Whore-Pope-Lumpen: this is the Trinity of prostitution that Baudelaire was also identifying (his Fusées are datable to the years 1855–1862; Marx’s Grundrisse to 1857–1858). In their supremacy, all are vicars of God: “l’être le plus prostitué, c’est l’être par excellence, c’est Dieu”; “The being most prostituted is the being par excellence, it is God.”⁵⁶⁷ Having only one area of manifestation, they do not achieve that global and perpetual prostitution which is the sign of divinity. Whether the Lumpen then appear as paupers, as dandies, or as poets makes little difference. They are, in any case, beings with no dignity (if anything, they have majesty). What takes away their dignity is their very admission of contact with something extra-social and self-sufficient, truly nefarious: pleasure, the invisible, the gratuitousness of art. (The writer is a member of the Lumpen as soon as he talks about art for art’s sake: an insolent response, in cracked falsetto, to his loss of status: he no longer has a purpose at Court, so he rejects all purpose.)

Un frisson nouveau

Modernity and nerves find their definitive voice in Baudelaire’s notes (even though the Goncourt brothers would later write, with defiant vanity: “We were the first to write about nerves”).⁵⁶⁸ The German romantics were still talking about ideas, but here a theological aside mingles with the smells of the streets, the nausea of manifestos, the incidents of city life, a summary of debts, a recipe for Icelandic lichen. A dreary personal sideshow, while the same old performance continues onstage. An obsession about the names of newspaper editors, a “list of villains” (“liste de canailles”).⁵⁶⁹ Burke’s sublimity, the “delights of chaos and immensity,” are now camped at the crossroads, appearing at every step are the gaping chasms that people went to see in Switzerland and belonged then to memories of the Grand Tour.⁵⁷⁰ One walks beneath “the square sky of solitudes,” in the savanna of the mind.⁵⁷¹ At times “the voice of the adjective pierced me to the bone.”⁵⁷²

Nerves first emerge as a historical subject with Baudelaire’s generation. As if, indeed, nerves had not run through the body, had not given those shudders, those shocks that are now felt with dismay, with delight. It is the first sign of the final fixation of the Spirit—first sonorous, then luminous, then all-embracing, then aural, then vaporous, and finally simply nervous—in the network of the Body. And this passage to the Body inevitably goes with an urge to experiment on the Body. For this, the Spirit has to be fixed in a certain place in order to have an effect on it. This is the crossroads, the meeting place for all praxes, all kinds of aestheticism (which are projects of great industrial enterprises, the first seeds of the whole impressive apparatus of the media, from the salon of Des Esseintes to the palace courtyards of Cecil B. De Mille), all positive sciences, all organizations, all systems of education. The new thought of the age is all assembled in one point: no longer to have one thought, but to act on every thought—and from this action to consider the thought that emerges. The most convincing action, it is supposed, will be the most effective. And the most effective action, consequently, will be considered by the most appropriate thought.