The Interweaving of Life and Text: Authorial Inscription and Readerly Self-Understanding Exemplified in Les Fleurs du mal

The present article attempts to make explicit the existential dimension of a canonical literary text: Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. This work is chosen because it transmits a series of disturbing existential assertions; that is, it is used, in the present context, to investigate Gadamer’s thesis of the reader achieving a new self-understanding through the text. By taking both the author’s as well as the reader’s positions into account in the interpretation, the intention is furthermore to explore the dialogical situation that Gadamer highlights in the understanding process. In order to achieve this, focus is put on the notion of subjectivity in the context of Romanticism and Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy. The contribution is structured as follows: first, an overview is provided with respect to the development of the notion of subjectivity from Kant to Kierkegaard. After this, the existential aspects of Les Fleurs du mal are analyzed.