This paper takes as its starting point the analysis of Baudelaire’s poetry proposed by Walter Benjamin, with an emphasis on Simmel’s idea, recuperated by Benjamin, that the transformations in space and perception in big cities affect sensorial interaction among individuals. These transformations relate both to the realm of the aura and eros, for they dismantle the link between desire and the presence of an essential distancing, which is closer in erotic experience. Thus, the shared gaze is no longer of importance in Baudelaire’s erotic poetry; and even perfume itself, which still keeps alive the possibility of this impulse towards the far away, fails before the inexorable destruction of Spleen’s devouring Time.
W. Benjamin; Baudelaire; Eros; Aura; Sense