Mallarmé

Rancière, Milner, Badiou

Robert Boncardo, Christian R. Gelder

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786603128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

From the post-War writings of Sartre and Blanchot to the post-structuralism of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, French philosophers have consistently debated the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, almost as a rite of passage. Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner and Jacques Rancière — three of the most important philosophers alive today — are no exception, having written extensively about the poet since the 1960’s and 70’s up until today. This book contains a series of interviews with these three figures on Mallarmé, as well as an extended introduction that places their thought on literature into dialogue. Speaking about their personal and philosophical relationships with each other, on methods of reading, on poetry and politics, and poetry and mathematics, each philosopher reflects on their life-long engagement with Mallarmé, as well as on the different, often incommensurable, images of the poet their philosophies have generated. As Rancière, Milner and Badiou point to the past importance and future directions Mallarmé gives to thought, these interviews lend credence to Barthes’ remark that “all we can do is repeat Mallarmé – and it is good that we do so”.

Chapter One

“A Singular Invention of Language and Thought”

Jacques Rancière

MALLARMÉ, LITERARY HISTORY, AESTHETICS

Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder: From Sartre and Blanchot’s post-World War II readings to the deconstructive intervention of Derrida’s “The Double Session” to Badiou’s more recent engagement with Mallarmé, French thinkers have persistently produced philosophically inflected readings of the poet. During this period, it would seem as though Mallarmé became the emblem of literature’s link to philosophy. Can you reflect on the role the poet played in post-war French philosophy?

Jacques Rancière: In fact, it was not as an emblem of the relation between literature and philosophy that Mallarmé became important, but as an emblem of pure literature or pure poetry and of the problematic relation between this purity and political radicality. On the first point, it must be remembered that it was Valéry who had prepared the terrain: it was not for nothing that the group who wanted to make Mallarmé the hero of materialist modernity called itself Tel Quel. And it was within a Telquellian context that Derrida addressed Mallarmé. On the second point, it was indeed the Sartrean theme of engagement—and disengagement—that made Mallarmé an exemplary negative case. What Sartre studied was a symbol of a literature that turned away from social reality and devoted itself to its own purity, that is, in fact, to an elitist game. On the contrary, the theoreticians of Tel Quel, all the while explicitly reprising Valéry’s vocabulary, argued in favour of the concordance between political revolution and the revolution of poetic form. Badiou first addressed Mallarmé as a figure of anxiety, as opposed to the courage of action, before finding in him the exemplary figure of poetry as a truth procedure—a procedure that produces a truth without producing the knowledge of this truth. For my part, if I became interested in Mallarmé, it was to challenge a certain idea of poetic modernity as autotelic.

RB & CG: Your first engagement with Mallarmé occurred once you had already established your place within twentieth-century French philosophy. Did Mallarmé nevertheless play a role in your philosophical education prior to the publication of Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren in 1996? Was he a point of reference during your formative years?

JR: No, Mallarmé did not play a formative role for me. Being young, I read first and foremost the poems he wrote in his youth, which are the least significant. And I did not feel concerned by the great Mallarméan agitation of 1965–70 when Tel Quel made him the hero of a poetics of the primacy of the signifier, and waged war against Jean-Pierre Faye over “comrade Mallarmé.” I became interested in him in the context of a seminar on the politics of writing I held at the Collège International de Philosophie at the beginning of the 1990s. It was at that moment I felt it necessary to criticize the paradigm that had made him a representative of the purity of an autotelic language. I demonstrated, to the contrary, how his poetic project gave poetry an active role at the heart of a community and how it implied a transformation of poetic language on the basis of nonlinguistic forms borrowed from music, dance, or from ceremonies, as well as on the basis of analogies with the movement of waves, the explosion of fireworks, or the movement of fans.

RB & CG: The Politics of the Siren was your first work devoted exclusively to literature and aesthetics, and it remains the sole monograph you have written on an individual author. Can you explain the reasons behind your choice to write on Mallarmé at the moment of your turn to aesthetics?

JR: In a sense, the writing of this book was purely accidental. The director of the collection had solicited me and I had proposed to write a book on Flaubert for him. As Flaubert had already been assigned, I took Mallarmé by default. That said, my interest in Mallarmé had nothing to do with an “aesthetic turn.” I have always been concerned with aesthetics in a precise sense: that of the relation between bodies, the places, and the temporalities they are assigned, and the words and spectacles that confirm or transgress this assignation. My work on Mallarmé was inscribed in the logic of a work on the politics of writing that I undertook in the 1980s as a prolongation of Proletarian Nights—a work that also fed into On the Shores of Politics and The Names of History. It was a matter of working on the way in which words become flesh or acts, as much in the life of a proletarian who discovers writing as in the life of the monks of the desert, of an English poet discovering the décor of the French Revolution, or of historians confronted by the speech of the poor and heretics. It was over the course of one of my seminars on the politics of writing that I began to address the case of Mallarmé. At the time, he was the great symbol of “autotelic,” antirepresentative modernity, and was always placed alongside emblematic figures of a turn towards abstraction in art like Malevitch or Schönberg. It was then that I was able to gauge just how much the project and the writing of Mallarmé were opposed to this dominant doxa: Mallarmé gave poetry the social vocation of preparing the celebrations of a community to come, and for this he sought his models in the performing arts. If my work on Mallarmé represented a turn, then it was to the degree that it initiated the larger critique of the modernist paradigm that I went on to produce, notably in Aisthesis.

DIFFICULTY, FORM, ELITISM

RB & CG: The descriptor difficult has been a recurring trope in the reception of Mallarmé’s writings. You yourself have intervened into this debate by strenuously disagreeing with those who, like Chassé and, to a degree, Sartre, see this difficulty as arising from an aristocratic cabalism, one which purposely mystifies an otherwise communicable message. Against this, you insist upon the irreducible imbrication of content and form in Mallarmé’s poetry, but also on its universal address. So much so that your book appears to offer an apology for his infamous difficulty, which you come to construe as a direct and proportionate poetic response to the aesthetic and political difficulties of his time. What is at stake for you in the question of Mallarmé’s difficulty? How do you understand the relation between the extraordinary complexity of his writings and their egalitarian horizon?

JR: I wanted to challenge a simple opposition between communicative language and the poetics of the incommunicable. Mallarmé belongs to the beginning of an epoch where artists—poets, painters, musicians, dancers, designers or, later, filmmakers…—called into question a certain model of the communication of messages and emotions: that of the story narrated, of events that are linked together, of characters whose feelings we follow, and of the moral that is to be drawn from all of this. This calling into question has often been described as elitist or formalist. But we forget that the displacement towards form or towards performance often took popular spectacles as its models (pantomime, the circus, music hall, fêtes, and, later, sport), and pursued a new alliance with the people on the basis of the very divergence with the bourgeois model of cultural consumption. Think of the way in which the Symbolist theatre directors, abstract painters, or “Cubo–Futurist” artists transformed themselves into militants of the Soviet revolution. Mallarmé is at the beginning of this movement. He finds his inspiration in the “little theatres,” in “music hall,” and in country fairs. He dreams of a poetry become performance that would “marvel” the people in the way fireworks do during a civic celebration. At the same time, his poetic practice is stretched across a plurality of models: the new and vaguely dreamed of Symbolist theatre, the poem perfectly closed in on itself in the form of a riddle, the idea that has found its typographical equivalent on a page conceived as a theatrical stage, the “current affairs” [grand fait divers] that stage the social conditions of the poetic act… Once again, the difficulty is Mallarmé’s own before it is that of the reader. It is to define the poetic mode corresponding to what for him seems to be the task of the poet in his time.

RB & CG: When discussing the significance of the “crisis of verse” that shook the French literary field in the late nineteenth century, you contend that this crisis was derivative of the historical novelty of the aesthetic regime of art itself. You argue that there can be no definitive idea of what constitutes poetry in the modern age, since an essential indistinction of the literary and the nonliterary inheres in this regime. The fragility of the category of the literary therefore creates the conditions in which the “crisis of verse” can occur. But is this not to downplay the specifically formal—indeed poetic—stakes of this crisis? While there are doubtless definitional difficulties posed, for instance, by the works of Gustave Kahn and Jules Laforgue when they are compared with poetry written using traditional forms of versification, there still remains a quite discernible distinction between free verse and prose writing—not to mention between free verse and the prose of the world. Does seeing the “crisis of verse” as derivative of a crisis in the idea of the literary more generally not strip the problem that Mallarmé confronted of its properly poetic specificity?

JR: What matters is knowing what we mean by “properly poetic.” “Poetry” has always signified much more than the art of writing verse. For Mallarmé, to refuse the solution of free verse is not to refuse a certain form of “poetic specificity” that would tie poetic form to the question of an equal or unequal number of feet. The search for the “number” is precisely the search for a measure of the poem that escapes arithmetical harmonies and disharmonies, a little like how geometrical proportions were tasked by Plato with subtracting the city from simple arithmetical equality. For Mallarmé, poetry’s specificity is to be an act of language that belongs to a symbolic economy destined to consecrate the community by doubling the material economy of the exchange of goods. This involves defining a homology between a plurality of spaces: the space between words that gathers them together on a page, the material space of their enunciation, the ideal space that their assemblage defines, the space in which humans come together to listen, look, and admire, and finally the ideal space that holds a community together. The fact is that Mallarmé spent much more time constructing the imaginary space of the séance and the Book than studying new rhythmic combinations. The question of rhythm is first of all, for him, the question that ties the forms of appearing—the unfolding and refolding of phenomena—to the form of communal “celebrations” to come.

RB & CG: You argue that in Un coup de dés Mallarmé extensively exploited the graphic dimension of writing to authenticate his intraliterary production of the Idea. He thereby secured the superiority of literature over music and ballet, fulfilling in a single stroke his poetic and political ambitions. However, you also show how Mallarmé ended up contradicting the antirepresentative ideal of his art: that is, in attempting to take advantage of the graphic possibilities of writing, he was led to produce a graphic representation of the movements of a ship and the upsurge of a Constellation. There is no doubt a certain bathos to this, given the antirepresentative ambitions Mallarmé had for his testamentary text. But is it truly possible to reduce the graphic dimensions of Un coup de dés to a mode of mimesis, and a rather banal one at that? What of the way its spatial disposition permits a multiplicity of syntactical and semantic combinations?

JR: It is a question of knowing what is meant by “antirepresentative.” Mallarmé has antirepresentative ambitions inasmuch as he sets out to substitute combinations of words and rhythms, which are the analoga of the modes of unfolding of natural phenomena, for the mere description of the spectacles of nature. On this point, he is inscribed in the continuity of a problematic that traversed the entire Romantic epoch: that of expressing nature as a formative power instead of expressing it as the ensemble of constituted forms. And many of his poems are in fact constructed as movements of appearing, unfolding, and disappearing. The multiple syntactic and semantic combinations of which you speak are essentially constructed on this model of appearing, withdrawal, and dissimulation, lines that merge and move away from each other, symmetries and dissymmetries on the page. The “formal” side of these Mallarméan combinations respond to an essentially spatial model. The problem begins when the poem wants to show its material power of accomplishing the Idea by giving itself a space adequate to its statement. At this point, the process is inverted: the poem, which had gone from natural spectacles to the abstraction of forms of appearing, must take the opposite path in order to make its material presentation similar to what it says. No longer must the septuor of scintillations be evoked by words alone, it must be visualized on the page. Mallarmé is not the only writer in whose work antimimesis is transformed into hypermimesis. Think, for example, of the role played by the model of pantomime in reformers of dance and theatre like Noverre and Diderot in the eighteenth century. The “banality” of which you speak refers to the general problem of the language of performance: by setting aside representative models of narration and expression, this language tends towards a limit, which is that of the language of pantomime.

RB & CG: Returning to the question of your opposition to those for whom Mallarmé is an unequivocal elitist, it seems important to point out that your work nevertheless aims to clarify, rather than reject out of hand, the significance of the poet’s subtraction from the public sphere. As you explain, the precariousness of Mallarmé’s project to produce an authentic Idea determined that he had to denigrate other practices, such as music and ballet, and treat them as mere simulacra. To take another example, in your reading of “Conflict” you show how Mallarmé construes the drunken debauchery of the workers as a deficient expression of their aspiration towards emancipation—an aspiration that only the poet could properly fulfill. Despite, then, the implicit egalitarianism of his poetico-political project, might we say that it is the internal conflicts of literature itself—that is, of the literature of the aesthetic regime of art, which can only confirm its authenticity by exteriorizing its immanent fragility in other practices—which end up corrupting Mallarmé, turning him into an elitist? Might the case of Mallarmé show that the literary enterprise brings with it an inherent danger of elitist deviation?

JR: It is already significant that, in order to express his withdrawal, Mallarmé declares himself to be “on strike” with respect to society. And “Conflict” does not oppose the refinement of the elitist poet to the vulgarity of drunken workers. In his Sunday evening drunkenness, Mallarmé sees an expression of the desire for a beyond of the simple material economy. He discerns the most rudimentary expression of this need for a festive consecration of communal life, of which the poetic act represents the supreme form. This act of consecration is the privilege of the poet, but the poet himself is anybody, “whoever” [quiconque veut] (D 283). Any prosaic reality can give the material of this “anonymous magnificence” to the poem, which is tasked with succeeding the “Shadow of long ago” (D 247—modified trans.). And the privilege that Mallarmé gives to poetry with respect to other arts is not a privilege of elitist art over popular art. For him, poetry gives itself a more essential task than music or dance because it is an art of speech, an art capable of making the idea that animates it explicit. But it is to music and dance—and possibly to the dance of “music hall”—that he demands the means for renewing the language of poetry in order to render it adequate to this task. In any case, the notion of elitism is a far too simplistic way of posing the problem. Proust used to say, quite rightly, that so-called popular literature was more adapted to the tastes of the aristocrats of the Jockey Club than to the tastes of militant unionized workers. The convenient opposition of the elite and the popular in fact covers over a much more complex game of borrowings and appropriations. In the nineteenth century, literature takes up the new aspirations of the people in order to create a hitherto unknown tissue of sensations and a new scansion of novelistic time, while in order to think their condition, the emancipated workers take up the elevated feelings of romantic heroes. The emancipation of the popular classes and the emancipation of literary speech intersect without becoming unified and echo each other without becoming identical.

RB & CG: Turning now to the relation of Mallarmé’s politics to your own, there appears to be elements of his position that you yourself would explicitly affirm. For instance, Mallarmé’s polemic against Wagner’s recourse to a mythology of national origins, as well as his radical refusal of any identitarian incarnation for a human community, seem in principle to align with your own rejection of a politics based on preestablished identities. There also appears to be a similarity between Mallarmé’s implicit opposition to the Saint-Simonian religion of labor and the emancipatory efforts of nineteenth-century workers, which you studied in Proletarian Nights. On the other hand, and as we mentioned above, you show that Mallarmé had to frame the worker in “Conflict” as incapable of emancipating himself without the guidance of the poet. How, then, would you describe the relationship of Mallarmé’s politics to your own?

JR: There are certainly similarities between the two approaches, a same refusal of the grand mythologies of incarnation of the people of flesh and blood. That said, it is clear that my point of view is also that of a researcher who can confront, with the distance of a century, the elements of the Mallarméan project with those of German idealism, Romantic religions, workers’ emancipation, or Wagnerian poetics. I can place the fictional encounter between the poet and the worker in “Conflict” or “Confrontation” in relation to that which effectively took place between workers and Saint-Simonian “priests” in the 1830s. The Saint-Simonian reference allows me to mark the tension that inhabits the Mallarméan poetic project. Mallarmé is critical with respect to the will of the “New Christianity,” which so strongly marks the nineteenth century, and he is even more distant from all mythology of origins and roots. However, his vision of the poet’s task as a sort of servant of a symbolic economy that remedies political economy is in the direct line of descent from his century’s new “religions,” which dream of a celebration of the sensible community that compensates for the formalism of the political community. In Proletarian Nights, I showed the gap between this project of the consecration of the community and the project of popular self-emancipation, most notably through the equivocations of the encounter between emancipated workers and Saint-Simonian priests.

RB & CG: Throughout the course of his posthumous reception, Mallarmé has frequently been mobilized as either a positive or a negative model for a politics of literature. Whether construed as a counterrevolutionary nihilist or a progressive, he has allowed such diverse thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, the Telquellians, and Jean-Claude Milner to define their own political positions—positions that involved either a rupture with, or a fideli...