I am the wound and the knife!
I am the blow and the cheek!
I am the limbs and the wheel—
The victim and the executioner!

These lines are from Baudelaire’s poem “L’Héautontimorouménos” (“The Self-Tormentor”), included in the 1857 first edition of *Les Fleurs du mal* and retained in later authorized editions. The poem belongs to the book’s cluster of pieces exploring spleen, self-division, and moral masochism—states Baudelaire dramatizes as modern, urban forms of anguish rather than purely religious contrition. In this lyric, the speaker describes an inwardly turned violence: the self becomes both the instrument and the target of punishment, echoing the era’s fascination with psychological interiority and Baudelaire’s recurring theme that consciousness can be its own tribunal and torture chamber.

In these paradoxical self-identifications—wound and knife, blow and cheek, victim and executioner—the speaker collapses the usual moral division between sufferer and aggressor. The lines dramatize an inner split: the self as both the site of pain and the agent that inflicts it, suggesting self-laceration, guilt, and complicity in one’s own torment. The imagery also evokes a theatrical or juridical scene of punishment, but internalized: the “wheel” (a torture device) becomes part of the speaker’s own body. Read this way, the passage captures a modern, Baudelairean sense of consciousness as self-consuming, where desire, remorse, and cruelty circulate within the same psyche.