This article focuses on human-thing interconnections in Baudelaire’s 1853 essay on toys, ‘Morale du joujou’, and shows how their entanglement finds echoes in his aesthetic writing. The article shows how the essay on toys indirectly thematizes the reciprocally transformative, embodied and participatory process that can also be traced ...
This article focuses on human-thing interconnections in Baudelaire’s 1853 essay on toys, ‘Morale du joujou’, and shows how their entanglement finds echoes in his aesthetic writing. The article shows how the essay on toys indirectly thematizes the reciprocally transformative, embodied and participatory process that can also be traced in Baudelaire’s account of artistic creativity. The human imagination is presented in Baudelaire’s essay, as in his art criticism, as entering into a kind of dialogue with the external world, which complicates the line between, and any hierarchical relationship between, subject and object.
