Charles Baudelaire: from Eros to Thanatos

The paper presents a concept that explains the creative subjectivity of Charles Baudelaire which is considered through the prism of the theory of egocentrism and existential philosophy. The research focuses on the verbal, moral and communicative forms of the poet’s egocentrism that have been formed while recreating the holistic view of the world through boredom, melancholy and nausea. The poet tries to understand, accept and demonstrate the reality through the ity, the struggle between Eros and Thanatos. Verbal egocentrism integrates the object with the subject and displaces the outside world in full that engenders boredom. Moral egocentrism fostered by nausea implies the inability to perceive the basic moral qualities and the actions of others and directs the poet towards Thanatos. Communicative egocentrism accompanied by illusion and melancholy becomes a fundamental principle of later life, turns Baudelaire into a “sacrifice from himself”. Baudelaire believes that an attempt to know himself and find himself in this world of existence rather than the being is a possibility of reconstructing the “split” of being, which turns into the destruction of reality supported by the egocentrism of the poet. The hyperfocus on oneself, the attempts to reconstruct one illusory world and create the other, the fragments of the world instead of its structure, the substitution of one’s own values and expression of oneself through creativity are the main features of egocentrism according to Charles Baudelaire.