Boncardo Robert - Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou

Mallarm

INSOLUBILIA: NEW WORK IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

Series Editors: A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens and Jon Roffe

Insolubilia are problems that one cannot solve, cannot salve and cannot savebut which nonetheless cannot be avoided. This series publishes works that engage with the problems that deserve the name contemporary because they arise in and pertain specifically to our contemporary situation. These necessarily novel works will explore foundational questions in philosophy from a new perspective, offer new syntheses of previously disparate fields of investigation with an eye to the contemporary problematic, and think through in a rigorous way the relationship between previously heterogeneous concerns that have now come into contact (e.g. critical theory and the environment; philosophy and the market; neuroscience and poetry). Insolubilia is accordingly a series that publishes the latest works in continental philosophy that incarnate, present, and engage the insolubles of our time.

Titles in the Series:

Mallarm: Rancire, Milner, Badiou by Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder

Mallarm

Rancire, Milner, Badiou

Robert Boncardo
and
Christian R. Gelder

Contents

We would like to thank the editors of InsolubiliaA.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens and Jon Roffefor their advice, their encouragement, their friendship.

ALAIN BADIOU

STPHANE MALLARM

QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX

JEAN-CLAUDE MILNER

JACQUES RANCIRE

The Subject to Which Everything is Attached

Everything depends on the point of view adopted. This, however, is not only multiple, but indeed, it is only through a succession of points of view, linked one to the other, that any conviction can take form.

Mallarm, Les mots anglais

This book contains a series of interviews with three major figures in contemporary continental philosophy: Jacques Rancire, Jean-Claude Milner, and Alain Badiou. What unifies this collection is that we ask each thinker to reflect upon their lifelong engagement with the late nineteenth-century poet Stphane Mallarm. Rancire, Milner, and Badiou have each been writing since the 1960s and 1970s, and their ideas about the poet can be traced from their earliest publications to the present day. However, what we hope this introduction and the interviews that follow show is that each thinker does not limit himself to commenting on Mallarm as an historical figure. In fact, their interpretations of the poet intersect with more general debates that have occupied French thinkers for the last half centurydebates about the formal distinction between poetic and ordinary language, about literatures relation to the nature and possibility of radical political change, and about poetrys ancient rivalry with mathematics. For the three thinkers interviewed in this collection, Mallarms role in twentieth-century philosophy seems to play out a remark the poet himself made about literary art: that it was the subject to which everything is attached (D 195). In the first half of this introduction, we shall examine Rancire, Milner, and Badious work on Mallarm from the perspective of their conceptions of poetic language and mathematics. In the second, we turn to their polemic over the political significance of the poets work.

MALLARM THE SCIENTIST, MALLARM THE MATHEMATICIAN?

Thanks to his reputation as both a linguistically innovative poet and a theoretician of language in his own right, Mallarm has long been a privileged object for linguists and literary theorists, not to mention for philosophers concerned with the power of poetry. At the close of her translation of Divagations (2009), Barbara Johnson writes that each of Mallarms infamous critical poems is a lesson in how language works. Transcending the limits of a stultifying communicational language,

For literary theorists and philosophers, on the other hand, Mallarm has frequently provided an object lesson in poetry or literatures power. Perhaps because of this, a series of slogan-like formulations have been extracted from their original context, as Thierry Roger has recently lamented.

More curious still is the long-standing tendency to read some conception of mathematics alongside Mallarm. As Roger notes, the first Belgian and French reviews of Mallarms 1897 masterpiece Un coup de ds were mostly concerned with the quasi-mathematical nature of some of the poems images. He writes, given its title, the first considerations on the