In the summer of 1845, a young, wayward, and disaffected Charles Baudelaire made a suicide attempt, writing letters that were to constitute his last will and testament. It was to be one of several suicidal crises which would punctuate Baudelaire’s life over the next twenty years, acutely documented in his correspondence, where the themes of depression, debt, and death come together to delineate a life that was lived, in almost every way, against life.
 
Horror of Life: The Suicide Letters of Charles Baudelaire brings together a selection of Baudelaire’s letters that spans his life as a writer, from the scandal and notoriety of The Flowers of Evil, to the images of urban decay depicted in Paris Spleen, to his dossier on the ‘artificial paradises’ of hallucinogens, to the essays on the mal du siècle of 19th century modernity, to his late fragments of misanthropic autofiction, and his final days as a convalescent, disease slowly eroding both body and mind.
 
A delirious mixture of confession, indictment, and abdication, these letters document Baudelaire’s own dark night of the soul, a spiritual itinerary saturated with the hues of catatonic depression, a pervasive existential dysphoria, and the always-looming allure of death.​​
 
Edited, translated and with an introduction by Eugene Thacker
Artworks by Martin Bladh
Photographs by Karolina Urbaniak