Reading and Otherness: The Interpretative Triangle in Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose

"Les Yeux des pauvres" and "Les Fênetres," among other of Baudelaire's prose poems, dramatize a speaking subject's interpretive acts in a way that mimics the reading process itself. Mirroring the ways in which we read ourselves in others, these poems also make evident a triangulation of interpretation that problematizes any straightforward identification of self and other. This article explores the critical triangle that develops within the poems among the interpreting subject, the third-person object of interpretation, and the second-person interlocutor who challenges the subject's perceptions. It argues that the radical other of this formation is the second person and studies the implications of the dynamic intersubjective tension between speaker and interlocutor for our own critical processes. (KMR)