Baudelaire himself feels the influence of this surgical metaphor of love when in Fusées, a section of his Journaux intimes, he claims several times that “the act of love is quite similar to a moment of torture or a surgical operation.” […] As for metaphorical surgery, it appears in Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen […] Baudelaire introduces a Parisian prostitute in the poem “Miss Scalpel,” in which we witness the humorous meeting between Miss Scalpel and the poet. Miss Scalpel is described by the poetic subject as an “unexpected enigma” who mistakes him for a surgeon of love “so nice and good to women.” The poet is attracted to her enigmatic figure—enigmatic because of her incongruous fantasy of being loved by a surgeon, or a man disguised as a surgeon who would come to see her “with his bag and his apron even stained with a bit of blood”. Miss Scalpel thus offers the poet a new identity, that of a surgeon, “a man who loves to cut, and hack and carve” the bodies placed in his professional hands. […] “Miss Scalpel” transfigures the poet into a surgeon whose love for cutting bodies is transmuted into poetic operations of dissection.

“…unharmed by the fading of our senses, immune to all change, immune in the most unthinkably far regions of ourselves, of our hearts, of our souls, perception lived on, imperceptible, unevocable, unexplorable, unrecognizable to itself, and it sought the counter-perception in the other soul, in the other heart, in the invisible depths of the other,”

“In myself, too many things have perished which, I imagined, would last forever.”

Desire in itself is empty, in other words it merely indicates direction, but never destination; destinations, in any case, always remain phantasmagoric and unclear; the closer we get to them, the more enigmatic they become.