From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordHallucination is the imagined image's power to eclipse what is actually before the eyes.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées VIII explains mistakes about faces through the eclipse of reality by a derivative image.
- In this editionThe edition keeps ‘hallucination’, including in the childhood passage, instead of retrospectively distinguishing healthy imagination from clinical hallucination.
- A place to readl’éclipse de l’image réelle par l’hallucination qui en tire sa naissance — The derivative image obscures the perception that generated it.
Meaning
Hallucination is the imagined image's power to eclipse what is actually before the eyes. Fusées VIII gives it a specifically relational structure: the hallucination arises from the real image and then obscures its source. The notebook is therefore interested in a transformation of perception, not only in visions without an external object.
The word moves among observation, polemical caricature and remembered childhood fantasy. These uses should not be converted into a retrospective medical diagnosis. Baudelaire also asks where the power stops: can what confounds a face invade pure reasoning itself?
Use in the book
Fusées VIII explains mistakes about faces through the eclipse of reality by a derivative image. The image is both dependent and usurping. That model helps illuminate the conjectural reading of faces in Fusées XVI: a beautiful face makes the observer dream of hidden desires and frustrated power. Yet the beauty passage also asks whether the speaker's brain is a bewitched mirror. His preferred interpretation may be an illuminating perception or an obsession projected back upon its object.
Fusées XII tests the boundary with the question of mathematical madness. Could a person really hold that two and two make three? The phrase ‘if these words do not shriek’ registers resistance within language before any answer is reached. It is a question about the relation between reasoning and disturbed experience, left as a question. Its proximity to the demand for a disciplinary whipper does not make the whip an established treatment for hallucination.
In Fusées XXII the word is turned against Hugo, whose imagined Promethean suffering allegedly develops into identification with Napoleon's exile. This is hostile satire using medical language, not an independently evidenced case history. Mon cœur mis à nu XCIV applies hallucinations to the child's fantasies of becoming a military pope or actor, emphasizing their pleasures. The repeated word joins invention and error without making them indistinguishable; the difficult task is to judge how an image governs the person who entertains it.
Places to read
- Fusées VIIIl’éclipse de l’image réelle par l’hallucination qui en tire sa naissance — The derivative image obscures the perception that generated it.
- Fusées XIIenvahir les choses de pur raisonnement — The mathematical question probes a possible limit.
- Fusées XVImon cerveau serait-il un miroir ensorcelé ? — The aesthetic observer raises doubt about his own instrument of judgment.
- Mon cœur mis à nu XCIVJouissances que je tirais de ces deux hallucinations. — Childhood fantasies are recalled through their pleasures.
Translation in this edition
The edition keeps ‘hallucination’, including in the childhood passage, instead of retrospectively distinguishing healthy imagination from clinical hallucination. It renders image réelle as ‘real image’, preserving the initial image rather than replacing it with bare reality. ‘Bewitched mirror’ retains the question mark and magical qualification. Those choices let readers hear Baudelaire's shifting usage while withholding a diagnostic uniformity that the French does not provide.