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Because the work of art can never coincide with its subject, because it is always belated with respect to what it represents, any attempt to determine its authenticity as a function of its adequacy to its subject will fail. As several of the papers in this cluster of essays suggest, the question of authenticity must therefore be addressed on different grounds-variously described here in terms of "a kind of authenticity grounded in the fake" (Lynes), of a claim that it is "only within the realm of the artificial that the category of the authentic has any meaning" (Shumway), of paintings whose meaning resides in their non-referentiality (Rothman), of what Wilde calls "the truth of masks" (Riquelme). The poem, painting, or musical performance becomes authentic at the moment that it is adequate to its own nonmimetic nature, at the moment it owns up to its inauthenticity.
But what does it mean to be authentically inauthentic, to be a real counterfeit? If modernism entails the imperative to convey something whose significance lies in what Baudelaire calls "sa qualité essentielle de présent," then modernism confronts the question of authenticity with particular clarity. The modern is defined fundamentally in opposition to the past, that is, as that which distinguishes what is modern from what precedes it.1 The attempt to convey the particularity of the modern, its very presentness, is then bound to fail, for the act of representation itself relegates the present to the past and can at best appear as a repetition of a lost present.2 Modernism thus emerges, as Vincent Sherry reminds us in his seminar contribution, as a series of radical Nows, a tradition of the new, in which authenticity is associated not with efforts to keep the present present, but rather with transience itself. The authentic is defined by its own destruction.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Walter Benjamin finds one of the earliest theorizations of modernist aesthetics in images of suicide in Baudelaire's writing, namely in the essay "On the Heroism of Modern Life" from the Salon of 1846. Baudelaire's references to suicide follow a series of claims that announce the advent of modernism. "It is true that the great tradition is lost, and the new tradition has not yet been created...