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The cat is for Charles Baudelaire, the poet of Les Fleurs du mal, both a sign and a symbol. In Michael Riffaterre's analysis of the poem "Les Chats," he isolates both meanings, the cat as the living sign of an erotic relationship (Riffaterre 226) and the cat as the symbol of the poet's "mystical communion with the universe" (Riffaterre 223). Between these erotic and mystical meanings lies the cat as daimon, that Greek concept of otherness that sometimes was portrayed as an interpretive conscience, a mediator acting as a guardian according to Hesiod's Works and Days or sitting on one's shoulder visible only to those one encounters (Arendt 180). Baudelaire the poet has a special daimonic vision insofar as the poet has insight into the daimon described by Hesiod as unseen by the one being influenced (Jaeger 52). The poet likewise literally sees the cat with its need to "watch ... [and] demand to be watched" (Riffaterre 227), thus leading the poet to be selfreflective as a consequence of this communication with the daimon.
The word daimon has also been confused historically with demon or devil and is thus linked with the evil that generates Baudelaire's vision for flowers or objects of beauty and delicacy. In a post-Levinas world, we learn from Alain Finkielkraut that love is the basic model for ethical relationships "le Mal procede d'abord d'une volonte de punir l'Autre de son intrusion dans mon existence" (Finkielkraut 145). Hence, the poet looks for allies in this insight into the ethical consequences of Evil. The cat is such an ally to be reckoned with in the quasireligious rituals that are Baudelaire's poems. While Georges Bataille speaks, out of inspiration from Baudelaire, about the need for a fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism (Bataille 1987 640), a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, Arthur Symons, comments that Baudelaire's poetry is "an eternal Mass served before a veiled altar" (Eliot 1932 62). Baudelaire's poems indeed create the ambience for Catholic ritual, the Mass, as a memento for Baudelaire from his father, Jean-Francois, who was a defrocked priest (Pichois and Ziegler 50). The role model for moving the sacred to the profane was thus already set for Charles. Jean-Francois, the ordained priest, became a teacher of Latin and...