Vaporous Modernity and Destructive Imagination

The objective of this article is to analyze the scopic regime on the basis of destructive imagination, whose two interesting manifestations are the representation of clouds in the work of Baudelaire and in impressionism. By the concept of scopic regime, I mean the way the artist's eye artializes the world into a landscape. Two principal poles comprising the scopic regime are the eye and the landscape which establish the relationship with each other through the process of artialization and subjectivation. The work is composed of two successive steps. First, I will analyze the invention of the vaporous landscape whose central figure is the cloud in Baudelaire and impressionism, especially in Monet. Secondly, I will examine the invention of an awakened eye corresponding to destructive imagination, which, contrary to the Einbildungskraft of Kant, exercises its negative power. Adapted from the source document.