Abstract

The paper proposes a focus upon the notion of “aura” as it emerges from the work of Baudelaire. In particular, the paper shows how the relevance of such a work lies precisely in its capacity to critically interrogate the relationship between art, aura and modernity: in its capacity to exhibit exemplary, on the one hand, the irremediable decline of aura understood as “uniqueness” and “originality” of the artwork (therefore, the aura as expression of a sense given once and for all) and, on the other hand, the possible survival of an aura conceived rather as appearance of an inaccessible “distance”, and then of an irreducible otherness. From this point of view, in staging a short-circuit between spleen and idéal, i.e between “myth” and “hope”, the Baudelairian artistic form offers itself to us as an expression of authentic “auratisation of the datum”.