The infinite taste of the Republic
During summer 1851, the twentieth instalment of the edition of Pierre Dupont’s Chants et Chansons came out. It contains a prefatory note dedicated to the author and signed ‘Charles Baudelaire’. The latter was not satisfied with a polite tribute to a fellow-poet and friend. He turned his note into a poetic and political manifesto against Romantic ‘voluptuousism’ and the ‘puerile’ and ‘sterile’ utopia of art for art’s sake. Pierre Dupont’s poetry, for him, was not merely the painful expression of the ‘sickly multitude that breath workshop dust’ and ‘sleep in vermin’. By including the ‘long look full of sadness’ that this multitude casts on ‘the sun and shade of the great parks’, it expresses much more profoundly the ‘genius of humanity’ and the ‘higher principles of universal life’. The secret of Pierre Dupont’s poetry resides not in its technical skill. It resides ‘in the love of virtue and humanity, and in that je ne sais quoi that radiates constantly from his poetry, which I would gladly call the infinite taste of the Republic’.1
The claim that these Second Republic-style humanitarian hyperboles are an interlude in the life of a poet, for whom the barricades of 1848 served primarily as an outlet for familial furies and who therefore did not waste any opportunity to mock the religion of progress and affections for the woes of the people, is probably founded. But even more so is the insistence that this revolutionary interlude is the only time that the poet got involved in politics and that, in the midst of this ‘lifelong abjuring’ to which he claims every ‘system’ condemns those who shut themselves within it,2 he showed himself to be unswervingly faithful to certain friendships and constant in his predilections for specific theoreticians and artists who undeniably present features of Republican poetry, social criticism or humanitarian religion: David, Barbier, Dupont, Proudhon, Leroux and Chenavard. The point being that the dogmatic will to establish the criteria of the beautiful always lags behind when it comes to ‘universal humanity’ and to ‘multiform and multi-coloured Beauty, which moves in the infinite spirals of life’.3 The ‘infinite taste of the Republic’ is not a circumstantial political infatuation against which this poet-aesthete would later oppose the aristocracy of art for art’s sake. It is a category of the aesthetic itself, of an aesthetic politics, and the new disciple of Joseph de Maistre has no problems appealing to it when, in the midst of total imperial reaction, he has to give a report on the art of painters. ‘Universal life’ and the ‘genius of humanity’ innervate the report the poet wrote for the 1859 Salon and the reflections he drew from it as to the essence of modern art. And these notions establish a singular line of egalitarian union between two characters that one would have thought destined never to meet: on the one hand, the painter of elegant life whose gaze delights in ‘fine carriages, proud horses, the dazzling cleanliness of the grooms, the dexterity of the footmen, the sinuous gait of the women, beautiful children, happy to be alive and well dressed – in a word, who enjoys universal life’;4 on the other, that German peasant, who asked a painter to portray him on the threshold of his farm at the day’s end, together with his large family, the signs of his prosperity and puffs of his pipe hued by the setting sun, without forgetting to render ‘the air of satisfaction’ he felt in contemplating his wealth’s having ‘increased by the labours of a day’. Contrary to the ‘spoilt children’ of painting, confined within the technical skill of the profession, this peasant here, Baudelaire comments, ‘understood painting. The love of his profession had heightened his imagination.’5 That the child of the peasant and of the wealthy man each have an equal air of satisfaction is the reflection of the common wealth, of the participation in ‘universal life’, which is missing in Theodore Rousseau’s ‘glistening marsh’ or Boudin’s ‘liquid or aerial conjurings’. To denounce this lacuna, Baudelaire has no hesitation in appealing to the authority of a most unlikely judge in matters of art, Maximilien Robespierre, who, having ‘carefully studied his humanities’, knew that humans ‘are never without pleasure in seeing others’.6
The ‘infinite taste of the Republic’ is therefore not an ephemeral expression from times of political fever. It is the enduring formula of an aesthetic republicanism. To draw out its features, we must mark a distance with today’s dominant interpretation of Baudelaire, the Benjaminian one of the ‘lyric poet in the era of high capitalism’. Through all its variations, this interpretation obeys the same fundamental objective. It aims to link the thematic and rhythm of Baudelairian poems directly to an anthropological given constitutive of modernity: that of the ‘loss of experience’ produced through market reification and through encountering the big city and the crowd. The ‘fanciful fencing’ of the rhymer, the duel with beauty in which the artist ‘cries out in fright before being vanquished’ and the anxiety of the poet ‘elbowed’ by the crowd, supposedly translate a modern experience of shock in which the worker’s automatism in being riveted to his machine, the pedestrian’s anxiety at each intersection, the gambler’s attention to every dice throw and the camera’s click all participate equally. And it is with relation to the inorganic power that gives its law to experience, or rather to the modern loss thereof – i.e. the reified fetish of the commodity – that we must supposedly understand the flaneur’s intoxication, his enjoying being like a commodity ‘tossed about in the stream of clients’; the enigmatic enjoyment of number that becomes clear ‘if one imagines it spoken not from the point of view of the human, but also from that of the commodity’7; and finally the destructive rage of the allegory, interrupting the course of history to stamp the reified world with the emblem of the only ‘radical novelty’ still available – death.
This interpretative gesture, which reads in the words and cadences of the poem the heroic transcription of a devastated sensory experience, cuts perhaps a little too fast through the aesthetic fabric within which the Baudelairian reverie of the infinite Republic becomes meaningful. It swings over to the viewpoint of a ‘destruction of experience’ something that is much rather a modification in the system of relations between elements defining a form of experience: ways of being and doing, seeing, thinking and saying. To avoid this short-circuit, it is useful to reinscribe the Baudelairian experience of the city and the crowd within the larger set of transformations that affected the poetic paradigm in his time.
It is perhaps from this point of view that we might re-examine the theme of the ‘heroism of modern life’. Those who have underlined the importance in Baudelaire of the theme of heroism and its embodiment in the ‘modern’ figure of the dandy have scarcely afforded any attention to certain singular occurrences of the term in his texts. In the preface to his translation of Poe, Baudelaire inserts some emphatic praise for savage nations, happily deprived of the ‘ingenious inventions that exempt the individual from heroism’, whereas the civilized man finds himself confined ‘in the infinitely small region of speciality’.8 The savage is at once warrior and poet. With his clothing, his ornaments and his weapons, he even makes for the perfect figure of the dandy, a ‘supreme embodiment of the idea of the beautiful in material life’.9 This identification is reprised in the Salon de 1859 in which the tribal chiefs painted by Fromentin make clear to the eyes of the critic the same ‘Patrician dandyism’ as the American Indians George Catlin once painted and who, ‘even in their state of fall, make us dream of the art of Phidias and of Homeric grandeurs’.10 The features of modern heroism and of Baudelairian dandyism thus come very close to those of Schillerian ‘naïve poetry’ and aesthetic education. Heroism is not primarily the virtue of individuals. It is the virtue of the world that brings together the reasons for acting and those of the poem. A hero is not a fearless man who engages in dazzling feats. He is the inhabitant of an intermediary world between the human and the divine. This mediation between separated worlds makes poetry possible. But the hero is also the being who knows no separation between the orders of acting and doing. This was how Hegel described the heroic universe specific to Homeric poetry: a world that ignores the division of labour, in which princes and warlords cut their meat themselves and are able to carve their own beds or forge their own weapons. The condition of naïve or heroic poetry is that the world is already poetic; and it is so by virtue of that indistinction from which Hegel regards the modern world of science, the economy and rational administration as definitively removed.
To this verdict, the era of Balzac and Dumas, we know, already replied: the condition of ‘naïve’ indistinction can be rediscovered as much on the streets of the modern metropolis as on the trail of Fenimore Cooper’s Indians. Modernity also has its heroism, i.e. its poeticity able to be read directly in the decor of the city, the manners and gait of its inhabitants, as well as in the gaping abysses in its depths below or behind its portes-cochères, and that set the world of the ordinary in communication with the universe of the fantastic. The novelist or poet is the observer – half-flaneur at the lookout for the picturesque in human mores, half-clairvoyant plumbing the gaping abysses beneath one’s feet or behind walls – who exhumes the poetry immanent to the prosaic world: the special and fleeting beauty, ‘modern’ in a word, that comes, according to Baudelaire, to be added to the eternal element of art. But finding virgin forests and Mohicans in Paris is only the simplest part of the programme. ‘Naïve’ poetry was not the picturesque poetry of mores of yesteryear, and one must not be taken in by the trompe-l’œil produced by the literature of ‘physiologies’, which were all the rage around 1840. The physiological project seems primarily to summon the entomologist’s gaze, as he analyses the ethos proper to each social type. But the author of physiologies, most often, does not observe anything at all. He threads commonplaces whose assemblage emblematizes a type. The matter is trifling since this encyclopedic pseudo-knowledge on society serves no purpose, since it is not a form of knowledge able to arm those who pursue social ends.
That is precisely the crux of the problem. The heroic world was the world of indistinction between the poetic sphere and that of action. And this very indistinction is what appears lost. Balzac, who, far more than Poe, forged the Baudelairian gaze on the city and the crowd, provided the most brilliant illustration of it. The minutely detailed and hallucinatory description that begins The Girl with the Golden Eyes of the five circles of Parisian hell emerged as the masterwork of a new novelistic ethology. But this ethology in no way contributes to the fictional energy that supplies the novel with its action. Moreover, the penetrative ability of the Thirteen is perfectly powerless to halt the disaster. Having knowledge of the multiplicity of social identities as well as of the turns, detours and abysses of the big city can serve to remythologize the world. But it does so only at the price of more firmly dismissing the lost paradise of the heroic world, as a world of immediate union between manners of being and manners of acting. To give full meaning to the poet’s resentment concerning a world ‘in which action is not the sister of dream’,11 it must be inscribed within the logic of a much more radical rupture. It is not dream that breaks with action. Instead, the promotion of dream results from the divorce accomplished between knowledge and action.
From the procrastinations of General Wallenstein to the wanderings of Wilhelm Meister, including the failed ventures of Balzac’s conspirators, the absurd gunshot of Julien Sorel, the fatigue of Büchner’s Danton, the idleness of Frédéric Moreau and the illusions of Tolstoy’s generals, the entire era named romantic seems, in fact, to be haunted in its plots and affected in its forms of construction by a single obsession: the failure of action. Action, as is well known, is not simply the fact of doing something. It is a mode of thought, a structure of rationality that defines both a norm of legitimate social behaviours and a norm of composition of fictions. Such was the Aristotelian arranging of actions linked through bonds of causality according to necessity or verisimilitude. The rationality of action corresponds to a certain form of the whole: that constituted by a denumerable and coherent set of relations – relations of coordination between causes and effects, of subordination between centre and periphery. Action requires a finite world, circumscribed knowledge, calculable forms of causality and designated actors. Now, this limitation appears lost to Balzac’s contemporaries and successors. The problem is not that the world has become too prosaic for elite souls to find satisfaction in it. It is that it has become too vast, and that knowledge has become too subtle, too differentiated for action to be able to find in it the suitable conditions of rarity. When aiming to designate the vice of new fiction, to which L’Éducation sentimentale bears witness, Barbey d’Aurevilly invokes the authority not of a literary man but of a general, Napoléon Bonaparte. The latter supposedly had reproached his brother Joseph for having ‘a terrible fault that prevents all action […] the kind of imagination that, above all, fills the head with pictures’.12 To fill one’s head with pictures is to impede the field of action, render its lines confused and its very goals derisory. Now, new social science itself does not stop making ‘pictures’ that widen the distance between thought and action. In these conditions, the search for the contemporary world’s own specific form of ‘heroization’ appears torn between two poles. On the one hand, heroic unity will be sought in a radicalization of the principle of voluntary action, in the pure decision to act, with or without ground. On the other, it will be found on the sole side of reverie, which cancels out the distortions that the will imprints on the course of things and enables the spectacle of modern life to unfold all its virtualities.
Baudelaire initially appears to take the former option. Discovering Poe and his ‘poetic principle’ permits him to fix the image of the poet who does exactly as he had projected and leaves behind no word that would not be the effect of an intention. But it also leads the author who seeks to test himself by writing novels or five-act plays to a strange observation: this poetic unity, formerly associated with the grand forms of tragedy and epic, now obliges one to limit oneself to the small forms of which the novella is the model. Such are the means, vouchsafes the poet, that make it possible to obtain the desired effect, i.e. unity of impression, via absolute control over all elements of the poem. But this strategic rationalization does a poor job at hiding the change in the very nature of the poetic: the ‘totality’ to be aimed at now is that ‘excitation’ of soul, which, ‘of psychological necessity’, is fugitive and transitory.13 That is the crux of the problem: the totality that gives its norm to the poem is no longer the organic body with well-coordinated, functional limbs. Baudelaire’s cadet, Hippolyte Taine, will hammer it home ceaselessly: the old beauty was that of bodies with muscles tensed for action. The modern age, as for it, is that of the nervous man. Benjamin sought to tie this theme of nervousness, which becomes an obsession in Baudelaire’s era, to that of shock, which he sees at the heart of the experience of the city and crowds. And, likewise, he linked the destruction of the organic model to the inorganic power of the commodity and the cadaver. But the refutation of the organic model is not the triumph of the inorganic. Opposed to the organism is not the inorganic; it is life as power that circulates through bodies, exceeds their limits and disorganizes the relation itself of thought to its effect. In fact, the effect that Baudelaire attributes to hashish ought to be generalized to the new set of perceptive experiences: all loss of ‘equivalence between the organs and pleasures’.14 The science of mind being established at the time parallels in this regard the science of society. Both explode what they were initially supposed to complete: the model of the organism, of the centre that commands it, the muscles that tense and the limbs that obey. The finite world of the organism – which is also one of action – now finds itself exceeded on two sides: on the side of its theatre, which no longer provides circumscribed scenes for action, and on the side of its agent, whose temporality no longer happens to coincide with the source of that action. The social world is lost in infinite ramifications. And similarly for the subject that was the cause of action. Its identity gets lost in the infinite smallness of sensations. The unity of the poem is a unity of effect and this latter has to correspond to a short excitation. The masterpiece of programmatic will thus comes very close to the conjuring trick of the illusionist or the charlatan. Will is no longer the rational adjustment of means to desired ends; it is essentially the act of its self-exhibition. And this is never so pure as when it is groundless, as when it is identified with the pure nervous discharge inflicted on the bad glazier, as he is hurled from the top of the staircase with his glass panes.
These displays and caricatures of the will are unable to re-establish any ‘heroic’ unity. Here again the art critic’s gaze belies the boastfulness of the poet, master of his effects: ‘In art one thing is not sufficiently noted, the share reserved for the will of man is not nearly as large as is thought.’15 If the new poetic form has to be brief, it is not to vouchsafe the mastery of the artist. It is, on the contrary, because it marks the punctual encounter between a subject, who is an infinite network of sensations, and a sensible world that exceeds all closure of the field of strategic action. The unity of the poem is that of the ‘patch of sky seen through the basement window’, giving ‘a more profound idea of the infinite than the panorama seen from a mountain peak’,16 just as that of a painting is ‘that dusty and luminous atmosphere of a room into which the sun wants to enter fully’.17 The world exceeds the field of action just as the subject exceeds the circle of the will. The act of thought that takes this excess into account bears a name; it is called reverie. Reverie is not the withdrawal into the inner world of one who no longer wants to act because reality has disappointed him. It is not the contrary of action but another mode of thought, another mode of the rationality of things. It is not the refusal of external reality but the mode of thought that calls into question the very boundary that the organic model imposed between ‘inner’ reality, where thought decided, and ‘external’ reality, in which it produced its effects.
It is here that the gaze upon the city and the urban experience become meaningful. In order to grasp this, it is necessary to relativize the radical novelty that Walter Benjamin, in order to make it coincide with the age of industrial capitalism and commodity fetishism, attributes to the urban experience of Baudelaire’s contemporaries. This urban experience is not that of curious flanerie, which instead belongs to the age of Sébastien Mercier and Rétif de la Bretonne. Nor is it that of the traumatizing crowd. And it is probably necessary to limit the importance given to Edgar Poe and his ‘man of the crowd’, which the Benjaminian reading privileges because this man’s journey ends up at sites of the commodity and crime. Baudelaire borrowed the model for his gaze upon the city less from Poe than from Balzac. Not Balzac the geologist of circles of the big city and observer of the types that stride along its boulevards, of their gait or their habits, but the Balzac who experienced the inanity of that physiological or physiognomic knowledge and fictionalized the very gap between knowledge about society and the success of action. Exemplary from this point of view is the last episode of Ferragus, in which the inconsolable spouse stops his carriage at the city limits, close to the ill-defined grounds of the Observatory where the bowls players meet. No physiology is given of this picturesque urban character. The voyeur’s gaze is cast on another spectator: the former plot leader of the Thirteen conspirators out to conquer society now become the inert observer of this game of bowls, or, as Balzac says in an expression that sounds like a dream title for a prose poem, ‘the fantastic genius of the jack ball’.18
Baudelaire’s first reflection on the heroism of modern life refers, as is well known, to Balzac. In it, Baudelaire couples the ‘spectacle of fashionable life’ with that of ‘millions of floating existences that circulate in the underground passages of a big city’.19 The relation between the modern, the heroic and the floating is worth dwelling on. In fact, this is the fullest sense of the otherwise banal statement according to which the beautiful is made of an eternal element and a fleeting element tied to the present. It is not simply a matter of combining today’s beauty with the beauty of old. It is a matter of identifying a specifically modern beauty, in contrast with classical beauty – enemy to ‘line-shifting movement’ – a beauty of the ‘floating’, that is to say, precisely, of the erased line. Floating existences are, in fact, much more than the ‘criminals and kept women’ Baudelaire mentions – thinking perhaps of Vautrin and Esther. These existences are not definable by the features of intermediary classes or populations of interlopers. They are definable simply by their belonging to a floating world. This world does not simply consist in the non-stop traffic of big cities. It is above all a world without stable base, definable circumference or well-established identities. Instead of identifying it with a specific social fauna – bohemian or other – of which Baudelaire would be the representative, this ‘flotation’ must be given its aesthetic dimension. The floating world is a world in which the lines of division between social identities are blurred; likewise, in Delacroix’s painting the line – both framework and emblem of the representational order – comes to be eliminated twice over: according to the truth of geometers, for whom each one contains a thousand of them, and that of the colourists, for whom it is only ever ‘the intimate merging of two colours’.20
This is the model through which the experience of the crowd must be grasped. It is primarily a model of the experience of a dreamer. The Baudelairian observer does not embark, as does Poe’s, in pursuit of characters who have struck his gaze, not even the passing woman that he might have loved.21 To follow her would be to denude her of what made her aura, namely not some apparition of the distant or some death blow, but very simply the past conditional as the mode and tense of the fugitive, mode and time of an appearing that is not merely ephemeral but is above all divested of the properties that render so prosaic any ‘dear soul’ from the moment it has consented to follow you. The model of the Baudelairian voyeur is the man who looks at the crowd from afar and on high, in a gaze that renders the latter indistinct. It is the dreamer behind his window, observing ‘beyond the waves/oceans of roofs’, such and such of those black or luminous holes in which ‘life lives, life dreams, life suffers’.22 Balzac again provides the model with Raphaël from La peau de chagrin who, from his garret, casts his gaze over those ‘Paris savannahs formed by roofs, flat as a plain but covering populous abysses’;23 and also the Victor Hugo of La pente de la rêverie, who sees through gothic windows familiar faces lose their features as they melt into an immense crowd that extends across continents, deserts and oceans:
Nameless crowd! steps, voices, eyes – a chaos!
Those who have never yet been seen or known.24
Foule sans nom! Chaos! Des voix, des yeux, des pas.
Ceux qu’on n’a jamais vus, ceux qu’on ne connaît pas.
The beauty the urban dreamer grasps is not that of the fashion of the day. Nor is it that of death perceived through the eternal repetition of the new. The rotting carcass is not the emblem of the vanity of all beauty; it itself offers a singular beauty, that of the multiple buzzing of flies and maggots, and of forms that erase themselves until they are no more than a dream, a forgotten ‘sketch’ on a painter’s canvas.25 Modern beauty is not the ‘always the same’ Benjamin that obsessed over after his reading of Blanqui and that he saw emblematized in the phantasmagoria of Baudelaire’s Sept vieillards. On the contrary, modern beauty is that of the anonymous multiple, of the body that has lost the lines that enclosed it, of the being denuded of its identity. But this loss of identity must not itself get lost in the sonorous chaos of Hugolian pantheism. Universal life is not the ocean into which all sinks. It is necessary to give to the multiple and to enjoyment of the multiple a framework that prevents them from getting lost in the deafening murmur of the crowd/ocean and in compassion for the woes of the world. Serving this is the window that shows and hides, the encounter with singular beings whose faces bear a history but, since Balzac, have lost the power to tell it and the exchange of gazes that opens an infinite vanishing line in the everyday space of the city. It is important that the window first and foremost opens only onto a world of other windows, behind which stands, for example, that wrinkly woman leaning over something indefinable and whose face, clothing and confused gesture permit a story to be made up.26 Modern beauty is also this: no longer a way of inventing stories that stage scenes with characters similar to us, but instead of making oneself dissimilar by inventing the possible lives of real beings glimpsed behind a casement window or at a bend in the street. And this, notably, is what permits the ‘sinuous’ aspect of the prose poem, in which all is both head and tail. Behind the offhandedness of the comments that preface Le Spleen de Paris there is a complete redefinition of poetic mimesis, to which the dreamlike form of the prose poem lends itself.
Its freedom consists in far more than the replacing of regular metre by the convenience of the sinuous line. It participates in the ruining of an entire tradition of thinking about the poem. Long ago Aristotle redeemed mimesis from Plato’s attacks by shifting away it from the imitation of characters toward the composition of those actions that distinguish themselves from the ordinariness of life because they have a head and a tail, a beginning, a middle and an end. With the loss of the paradigm of action, mimesis again comes to be the invention of characters. But this new mimesis inverts the old logic according to which the poet would invent beings of fiction to whose feelings actors lent their real bodies. Henceforth, real bodies must rather serve as supports for the creations of reverie, on the condition, of course, of being stripped of their properties, and rendered available for reverie to reinhabit them. Such is ultimately the moral – à tiroirs – of Le vieux saltimbanque. The poem seems entirely devoted to celebrating this new beauty, which is placed under the egalitarian sign of the effervescence of the multiple, wherein gain and loss make one ‘equally joyful’ about the fete, and wherein, as in a Decamps painting, all is merely ‘light, dust, cries, joy, tumult’.27 And the very perfection of the painting is what appears is contributed by the encounter of the old entertainer leaning against the posts of his shack, like Ferragus against his tree, but whose gaze, instead of setting itself on the path of the bowls, wanders ‘profound, unforgettable’ around the changing flux of the crowd and the light. The reader thus begrudges the poet for ending his walk with the dullest of allegories: the old entertainer provides the image of the ‘old man of letters who has outlived the generation he so brilliantly amused’.28 But this very dull conclusion can in turn be unfolded and made to reverberate on the urban stroll. The old man of letters, whose shack is empty, is also the poet fixed to his identity, playing the role of the poet. The multiple life and the multiple lives in which the new poet must lose himself releases him from that outmoded role. The profound gaze of the old entertainer therefore stands not as the contrary of the poetry of the multiple but instead is its multiplier. More exactly it opens in the simple multiplicity of the crowd the line of an infinitization. The crowd does not merely present bodies available for the modern poet’s embodiments. It also presents singular encounters, gazes that cause to deviate the very enjoyment that they increase and which prevent it from closing again into possession. The wealthy man’s joy is miserly when it has not been infinitized by the poor man’s gaze, stretched toward the café’s lights and decorations, or by his ear, which strains to hear the distant echoes of the concert; but the poor man’s joy remains petty, too, so long as it has not been traversed by the gaze of one who no longer has anything to show to onlookers. It is this republican infinitization of sensation that those ‘dear souls’ cannot understand, since their satisfied consumption refuses to be spoiled by poor people with eyes ‘as wide open as portes-cochères’.29 The enjoyment of the multiple is unable to become enclosed either in solitary possession or in amorous reciprocity. Poetic ‘prostitution’ is decidedly something other than the emblematic exhibition of that commodity in which life is made a symbol of death. And the infinitization of the multiple is not contradictory with the rejection of progress. The poet, who laughed of his past revolutionary extravagances, remained steadfast on this point: ‘It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their stupid pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, more vast, more refined.’30 The unknown is not merely the chasm at the bottom of which death is the only assured novelty. Behind each window, at the crossing of each street, at the threshold of each place of pleasure, it can offer itself to the aesthetic Republic’s work of infinitization. It is a modest but faithful politics. The issue is not to reduce to this alone the entire work and thought of a poet who had multiple faces and roles. But taking it into account can help us to cast a new gaze on this very multiplicity and reopen the space specific to the unfolding of its contradictory virtualities. The problem, moreover, is not one about interpreting a poet. It is to grasp the mutations of gaze and thought, the divisions of time and space, of words and images, according to which the idea of poetry and the Republic combined to draw a certain visage of community.