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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 August 2019
Among the plethora of efforts to define modernity, Michel Foucault’s attempt in an essay answering the question “What is Enlightenment?,” which was famously posed by the eighteenth-century-Germany Aufklärer, is particularly suggestive. Modernity, he argued, is neither a temporal period nor adherence to a set of progressive beliefs and practices; it is instead an attitude, “the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to ‘heroize’ the present.” Here Charles Baudelaire’s seminal essays “The Salon of 1846: On the Heroism of Modern Life” and “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), which celebrated the illustrator Constantin Guys’s depiction of the unsettled, turbulent world of the modern city, served Foucault as a recipe for a more general response to “modernity” in all of its motley variety.
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