Robert Boncardo & Christian R.

Gelder

Introduction

Advice To Young Psychoanalysts: Read Mallarm

s Jean-Michel Rabat recalls in Lacans Return to Freud,1 in 1969 the

French linguist Georges Mounin published an essay in La Nouvelle
Revue Franaise entitled Quelques traits du style de Jacques Lacan.2
Amidst scathing remarks about Lacans self-described Gongorism, his
disastrous incomprehension of Saussure, and his idiosyncratic use of constructions
like de ce que or pour ce que in place of the far more familiar parce que, Mounin
suggested that Lacans linguistic peculiarities, like those of Mallarm before him,
arose from an infantile bilingualism. While Mounin was wrong about the linguistic
ambiance of both the psychoanalysts and the poets childhoods, for many French
thinkers of the last half-century the proximity between their respective styles has
been too striking to ignore. Reflecting on his ambivalence towards the psychoanalysts literary imagination and scientific pretensions, Lacans own analyst Rudolph
Loewenstein remarked that when I read his works I cant help thinking, Words,
words, words. And yet I love and admire Mallarm.3 In a perhaps more positive
vein, Jean Bollack described Lacans translations of Heidegger as having drawn the
German thinkers work away from an etymologizing nationalism and towards science, art, and language, and thus as having add[ed] a touch of Mallarm.4 In his
own attempt to account for their stylistic proximity, Vincent Kaufmann offers an
impressive yet far from complete list of those who have compared Mallarm
and Lacan:
In her Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, Elisabeth Roudinesco recalls that
in a dossier published by LHumanit on the day after Lacans death, JeanPierre Lonardini one of the contributors to this dossier compared the
style of Lacan to that of Mallarm. He was certainly not the first to do so.
In 1974 Shoshana Felman had brought the two uvres together in a very
feminine special edition of LArc devoted to Lacan. Ren Girard spoke in La
violence du sacr of a Mallarman version of psychoanalysis, and others
had perhaps made similar remarks even earlier. More recently, the same

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comparison has also been made by Alain Badiou, who sees in Mallarm and
Lacan the greatest formal dialecticians in French thought.5
Lacan himself referred infrequently to Mallarm. His two most significant references are no doubt to be found in the Ecrits, where Lacan twice uses the poets image of ordinary discourse as a coin put into someone elses hand in silence6 to convey the difference between empty and full speech.7 However, as Jean-Claude Milner
remarks, Lacan not only composed unpublished sonnets in the style of Mallarm,8
he also took inspiration from the poets designs for a literary ceremony Mallarms infamous Book when conceiving of La cause freudiennes institutional
structure.9 More significantly still, Milner argues that Lacan associate[d] Freud
and Mallarm under the heading of the signifier. Milner writes:
The modern reflection on language begins, it seems to me, with the following affirmation that we read in Meillet, who was a direct student of Saussure: the name bird does not designate the bird that is there, but the one who
has taken flight. The signified consists in the absence of the signified thing.
How can we not link these aphorisms to Mallarms flower, which is absent
from every bouquet? Is this the same absence? If yes, then the condition of
possibility of language as an object of a Galilean science, and the condition
of possibility of language as a poetic material, are one and the same. I claim
that the Lacanian notion of the signifier sums up this unicity.10
In tracking the history of Lacans or of Lacanians relation to Mallarm, it
is indeed the signifier that occupies pride of place. The most noteworthy attempt
to bring Mallarm and Lacan together, and indeed to do so, as Milner suggests,
through an alliance between the science of structural linguistics and poetry, is
to be found in work of the Telquellians, mostly through Julia Kristeva. Announcing Tel Quels program in Les lettres franaises in 1968, Philippe Sollers wrote that
the journal would attempt to go back before those effects that can be situated in
the 1920s (Surrealism, Formalism, the extension of structural linguistics) in order
to properly pinpoint a more radical reserve inscribed at the end of last century
(Lautramont, Mallarm, Marx, Freud).11 As Kristeva argued exhaustively in Smitik (1969) and La rvolution du langage potique (1974), Mallarm was part of an
avant-garde whose radical linguistic negativity presaged the Freudian discovery of
the unconscious, understood in terms of Lacans dictum that the unconscious was
structured like a language.12 This genealogy involved the passage from poetic insight to scientific foundation. Commenting in his 1965 essay Littrature et totalit
on Mallarms reply to Proust, The Mystery in Letters, Sollers put this points as
follows:
Mallarm writes: There must be something occult deep inside everyone,
decidedly I believe in something opaque, a signification sealed and hidden,
that inhabits the common man: for as soon as the masses throw themselves
toward some trace that has its reality, for example, on a piece of paper, its
in the writing not in oneself that there is something obscure: they stir

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crazily like a hurricane, jealous to attribute darkness to anything else, profusely, flagrantly. Mallarm adds: I prefer, faced with aggression, to retort
that contemporaries dont know how to read. For us, these remarks can be
illuminated in a new light if we consider the findings of psychoanalysis,
particularly the following, recent one: that the unconscious is structured
like a language. The existence of this signifier sealed and hidden, which Mallarm suspects in each person, has since, if I may say so, been scientifically
proven.13
In the spirit of avant-garde one-upmanship, in 1974 Kristeva sought to show how
Mallarm offered resources not only for legitimating, but indeed for going beyond
Lacan and the primacy he accorded the Law. In a long reading of Prose (pour des
Esseintes), for instance, she shows how the poems phonic patterns disrupt its lawgoverned signifying unities. A sense of Kristevas reading strategy can gleaned
from her commentary on the first stanza:
Hyperbole ! de ma mmoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourdhui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vtu
Kristeva firstly explores the semantic and articulatory overdetermination of the
word Hyperbole, which she claims is central to understanding the poem as a
whole. For her, the semantic value of the word is the negation of an authority,14 a
value she deduces, firstly, from the fact that one of its a-signifying parts, the signifying differential15 [per], is a homophone of pre, which is also linked phonically to
the term fer, an image of intransigent solidity, as well as to the term re found
in the syntagm lre dautorit from the fourth stanza. Secondly, she claims that
the signifying differential [bol] stands for the seme for symbolic negation16 since
it constitutes part of a term Mallarm frequently uses to refer to negation, namely,
abolir and its cognates. Finally, that the word Hyperbole involves a glottal stop17
means that it expresses an aggressivity, 18 which constitutes the articulatory accompaniment to the seme of negation. Hyperbole thus names the first movement
of what Kristeva takes to be the poems program: that an irruption of the drives, a
negativity, destroys the stases and the finitudes represented by the symbolic code
of language.19 Mallarms poetry instantiates and disrupts the Symbolic Law, relativizing Lacans central concept by recourse to the feminine force of la smiotique.
While Tel Quels references to Mallarm and Lacan oscillated between using the
psychoanalyst to clarify the poet, then using the poet to surpass the psychoanalyst, Jean-Claude Milners 1978 book For the Love of Language employs Lacans own
concept of lalangue to conceive the difference between what structuralist and generativist linguistics can capture of language, on the one hand, and those languageeffects that escape both of them, such as poetry, on the other.20 Given languages
proclivity for producing equivocity, all signifying activity is either in excess of
what the subject means to say, or misses what the subject was aiming for. For Mil-

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ner, this irreducible discrepancy gives rise to the dream of an Absolute language,
of which Mallarm offers a classic image: Languages imperfect insofar as they are
many; the absolute one is lacking.21 Yet as Milner recognizes, for Mallarm verse
is precisely that which makes up for languages deficiencies, as a superior supplement22 by overcoming the Chance encounter between sound and sense in the
transmutational space of a verse.
Milner stages another encounter between Mallarm and Lacan in his 1983 book Les
Noms indistincts. Here, he claims Un coup de ds comes as close as any text can to
simultaneously staging the registers of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary
(R, S, and I):
in the dry crackle of the two dice, thrown one against the other, one bearing the figure of meaning and the other of sound; in the course of this instant an instant without duration, but one that, for having taken place
once, is such that nothing can make it so that it did not take place: hence the
character of an eternal circumstance that, through the alliance of words, we
can confer upon it we will thus hear the encounter: of S, for it is a matter
of numbers (figures of the dices faces, arithmetic of verse, network of syntax and lexicon), of I, for it is a matter of formed matter (cubes of dice, sonorities and significations of words), of R, finally, the idea of which is given by
the cluster of stars, without properties, without any form other an illusion,
yet nevertheless countable as the septuor and nameable as the Septentrion.23
Milner has since prolonged his engagement with Mallarm and Lacan in later
works such as Luvre claire, where the poets doctrine of contingency is shown to
presage post-Popperian science in its insistence on the centrality of falsification.24
His 2003 piece, The Tell-Tale Constellations, reprinted in this collection, extends
this argument through an analysis of Mallarms image of the constellation.
Published a year before Milners Les noms indistincts, Alain Badious Theory of the
Subject presents Lacan and Mallarm, as Kaufmann pointed out above, as the two
great modern French dialecticians.25 We will leave a discussion of this work for our
presentation of Badious essay published here, Is it Exact That All Thought Emits a
Throw of Dice? Suffice to say that while Badiou has never engaged with Mallarm
and Lacan within the framework of a language-centred philosophy or science,
the poet and psychoanalyst have long accompanied his thinking: they appear in
close proximity, at once textual and conceptual, in pieces such as Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis from Conditions,26 as well as in Badious 1994-1995 seminar Lacan:
Lantiphilosophie 3.27
In more recent years, critics have maintained the suggestive linkage between Mallarm and Lacan. In Mallarm le livre: Etude psychanalytique (2007),28 Joseph Atti has offered the most committed and extensive Lacanian analysis of the poets
uvre to date, while in Contre lternit: Ogawa, Mallarm, Lacan (2009),29 Jean Allouch has examined the interlinked questions of hermeticism, language games and,
most centrally, of ones second death or disappearance, through a close engagement

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with Leo Bersanis classic work The Death of Stphane Mallarm. Perhaps the most
promising angle of attack is to be found in Patrick Thriaults Le (D)montage de la
fiction: La rvlation moderne de Mallarm (2010).30 Thriaults point of departure
is Mallarms admission in Music and Letters that he is reluctant to take apart
impiously, in public, the fiction, and consequently the literary mechanism itself,
in order to lay out the principle part or nothing.31 For this radically modern poet,
literature has no transcendental guarantee. However, not only does playing the
literary game require an at least feigned investment in the illusio of its ontological
grounding; it also brings with it a singular jouissance, which seems irresistibly to
correlate with the existence of an Ideal. How can Mallarm adapt himself to the
pragmatic contradiction between belief and critical lucidity, which characterizes
his position of enunciation? For Thriault, Mallarm precedes Lacan in recognizing
that the subjects desiring economy is structured by a lack: literatures principal
part or nothing, its superior attraction that is in fact a void.32 For both poet and
psychoanalyst, understanding desires motor33 not as an excess but as a lack one
which, moreover, can never be filled allows a first step towards an equal parts
tragic and ludic acceptance of the ineradicable inexistence of the Ideal. But Thriault goes further, showing how their shared conception of desire and the Law can
help explain Mallarm and Lacans infamously hermetic, indeed initiatory, mode
of address. While both promise to lead the reader towards knowledge, whether it
be of Literature or the Law, both of these knowledges are progressively revealed to
be nothing or almost-nothings.
Other contemporary approaches to Mallarm and Lacan exist, and the points of
comparison, real-historical entanglements, and distance-takings have hardly been
exhaustively addressed by existing studies.34 A work on Lacans Mallarm remains
to be written.

This edition of S: Journal for the Circle of Lacanian Ideology Critique, however, seeks
to advance and problematize the relation between Mallarm and Lacan by translating a series of the best and most exciting scholars working on the poet today. Some
of the names in the journal will no doubt be familiar to readers, while others have
never before appeared in translation. In what follows, we will briefly outline each
of the essays with an eye to situating them within the authors larger work.
One philosophical contemporary of Tel Quel who also maintained a close relationship with Mallarm and Lacan is Alain Badiou, whose 1986 lecture Is it Exact
That All Thought Emits a Throw of Dice? is the first article in this edition.35 To
place the essay in its proper context, we first need to refer to Badious 1982 book
Theory of the Subject. Two years after the publication of Kristevas La rvolution du
langage potique, and developed over five seminar sessions held between December
15, 1975, and February 8, 1976, Badiou provided his first and to date most extensive engagement with Mallarm. In these seminars, later published as the second

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chapter of Theory of the Subject, Badiou reads Mallarm and Lacan as two equally
brilliant exponents of the structural dialectic.36 Both poet and psychoanalyst are
supposed to have taken a step beyond structuralism by showing how the web of
weak differences constituting any given structure is caused by an absent event,
a vanishing upsurge of strong difference that henceforth insists in the structure,
splitting each of its individual elements.37 However, Mallarm and Lacan still remain incorrigible conservatives who have to be surpassed if a truly revolutionary
thought is to be constructed. In poems such as A la nue accablante tu and the
Sonnet en yx, Badiou reads Mallarm as having staged events that are made
to disappear as soon as they appear, thus allowing weak difference to assert its
primacy over strong difference.38 By stark contrast, in Is it Exact? we witness
Badiou taking an irreversible step towards treating Mallarm as his master,39 as
he puts it in Logics of Worlds; a master from whom he has learned to think, rather
than repress, the event. In fact, Badious 1986 piece includes a long reading of Un
coup de ds that will make up much of Meditation Nineteen from his magnum
opus Being and Event (1988), where Mallarm is treated as the unsurpassable poetthinker of the event. In anticipation of this reading, Badiou opens Is it Exact? by
asking: how Mallarm can present himself as a man habituated to dream, as he
does in his 1889 homage to Villiers de lIsle-Adam, yet also write in Funeral Toast
that the pure poets humble, generous gesture / prohibits dreams, his functions
enemy?40 For Badiou, everything turns on the poet being habituated in the sense
of attuned to dream in the form of the event, and not in the form of Romantic
reverie or mystical communion. Badiou writes: I will therefore hold that the real
of which the Mallarman text proposes the anticipation is never the unfolded figure of a spectacle. Mallarms doctrine devotes poetry to the event, which is to say
to the pure there is of occurrence (18). Using a Lacanian terminology, he writes that
Mallarms prohibition bearing upon imaginary totalization the Nature of the
Romantics authorizes a symbolic subtraction, from which is fixed a point of the
real (19). In his extensive reading of Un coup de ds, Badiou thus shows how Mallarm first circumscribes the evental site where an event will perhaps have
taken place, before producing an absolute symbol of the event (25) in the form of
the dice-throw, which the Master hesitates to perform before sinking beneath the
waves. Is it Exact? thus constitutes a stunning reversal of Theory of the Subject,
inaugurating Badious mature thinking of the event, whose concept Mallarm will
have heroically provided for all philosophy to come.
While less well-known to Anglophone readers than Badiou, Jean-Claude Milners
engagement with Mallarm nevertheless extends from his first book to his most
recent writings. The Tell-Tale Constellations, a 2003 piece first published in the
journal Elucidation, finds its place within the second stage of his dialogue with the
poet. In one of his early works, For the Love of Language (1978), Milner asks how it
is possible that language can be the object of a science linguistics as well as of
love, in the form of poetry. Here, he differentiates between the motivations of the
linguist, who seeks to identify the universal rules governing the grammatical and

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the ungrammatical, and the purists, who are fascinated by the power of language
to break down these very rules. Milners first examination of Mallarm treats the
poet as an exemplary purist. As he notes in a recent 2016 essay Mallarm Perchance, which continues the thread of For the Love of Language, rather than strictly
adhering to the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified legislated by Saussure, Mallarm thinks that verse can alone create a total word whose signifier
would in fact correspond to its signified whose sound would be uniquely joined
with its sense. This is Mallarms promise:41 that verse can create a word whose
phonic qualities match with its signified content, thus making up for the internal
deficiencies of language. Yet this is a promise unable to be kept, and defines Mallarm as an exemplary purist.
Taking up the relations between linguistic science and poetry in the second stage
of his engagement with the poet, The Tell-Tale Constellations pits Mallarm the
purist against a thematic that has occupied Milner since For the Love of Language:
the conditions that define post-Galilean science. Following the work of Alexandre Koyr and, above all, Koyrs influence on Lacan Milner locates a radical historical cut that took place with Galileos unveiling of the infinite Universe,
as opposed to the finite cosmos of the ancients. One of the defining features of
this Universe is the role Galileo accorded mathematics. In the post-Galilean universe, mathematics underwrites the sensible regime thanks to what Milner calls
the mathematization of the empirical.42 For the post-Galilean scientific subject,
empirical reality is not defined by a sensible relation to the world or even by a
situated agent operating in a spatio-temporal field. Instead, empirical reality is
mapped and formalised by mathematical language. This, for Milner, results in the
non-existence of the constellations in the post-Galilean Universe. As he opens The
Tell-Tale Constellations: Constellations do not exist; there only exist the stars that
compose them. This is a lemma of modern science. It is also one of the differential
traits that separates the phusis of the Ancients from post-Galilean Nature (31). In
other words, the Universe mapped by Galilean science takes stars that cannot be
immediately perceived by the gaze as more real than the ideological, cosmological
and contingent groupings of stars named the constellations: Visible or not, the
stars are real; precisely because they are visible, constellations are imaginary (31).
In this article, Milner asks how Mallarm responded to this sacrifice demanded
by science (33). Rather than constructing an alternative, intrinsically poetic, Universe to the one presented by post-Galilean science, Mallarm believes that [v]erse
and, more generally, Letters must constitute a limit to science (34). In other words,
Mallarm uses the calculations of verse and his doctrine of Chance to render visible that which post-Galilean science deems invisible. His poetry, though, not only
bear[s] witness to this disappearance, it also draws upon the brilliance of the
constellations to posit a subtraction and exception (34) to modern science that
is, an internal limit. This limit, crystallized by the image of the Constellation that
perhaps appears at the close of Un coup de ds, signals Mallarms verdict on postGalilean science: he says no to it, calling upon the numbers that comprise the cal-

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culations of verse to critique the hyper-scientific modernity instituted by Galileo.

Mallarms singular use of language not only stands in distinction to the linguistic
sciences, but, in The Tell-Tale Constellations, also to scientific modernity as such.
In his article on Play, jouissance and illusio in Mallarm and Bourdieu, Patrick Thriault continues the work begun in his 2010 book Le (D)montage de la Fiction. There
he had demonstrated a homology between Lacans apparently oracular discourse
and the notoriously hermetic structure of Mallarms own address. In his 2011 article, Thriault extends his engagement to Bourdieus reading of a key passage from
Mallarms Music and Letters. Arguing that Bourdieu mistakes Mallarms relation to the literary game for an elitist cynic, Thriault shows how the poet was
not only exemplarily conscious of the sociological determinants of his practice, as
Bourdieu recognized, but also that he understood the libidinal dynamics of literature something the sociologist failed to elaborate. In a striking anticipation of
Lacan, Mallarm describes how the practice of reading and enjoying literature is
performed [i]n light of a superior attraction like a void; in light, that is, of an Ideal
or transcendent object of belief, which is ultimately revealed to be a nothingness.
As Mallarm clarifies, the vacuity of this Ideal does not prevent the reader from
being lured on (Divagations, 187) by it. Like Lacan after him, Mallarm recognizes
the perennial or invincible nature of the Ideal, beyond all of the twists and turns
of the history of thought (47). More importantly still, both Frenchmen understand
how the desiring economy of the subject can be structured by an absent object,
whose inexistence in no way prevents it from acting as a libidinal motor (Mallarms own term, Divagations, 187). For Thriault, against Bourdieu, this mode of
jouissance cannot be identified purely and simply with cynicism. This is not only
because it operates pre-reflexively. Rather, as Thriault shows through a reading
of an early letter written to Mallarm by his friend Eugne Lefbure, Mallarms
subjective position is best described as that of a pervert. At once duplicitous and
mystifying, read through the structural position of the pervert, Mallarm can be
seen to orient himself towards the restricted domain of literary production in late19th century France in a way that allowed him to be aware of, detached from, yet
capable of manipulating its singularly complex codes.
With Thierry Roger and Jean-Franois Hamels articles, we turn from libidinal to
political economy. In Art and Anarchy in the Time of Symbolism, Roger provides
perhaps the most extensive and informed treatment to date of Mallarms relation to anarchism.43 As Roger recalls, this question preoccupied prominent modern
critics like Julia Kristeva, whose book La rvolution du langage potique includes
a long section on the objective solidarity between the poets artistic negativity
and anarchist political praxis.44 Yet by drawing on newspaper and journal articles,
books of literary criticism as well as novels from fin-de-sicle France, Roger proves
that the question of anarchism already exercised the minds of Mallarms literary
contemporaries perhaps even more so than it did his 20th century avant-garde
readers. But Roger does more than rectify the scholarly record.45 His article also
clarifies the complex process of metaphorical transfer, as well as mutual misun-

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derstanding, that linked literature to anarchism in late-19th century France. Firstly,

Roger maps the most obvious sites of conflict between anarchism and Symbolism.
Despite what he describes as the sincere, profound and durable engagement (62)
of writers like Mirbeau, Quillard, Lazare or Fnon with the anarchist movement,
from the start there existed an irreducible tension between Symbolisms tendency
towards the autonomization or absolutization of literature, not to mention its historical pessimism, and anarchisms progressivism and obvious concern for le fait
social. Even their shared distaste for commodity society could not durably synthesize the egalitarianism of one with the aristocratism of the other. A more promising terrain of agreement, however, could be found in the cardinal notion of the
individual (66). Yet as Roger explains, while one form of individualism attack[ed]
institutions and authority, the other attack[ed] the people, universal suffrage and
equality understood as egalitarianism (67). But where is Mallarm to be situated
on this constantly shifting terrain? Roger proceeds first by assessing the poets
own pronouncements on anarchism, before turning to the formal properties of his
work. While Mallarm showed a deep distrust of what were for him the factitious
forms of justice found in the institutions of the Third Republic, he showed a consistent scepticism towards modes of anarchist praxis such as bombings. Instead,
he praised both the intellectual virtues and enduring political efficacy of writing.
Most significant, however, was his desire to go beyond or rather before all
existing political ideologies to again institute, through poetry, an articulation between the human and the cosmic (73). Following Bertrand Marchals La religion de
Mallarm, Roger thus concludes that however radical his poetic innovations, Mallarms was ultimately a quite traditional Grand politics that sought a social form
and cosmological harmony; a politics, in other words, that would no doubt horrify
an anarchist nominalist like Stirner (74), not to mention many of Mallarms own
anarchist admirers.
Jean-Franois Hamels article picks up where Rogers historical inquiry leaves off,
turning this time to the political reception of Mallarm in the 20th century. Drawing on his account of the initial stages of this reception, which he presents in exhaustive detail in his 2014 book Camarade Mallarm: Une politique de la lecture,46
Hamel offers a genealogy of the figure of le camarade Mallarm, a paradoxical
incarnation of the poet as a privileged point of reference for progressive and revolutionary thinkers, from Sartre to the Telquellians, Badiou to Rancire. Hamels
research sheds light on contemporary readings of Mallarm, in particular those of
Badiou and Rancire, and allows us to see, as he puts it, the two chains of memory
(99) that have structured Mallarms recent reception. On the one hand, Hamel
discerns a tendency to treat Mallarms work as a philosophical hieroglyph that
demands to be deciphered in order to discover within it the ethical and political
foundations of a community to come (99). On the other hand, Hamel reveals how
Mallarms nationalization or sacralization in the context of the Occupation
and the Liberation determined that his exigent poetics and posture of aristocratic
isolation became associated with a principled opposition to the collaborationist

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gregariousness of universal reportage (99), as Hamel memorably puts it. In the

most extensive section of his article, Hamel demonstrates that it was the decisive
influence of Valrys reading of Mallarm indeed of his reading of late-19th Symbolism more generally that laid the foundations for this figure of le camarade
Mallarm. For Valry, Mallarm was at once an aesthetic and an ethical guide.
For later writers such as Henri Mondor and Maurice Blanchot, Valrys reading
thus permitted the poets very position within the Ivory Tower to become the
condition of possibility for his political and ethical potency. Moreover, it made him
a metonymy of all that was best in French culture. As Hamel remarks, there was
nothing obvious about this, since [i]n his lifetime, his poetry was described as
Latin, Hebrew, Chinese (96): that is, as anything but French. Hamels work thus
suggests that Mallarms uncompromising linguistic radicality his formal inventiveness has ultimately become indissociable from the ethical and political
guidance that, in the guise of le camarade Mallarm, he has provided to many
French thinkers since.
Vincent Kaufmann is one such critic intimately familiar with the various incarnations of le camarade Mallarm.47 In his 2011 book La faute Mallarm: Laventure de
la thorie littraire,48 Kaufmann uses the poet or, rather, those readings of the poet
published in journals such as Tel Quel and Change as a point of condensation for
the aesthetic and political concerns of post-Sartrean French literary theory. Kaufmann defends the utopian energy and theoretical inventiveness of this periods
signature texts, all the while admitting that today it is no doubt closed as a chapter
in the history of literary criticism.49 In Believe That it Was to be Very Beautiful, by
contrast, Kaufmann turns away from theory to a more traditional form of literary
history, even if he qualifies his article as an anti-philological tale. He takes up the
crucial question of Mallarms relation to his two most important predecessors,
Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire. Focusing on Baudelaire as the poet who first
and perhaps forever defigured French poetry, to adapt a term from Barbara
Johnson to whom Kaufmanns essay is dedicated, he describes the paradoxical intergenerational dialectic linking Mallarm to his forebears. Is it possible, he asks,
to be the heir of a poet notorious for his own inability to fully assume his history,
who squandered his inheritance and neglected the property he was bequeathed; a
poet, moreover, who denied the very existence of a transcendent Other from whom
symbolic authority could flow? As Kaufman shows, Mallarms first treatment of
Baudelaire in Literary Symphony is a model of self-deception. Instead of registering
that his predecessor had broken indeed denounced (Kaufmanns term, 112)
the poetic contract between religion, community and lyrical subjectivity, in his
1865 text Mallarm treats him as nothing less than the preeminent exponent of a
religion of letters (107). Comparing Literary Symphony with its heavily-modified
reprise in Divagations, titled Long Ago, in the Margins of a Copy of Baudelaire (1888),
Kaufmann notes how in the intervening period Mallarm erased from his text all
of the marks of subjectivity. For Kaufmann, Mallarms infamous death as an author
is above all a mark of his relation to Baudelaire. In regards to the poets well-known

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letter to Henri Cazalis, Kaufmann argues that it is no coincidence it was written

at almost the exact same time as Baudelaires death. Whatever the real state of
Mallarms health, he writes, whatever role hypochondria played (but all of this
is even more significant if it is a case of hypochondria), it is necessary to point out
that at the moment of Baudelaires death Mallarm begins to be sick, to die as if
he were contaminated by Baudelaires death (110). This contamination consists
in the fact that far from promulgating a religion of letters, Mallarm came to recognize that Baudelaire had in fact denounce[d] a specific poetic contract signed
by God, the (charitable) poet and meaning (the good), a contract which had had its
glory days and its romantic predecessors, Hugo in particular (111). But if symbolic
transmission was now impossible, for the simple reason that after Baudelaire the
Symbolic itself had been revealed to be radically inconsistent, how did Mallarm
take up the intergenerational thread of French poetry? How, Kaufmann asks, can
one come after a poetry infected by a pathology? (112),a pathology of transmission? For Kaufmann, Mallarms uvre cannot be understood unless his apparent
reprise of the Hugolian gesture of creating a poetic ceremony to unite a sundered
community is seen as a knowingly post-Baudelairean project. After Les Fleurs du
mal, there are no more subjects or communities; no more God or people. However,
there is language, and thus poetry, even if its existence is as precarious as the communities it can fleetingly form. After swallowing Baudelaires tutelary poison,
Mallarm thus undertook the impossible task of creating a community for whom
the big Other is knowingly barred.
Claude Prezs piece Mallarm, Polecat-Ferret, is similarly concerned with questions of transmission and poetic history. This time, however, it is not Mallarm who
occupies the unenviable position of the troubled heir, but rather the contemporary
French poet Dominique Fourcade, who is introduced to English readers for perhaps
the first time in his otherwise long and celebrated career. As Prez points out, Fourcades relationship to Mallarm is unique in the contemporary intellectual context.
For not only is he a working poet and theoretician of poetry in his own right, he is
also a critic at times furious, forgiving, but always energetic of the obscure
Sphinx of Tournon.50 Central to Fourcades approach is the gap he perceives between Mallarms programmes and the actual poems that result from them.
While an extensive and star-studded list of philosophers have mined Mallarms
prose works for insights, Fourcades judgement of them is devastating: There is an
abyss between the great programmatic moments unverifiable experiences, capital experiences, as stimulating as possible and the very constrained mechanics of
a number of poems (127). However, as Prez also makes clear, Fourcades severity
with respect to Mallarm is interwoven with a deep ambivalence about the influence the poet has had on French letters. Recounting an at turns hilarious and horrifying dream, Fourcade imagines himself being handcuffed to Mallarm (123).
But is Mallarm the policeman who has captured Fourcade as punishment for his
heresy, or is Fourcade the one detaining Mallarm, thus protecting contemporary
French poets and artists from his deleterious influence? For Prez, the answer is

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both. Moreover, he demonstrates that Mallarm and Fourcade share more than the
latter is perhaps willing to admit. Not only does the postmodern bric--brac cluttering Fourcades poems recall Mallarms staging of the salon dcor of his time, but
in its formal dispersal Fourcades poetry shows the author of Est-ce que jpeux placer
un mot? owes an unpayable and thus disavowed debt to Mallarm.
Channelling Fourcade, Prez remarks that philosophers do little of what Fourcade
exemplarily does, namely to ask whether Mallarms poems are successful as poems. For Larissa Drigo, by contrast, there is no bathetic gap between the poets
soaring pretensions and his actual achievements. Correlatively, there is no reason
to give up on the project of treating Mallarms work as a reservoir or generator
of concepts (128). In Folding and Unfolding the Infinite, Drigo sets herself the difficult task of explaining how with Un coup de ds Mallarm produced a work whose
singular configuration of space-time [was] capable of presenting its own infinitude (137). For Drigo the infinity operative in Un coup de ds is without doubt a
potential infinity. Drawing on two of Borges short stories, The Garden of Forking
Paths and The Aleph, stories which present in a contracted, finite form both temporal and spatial infinities infinities capable of being unfolded in the successive
manner proper to reading Drigo explains how Mallarm seeks to do something
similar in the space-time of his final poem. From Borges, Drigo writes, we can
conclude that to demonstrate the inexhaustible infinity of literature, the poem must
provide the following: the presentation of a potentially infinite series of convergent, divergent, or parallel times that intersect or are unaware of one another; and
the presentation, in a restricted space, of a multiplicity of infinite spaces (137). In
demonstrating how Mallarm achieves this, Drigos analysis focuses on the formal
features of Un coup de ds. The different motifs of the poem, for instance, constitute
so many convergent and divergent narrative trajectories for the reader to follow,
while the singular use of the double page and its central fold is supposed to stage
the fan-like structure of the poem: its contraction and potentially infinite dilation
of space and time. If in his Observation relative to the poem, Mallarm claimed
to have replaced regular sound patterns or verses with prismatic subdivisions of
the Idea, then according to Drigo Mallarms Idea is infinitely divisible. For her,
the figure of the siren, whose impatient scales make disintegrate the rock / false
manor / which imposed / a limit on infinity, is the ideal incarnation of Un coup de
ds itself. Drigo thus implicitly provides a novel interpretation of Valrys intuition
upon seeing the proofs of Un coup de ds for the first time, when he asked: Was I
not present at an event of a universal order?51
Closing our collection is Guillaume Artous-Bouvets piece Of a Latent Prose. Combining close attention to the syntactical intricacies of the texts with a philosophical
sensibility, Artous-Bouvet leads us back to a typically Lacanian problem also addressed by Thriault: the relation between desire and knowledge. Beginning with
a comparison of Badiou and Rancires readings of the sonnet A la nue accablante
tu, Artous-Bouvet demonstrates that by translating the sonnet into a prose discourse, both philosophers fail to distinguish between three very different forms of

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prose that Mallarm mobilizes. First, there is the literal and linear prose (151) that
relates the successive hypothetical events of the sonnet. Next, there is the sonnets
immanent meta-discursive voice, through which it speaks of what it (ideally) does
or is doing. As Artous-Bouvet suggestively puts it, this is the reflexive consciousness of the poem, as opposed to its mere meaning (151). Finally, there are Mallarms external (146) prose pieces, which include his infamous critical poems.
On the basis of this triple distinction, Artous-Bouvet proceeds to a close reading
of Prose (pour des Esseintes), a poem whose perplexing title foregrounds the very
problematic of the piece. For Artous-Bouvet, Prose is indeed a work of prose insofar as it takes the form of a linear narrative, at least at some of its key junctures. Yet
it is also a work of prose insofar as it expresses its own operation: that is, it both
performs and proclaims it is performing poetrys new duty (153) to transpos[e] a
fact of nature into its vibratory near-disappearance (Divagations, 210), as Mallarm
famously put it in Crisis of Verse. However, in order to double its effective operation with a discourse on its very operation, Artous-Bouvet shows that the poem
must stage within itself some irreducible moment of enunciation. Identifying three
such moments in Prose, Artous-Bouvet notes that the second person pronoun tu
present in the opening verses Hyperbole ! de ma mmoire / Triomphalement ne
sais-tu / Te lever mysteriously disappears and is replaced by the first person
plural pronoun nous, most notably in the ninth and tenth verses: Nous promenions notre visage / (Nous fmes deux, je le maintiens). For Artous-Bouvet, the
parenthesis that surrounds this tenth verse, along with the verses strikingly assertoric tone not to mention the strangely singular form given to the noun visage
in the verse that precedes it all suggest that the unity-in-duality of the poet and
his companion of the poem and its contemplative meta-discourse is actually
of the order of desire, not of actuality. Through this reading, Artous-Bouvet thus
seems to conclude that if Mallarm wrote extensive external prose pieces, then it
was precisely to suture the irreducible gap between desire and knowledge, which
the poem exemplarily articulates.
Notes
1. Jean-Michel Rabat, Lacans Return to Freud, in Jean-Michel Rabat (ed.) Cambridge
Companion to Lacan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1-24.
2. Georges Mounin, Quelques traits du style de Jacques Lacan, La Nouvelle Revue Franaise, January 1 (1969), pp. 84-92.
3. Cited in Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought, trans. Barbara Bray (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1997), p. 87.
4. Cited in Ibid., p. 228.
5. Vincent Kaufmann, Les styles du livre: Mallarm et Lacan, Dalhousie French Studies,
Vol. 25, Mallarm, Theorist of our Times (Fall-Winter, 1993), p. 57.
6. Stphane Mallarm, Divagations. Translated by Barbara Johnson, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 210.

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7. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 251, p. 801. Page numbers refer to
the original French pagination, reproduced in the English translation.
8. Jean-Claude Milner, I Believed I Owed Mallarm the Truth, in Robert Boncardo, Christian R. Gelder, Mallarm: Rancire, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield International,
2017) [forthcoming].
9. Jean-Claude Milner, Luvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p.
160.
10. I Believed I Owed Mallarm the Truth, op. cit.
11. Philippe Sollers, Lettres franaises, 30 October-5 November, 1968.
12. Kristeva, J., Smitik : Recherches pour une smanalyse (Editions du Seuil, 1969), Kristeva, J., La rvolution du langage potique : Lavant-garde la fin du XIXme sicle : Mallarm
et Lautramont (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974).
13. Philippe Sollers, Littrature et totalit, Logiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), p. 109.
14. La rvolution du langage potique, op. cit., p. 243.
15. Ibid., p. 211
16. Ibid., p. 243.
17. Ibid., p. 246.
18. Ibid., p. 247.
19. Ibid., p. 245.
20. Jean-Claude Milner, For the Love of Language, trans. Ann Banfield (London: The MacMillan Press, 1990).
21. Divagations, p. 205.
22. Ibid., p. 206.
23. Jean-Claude Milner, Les Noms indistincts (Paris: Verdier, 2007), p. 41.
24. Luvre claire, p. 62.
25. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Continuum, 2009), p. xl.
26. Alain Badiou, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, in Conditions (London: Continuum,
2006), pp. 201-202.
27. Alain Badiou, Lacan: Lantiphilosophie 3, 1994-1995 (Paris: Fayard, 2013), pp. 21-22, p. 38.
28. Joseph Atti, Mallarm le livre: Etude psychanalytique (Toulon: Editions du Losange,
2007).
29. Jean Allouch, Contre lternit: Ogawa, Mallarm, Lacan (Paris: Epel, 2009).
30. Patrick Thriault, Le (D)montage de la fiction: La rvlation moderne de Mallarm (Paris:
Honor Champion, 2010).
31. Divagations, p. 187.
32. Ibid.

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33. Ibid.
34. See for example Aleksi Branko, Lacte potique absolu de Mallarm et de
Lacan,Topique 4, No. 109, (2009), pp. 87-128.
35. This piece has previously appeared. along with the original, in Hyperion: On the Future
of Aesthetics, On Mallarm, Vol. IX, No. 3 (Winter 2015), pp. 44-63, pp. 64-786.
36. Theory of the Subject, pp. 54-55.
37. Ibid., p. 72.
38. Ibid., p. 88.
39. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Being and Event 2 (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 4 (translation modified).
40. Stphane Mallarm, Funeral Toast, in The Poems in Verse, trans. Peter Manson (Oxford,
OH: Miami University Press, 2011), p. 107.
41. Jean-Claude Milner, Mallarm Perchance, trans. Liesl Yamagutchi, in Hyperion: On the
Future of Aesthetics, Vol. IX, No. 3 (Winter, 2015), p. 87.
42. Jean-Claude Milner, Introduction une science du langage (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989),
p. 21.
43. Readers interested in this topic will no doubt also find Patrick McGuinness even more
recent work stimulating. See Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de sicle
France: From Anarchism to LAction franaise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
44. See in particular La rvolution du langage potique, p. 427.
45. Rogers extraordinary and unsurpassable work on the Coup de ds, numbering over 900
pages in length, is similarly at once a work of historical reconstruction and critical limitmarking. See Thierry Roger, LArchive du Coup de ds: Etude critique de la rcption dUn
Coup de ds jamais nabolira le hasard de Stphane Mallarm (1897-2007) (Paris: Garnier,
2010).
46. Jean-Franois Hamel, Camarade Mallarm: Une politique de la lecture (Paris: Minuit,
2014).
47. See Kaufmanns Potique des groupes littraires, avant-gardes 1920-1970 (Paris: PUF, 1997).
48. Vincent Kaufmann, La faute Mallarm: Laventure de la thorie littraire (Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 2011).
49. Ibid., p. 15.
50. Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarm: La lucidit et sa face dombre (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 92.
51. Paul Valry, Le Coup de ds. Lettre au directeur des Marges, uvres, I, d. J. Hytier
(Paris, Gallimard, coll. Pliade, 1957), p. 624.