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

Corey McCall

Elmira College


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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 self-

fashioning, I turn next to the living body as the object of discipline (in Foucault) and custom (in

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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

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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 self-

definition 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 featureof 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

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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 orAusgangfrom 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 asAusgangor 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

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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,

KantsAufklrungunderstood 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

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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,

appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of

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

to a 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

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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

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interesting curiosity (Ethics, 311). This would reduce the modern artist to little more than a

collector of experience, aflaneur, 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 theflaneurunderstood 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 artistbut rather

a man of the worldwith whom I had to do. I ask you to understand the word artistin a

very restricted sense and man of the worldin 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).

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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 art-

making 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 illuminatedthings 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 theflneurand 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 mereflneur, 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 theflneurprecludes 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, andflaneurs

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 orAusgang. 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 anAusgangor

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 oflife, 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 inDiscipline 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 theHistory 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 aflneur. What makes him the

modern painterpar 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 herreformation (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 theAufklrung: 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 theBirth 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 ofThe 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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1 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-volumeFoucault 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 asEthics.4 Interestingly, this would put Foucault in the company of thinkers like Rousseau, Hegel, Diderot, Kierkegaard, andHeidegger 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 bookThe Barometer of Reason: On thePhilosophies 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 planto 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 MichelFoucault 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 identifyingFoucault 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 asort 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).7Ethics, 305: Now, the way Kant poses the question ofAufklrungis 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 definesAufklrungin an

almost entirely negative way, as anAusgang, 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, 1111 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.12What, 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 reduceand 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


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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 toBaudelaires 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 andPainting: 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, 3218 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 andthe 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 thedifferentiated 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 NY: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 Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2004.

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: APostructuralist Mapping of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.


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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. Sheridan

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 31:3(2005)

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