From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordBad taste becomes attractive when it can be willed as a breach of expected approval.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées XVIII places bad taste beside the mixture of grotesque and tragic, compared to dissonances enjoyed by jaded ears.
- In this edition‘Bad taste’ and ‘displeasing’ retain the verbal opposition between goût and déplaire without replacing it with the more approving ‘transgression’.
- A place to readle plaisir aristocratique de déplaire — The maxim defines pleasure through a deliberately adverse response.
Meaning
Bad taste becomes attractive when it can be willed as a breach of expected approval. The phrase ‘aristocratic pleasure of displeasing’ makes taste relational: what delights the speaker includes another person's dissatisfaction. This is more pointed than enjoying an unconventional object in private.
The aristocracy here is a claim to distinction, not proof that the speaker's judgment is independently superior. If the pleasure needs an offended audience, defiance remains tied to the very public from which it seeks separation. The paradox is part of the aphorism's pressure.
Use in the book
Fusées XVIII places bad taste beside the mixture of grotesque and tragic, compared to dissonances enjoyed by jaded ears. The comparison supplies a physiology of reception: familiarity can dull response, making discordance newly stimulating. It does not say that any ugly or offensive object is automatically good art. The pleasure comes through a relation between the mixture and a particular state of sensibility.
Fusées XVII gives the wish to displease a more aggressive aim: universal disgust and horror would finally conquer solitude. Antagonism becomes a method of producing distance. Yet that strategy risks making the self dependent on others' reactions. The announcement of a book not written for ‘my women, my daughters and my sisters’ similarly manufactures a hostile imagined readership while refusing its authority.
The taste for surprise in Fusées XII supplies a related aesthetic criterion, but surprise and displeasure should not be equated. One can awaken attention without humiliating an audience, and Fusées VI admits that buffoonery rarely remains charitable. These neighbouring passages allow the reader to recognize the energy of deliberate offence while asking what it costs. The notebook's attacks on persons and groups are not absolved because displeasure is sometimes an aesthetic resource.
Places to read
- Fusées XVIIIle plaisir aristocratique de déplaire — The maxim defines pleasure through a deliberately adverse response.
- Fusées XVIIIcomme les discordances aux oreilles blasées — Mixed registers answer a state of jaded reception.
- Fusées XVIIj’aurai conquis la solitude — Universal disgust is imagined as a route to separation.
- Fusées VImais c’est rare — The qualification in the buffoonery-and-charity sentence checks easy celebration of offence.
Translation in this edition
‘Bad taste’ and ‘displeasing’ retain the verbal opposition between goût and déplaire without replacing it with the more approving ‘transgression’. ‘Jaded’ for blasées matters: the analogy concerns a dulled appetite, not a timeless rule of artistic judgment. The edition's ‘intoxicating’ also keeps the aphorism within the wider vocabulary of ivresse, so the claimed aristocratic coolness is inseparable from a sought excitement.