El faro oscuro de la modernidad: resistencia intelectual, subversión estética y crítica al progreso en Charles Baudelaire. Aproximaciones al pensamiento radical moderno

Abstract

This paper carries out an enquiry on Baudelaire’s critique of the concept of progress as an aftermath of modernity and attempts to demonstrate how Baudelaire replies to the technical achievements as an inevitable analogy of a social ideal of perfectibility. The main proposition of this critique is how modernity conceals the conditions that determine exploitation and human misery by means of enervating the mind with material progress as a solace. The surrender to this technical imperative as a model for civilization points out the advent of radical intellectual movements opposed to this mode of utilitarianism and technocracy that suppresses any possibility of moral perfectibility. Is Baudelaire’s work as a critique of progress capable of shedding some light to the shift in the perspective of the historical expectations, if it is construed as an effort against the progressive alienation of life under modernity?