Estetică, politică şi imaginaţie critică
Aesthetics, Politics, and Critical Imagination

Summary/Abstract: The article aims at defining the modern notion of critical imagination proceeding from the theoretical writings of Charles Baudelaire. Having as its reference points the Kantian criticism, on the one hand, and Jacques Derrida’s theory of “supplement”, on the other hand, the study points out the fact that, in contrast to the Romantic creative philosophies of Schelling, Coleridge or Novalis, for which the imagination remains stranded with the traditional ideas of unity and cosmic plenitude, Baudelaire rethinks the modern concept of imagination by integrating in his theory of poetry, following Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Composition, the rationalism and lucidity of the philosophical criticism. Moreover, the Baudelairian critical imagination not only anticipates the theory of “supplement” of Derrida (defining the imagination as “supplement”), but also amends it avant-la-lettre: unlike the poststructuralist philosopher’s approach, which aims at pointing out the perilous and subversive political dimension the the supplement, Baudelaire emphasizes, on the contrary, the catalytical, augmentative and paradigmatic reordering action of the latter. It is surpassed thus the vicious circle of the “supplementarism” as phantasmal duplication and subversive mimetism and opened the hermeneutical circle of the comprehensive understanding, under the sign of which the protean dynamism of the arts turns out to be, politically speaking, the pattern of the perpetual change of human existence.

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