Untimely Metamorphoses: Darwin, Baudelaire, Woolf, and Animal Flânerie

International audienceDrawing on Charles Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf, this essay highlights the presence of the animal in the representation of flânerie, by examining how human flâneurs and flâneuses were brought into real and metaphorical proximity with animal ones. In contrast with an essentialist conception of the animal as being outside history, Baudelaire and Woolf variously captured urban contemporaneity through a trans-species aesthetics of flânerie, questioning, both within and outside Darwin’s evolutionism, the anthropocentric distinction between historical and unhistorical. While taking Nietzsche’s concept of the untimely as its starting point, the essay reappraises its conceptual reappropriation by Deleuze and Guattari, and thus proposes to understand animal flânerie as a disruptive process of becoming-animal, subverting the ontological foundations of the Aristotelian city