Correspondences: Postal, Political, and Poetical

Abstract

Benjamin’s concept of correspondances introduces the faculty of judgment as pertaining to the realm of similarities. This is a determining capacity, language’s ability to distinguish likenesses, but it is at the same time only one side of the ability that also lets us grasp an image as it flits by. Benjamin creates the concept from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondances,’ which belongs to Spleen et idéal. In its first quatrain, Baudelaire presents nature as a temple whose columns sometimes enounce a confused speech; man, painstakingly making his way through this forest of symbols, is the object of its familiar glances. In the second verse, these glances and utterances receive an answer. Like echoes from far away, there are sounds, colors, and fragrances that intermingle in obscure depths and extend over both night and day, coming not from man as such, it seems, but from his roaming about in nature. ‘Correspondances’ deals with what in Kantian parlance is the matter of sensation: chaotic, manifold, disorganized, or rather not-yet organized sensations, being ‘not-yet’ ordered in time and space.² These undetermined sensations without form are nevertheless exactly what may answer the obscure pronunciations of nature’s temple — the mumbling muttering which to Benjamin is nothing other than ‘the book of nature.’³

La Nature est un temple oú de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances,’ Fleurs du mal¹