Aphrodite’s Children: Hopeless Love, Historiography, and Benjamin’s Dialectical Image

THERE IS A MOMENT in Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, in the poem “A une passante,” when the bustling crowd of a Parisian street gives way before the poet and he encounters a beautiful woman, dressed in widow’s clothes. The two exchange glances and then the woman passes by, leaving the poet alone to contemplate the love he might have experienced, but for which he can now only feel regret. It is this precise moment in Les Fleurs du Mal that Walter Benjamin, in his “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” chose for his illustration of a certain type of love, a love he associates with cosmopolitan modernity, “of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.”