Vierges en Fleurs: Baudelaire's Lesbian Poems and the Ethics of Writing Sameness

Over a decade before the publication of his first collection of poetry, Baudelaire announced on several occasions that this collection would be entitled Les Lesbiennes (Lesbians). Although the collection eventually came out with the title Les Fleurs du mal instead of Les Lesbiennes, and although there are only three poems in the collection that explicitly address the lesbian subject, the arch-modernist's one-time intention to invoke the lesbian figure for his representation of modernity is more than suggestive. Arguing that both Walter Benjamin's and gender studies' readings of Baudelaire's lesbian figure are inadequate, this essay considers the ethico-political implications of Baudelaire's writing of female homoeroticism. While in other poems Baudelaire's poetic persona is easily recognized as being manipulative and violent towards the female, in the Lesbian poems, I will argue, this persona approaches the radical other in a non-desiring and non-narcissistic manner-hence assuming a subject-object dynamic quite different from that which has been said to ground the ideology of modernity. The governing claim of this essay is that, at a time when the conceptualization of ”difference” is assuming formative importance in modernity's political philosophy, cultural imaginary, and epistemology, Baudelaire's evocation of sameness not only collapses the subject-object dichotomy at the forefront of high modernity, but also figures as an ethical possibility wherein the self attends to the radical other for the sake of the other.