According to Giorgio Agamben, Beau Brummell’s lack of intentionality while tying his neck-cloth (2.7) became an inspiration for some of the most important modern poets who did not hesitate to consider him their master. From this point of view, Brummell can “claim as his own discovery the introduction of chance into the artwork so widely practiced in contemporary art.”1
Even more important is Brummell’s contribution to a certain vein of inhumanity present in avant-garde poetry, of which Agamben makes a list of examples:
What is new about modern poetry is that, confronted with a world that glorifies man so much the more it reduces him to an object, modern poetry unmasks the humanitarian ideology by making rigorously its own the boutade that Balzac puts in George Brummell’s mouth: “nothing less resembles man than man.” Apollinaire perfectly formulated this proposition in Les peintres cubistes, where he writes that “above all, artist are men who wish to become inhuman.” Baudelaire’s antihumanism, Rimbaud’s call “to make one’s soul monstrous,” the marionette to Kleist, Lautréamont’s “Is it a man or a stone or a tree,” Mallarmé’s “I am truly decomposed,” the arabesque of Matisse, that confuses human figures and tapestries. “My ardor is rather of the order of the dead and the unborn” from Klee, “the human doesn’t come into it” of Gottfried Benn, to the “nacreous snail’s pace” of Eugenio Montale and “the head of the head of medusa and the Robot” of Paul Celan, all express the same need: there are still figures beyond the human!2
Among the set of figures that lie beyond the human also are literary and cinematographic characters like the vampire, the werewolf and the zombie. The latter, quite literally a “living dead,” allows us a glimpse of the relationship of the homo sacer with Agamben’s list. The sacred man is the inhuman in the legal sphere. A legal representation of that which cannot be represented legally and which acquires a monstrous appearance in the imaginary.
As part of this lineage, the dandy act as the hinge between the world of the human and the inhuman, between the work of art and the commodity. He is the direct ancestor of the modern celebrity, sovereign of a world secularized by the reign of commerce.
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