daimon

This text attempts to explore the correspondence between Immanuel Kant’s notion of genius and the representation of the figure of the genius in “The Chants of Maldoror” by Isidor Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont. The aim is to show how and to what extent Kant’s well-known definition is supported and overturned in the medium of the fictional text. As the genius of Kant is a miraculous complex of imagination, reason, taste and spirit, Maldoror is his dark double, an inverted reflection, a daimon, who weaves the ontolog- ical texture of the world, a celestial force who sets the world in the flames of the revolution. By means of a recuperation of the classical heritage of the notion of daimon and its intersection with Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime, a new perspective reveals itself. Maldoror posits himself as a genius through the interaction with the sublime. The first front of the sublime unfolds in the traditional images of the ocean and the mathematics, representing the Kantian notions of the dynamic and the mathematical sublime. However, Lautréamont discloses new fronts of the sublime in the territories of sublimitas, of the apoc- alyptic, chaotic figures, matter and forces, the origin of which can be traced back to Antiquity. The genius is not anymore a figure of the light of reason, but an enigmatic darkness whose energy bursts on the surface of existence as destruction, violence, chaos and death. Negativity here presents a radical experience, which transforms all into absolute freedom, into a life without limits. Lautréamont breaks through the aesthetic limitation of the act of geni- us, drawn by Kant, and turns the fictional text into a laboratory in genetic en- gineering, projecting from the heart of aesthetics a new imperative: the use of the medium of literature as an experimental space for transfor