This article tries to explore the idea, cautiously suggested by Walter Benjamin in "Some motifs in Baudelaire", concerning a "secret architecture" in The Flowers of Evil, a drawing that would be able to unify the poems and show the fragile harmony between the moments of the book in which the auratic perception is celebrated, and those in which its loss is undoubtedly affirmed. The poem "To a Passerby" would function, in this architectonic approach, as a privileged passage between those extremities, and would show us a way to ponder the modern perception of the work of art, not as a simple overcoming of the auratic, but as a tense dialectic between shock and mourning for the lost unity.
philosophy of art; criticism; poetry