Nel segno del possibile. Arte e immaginazione in Baudelaire

The paper shows how in Baudelaire’s work the faculty of imagination represents the dimension which makes possible to institute art as a production of the “possible”, i.e. as a device able to bring out, through the immanence of the datum (the appearance, the sensitive), the “other of the datum”: the transcendence of the “non-identical”. In this perspective, Baudelaire’s art qualifies itself for its ability of witnessing the transmutability of the categorical order established in the world. Hence, its function is both critical and utopian. From this point of view, the interconnection which binds Spleen and Idéal, i.e. sense and non-sense, becomes the center of Baudelaire’s poetry: if the Spleen is the feeling of the “permanent catastrophe”, the Idéal is the expression of a transcendence that the work of art, as a non-kept “promise of happiness”, has to affirm and deny at the same time, in order to preserve its “content of truth”, in a irreducibly dissonant world.