From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordProstitution is an aggressively transferable word in these notebooks.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées I places the question ‘What is art?’
- In this editionThe 2026 English retains ‘prostitution’ and ‘prostitute oneself’ rather than substituting promiscuity, publicity or self-abasement.
- A place to readQu’est-ce que l’art ?
Meaning
Prostitution is an aggressively transferable word in these notebooks. It can name the sale of sexual access, but it also names the self's availability to others: the actor before a public, the lover leaving himself, the artist circulating among readers, even God as the inexhaustible recipient of individual appeals. These are connected uses, not interchangeable moral verdicts. The word deliberately carries the social disgrace of its literal sense into activities conventionally called noble.
Its decisive ambiguity concerns giving. To offer oneself may be generous, a surrender of possessiveness; it may also dissipate the self or submit it to an audience's appetite. Neither ‘commercialization’ nor ‘self-sacrifice’ covers this entire field. Baudelaire makes the scandal of the word do work that a neutral term for communication could not do.
Use in the book
Fusées I places the question ‘What is art?’ beside an answer of one word. The nearby performance and ball offer an explanation through mutual enjoyment: everyone takes pleasure in everyone else. The artist's relation to others enters the same economy as erotic desire. Yet the section calls the taste for prostitution generous and declares it corrupted by ownership. Here the apparently disreputable term judges respectable possession, rather than merely condemning love.
Mon cœur mis à nu LXVII makes the relation explicit: love is the need to leave oneself; worship involves both sacrifice and prostitution. Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII then calls God the most prostituted being because he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love. The theological extension prevents a reading in which prostitution invariably means degradation. It also prevents the comforting claim that Baudelaire has simply replaced the literal meaning with a harmless metaphor: the offence depends on the literal word remaining audible.
Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII pulls the concept in another direction. Ordinary desire to be two is opposed to the genius's wish to remain one; glory nevertheless requires remaining one while prostituting oneself in a particular manner. This is a problem of artistic exposure, not a solved rule of withdrawal. The notebook itself addresses an imagined readership while trying to preserve an inassimilable speaker. Its provocative formulation participates in the danger it describes.
Places to read
- Fusées IQu’est-ce que l’art ? Prostitution. — The abrupt definition puts artistic communication inside an erotic and social economy.
- Fusées Iun sentiment généreux : le goût de la prostitution — Generosity reverses the expected valuation of the word.
- Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIIIle réservoir commun, inépuisable de l’amour — God supplies the most extreme extension of availability to others.
- Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIILa gloire, c’est rester un, et se prostituer d’une manière particulière. — Fame combines singularity with a distinctive form of public exposure.
Translation in this edition
The 2026 English retains ‘prostitution’ and ‘prostitute oneself’ rather than substituting promiscuity, publicity or self-abasement. This is essential to the repeated collisions between art, love and divinity. In Fusées I, ‘ownership’ for propriété also helps distinguish the generosity of availability from the desire to own its recipient. The heading does not imply that every use refers to sex work as an institution.