of a sophisticated artist belonging to one of those ages which, in our vanity, we characterize as civilized one can see the duality embodied (PML, 3). The former emphasizes the eternal and unchanging, while the modern artist emphasizes the fleeting contingency of the circumstantial. Furthermore, this artistic duality remains constant because it represents the more fundamental duality of man as embodied soul (PML, 3). Baudelaires philosophical prelude already shows the reader that it will be impossible to discuss art without discussing the individual who makes

the art, understood as that individual who defines herself in terms of this creation. Both the ethical and political dimensions of modern self-fashioning are developed in Baudelaires essay. Initially it seems that this treatment of beauty in its dual aspect might undermine Foucaults analysis, in which the artists task is simply to heroize the present in order to make sense of it and thereby provide her own existence with meaning. Ultimately, this talk of beauty, this philosophical prelude, that begins Baudelaires essay complicates Foucaults treatment of Baudelaire, but it does not necessarily undermine it. Ultimately it is a question of focus, for Foucaults treatment focuses less on the philosophical reflection on the nature of beauty that structures Baudelaires essay and more on the question of the individual whose task it is to express this beauty. Foucault emphasizes that the question concerns the relationship between freedom and reality, between what is given and what one does to transform the given into something radically new: For the attitude of modernity, the high value placed of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it otherwise than it is and transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it (Ethics 311). In his essay, Foucault focuses on the individuals attempt to stylize her existence and utilize artistic means to do so. Indeed, Foucault claims that this heroization of the present is necessarily ironic, for otherwise it would be nothing more than a nostalgic attempt to recover a lost unity or a futile attempt to preserve a fleeting moment and render it little more than a curiosity. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and

interesting curiosity (Ethics, 311). This would reduce the modern artist to little more than a collector of experience, a flaneur, that idle, strolling spectator who is content to capture memories and experience as specimens for further study (Ethics, 311). There is an essential difference between the flaneur understood as a mere collector of experience and the true artist, the painter of modern life. This is not the only pertinent contrast at work in Baudelaires essay, however, for the true painter of modern life must be contrasted with both the artist and the dandy. Baudelaire introduces these oppositions and, as I shall show, more fundamental ones in the all-important third section of his essay entitled The Artist, the Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child. Most artists according to Baudelaire are little more than mere technicians. They spend time in their studios working, that is, engaging in the patient labor that might yield a masterpiece, but this work is essentially an individual affair with little significance beyond the confines of the studio. Furthermore, this labor is ultimately a waste of time, because this labor lacks the essential lan of genius, for the run of the mill artist lacks the cosmopolitan dimension of Constantin Guys, a consummate man of the world: When at last I ran him to earth, I saw at once that it was not precisely an artist but rather a man of the world with whom I had to do. I ask you to understand the word artist in a very restricted sense and man of the world in a very broad one. By the second I mean a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses; by the first, a specialist, a man wedded to his palette like the serf to the soil (PML, 7).

Much more than a mere artist, Guys is fascinated by the whole world, and seeks to understand it in all its maddening diversity. Guys art transcends mere artistic limits because his interests are both moral and political. Baudelaire continues, Monsieur G. does not like to be called an artist. Is he not perhaps a little right? His interest is the whole world; he wants to know, understand, and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe. The artist lives very little, if at all, in the world of morals and politics (PML, 7). So, there is an ethical obligation entailed in Guys understanding of what it means to be a painter. The exemplary artist as man of the world is Constantin Guys, certainly a curious choice on Baudelaires part. Baudelaire devoted essays to much better known contemporaries such as Delacroix and Daumier, and this has led scholars to speculate that Guys was meant to stand in for a consideration of Baudelaires friend Manet, so that one could simply replace each mention of Guys with that of Guys much more famous contemporary. However, we should avoid this overly hasty maneuver, for Baudelaire knew exactly what he was doing when he made Guys the subject of his study and thereby designated Guys the exemplary painter of modern life. A more well-known subject would have worked against the very distinctions Baudelaire was attempting to draw. Readers would have been dazzled by the star at the center of the essay and forgotten the insightful contrasts Baudelaire was attempting to draw, foremost among these the distinction between the artist and dandy on the one hand and true artist as distinct from the technical hack on the other. Guys anonymity is entirely the point, for Guys identity is inseparable from his artmaking process. Consider this description of Guys from the third section of Baudealaires essay:

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When Monsieur G. wakes up and opens his eyes to see the boisterous sun beating a tattoo upon his windowpane, he reproaches himself remorsefully and regretfully: What a peremptory order! What a bugle blast of life! Already several hours of light everywherelost by my sleep! How many illuminated things might I have seen and missed seeing! So out he goes and watches the river of life flow past him in all its splendor and majesty. He marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained amid the turmoil of human freedom. He gazes upon the landscapes of the great citylandscapes of stone, caressed by the mist or buffeted by the sun. He delights in fine carriages and proud horses, the dazzling smartness of the grooms, the expertness of the footmen, the sinuous gait of the women, the beauty of the children, happy to be alive and nicely dressedin a word, he delights in universal life.10 Guys is absorbed in the pageant of modern life, its customs, mores, and spectacle. He feels this modern existence and fully identifies with it. The dandy compares unfavorably with the painter of modern life, for the dandy ultimately aspires to insensitivity: I have told you that I was reluctant to describe him as an artist pure and simple, and indeed that he declined this title touched with an aristocratic reserve. I might perhaps call him a dandy, and I should have several good reasons for that; for the word dandy implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding off the entire moral mechanism of this world, however, the dandy aspires to insensitivity, and it is in this that Monsieur G., dominated as he is by an insatiable passionfor seeing and feelingparts company decisively with dandyism (PML, 9).

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The dandys attitude is a thoroughly anesthetic one; her blas indifference toward existence and her essential Stoicism makes it impossible to identify Guys with this attitude of disengagement. Baudelaire draws the distinction between the attitude of the flneur and the painter of modern life in the following way: And so away he [Guys] goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted himthis solitary, gifted with an active I imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human deserthas an aim loftier than that of the mere flneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call modernity; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory (PML, 12). Although Guys moral bearing is somewhat similar to dandyism, the dandys indifference prevents an easy identification. The ironic detachment of the flneur precludes the identification with modern life that Guys exemplifies in his work. Baudelaires entire discussion demonstrates the difficulty inherent in attempting to identify Guys in terms of pre-established categories. Neither reducible to the figure of the technically proficient artist nor the ironic dandy, Baudelaire next suggests that Guys character might be somewhat similar to that of the philosopher, although his fascination with the unclassifiable singularities of existence comes at the expense of universal categories, which precludes this identification between painter and philosopher .11 Guys modesty, which Baudelaire respects by addressing him as Monsieur G. throughout the essay, is an attempt to resist various attempts to classify him. One suspects that Baudelaires difficulties stem from the

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fact that Guys, the not-quite artist, not-quite moralist remains, like all geniuses, singularly immune from the mania for classification so beloved by critics, philosophers, and flaneurs everywhere, Baudelaire among them. Indeed, Foucault correctly points out the manifest ironies inherent first in Guys attempt to define himself vis--vis the present along with Baudelaires unsuccessful attempt to critically assess another individuals relationship to the present and thereby fix his relation to his time. Although we may not be much closer to defining who Guys character, we can begin to see why Foucault draws on Baudelaire in order to make sense of Kants original essay. Through his art, Guys enacts the public use of reason and demonstrates the inadequacy of private artistic technique. Furthermore, Guys fiercely guarded anonymity and his ability to defy classification provide a concrete example of what Foucault might have meant when he described Kants conception of Enlightenment in this essay as a form of exit or Ausgang. Additionally, Baudelaires stress on Guys anonymity reminds one of Foucaults reticence with regard to his own identity, as exemplified in texts such as the well-known concluding remarks of the Introduction to The Archaelogy of Knowledge and elsewhere.12 However, this raises a potential difficulty: if the aim of Enlightenment (or at least one of its primary aims) is the refusal of identity (Kantian Enlightenment understood as an Ausgang or escape), then what might this art of anonymity, this art of refusing a predetermined identity have to do with the aesthetics of existence, in which one identifies oneself as an ethical subject? Initially the two impulses seem to be, if not contradictory, then deeply at odds with one another. Foucault seems to be saying that Kant and Baudelaire are helpful because they exhort us to escape from given identities, or at least to understand the radically contingent nature of these identities. On the other hand, Foucault points out that Baudelaires text in particular

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demonstrates that there is an essentially ascetic dimension to this attempt to articulate oneself as a modern subject. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day calls dandysme. (Ethics, 311). To be modern is to invent oneself, not to discover within the recesses of oneself ones true freedom (Ethics, 311). And here one can find a helpful clue to resolve this apparent dilemma: both Kant and Baudelaire adamantly oppose the attempt to impose an identity from outside which forces one to speak, recalling Kants phrase, as a cog in a machine. The difficulty that Baudelaire has in determining Guys precise identity stems from his manifest originality, an originality or freedom that refuses given identities in order to speak or create an identity on ones own behalf, an enactment through which one constitutes ones identity in ways irreducible given categories: Enlightenment as the project of a difficult autonomy.

2. Life and Death The previous section provides a plausible answer to why Foucault might have paired Baudelaire with Kant in order to clarify his idea of modernity. I hope to have begun to clarify what Baudelaire means by calling Guys a painter and man of the world and the significance of these designations for Foucaults essay. Put simply, for Baudelaire it is the activity of painting that defines Guys, and not the trappings of fame that accompany this identity. In this second section, I would like to take up a different question. If the first section began to explore what it might mean to call Guys a modern painter (as opposed to artist, dandy, or philosopher), in this second section I would like to take up the second term from the title of Baudelaires essay and explore

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the significance of life, beginning with the Baudelaires treatment of the concept, and then turning to a consideration of the concept of life as reflected in Foucaults work. Broadly speaking, we may distinguish three distinct meanings for this term life, meanings present in both Foucaults work and in Baudelaires essay. First, the term indicates an ethical task, i.e. something that we attempt to inform with meaning (ethical life). Foucault finds this use of the term present in ancient Greek and Roman practices of the self, and he finds Baudelaire utilizing the term in much the same way in his description of Guys. Secondly, the term life indicates something beyond or beneath the purview of theoretical scrutiny which goes unnoticed. Life in this sense has an utterly mundane character. Although this sense of the term is less easy to discern in Foucaults work, it certainly applies to his treatment of the regulation of life and lifes processes in Discipline and Punish (i.e. the living body as the object of discipline).13 Finally, there is the brute biological and physiological significance of the term that Foucault made the subject of his earlier studies (Order of Things, Birth of the Clinic) and to which he returned late in his career with his treatment of biopower, most obviously in the conclusion to the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Volume 1. While I have touched on these first two senses of the term with regard to both Foucault and Baudelaire in the first section of this paper, now I would like to turn to the third, biological sense of the term life. In addition, I will begin to point out certain connections between this third biological conception of life and the other two. Baudelaire turns to Guys sketches of the Crimean war in order to make sense of the vitality he finds in these works: I have studied his archives of the Eastern Warbattlefields littered with the debris of death, baggage trains, shipments of cattle and horses; they are the tableaux vivants of an

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astonishing vitality, traced from life itself, uniquely picturesque fragments which many a renowned painter would in the same circumstances have stupidly overlooked (PML, 19). In his What is Enlightenment? essay, Foucault discusses the transfiguring element that is so essential to Guys genius. Citing a passage from Baudelaires essay, Foucault writes But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flneur. What makes him the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaires eyes is that just when the whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His transfiguration entails not an annulling of reality but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom; natural things become more than natural, beautiful things become more than beautiful and individual objects appear endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of their creator (Ethics, 311; Cf. PML, 11). Foucault neglects to mention that not only does Guys impart a semblance of life that is perhaps something more than life to inanimate objects, but he also imparts a semblance of life to those who were once living but have perished. Guys carefully sketches the living and the dead and imbues both with a sense of dignity. To these corpses the artist grants a dignified air largely lacking in both life and death. In Guys hands, the forgotten dead on the battlefields of the Crimea become meaningful, rather than anonymous corpses overlooked in the official accounts. On the one hand, this is utterly mundane, for Guys paints things other artists would ignore because they find the subjects unworthy of the of their grand artistic vision. The wonder of Guys art lies not just in how he paints, but in the subjects he chooses to paint, and in the fact that he can, due to the way he sees and how he expresses himself, transfigure mundane subjects. Through his art, he grants these insignificant subjects an enchantment seemingly precluded by

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their utter insignificance. And what could be more insignificant and mundane than an anonymous corpse on a forgotten battlefield? Impressive as it might be, this feat alone cannot alone account for Guys genius, nor can it account for his originality. After all, the greatness of Dutch still life and genre painting lies in the ability of its practitioners to transform the quotidian into something much more significant. These painters had the vision and the ability to make something mundane into something extramundane. J.M. Bernstein has recently taken up the question of transfiguration in Dutch still life painting through a comparison with the work of the painter Pieter de Hooch and his contemporary Descartes. Bernstein argues in his essay Wax, Brick, and BreadApotheoses of Matter and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Painting: Descartes and Pieter de Hooch that he is trying to consider the significance of the Enlightenment through a comparison of the three material objects that comprise his title.14 He argues that the Descartes wax and de Hoochs bricks represent two rival conceptions of the Enlightenment: the actual one and the one promised through de Hoochs bricks but never realized. Shorn of its sensible qualities, Descartes wax is a geometrical abstraction of a body. Descartes well-known treatment of the wax from his Second Meditation enacts the quantitative abstraction necessary to make humans, in Descartes own phrase from The Discourse on Method, masters and possessors of nature.15 Such goals are absent from the work of de Hooch. Bernstein describes de Hoochs work in the following terms quite similar to the terms Baudelaire uses to describe Guys: Whatever else is occurring in these canvases [] the dominant experience they render is of a material world suddenly there with a density and a solidity not in themselves imaginable, and by extension, a vindication of a wholly secular world that requires

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nothing outside itself for its completion. To put the same thought another way, I want to see these paintings as themselves a form of claiming, a way of rendering the sensible world of everyday experience such that it can be seen as self-sufficient and complete, hence fully worthy of our investment in it. What de Hooch offers is everydayness raised to the level of the monumental, a sublime everydayness that in being sublime in this way imagines a life for finite creatures that does not call up any contrastinginfinite, otherworldly, heroicvalues. If Bernstein is right about the significance of de Hoochs bricks as proposing another possibility to the Enlightenment scientific project, then the significance of de Hoochs paintings largely coincides with Baudelaires interpretation of Guys as the painter of modern life. An essential aspect of art, at least since the modern separation of art from its prehistoric and pre-modern origins in ritual, consists in (in Arthur Dantos phrase) the transfiguration of the commonplace. So this alone cannot account for his genius. Both Foucault and Baudelaire point out that the greatness of Guys lies in his ability to define himself through his art, i.e. to lose himself in his work or, alternatively, give his life meaning in light of his work. But what is the significance of the term of modern life in the title of Baudelaires essay? First, the painter of modern life is the painter who can, through her art, give meaning to this modern form of existence. For Baudelaire, modernity is another name for contingency itself: By modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable. Every old master has had his own modernity; the great majority of fine portraits that have come down to us from former generations are clothed in the costume of their own period (PML, 14).

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Indeed, the modern corresponds to the transitory aspect of beauty, of which fashion is the paradigmatic expression: the painter of modern life gives form to the fugitive itself. Whereas prior ages had employed this modern element in order to lend their art a concreteness it would otherwise lack, the challenge facing the modern painter is to give meaning to this contingency that might otherwise go unnoticed, and thereby transform this contingency into something more meaningful. The problem of modernity, as both Kant and Baudelaire saw, was the problem of the present: how can the present be made meaningful, not in light of an idealized past or a promised future, but on its own terms. Rather than looking to the art of the past in order to find his own style, Guys looks to the life of the present. Most of us for whom nature has no existence save by reference to utility pay no heed to the utter originality of modern life as it unfolds before our very eyes (PML, 15). Hence this individual who loses himself in his art gives form to an age and represents those types of individuals that populate it. Guys marks the physiognomy of an age by representing the physiognomies that typify it, the outward show of life. The social and cultural significance is plain: Guys paints everyday life and renders this contingency into something monumental. Although it is more difficult to discern, there is a natural correlate to this cultural significance, one that conforms to the third sense of life in Foucaults work. I would like to briefly outline this natural dimension of life in Baudelaires essay before returning to the sense of life in Foucaults work. Recall that Baudelaire began his essay by stating that beauty possesses both variable and invariable aspects, and this dualism conformed to the natural dualism of the human being understood as the conjunction of body and soul. Furthermore, Baudelaire repeats the idea that there is a certain naturalness to Guys art and that he possesses a child-like wonder in the face of

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the world. Furthermore, his artistic ability could not be achieved unless he were in some sense naturally gifted: Guys is described, for example, as a natural colorist, and yet he must, through art, transfigure this natural endowment. Nature ultimately stands for all that is wicked and depraved in existence for Baudelaire, while art is a sign of the good. Thus civilization is a transfiguration of the fallenness of humanity in its natural state: Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-a-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation (PML, 33). Thus fashion has an inescapable moral significance, in that it provides an example of how we might escape the depravity of nature. Baudelaire here echoes a common refrain found in various Enlightenment thinkers. For example, Kant sees culture as the human attempt to account for the lack of natural abilities. Human history records the moral progress that humans make in their various attempts to escape from the bonds of nature. As humanitys natural endowment, reason must be conceived as the means whereby human civilization progresses: It seems as if nature had intended that man, once he had finally worked his way up from the uttermost barbarism to the highest degree of skill, to inner perfection in his manner of thought and thence (as far as is possible on earth) to happiness, should be able to take for himself the entire credit for doing so and have only himself to thank for it.16 Baudelaire finds in fashion this moral significance similar to Kants conception of reason as the natural means whereby humans become free. Fashion exhibits both the life of a people and individuals moral struggle to define themselves as something more than simply natural. Just as

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reason is for Kant, fashion marks a defining trait of humanity, for it distinguishes human beings from mere animals, which are simply alive. Human life understood as a moral form of life as exemplified by fashion develops as a way of escaping from mere life, from the depraved natural existence that Baudelaire claims is the source of all criminality and licentiousness.17 Thus we return to the theme of Enlightenment once again, but from a very different vantage point. In his Introduction to Georges Canguilhems The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault treats this theme of Enlightenment from the point of view of French history of science, specifically the science of life. As he explains in What is Enlightenment?, Kants essay marks the point at which philosophy poses the question of the present for its own sake, not subordinated to any other past or future concerns.18 According to Foucault, in France the philosophy of science carries on this legacy. I am not claiming that Foucault had Baudelaires essay in mind when writing about French historians and philosophers of science, but there are nonetheless similarities to be found between this movement in thought and Baudelaires treatment of the relationship between art and life: In the history of the sciences in France, as in German Critical Theory, what is to be examined, basically, is a reason whose structural autonomy carries the history of dogmatisms and despotisms along with ita reason, therefore that has a liberating effect only provided it manages to liberate itself (EW2: 469). Hence the French historians of science played a structural role similar to that played in German society by the Aufklrung: to liberate thought from itself. Foucault begins this essay by pointing to the work of Georges Canguilhem as the key to making sense of the disparate strands of the French intellectual scene during the 1960s. Canguilhem provides a point of reference for French Marxists and sociologists as well as

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Lacanians of the period. What was distinctive about him as a historian of science is that he forced the history of science back down from the heights of science understood in terms of formalization: So he brought the history of the sciences down from the heights (mathematics, astronomy, Galilean mechanics, Newtonian physics, relativity theory) to regions where the knowledge is much less deductive, where it remained connected, for a much longer time, to the wonders of the imagination, and where it posed a series of questions that were much more foreign to philosophical habits (EW2: 470). In a word, Canguilhem devotes himself to understanding the contingency of life. One might draw parallels between this concept of the radical precariousness of life and the living beings need to ceaselessly navigate the threat of disease and eventually succumbing to the inevitability of death, with certain aspects of Baudelaires treatment of Guys and, indeed, with Foucaults own treatment of modernity understood as contingency, as the attempt to find meaning where one might find only oblivion. According to some views, such an exercise might seem very farfetched: what could seem odder than trying to understand biological functions in terms of art; indeed, from a formalist point of view such as Kants, nothing could be stranger than trying to comprehend art in terms of life and vice versa. For Kant, art presents a rarefied world in which mundane matters can have no purchase; judgments of taste must be disinterested.19 Baudelaire and Foucault write against such formalist views, for both thought that art could help us to understand life and render it meaningful. Not only does Foucault claim in the passage cited above that Canguilhems studies of the concept of life were much more imaginative than those of his colleagues who were studying the more formal, deductive sciences, he associates Baudelaire with death in at least two

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places. The first place is in the essay What is Enlightenment? itself, in which he cites Constantin Guys as the painter best able to depict fashion as symbolic of death: The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as the necessary costume of our time, the one who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death (EW1:310). Foucault had already noted the relationship between Baudelaire and death some twenty years prior. In the Birth of the Clinic, Foucault mentions Baudelaire in passing. It is significant that this mention of Baudelaire explicitly connects the concerns of knowledge with life, which are the terms that would later interest him in Canguilhems work. Furthermore, this discussion of the relationship between knowledge (and by extension language) and death takes place within the context of a question already posed in the first section: can we ever have precise knowledge of an individual, and, more specifically, can we ever have precise knowledge of an individual life? The introduction of death into discourse allows for something which had been disavowed since Aristotle, the knowledge of the individual.20 What made this knowledge possible was the realization that death was not something beyond life and hence utterly distinct from it but rather intrinsic to life. Foucault points out that this knowledge of the intimate relationship between death and life became expressed through the art of the nineteenth century: The nineteenth century will speak obstinately of death: the savage, castrated death of Goya, the visible, muscular sculptural death offered by Gricault, the voluptuous death by fire in Delacroix, the Lamartinian death of aquatic effusions, Baudelaires death. To know life is given only to that derisory, reductive, and already infernal knowledge that only wishes it dead (BC, 171).

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Foucault suggests that for these nineteenth century artists, embracing death becomes a means of escaping the monotony of life. When it comes to modernity, death and the transitory are never far away. Indeed, in these concluding passages of The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault suggests that during this period, death provides the means not just to understand life, but also give ones life meaning as well: Now, on the contrary, [death] is constitutive of singularity; it is in that perception of death that an individual finds himself, escaping from a monotonous, average life; in the slow, half-subterranean, but already visible approach of death, the dull common life becomes an individuality at last; a black border separates it and gives it the style of its own truth (BC, 171). The concerns of life invariably point us toward death; perhaps, in the end, all arts of existing are only really ways of confronting death and rendering ones life meaningful in its harsh light.

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See the essays in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). See in particular the essays by Bernstein (Foucault: Critique as a Philosophical Ethos), Habermas (Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucaults Lecture on Kants What is Enlightenment), and Schmidt and Wartenberg (Foucaults Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self), but all of the contributions reflect this consternation to one degree or another. 2 Indeed, I would argue that while the Enlightenment and the aesthetics of existence only comes to the fore late in Foucaults career, it is an abiding concern throughout his work. For a reading that complements this idea, see Thomas R. Flynns two-volume Foucault and the Project of Historical Reason. 3 Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984-, Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow (NY: New Press, 1994), 309-310. Hereafter cited as Ethics. 4 Interestingly, this would put Foucault in the company of thinkers like Rousseau, Hegel, Diderot, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger that Robert Pippin analyzes in his recent article on the art historian and critic Michael Frieds conception of artistic (painterly) authenticity as a reflection of the problematic of personal and social authenticity during the modern period. Perhaps (if Foucault is right), Kant and Baudelaire must be added to the list as well. Indeed, issues of absorption and theatricality (Frieds terms) abound in Baudelaires text. See Robert Pippin, Authenticity in Painting: On Michael Frieds Art Criticism, Critical Inquiry 31:3 (2005). See also Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 5 Vincent Descombes points out the ambiguity of this ideal and criticizes Foucaults philosophical response to the present (and, indeed, all explicitly philosophical responses to the present) in his book The Barometer of Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events. Trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz (NY: Oxford University Press, 1993). Foucault is not the only philosopher Descombes critiques in this text; indeed, his thesis is that philosophy is fundamentally unsuited to deal with the vagaries of the present moment, and that making sense of the modern should instead be the aim of literature. I plan to confront Descombes specific claims more thoroughly in a subsequent essay. 6 Putting the matter this way helps to underscore the relationship between Foucaults notion of self-fashioning and what Stanley Cavell calls moral perfectionism, the idea that one must define oneself and ones society relative to imagined future that one hopes will be better than today. Indeed, Cavell has recently aligned Foucault with moral perfectionism along with the likes of Emerson, Nietzsche, and others: I do not conceive of [moral perfectionism] as an alternative to Kantianism or utilitarianism [] but rather as emphasizing that aspect of moral choice having to do, as it is sometimes put, with being true to oneself, or as Michel Foucault has put the view, caring for the self. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 11 Elsewhere in the same text, Cavell summarizes the standpoint of moral perfectionism thusly: Moral perfectionism challenges ideas of moral motivation, showing (against Kants law that counters inclination and against utilitarianisms calculation of benefits) the possibility of my access to experience which gives to my desire for the attaining of a self that is mine to become, the power to act on behalf of an attainable world I can actually desire (33). Notice that identifying Foucault with moral perfectionism as Cavell understands it does not preclude alternative understandings of Foucaults ethics, as, for example, a variety of virtue ethics. However, Cavells suggestion that we understand the care of the self as a sort of moral perfectionism might shed new light on Foucaults debt to Nietzsche as one not simply based upon Nietzsches conception of genealogy but upon his conception of ethics as well (provided that Cavell is correct in his assessment of both men as moral perfectionists). 7 Ethics, 305: Now, the way Kant poses the question of Aufklrung is entirely different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklrung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an exit, a way out. 8 Foucault points out that this novelty is apparent with respect to Kants other texts concerning the philosophy of history, which display a teleology absent from this short text. 9 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne (NY: Phaidon, 1964), 3. Hereafter cited as PML. 10 PML, 11 11 PML, 7: He is a master of that only too difficult artsensitive spirits will understand meof being sincere witout being absurd. I would bestow upon him the title of philosopher, to which he has more than one right if his excessive love of visible, tangible things, condensed to their plastic state, did not arouse in him a certain repugnance for the things that form the impalpable kingdom of the metaphysician. 12 What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparingwith a rather shaky handa labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we

write, Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (NY: Pantheon Books, 1972), 17. 13 The lived body that is the object of discipline would be a key example here. This second sense of life is closely allied to Baudelaires observation that Guys paints both the death that results from battle and the pomp and circumstance or life that goes along with being a soldier in nineteenth century Europe: Once more to attempt at the kinds of subjects preferred by our artists, we would say that it is the outward show of life, such as it is to be seen in the capitals of the civilized world; the pageantry of military life, of fashion and of love (PML, 24). 14 J.M. Bernstein, Wax, Brick, and BreadApotheoses of Matter and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy and Painting: Descartes and Pieter de Hooch, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 19-45. 15 Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), p. 35. 16 Immanuel Kant, Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed. Ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 43. 17 PML, 32 18 Conceiving of the present on its own terms provides a basis for Foucaults practice of genealogy, a history of the present. This concern with the present alongside critique marks Foucaults affinity with Kant that Foucault attempts to draw in this essay. I thank an anonymous reviewer from The Journal of Speculative Philosophy for helping me clarify this point. 19 For a recent critique of Kants formalism, see Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Nehamas contrasts the formalism of thinkers and critics such as Kant, Schopenhauer, and Roger Fry with an ancient approach to artistic beauty found primarily in the work of Plato and the Platonic tradition. According to this latter view, beauty is the object of desire rather than distinterested contemplation. It should be clear that Baudelaires own position is closer to Platos, and Foucaults would be as well. 20 Foucault writes: The individual is not the initial, most acute form in which life is presented. It was given at last to knowledge only at the end of a long movement of spatialization whose decisive instruments were a cerain use of language and a difficult conceptualization of death [] The old Aristotelian law, which prohibited the application of scientific discourse to the individual, was lifted, when in language, death found the locus of the concept: space then opened up to the gaze the differentiated form of the individual, Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (NY: Vintage, 1994 [1961]), 170. Hereafter cited as BC.

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne Phaidon, 1964. Bernstein, J.M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Cavell, Stanley. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life Harvard University Press, 2004. Cambridge: NY:

Descartes, Ren. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Descombes, Vincent. The Barometer of Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events. Trans. Steven Adam Schwartz. NY: Oxford University Press, 1993. Flynn, Thomas R. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward and Existentialist View of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Volume 2: A Postructuralist Mapping of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. NY: Pantheon Books, 1972. ________. Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Smith. NY: Vintage, 1994 [1961] ________. The Essential Writings, Volume 1: Ethics. Ed. Paul Rabinow. NY: New Press, 1994. _______. The Essential Writings, Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. NY: New Press, 1994. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Kelly, Michael, ed. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Nehamas, Alexander. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pippin, Robert. Authenticity in Painting: On Michael Frieds Art Criticism, Critical Inquiry (2005) 31:3 Sheridan