ABSTRACT
In the necrological article on Delacroix, Charles Baudelaire does Giuseppe Ferrari the signal honour of associating the philosopher/dandy's views on history as recurrence with those of the painter/dandy, in a common opposition to the myth of progress and he provides further elements towards a definition of intellectual dandyism. The trajectory which took Ferrari from the earlier to the later book is paralleled by Baudelaire's own trajectory over the same period. In the later Baudelaire, as in Ferrari, the tragedy of a nature given over to the conflict of principles is only mitigated by virtue of the law which proclaims the antagonism— the last resource of human intelligence in the face of tragedy and the only truth which escapes universal error. In Ferrari, as in the later Baudelaire, the 'law of contrasts' has a patently anti-humanist character. Dandyism can only be understood in terms of a world where no unity is possible, in the intellectual or the political sphere.
