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Specters of Modernity. AI image Encounters with Retrospective Affinities Intellectual history typically imagines influence as a linear process in which later thinkers inherit, revise, or reject the work of their predecessors. Yet some encounters disrupt this temporal logic. A writer may discover, retrospectively, that an earlier figure articulated ideas or intuitions he believed to be uniquely his own. These moments produce a peculiar form of affinity—neither straightforward inheritance nor conscious reception, but a belated awareness of conceptual proximity across time. Charles Baudelaire’s first encounter with Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this phenomenon. In an 1864 letter to Théophile Thoré, Baudelaire recalls the shock he experienced upon reading Poe: “The first time I opened one of his books I saw, not merely certain subjects which I had dreamed of, but whole sentences which I had thought—yet written by him twenty years earlier.” This suggests not imitation but an unexpecte...