Thinking Poetry

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 Thinking Poetry

Philosophical Approaches to
Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

Edited by Joseph Acquisto

thinking poetry
Copyright © Joseph Acquisto, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

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ISBN: 978-1-137-30363-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Acquisto, Joseph
Thinking poetry : philosophical approaches to nineteenth-century French poetry /
Joseph Acquisto, editor.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-137-30363-9 (alk. paper)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. French poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. French literature—
Philosophy. 3. Philosophy, French, in literature. I. Acquisto, Joseph.

PQ439.T56 2013
841'.80915—dc23 2012035149

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: Februrary 2013

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Introduction 1
Joseph Acquisto
1 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard:
Art, Fallibility, and Faith 9
Edward K. Kaplan
2 Passages through Baudelaire:
From Poetry to Thought and Back 25
Catherine Witt
3 Otherwise than Being: Levinassian Ethics in
Victor Hugo’s “La Force des Choses” 43
Bradley Stephens
4 “Je est un autre”: Identity, Alterity, and Drug
Use in Baudelaire and De Quincey 59
Alain Toumayan
5 “Poésie-boucherie”: Baudelaire’s Aesthetics
and Ethics of Execution 75
Ève Morisi
6 Absolutely Absolute: Mallarmé, Blanchot,
and the Absence de livre 97
John McKeane
7 Blank Phenomenality 113
Claire Chi-ah Lyu
8 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 131
Emile Fromet de Rosnay
9 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 149
David Nowell Smith
vi Contents

10 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community:

Revisiting Rancière’s Aesthetics 167
Alison James
11 Baudelaire with Badiou: Event and Subjectivity in
“L’Héautontimorouménos” 185
Joseph Acquisto
12 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée”: Édouard Glissant
Reinvents Nineteenth-Century French Poetry 203
Hugues Azérad
Contributors 221
Index 225
Introduction
Joseph Acquisto

French poetry studies are at an important crossroads. While cul-

tural studies approaches have for some time dominated the field of
prose fiction, these methods have not proven as fertile in the domain of
lyric poetry, where theoretical points of reference often stretch further
back to the era of deconstruction. Recent years, however, have seen a
renewed interest in lyric poetry among literary critics whose work inter-
sects with philosophy. Contemporary philosophers such as Alain Badiou
and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have made nineteenth-century poetry cen-
tral to their philosophical projects in ways that suggest a potentially rich
site of interaction between philosophical inquiry and poetic production.
Other figures, such as Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben, operate at
the boundary of philosophy and political theory, again with frequent ref-
erence to poetry, while contemporary poet-critics such as Michel Deguy
and Yves Bonnefoy often ground their writings on poetry in a dialogue
with their nineteenth-century poetic predecessors. On the contemporary
Anglo-American critical scene, the “ethical turn” in criticism that figures
in work by authors such as Martha Nussbaum, Richard Eldridge, and
Rita Felski invites us to examine poetry as a privileged site of expression
of subjectivity and relationship to an other.
This volume seeks to analyze and extend the connections between phi-
losophy and poetry as they manifest themselves in nineteenth-century
poetry studies. Featuring authors from both sides of the English-speaking
Atlantic, the book does not seek to treat nineteenth-century French poetry
merely as an “example” of philosophical concepts, or to claim that poets are
philosophers in disguise, but rather to establish a dialogue between poetry
and philosophy where each could be said to read the other. Why is it that
poets have played such an important role for contemporary philosophers?
What can that role be said to be, exactly? Can the new philosophical invest-
ment in poetry be seen as an extension of, or in opposition to, the ways in
2 Joseph Acquisto

which deconstruction made poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé central

to its approach? How can poetry serve as an important link between phi-
losophy and political theory? How do formal considerations intersect with
philosophical approaches? These are some of the broader questions that
guide the authors in this volume. The theorists and philosophers studied
in these essays are among the most important and groundbreaking writ-
ers working today, such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio
Agamben, whose works push the boundaries of literature, philosophy, and
theory, positing new relations between aesthetics and politics in ways that
aim to give each its due. Other philosophers analyzed in this volume con-
centrate on the relationship of poetry to ethics, thus helping build the kinds
of bridges recently advocated by Rita Felski between “high-minded” theory
and lived experience (Felski 13). The authors in this volume contribute
to our understanding of the relationships between literature and philoso-
phy and between theory and lived experience, all the while providing new
insight into important poets of the nineteenth century.
There are many ways to conceive the relationship of philosophy and
poetry, from complementary to antagonistic; what emerges most strongly
from recent remarks by poets and philosophers about this relationship is
that it is most helpful to think of the rapport as a series of moments of
bringing together and drawing apart, a resonant and suggestive yet always
temporary reevaluation of how the two interact. Philosopher Nicolas Go
has recently commented on these interactions, and his comments could
serve as an effective starting point for dealing with these questions: “If the
philosopher seeks . . . truth, the poet aims rather at accuracy . . . The same
man can start as a philosopher and become a poet. Or vice versa. But then
he necessarily changes his relationship to language and the real” (Go 111).
What unites poetry and philosophy, then, is their goal of establishing a
relation with the real. Once we arrive at this joining point, however, we
are immediately aware that the common goal is sought by highly contrast-
ing methods and, most significantly, different concepts of what the real
at which we aim might be, how we might come to know it, and how we
could express that knowledge. Perhaps the most outspoken recent voice
to note the potential antagonism between philosophy and poetry when
it comes to defining and expressing the real is poet Yves Bonnefoy, for
whom poetry must necessarily surpass philosophy because it surpasses the
conceptual thinking that is philosophy’s trademark: “For me the idea of
poetry is that it should transgress conceptual thinking, and aim to ensure
the proper functioning of what such thinking renders difficult or even
impossible: namely, to become aware of our essentially finite nature and
of the needs and aspirations that it creates in us, to perceive the meaning
 Introduction 3

that poetry can find in life—that is, another way of knowing—and ulti-
mately to renew our relationship with others, which has been spoilt by
our inevitably abstract and fragmented approach through analytic think-
ing” (xix). Poetry, like philosophy, can be a way of knowing, and perhaps
even one that initially depends on philosophy but must ultimately affirm
other modes of human experience that cannot be expressed in any other
way and thus cannot be reduced to the logical arguments of philosophical
discourse. In this sense Bonnefoy is calling not for a rejection of the philo-
sophical enterprise through poetry but rather its extension and deepen-
ing; his arguments about the limits of standard prose discourse provide
an imminent critique of philosophy by using its methods, even though he
ultimately phrases these objections as a personal feeling (“for me”). Poetry
thus becomes another kind of philosophizing, although Bonnefoy would
not want to reduce poetry’s specificity by assimilating it to philosophy in
that way.
Perhaps it is best, then, to insist that what is most valuable in poetry lies
in the fact that it cannot be separated into its constituent elements without
losing all that would make it valuable. Bonnefoy hints as much when he
criticizes a “fragmented” approach; other theorists such as Jacques Rancière
have hearkened back to Stéphane Mallarmé himself in order to take up
these ideas of the extent to which a poem can contain a philosophy. He
notes that Mallarmé calls for philosophy to be “included and latent” in the
poem and goes on to ask what this could mean. Assuredly not, Rancière
says, “a ‘philosophical meaning’ to be discovered” in the poem (Rancière
81). Rather, philosophy must be present “in the specific way in which the
thought ‘takes place’ and the Idewa inscribes itself in the form of a poem,
beyond the ordinary forms of discursive thought” (81). But here the discus-
sion is starting to sound firmly anchored in the nineteenth century rather
than in our day; after all, the sorts of idealist perfection that Mallarmé
evokes have been greeted with much skepticism since his day. Alain Badiou
underscores the distance that separates us from Mallarmé’s generation but
still maintains the possibility of a space for poetry:

But the imagery of the poet-guide, already obsolete by the end of the nine-
teenth century, is utterly ruined in the twentieth. As heir to Mallarmé, the
twentieth century establishes another figure, that of the poet as secret, active
exception, as the custodian of lost thought. The poet is the protector, in
language, of a forgotten opening; he is, as Heidegger says, “the guardian
of the Open.” The poet, ignored, stands guard against perdition. We are
still immersed in the obsession with the real, since the poet guarantees that
language preserves the power to name this real. Such is the poet’s “restricted
action,” which remains a very elevated function. (Badiou 20–21)
4 Joseph Acquisto

Rather than seeing a simple historical continuum, where past ages

believed in the transformative power of poetry and this one does not,
Badiou invites us to continue engaging with the project of fulfillment of
poetry’s power to name the real, a concern of urgent and immediate inter-
est to poets and philosophers alike.
Such a fulfillment can never be fixed or stagnant, so it is important
that poets and philosophers continue to make interventions in the ongo-
ing process of making sense, whether poetic or philosophical. This is what
Jean-Luc Nancy emphasizes in his consideration of poetry as something
always beyond itself:

“Poetry” does not exactly have a meaning, but rather the meaning of an
access to meaning which is absent each time. The meaning of “poetry” is
always a meaning to be made (toujours à faire).
Poetry is by essence something more and other than poetry itself . . . It
can even be the opposite or the refusal of poetry, and of all poetry. Poetry
does not coincide with itself: maybe this non-coincidence, this substantial
impropriety, makes poetry in a proper sense.
Poetry will only ever be what it is on condition of being at least capable
of negating itself: negating, denying, or canceling itself. (10)

The philosopher’s language here borders on the mystic in order to say

that poetry is always something other than itself. It is not that poetry is
an empty signifier but rather that it calls for its own constant reinvention
by poets and philosophers continuing to search after something whose
essence is to have no essence, as Nancy implies. He reminds us that “mak-
ing sense,” with all the active connotations of that expression, is the task
of both poets and philosophers, who create meaning from the otherwise
chaotic raw material that constitutes experience, using language to create
perhaps surprising points of connection between those aspects of experi-
ence, seeing links where none were thought to exist. So while Nancy’s
conception of poetry at first seems to bring it to a higher level of abstrac-
tion, surpassing any actual poems, the emphasis on “making sense,” and
doing so via the only medium poets have, which is language, returns us
back to actual poems as interventions in the desire to make sense of the
world. Thus Nancy refuses to see poetry and philosophy as in conflict:
“Philosophy versus poetry does not constitute an opposition . . . Together,
they are difficulty itself: to make sense” (11). Each serves as a kind of
check on the other, a reminder of the other’s stumbling blocks, limits, and
points of weakness when it comes to establishing meaning or representing
reality. They are united by their very opposition as similar but different
kinds of discursive practice whose stakes are high.
 Introduction 5

This productive tension is what Christian Doumet has recently empha-

sized: “In the general dispersal of discourses, . . . the poem represents itself
to the thinker as a persistent question . . . It is an obstacle to preformed
syntaxes, logical currents, formulas of all sorts . . . Its surging forth . . .
interrupts and then interrogates the course of reflection. It reveals there
other less visible currents, less expected but not less active, a whole uncon-
scious face of thought” (Doumet 18). Poetry interrupts overly habitual
modes of thought in order to provide the new, whether through syntacti-
cal structures, or, more frequently, the power inherent in metaphor of
encouraging us to see connections we had never thought to seek before.
This is also a link between literature and everyday lived experience, in
which we depend on well-established links and connections in order to
function in the world but are awed and surprised when that habitual pat-
tern is broken in a way that allows us to assign new meaning to a familiar
experience. In thinking, also, we depend most of the time on familiar
structures, but the most original kinds of thought are generated from this
shock of the new, the newly formed relationship of things one had not
thought to connect. In this sense, poetry and philosophy interrupt each
other and are joined by their mutual capacity to rescue us from habit.
Doumet traces a recognition of this commonality expressed in terms of
seeing new connections back to precisely the beginning of the period that
interests us in this volume, in the writings of Leopardi (Doumet 180).
The goal of this volume, then, is not to make comparisons between
philosophy and poetry or to see how they combat each other for control
of similar territory but rather to see how each makes and remakes the
other, serves as the other’s interruption, and allows us to call into question
that which we had never thought to question, by establishing points of
connection between things we had not thought to connect, all of which
is in the service of trying to “make sense” in opposition to the void of
a chaotic and unpatterned world. It is in terms of void and meaning,
but less in a metaphysical sense than in terms of lived experience, that
Jean-Michel Maulpoix takes up the question of what poetry can, after all,
do, even now, even beyond the grand dreams of the nineteenth-century
poets: “What can poetry do? Remind us of the void of which we are
made. Show us . . . sensations, landscapes, thoughts, even emotions . . .
And thus perhaps draw our proper contours, show us that we are flesh
and breath, of carnal thickness and of nothing. Poetry brings the empty
and the full in us into proportion” (Maulpoix 255). This invites us to a
sense of humility and to a suspicion in the face of any claim to have found
a definitive answer to a set of questions that need to keep transforming
themselves in order to remain valid. Hence Maulpoix refers to himself as
6 Joseph Acquisto

“the perplexed poet,” daunted in the face of poetry’s potential but willing
to engage with it in exchange for a certain kind of power that it conveys:
“Poetry offers to each of us the power to insist . . . The power to keep one’s
defects. To accept not knowing. To want perplexity. The power of the lack
of power” (256).
The contributors to this volume have provided a multiplicity of
points from which to engage the specifics of how philosophy enters into
a dynamic relationship with nineteenth-century poetry. The poets who
have been of most central interest to philosophers themselves are natu-
rally the most frequently represented in this collection, hence the large
numbers of contributions about the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and
Stéphane Mallarmé, arguably the two French poets of their century who
did the most to transform poetry’s relation to metaphysics, ethics, and
other avenues of philosophical inquiry. The focus is not exclusively on
these two poets, however; figures such as Arthur Rimbaud and Victor
Hugo also find a place here.
The first two essays form a group by examining pre-twentieth-century
philosophical perspectives. Edward Kaplan’s contribution considers the
ways in which philosophy interacted with poetry within the nineteenth
century on its own terms. Kaplan analyzes points of intersection between
Baudelaire and Kierkegaard on philosophical, theological, and ethical
grounds. Catherine Witt bridges nineteenth- and twentieth-century phi-
losophy by tracing the move from system to experience in a reading of
Baudelaire that situates him in relation to German idealism and to the
thought of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Her reading of Baudelaire’s “A une
passante” connects it to Montaigne and Rousseau by way of the nescio
trope and the recounting of a death scene.
Alterity and ethics are the focus of the next group of essays. Bradley Ste-
phens reads Victor Hugo in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of radi-
cal otherness, arguing that lyric allows us to resist totalizing reason by the
particular way in which it constructs subjectivity. Lyric identity is also at the
heart of Alain Toumayan’s investigation of the potential for drug use, as it is
constructed by Baudelaire and De Quincey, to provide access to authentic
otherness. Ève Morisi also addresses the ethical in Baudelaire by focusing on
his aesthetics of violence and expiatory sacrifice, claiming that Baudelaire in
his poetry overturns the regulatory function of sacrifice as theorized before
him by Joseph De Maistre and in our time by René Girard.
Stéphane Mallarmé looms large in the relation of philosophy to
nineteenth-century poetry, and the next group of essays is united by a
focus on some of the metaphysical implications inherent in and created
by his poetic practice. John McKeane situates the poet between Hegel and
 Introduction 7

Blanchot in order to explore the notion of the absence of the book in rela-
tion to the absolute and to the fragment, while Claire Chi-ah Lyu relates
the essential notions of blanc and salut in Mallarmé, reading the latter
term as both salvation and greeting. Her analysis, like McKeane’s, links
twentieth-century interpretations of Mallarmé to earlier philosophical
traditions, including those of Descartes and Hegel. Emile Fromet de Ros-
nay also focuses on Mallarméan salut, but in the context of philosophical
readings of tragedy ranging from Aristotle to the German idealists and on
through contemporary thinkers such as Agamben. Both Lyu and Fromet
de Rosnay use Mallarmé’s poetry to rethink a certain strain of redemp-
tive logic in continental philosophy. David Nowell Smith, likewise, reads
Mallarmé as a focal point for a range of writers who engage with the rela-
tionships among poetry, language, and thought, most notably Heidegger,
Blanchot, and Bonnefoy. Smith stages the debate between such thinkers
and evaluates the critique of a theoretician such as Henri Meschonnic,
whose critique of philosophical or “theoretical” approaches to the lyric
ends up revealing the pertinence of those very approaches.
The last group of essays shifts from the ethical or metaphysical con-
cerns that guided the previous sections of this collection in order to
address questions of subjectivity and politics in their relation to poetry.
Alison James extends the important reflections of Jacques Rancière on
aesthetics and community by broadening that analysis to a consideration
of poetic form via the theorizing of Jacques Roubaud, who, like Ran-
cière, reveals an intrinsic contradiction in the history of modern verse.
James elaborates the two thinkers’ analysis of different but related forms
of “crisis in verse.” My own contribution extends Alain Badiou’s theory
of the event and his espousal of poetry as one of the four “conditions” of
philosophy by reading him not in the context of Mallarmé, his poet of
preference, but of Baudelaire. My reading of “L’Héautontimorouménos”
demonstrates how poems refuse to be subsumed within abstract thought
but nonetheless serve as an important site of production of thought,
allowing a unique point of access to the “infinite multiple” of truth as
Badiou describes it. Hugues Azérad, in the last chapter, extends these con-
siderations of political subjectivity by tracing the way Édouard Glissant
reads Rimbaud and Mallarmé in his major work on poetics, L’Intention
poétique, as contributors to a “poetics of relation, peripheral and bound-
less,” which is fully consistent with Glissant’s own notion of the poetics
of the Tout-monde, which both informs and is informed by his own poetic
theory and practice.
With a variety of theoretical lenses, then, the contributions in this
volume seek to develop resonance between poetic and philosophical
8 Joseph Acquisto

thinking, or, rather, between those two modes of creating meaning from
lived experience. The bringing together and drawing apart of poetry and
philosophy yield a rich terrain where so many fundamental aspects of the
human experience, from metaphysics to ethics to politics and beyond,
are not just reflected but reshaped by the literary form in which they
find expression. What the essays collected here have in common is their
attempt to articulate, through readings of particular poems through the
approaches of a variety of thinkers in the French tradition and beyond,
just how those points of poetic and philosophic resonance come to be
established.

Works Cited
Badiou, Alain. The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
Bonnefoy, Yves. “Foreword: Ending the Mission, Inaugurating the Pact.” Twentieth-
Century French Poetry: A Critical Anthology. By Hugues Azérad and Peter Collier.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. xix–xxv.
Doumet, Christian. La déraison poétique des philosophes. Paris: Stock, 2010.
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.
Go, Nicolas. Les printemps du silence. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2008.
Maulpoix, Jean-Michel. Le poète perplexe. Paris: José Corti, 2002.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Résistance de la poésie. Bordeaux: William Blake et compagnie, 1997.
Rancière, Jacques. Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène. Paris: Hachette, 1996.
CHAPTER 1

Baudelaire through
Kierkegaard
Art, Fallibility, and Faith

Edward K. Kaplan

I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a primitive lyrical
validity.
—Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

O Creator! Can monsters exist in the eyes of the only One who knows
why they exist, how they were made and how they might have been able
not to be made?
—Baudelaire, “Miss Scalpel”

Both Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–

67) invented unique literary genres in order to launch spiritual revolutions.
Their various works can be interpreted in terms of aesthetic, ethical, and
religious dimensions of human experience. The esthetic favors the quest
for ideal beauty and sensory or imaginative stimulation—what Kierkeg-
aard calls “immediacy.” The ethical confronts fantastical impulses with
the reality of other beings, human or otherwise; Kierkegaard labels this
system of moral values the “universal.” The religious dimension points to
the “Absolute,” a mode of experience beyond words, beyond concepts.
The reality of God is “incommensurable” with the “ethical,” whereas the
“esthetic” ignores morality, transcendent meaning, or God. These catego-
ries are not always separable in life.

An early version of this essay was presented at the annual conference of the American Academy
of Religion in November 2002.
10 Edward K. Kaplan

Historical, biographical, and spiritual parallels help clarify how Baude-

laire and Kierkegaard faced basic perplexities. Both authors were exces-
sively self-reflective and both repudiated the trivialization of art, morality,
and religion, as they sought to preserve their personal integrity against
“the crowd”—as Kierkegaard put it, “defrauded by the Other.” On an
intimate level, both men were social and metaphysical bachelors bereft of
confident relationships with lovers, family, friends, community, nation,
and church. They shared the conviction that only the “Single One” can
stand before God or absolute Truth.1 Both felt (and were) deeply “misun-
derstood,” yet both continued purposely to defend their values without
compromise.
They attacked mediocrity, prejudice, self-deception, and complacency
with the rhetorical technique of “ethical irony,” a discrepancy between
statement and meaning, such as the appearance of evil intent or perversity,
designed to provoke an ethical response. (It is a form of Socratic irony.)2
With open hostility, Baudelaire repudiated the hypocrisy of France’s bour-
geois values and the bigotry of his country’s dominant Catholic Church.
Kierkegaard, writing in his own name or under pseudonyms, repudiated
the superficiality of the official Danish church and challenged his fellow
Christians courageously to scrutinize themselves and become authentic
before God. And both were haunted by sin and by the very fact of human
finitude.
Baudelaire’s poetry irritated conventional literary taste (and French
government authorities) with its penchant for the macabre, ugliness, and
perversity; while Kierkegaard, pseudonymous author of The Seducer’s
Diary (part one of Either/Or, 1843), fostered the illusion of his own prof-
ligacy, especially during the period he notoriously broke his engagement
with Regine Olsen.
The ambiguous lyricism of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857; second, definitive
ed., 1861, usually translated as “The Flowers of Evil”) effected a world-
wide literary revolution, which Victor Hugo recognized as “un frisson
nouveau” (“a new shudder” or sensibility).3 Baudelaire indeed practiced
an aesthetic paradox: “flowers” (or beauty) emerge from “evil” (or vice).
I characterize Baudelaire’s “terrible moralité” (horrifying morality) as
“ethical irony,” a provocative Socratic dialogue with the reader. The poetic
persona appears to relish cruelty, cynicism, the compulsion to escape, and
lustful or criminal moods; these “corrupt” postures may incite conformist
readers to anger or resistance but also, hopefully, to self-critical insight—if
the reader does not construe the poet’s “immorality” literally, as the final
word.4 Poems that appeal to selfish, prurient, or harmful impulses should,
implicitly, spur us to look within and confront our conscience.
 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard 11

The Existential Presupposition

Both thinkers begin with the self. Baudelaire famously admitted that he
was tormented and energized by internal contradictions: “As a child, I felt
in my heart two contradictory impulses, the horror of life and the ecstasy
of life” (OC1: 703). Translated into theological terms, “two simultaneous
attractions, one toward Satan, the other toward God” (OC1: 682–83).
Les Fleurs du Mal both performs and anatomizes these dualities, polarities
between good and evil, “spleen and the ideal,” depression and transcen-
dental imagination. The self remains torn, either “dispersed” or “concen-
trated.”5 No synthesis appears on the horizon.
The self as such becomes the battleground. Yet to interpret Baudelaire’s
poetry only in terms of binary opposites neglects its deeper drive to sur-
pass rigid dualistic categories. Despite dramatic evidence to the contrary,
the poet does not seek primarily to escape from the world through limit-
less reverie (or “voluptuous pleasure”)—the domain of “the aesthetic”;
rather, Baudelaire seeks to overcome contradictions in order, ultimately,
to reconcile infinite dreams with finite reality.
My reading of Baudelaire, inspired by Yves Bonnefoy who himself was
inspired by Kierkegaard, emphasizes the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du
Mal in which the poet embraces as ultimately precious that which actu-
ally exists—the domain of “the ethical.”6 The “religious” dimension—or
God as absolute reality—remains implicit for Baudelaire, except at two or
three exceptional moments, examined later in this chapter.7
Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death (1849) maps out the ideal
human consciousness as “a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the
temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short it is a syn-
thesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is
not yet a self ” (SD 146).8 Kierkegaard’s analysis points to the ultimate
necessity of religious faith: “This then is the formula which describes the
condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating
itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded trans-
parently in the Power which posited it.”9
Religious confidence, however, separates Baudelaire and Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard posits the existence of God the Creator, God the ground of
human being, and his faith rings loud and clear: “I am convinced that God
is love; this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is pres-
ent to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more
vehemently than the lover for his object; but I do not believe, this courage is
lacking” (FT 44–45). The word “lyrical” points to an intrinsic connection
of faith with the person’s essential self. Baudelaire, for his part, did not meet
God (or the forgiving Christ) on the other side of the paradox.
12 Edward K. Kaplan

Poetry, however, as Baudelaire lived and wrote it in the postromantic

era, might provide flashes of radical self-understanding. “Au lecteur” (“To
the reader”), which opens Les Fleurs du Mal, takes for granted the fragility
of free will as humankind’s inexorable fallen condition.
The poem presents three sorts of “vice.” First are pervasive weak-
nesses: “La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine” (“Stupidity, error, sin,
stinginess”). The poet then ironically deplores the “shameful” fact that
we are too weak to commit crimes that require passion, “le viol, le poi-
son, le poignard, l’incendie” (“rape, poisoning, murder, arson”), as if
murder were more noble than stinginess (itself, semantically, a degraded
form of avarice). This is a crucial example of ethical irony: the poet does
not literally promote lethal crimes; rather, he admires self-assertion and
free will, even passion, within the context of moral responsibility—but
he does so indirectly. Nor does he just blame the devil. The ending
insists that the worst “vice” is Ennui or despair, over which the person
must gain control:

C’est l’Ennui! –l’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,

Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur, —mon semblable, —mon frère! (OC1: 6)

[It is Ennui! —its eyes filled with involuntary tears,

It dreams of scaffolds while smoking an opium pipe.
You know it, readers, that finicky monster,
—Hypocritical reader, —my peer, —my brother!]

Usually translated as “boredom,” ennui is apathy or depression, melan-

choly that functions as a pathological defense against the anxiety of life
itself. The final line of “Au lecteur,” which T. S. Eliot quotes at the end of
“The Waste Land” (section one), directly challenges readers.
Insult and aggression rip at the reader’s veil of denial or self-deception.
After all, most of us are loath to acknowledge that our desires are rife with
anxiety or despair. By attacking the reader as “hypocritical,” the poet not
only repudiates overt dishonesty; he also recognizes a universal (or ethi-
cal) bond between victims: “mon semblable” (my peer). The final word
asserts the poet’s intimate identification with and compassion for “mon
frère” (my brother). Such is Baudelaire’s ironic method of establishing
solidarity with his readers.
Baudelaire and Kierkegaard both assume existential anxiety as intrin-
sic to the human condition. Ennui is both a major symptom of and a
defense against despair: as Kierkegaard asserts, “there lives not one single
 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard 13

man who after all is not to some extent in despair, in whose inmost parts
there does not dwell a disquietude, a perturbation, a discord, an anxious
dread of an unknown something, or of a something he does not even dare
to make acquaintance with, dread of possibility of life, or dread of him-
self ” (SD 155). Kierkegaard uplifts readers by demanding that we become
spirit, though we endure suffering along the way. Baudelaire, whom such
faith eludes, concentrates on anxiety as a source of insight.
We might accordingly retranslate Baudelaire’s title, Les Fleurs du Mal,
which summarizes this existential presupposition, as The Flowers of Afflic-
tion. In French, the word mal can signify illness, physical or emotional
pain, or active evil. Simone Weil, the intrepid philosopher of anguish,
understands le malheur (affliction) in its broad sense as a basic ontologi-
cal condition.10 Baudelaire’s implicit understanding is probably closest to
that of Paul Ricœur, who interprets original sin as “fallibility,” a univer-
sal human potential for wrongdoing, our finite condition rather than an
ineffaceable impulse to harm others (Ricœur 123–24).

Conversion to the Ethical

Baudelaire’s interpreters still tend to feature his “esthetic” escapes from
the frustrations imposed upon desire. The original version of Les Fleurs
du Mal (1857) emphasized the dualistic implications of its first and
largest section, “Spleen and Ideal.” Subsequent sections confirm the
impossibility of evading time, except temporarily through fantasies,
drugs, acts of sex and violence, and idealized memories. “Wine,” “Flow-
ers of Evil,” “Revolt,” and “Death” develop this otherworldly (or aes-
thetic) view.
A radical conversion, however, took place between the first and sec-
ond editions, between 1857 and 1861.11 Major changes in the structure
and content of the second edition surpass a poetry of escape in favor
of a poetry of finitude. The most obvious innovation is the new second
section, “Tableaux parisiens” (Parisian pictures). These and other poems
added in 1861 demonstrate how Baudelaire reconciled himself with
imperfect realities and even found solace in this acceptance.
Kierkegaard’s famous passage on “the knight of faith” in Fear and
Trembling (1843) guides my interpretation of Baudelaire and others
who strive to reconcile temporality and the Absolute. Here is Kierkeg-
aard’s evocation of the paradox of modern faith that Baudelaire strove
to actualize in literature without being able to conceptualize it. Its first
decisive movement is that of “resignation,” relinquishing his dreams of
perfection:
14 Edward K. Kaplan

With infinite resignation he has drained the cup of life’s profound sadness,
he knows the bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing every-
thing, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes
to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher, for his
continuance in the finite did not bear a trace of the cowed and fearful spirit
produced by the process of training; and yet he has this sense of security in
enjoying it, as though the finite life were the surest thing of all. And yet,
and yet the whole earthly form he exhibits is a new creation by virtue of
the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then grasped everything
again by virtue of the absurd. (FT 51)

How can a visionary sanctify life in its imperfection? A conceptual appa-

ratus beyond binary oppositions is required. Or faith in a transcendent
God who loves the world. Baudelaire is, rather, a knight of faith in train-
ing, unable to grasp the ideal, not yet prepared to trust God by virtue of
the absurd. The poet is wounded, in Kierkegaard’s terms, by “the cowed
and fearful spirit produced by the process of training.”
Baudelaire does, however, depict a “conversion” to the value of poetry
(or finite art) in the augmented 1861 version of “Spleen et Idéal.” A
group of poems known as the “Beauty Cycle” (numbered 17–21), if
interpreted together as a sequence, trace the poet’s rejection of aesthetic
idealism in favor of mortality as a precious (and beautiful) dimension of
being human.
The famous sonnet “La Beauté” (“Beauty”) typifies the relative indif-
ference to ethics that dominates the idealist first edition, as it begins: “Je
suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre” (OC1: 21; “I am beautiful,
O mortals! like a dream of stone”). The artist can produce only a facsimile
of eternal, transcendent loveliness while reenacting a tragic destiny: “Les
poètes, devant mes grandes attitudes / . . . Consumeront leurs jours en
d’austères études” (21; “Poets, confronting my grandiose poses, . . . Will
consume their days in austere studies”). Art demands self-sacrifice to an
unreachable ideal. The woman figure is cold, inaccessible, and fundamen-
tally destructive, although, as the poet insists at the end, her eyes become
“De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles” (21; “Pure mirrors
which make all things more beautiful”). Idealist art strives to transform
(or deny) the world’s shortcomings.
“Le Masque” (“The Mask”), added in 1861, conveys a momentous
conversion, reinforcing the section’s ethical thrust. As if to neutralize “La
Beauté,” this new poem interprets a sculpture of Ernest Christophe, to
whom the poem is dedicated, which itself allegorizes the troubled rela-
tionship between art and life. The poet begins by admiring a woman’s
athletic body that represents the aesthetic: “Vois quel charme excitant la
 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard 15

gentillesse donne! / Approchons, et tournons autour de sa beauté” (OC1:

23; “See what stimulating magic her loveliness bestows! Let’s go closer,
and walk around her beauty”). The poet then becomes a self-reflective
critic who courageously anatomizes his adoration; he discovers the wom-
an’s “mask” and translates it allegorically. The drama pivots on this brief,
striking stanza:

Ô blasphème de l’art! ô surprise fatale!

La femme au corps divin, promettant le bonheur,
Par le haut se termine en monstre bicéphale! (23)

[O blasphemy of art! O fateful surprise!

The woman of body divine, promising happiness,
at the top becomes a two-headed monster!]

The woman’s magnificent body renders all the more grotesque the contra-
dictory heads he discovers. One face represents truth, the other falsehood.
The “lying” mask shocks the aesthete into recognizing the inevitable tri-
umph of finitude over “art.” Art is “blasphemous”—in this context as in
“The Artist’s Confiteor” (OC1: 278–79)—for striving to rival God the
Creator by denying the human condition.
The poet then confirms his conversion to ethical awareness. The final
section (lines 20–36) depicts his compassion with the statue as if it were
a real woman. The repeated word beauty (coupled with “great pitiful”)
highlights the irony of his original illusion and prepares his humanistic
lesson:

Pauvre grande beauté! Le magnifique fleuve

De tes pleurs aboutit dans mon coeur soucieux;
Ton mensonge m’enivre, et mon âme s’abreuve
Aux flots que la Douleur fait jaillir de tes yeux! (24)

[Great pitiful beauty! The magnificent river

Of your tears flows into my anxious heart;
Your lie intoxicates me, and my soul slakes its thirst
In the waves that Suffering makes gush from your eyes!]

Baudelaire places us at the heart of another paradox, one that Kierkegaard

also helps us elucidate—namely, the seductive resemblance between aes-
thetic and ethical emotions. (After all, the statue, and an allegorical one at
that, is twice removed from a living person.) This poetry of compassion
cannot rid itself of the pleasures of aesthetic immediacy. As in the poem
16 Edward K. Kaplan

“Les Petites vieilles” (“Little Old Women”), Baudelaire admits, “je goûte
à votre insu des plaisirs clandestins” (OC1: 91; “I enjoy hidden pleasures
without you knowing it,”).12
How do we interpret the observer’s lucid judgment “Your lie intoxicates
me”? His ivresse (drunkenness or inspiration) can develop in two direc-
tions. On the obvious thematic level, the poet is emotionally (and ethically)
roused by the woman’s grief. Or is he inspired by her inner struggle as a
person, by her pathetic attempt to mask her mortality? Or is he inspired
by the artistic lie itself, her denial of reality? The woman’s seductive body
reinforces her need to deny, or transcend, physical frailty and despair.
The poem concludes with a radical change of form, from exposition to
dialogue: An ethical reader seizes the initiative to ask, “—Mais pourquoi
pleure-t-elle” (OC1: 24; “But why does she weep?”).13 After unmasking
the woman-statue, the poet identifies with her as a person in her own
right. His answer asserts a simple truth, the very banality of which con-
veys sincerity: “–Elle pleure, insensé, parce qu’elle a vécu! Et parce qu’elle
vit!” (24; “She weeps, mad one, because she has lived! And because she
lives!”). Without any irony of qualification, the poet qua critic celebrates
the pathos of temporality.
The poem ends by affirming a human solidarity: “C’est que demain,
hélas! Il faudra vivre encore! / Demain, après-demain et toujours!—
comme nous! » (24; “Tomorrow, alas! she must continue living! Tomor-
row, the day after and always!—Like [all of ] us!”). Artistic illusion cannot
redeem human fallibility. Life’s essential fragility makes all human beings
worthy of our compassion.
The woman behind the mask is at one and the same time Baude-
laire’s “hypocritical reader” and his “sister.” The poet replaces (one might
even say deconstructs) the bewitching illusion with an uncharacteristic
simplicity. The anguished person becomes another one of Baudelaire’s
autonomous, reflective women, free of the ambivalence (or hostility) he
usually displays toward young, attractive females.14
As if further to relinquish the ambition to recreate or mask reality,
the famous “Hymne à la Beauté” (“Hymn to Beauty”) that follows “Le
Masque,” also added in 1861, invalidates the transcendental idealism of
“La Beauté” even more directly. Baudelaire evokes artists who sacrifice
themselves to the Absolute, beyond good and evil. At the end, he reaf-
firms his acceptance of the limits of art. The task of art is ethical. Beauty
now retains a surprisingly modest task, to make life bearable: “[rendre]
L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds” (OC1: 25; “to make
the universe less hideous and time less oppressive”).
 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard 17

Poems in Prose
New conceptions demand new forms.15 While completing Les Fleurs du
Mal from 1857 to 1860, Baudelaire had invented a literary genre, which
he named experimentally “the prose poem.” Published gradually in peri-
odicals from 1855 on, Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen) first appeared as a
collection of fifty pieces in 1869. These “fables of modern consciousness”
(as I prefer to call them) both perform and evaluate the powers and the
frailties of imagination.16
Literary consciousness itself becomes the locus of existential insight.
(Moreover, Baudelaire’s self-reflective prose poems can provide a herme-
neutical key to Les Fleurs du Mal.) Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death
helps explain the dialectics of despair and imagination in Baudelaire’s
programmatic prose poem “Le Confiteor de l’artiste” (“The Artist’s Con-
fiteor”), the very title of which places artistic aspirations under the aegis
of guilt and sin. The prose poem begins with a cosmic reverie on autumn,
culminating in an ecstasy in which the self no longer differentiates itself
from surrounding nature: “[A]ll these things think through me, or I think
through them (for in the grandeur of reverie, the self is quickly lost!)”
(Prowler 4). This is the highest point of aesthetic immediacy: conscious-
ness and its contents are one.
Now, in Kierkegaard’s terms, the “fantastical” self, liberated to the
extreme, becomes “volatilized,” dangerously fragile: “Generally the fan-
tastical is that which so carries a man out into the infinite that it merely
carries him away from himself and therewith prevents him from return-
ing to himself ” (SD 164). That is exactly what happens in Baudelaire’s
Confiteor. The very pinnacle of liberation, the moment of ecstasy, what
Kierkegaard calls “the despair of too much infinity,” provokes acute anxi-
ety: “The force of voluptuous pleasure creates uneasiness and concrete
suffering. Then my excessively taut nerves produce nothing but shrill and
painful vibrations” (Prowler 4).
Baudelaire warns against this triumphant aestheticism. The experience
is radically solipsistic, denying the world outside the mind. Moreover, the
dreamer risks losing his self; denying reality is intrinsically “sinful.” The
artist accordingly confesses, but not in humility as would a penitent beg-
ging God for forgiveness.
The inevitable tension within creative desire typifies the artist’s fallen
condition, as he concludes, “Ah! Must we suffer eternally, or else eter-
nally flee the beautiful? Nature, sorceress without mercy, ever victorious
rival, let me be! Stop tempting my desires and my pride! Studying the
beautiful is a duel in which the artist shrieks with fright before being
defeated” (Prowler 4). Baudelaire owns up to his arrogant competition
18 Edward K. Kaplan

with Nature, a doomed rivalry, for the creature can never match God the
Creator. Yet the artist stubbornly preserves his pride and free will, auda-
ciously claiming the martyrdom of aesthetic self-sacrifice. The collection’s
fuller context suggests that he never entirely surrenders his ego, his artistic
ambitions.
A comment on despair and sin in The Sickness unto Death places Baude-
laire’s refusal to relinquish his ego into a specifically religious context:
“From a Christian standpoint such an existence (in spite of all aesthetic)
is sin, it is the sin of poetizing instead of being, of standing in relation
to the Good and the True through imagination instead of being that, or
rather existentially striving to be it. The poet-existence here in question is
distinguished from despair by the fact that it includes the conception of
God or is before God” (208).

Standing Before God

Two fundamental elements, according to Kierkegaard (and classic Chris-
tianity), are necessary for faith: infinite resignation (surrender of one’s
will to the divine) and trust that God, for Whom everything is possible,
is love. Baudelaire’s ideology of original sin, opposing the reigning mate-
rialistic doctrine of infinite human progress, reflects his self-loathing and
deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. His belief in the traditional Christian
God was so frail that he hardly ever, if at all, considered the possibility
of forgiveness and divine love—the Christian antidote to which Kierkeg-
aard testified with his life and writings, among them Edifying Discourses
(1843), Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, and Works of Love (both
1847).
And yet, like many seekers of the postromantic (i.e., postutopian and
post-Christian) era, Baudelaire harbored the hope that there existed a
God, a Supreme consciousness endowed with understanding and com-
passion. Most of Baudelaire’s writings, however, remain within the aes-
thetic and its relation to social alienation.17 His community consists of
criminals, old women and old men, widows, orphans, lonely boys, out-
dated actors and clowns, prostitutes, lesbians, beggars, and other marginal
creatures reflecting the poet’s self-representation as alienated, rebuffed,
and misunderstood. Baudelaire exhibits the negative pole of the radical
Kierkegaardian dialectic, the lone person standing before the Absolute.
Baudelaire’s most discerning fable of modern consciousness, “Made-
moiselle Bistouri” (“Miss Scalpel”), plays out the conflict between ethical
realism and aesthetic solipsism, leading him to the crossroads of ulti-
mate absurdity or faith.18 The very possibility or impossibility of mutual
 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard 19

communication (or dialogue) is its manifest topic. A woman’s direct

(though delusional) speech dominates the narrative.
For the first time in the collection, a woman, a caricature of the narra-
tor’s own narcissism, attempts persistently to absorb him into hers. The
narrator is a Parisian flâneur who warily involves himself with a middle-
aged woman, a prostitute, who is prey to a compulsion to nurture doc-
tors, to attend their bloody surgeries, and to be treated by them, even
though she has no physical symptoms. “Miss Scalpel,” as she is called, is
a hypochondriac who seeks to control a little corner of her mortality as
she tries to absorb the socially alienated stroller into her mental alienation.
She insists that he is a medical doctor, which he doggedly denies, insisting
on his reality principle: “No. I am not a doctor. Let me go” (Prowler 115).
Acting as an urban detective, he begins with detached curiosity and
ends with compassion. At first she is simply fodder for his intellect: “I pas-
sionately love mystery, because I always hope to untangle it. So I allowed
myself to be dragged off by that companion, or rather by that unhoped-
for enigma” (115). Matter-of-fact questions of temporality enter the
one-sided conversation. In addition to her sadistic passion for surgical
procedures, Miss Scalpel seems to be preoccupied with aging: “—Now
where did that white hair come from? You weren’t like that, not long ago,
when you were an intern under doctor L—. I remember that you were the
one who helped him with the major operations. Now there’s a man who
loves, to cut, hack and saw!” (115–16).
Then he steers her toward the real world, without success: “But, I
replied, in turn following, me as well, my obsession, ‘why do you believe
I’m a doctor?’” The narrator wants her to accept him for who he truly is.
But the dialogue reaches a dead end as he steadfastly maintains his real-
ity principle, probing her memory as would a psychoanalyst: “‘Can you
remember the time and the situation when this so peculiar passion arose
in you?’ With difficulty I made myself understood; finally I succeeded.
But then she replied very sadly, and even, as far as I can remember, avert-
ing her eyes, ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember’” (117–18). The obsessed
woman resists the narrator’s rational scalpel, shielding her (subjective) self
and its dream. Her eyes avoid his (objective) gaze and she voices “the
sadness of finitude” (in Ricœur’s phrase), an incipient recognition of the
truth. Might she become rational? We suspect that disillusion would con-
sume her.
The unraveled dialogue has ended. But not the narrator’s quest for
truth. In a sort of epilogue, the narrator interprets his own fable, or, rather,
he attempts to discern its meaning. His outburst expresses a passion for
justice that carries no irony, no bitterness, but compassion, righteous
20 Edward K. Kaplan

perplexity at the enormity—and the senselessness—of undeserved suffer-

ing. This extraordinary “prayer” marks Baudelaire’s boldest insight into
the powers and the limits of human understanding:

What weirdness you find in big cities, when you know how to walk about
and look! Life swarms with innocent monsters.—Lord, my God! You, the
Creator, you, the Master; you who made Law and Freedom; you, the sov-
ereign who lets things happen, you, the judge who forgives; you who are
abounding in motives and causes, and who have perhaps placed a taste for
horror in my mind in order to convert my heart, like the cure at knife point;
Lord, take pity, take pity on madmen and madwomen! O Creator! Can
monsters exist in the eyes of the only One who knows why they exist, how
they were made and how they might have been able not to be made? (118)

The frustrated narrator experiences, in his marrow, the metaphysical

absurdity of human existence. Ultimate meaning and universal justice are
far beyond his ken. Only indirectly can he respond to the mad woman’s
anguish by addressing God the Creator over seven times. (Conventional
wisdom—like Job’s friends—assumes that human distress reflects divine
justice and is proper retribution for sins committed.) But Miss Scalpel
harms no one. Unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, she exercises
no free choice. The torment of the insane, the city’s “innocent monsters,”
challenge the very notion of a divine order.19
Baudelaire has touched the limits of religious thinking; having carried
art and ethics to their fullest powers, he finds them insufficient to his
quest for justice and truth. His flâneur stands on the brink of Kierkeg-
aard’s “yawning qualitative abyss” between humankind and God, between
the universal and the Absolute, between the ethical and the religious. Dis-
mayed, he surrenders his pride by acknowledging that he is but a crea-
ture. Overwhelmed by injustice, with fear, trembling, and moral anguish,
he questions the raw, brute mystery of existence. Having exhausted his
intellect, has he leaped into faith, trusting God by virtue of the absurd?
Can Kierkegaard help us discern the theological content of Baudelaire’s
ambiguous prayer?
Baudelaire’s narrator confronts the alternative of despair or faith,
unable to embrace either. We cannot know whether or not Baudelaire
the author, interpreting his own fable, would ratify the existence of a God
who listens and cares. Whatever the answers, readers struggle to penetrate
the meaning of irremediable injustice in a spiritually radical manner—
from God’s perspective. Beyond the human mind lies a possible transcen-
dent logic, “the eyes of the only One who knows why they exist, how they
were made and how they might have been able not to be made.”
 Baudelaire through Kierkegaard 21

That being said, Baudelaire is free of idolatrous religion. He does not

seek to sell faith at a bargain rate, as Kierkegaard would say, to replace
the metaphysical enigma with a facile dictum. His passionate confronta-
tion with mystery presupposes his own autonomy and self-awareness. His
reverential yet assertive humility concedes that intelligence can be glori-
ous, but in seeking the fundamental meaning of existence, like Job, he is
humbled and awed.
“Miss Scalpel” reaches a wisdom most appropriate, I believe, to our
post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-9/11 era. It ends with unanswered
questions while affirming the sanctity of every human being.

Fellowship of Sorrow
The question of faith and finitude remains unresolved for both Baude-
laire and Kierkegaard. The latter movingly admits in Fear and Trembling
that he lacked the courage of infinite resignation, surrender to God with-
out second thoughts: “Whenever I essay to make this movement, I turn
giddy, the very instant I am admiring it absolutely a prodigious dread
grips my soul—for what is it to tempt God?” (FT 58).20 The passage
continues, “And yet this movement is the movement of faith and remains
such, even though philosophy, in order to confuse the concepts, would
make us believe that it has faith, and even though theology would sell
out faith at a bargain price.” Nor does Baudelaire possess that “humble
courage,” “that courage of faith,” the celebrated Kierkegaardian “leap of
faith” beyond reason.
There is a chapter of Either/Or Part I, on the aesthetic, that defines
a fellowship of sorrow to which Baudelaire (and Kierkegaard) certainly
belonged: “The unhappy one is the person who in one way or another has
his ideal, the substance of his life, the plenitude of his consciousness, his
essential nature, outside himself. The unhappy one is the person who is
always absent from himself, never present to himself ” (E/O 222).
Baudelaire did not find peace in infinite resignation; his ego remained
too fragile; defensively, he still wielded the double-edged weapons of bit-
terness, attaching him still to a hurtful past. At the end of his other peni-
tential fable, “À une heure du matin” (“At One O’Clock in the Morning,”
no. 10), he judges himself harshly for pretending to respect influential
persons he detested. Then he addresses a most lucid prayer, first to people
he loved, and then to God: “Annoyed with everyone and annoyed with
myself, I long to redeem myself and to bolster my pride a bit in the silence
and solitude of the night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have
sung, fortify me, sustain me, remove me from untruth and the world’s
corrupting fumes. And you, Lord my God! Grant me the grace to produce
22 Edward K. Kaplan

a few beautiful verses to prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men,
and that I am not inferior to those I despise!” (Prowler 17).21
Alone, ashamed, the chastened poet is willing to settle for “a few beau-
tiful verses.” Yet he expresses, not modesty, not trust, but an admixture
of contrition and wounded pride. Incapable of perceiving himself as
accepted by the divine, still obsessed with absolute truth, he could not
enter Kierkegaard’s ultimate sanctuary: “I am convinced that God is love;
this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity” (FT 44–45). Baude-
laire’s readers can only strive, as we interpret his texts, to achieve a fuller
harmony of irony, self-acceptance, and purity of heart.

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Ricœur, Paul. Fallible Man. Trans. Charles Kelbley. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965.
Runyan, Randolph. Intratextual Baudelaire: The Sequential Fabric of “Les Fleurs du
Mal” and “Spleen de Paris.” Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010.
Thélot, Jérôme. La Poésie précaire. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.
Weil, Simone. “The Love of God and Affliction.” Waiting for God. New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1951. 117–36.

Notes
1. See the critique by Martin Buber; see also Kaplan, “Buber.”
2. For my use of “ethical irony” as an interpretive strategy, see Handwerk: “ethical
irony focuses on how verbal incompatibilities set up and provoke a deeper inter-
rogation of self-consciousness” (2).
3. Victor Hugo letter to Baudelaire, October 6, 1859: “You are on the march. You
press forward. You endow the heavens of art with a mysterious horrifying ray.
You are creating a new shudder” (OC1: 1011).
4. See Kaplan, “Teaching,” “Vicissitudes,” and Baudelaire’s Prose Poems.
5. “De la concentration et la vaporisation du moi. Tout est là” (OC1: 676; “Of the
concentration and the vaporization of the self. Everything is there.”).
6. I owe this generative insight to Yves Bonnefoy. See Bonnefoy, “L’acte et le lieu
de la poésie.”
7. See “Un Voyage à Cythère” (OC1: 117–19) and the prose poems “Mademoi-
selle Bistouri” (OC1: 353–56) and “A une heure du matin” (287–88) treated
following. See also Thélot.
8. See also the following: “The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and
finitude which relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, a task which
can be performed only by means of a relationship to God. But to become one-
self is to become concrete. But to become concrete means neither to become
finite nor infinite, for that which is to become concrete is a synthesis” (SD 162).
9. SD 147, quoted again as the final sentence of the book, 262.
10. See Weil.
11. For approaches that emphasize Baudelaire’s acceptance of finitude, see Burton,
Lawler, Runyan, and Babuts.
12. Speaking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Les Paradis artificiels (1860), Baudelaire
writes, “The enthusiasm with which he admired virtue, the febrile compassion
that filled his eyes with tears as he contemplated a noble act or the thought of
all the noble acts he would have wanted to complete, sufficed to give him a
superlative idea of his moral worth. Jean-Jacques became intoxicated without
hashish” (OC1: 436).
24 Edward K. Kaplan

13. See the prose poem “Les fenêtres” (“Windows”), in which a reader asks the nar-
rator, “Are you sure that that legend is the true one?” (OC1: 339).
14. See Baudelaire, Exposition universelle (1855), on Delacroix’s “femmes
d’intimité”: “It is as if they carry within their eyes a doleful secret, impossible
to bury in the depths of deceit. Their pallor is like the revelation of internal
battles” (OC2: 594). See also the prose poem “Les Veuves” (OC1: 292–94;
“Widows”).
15. See the pioneering work of Barbara Johnson, who defined the new genre as “a
critical poetry”: Défigurations du langage poétique (Flammarion 1979).
16. Some of the following discussion is taken from Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (1990).
I quote from my translation, Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler.
17. That is why his poetry and prose fables are peopled with citizens of “disappointed
ambition, unfortunate inventors, thwarted fame, shattered hearts, by all those
tumultuous and secretive souls in whom a storm’s final sighs still rumble, who
retreat far from the insolent gaze of the joyous and the idle” (Prowler 23).
18. The following discussion is taken from my book, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 145–
51, with some changes. For an important perspective that criticizes mine, see
Powers.
19. See Herbert Fingarette, “Meaning”; substantially revised in Fingarette,
“Whirlwind.”
20. See also FT 62: “The last movement, the paradoxical movement of faith, I
cannot make (be that a duty or whatever it may be), in spite of the fact that I
would do it more than gladly. Whether a man has the right to make this affir-
mation, must be left to him, it is a question between him and the Eternal being
who is the object of faith whether in this respect he can hit upon an amicable
compromise.”
21. See my analysis of this poem in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 56–58.
CHAPTER 2

Passages through
Baudelaire
From Poetry to Thought and Back

Catherine Witt

comme j’ignorais où je me trouvais, je ne savais même pas au premier

instant qui j’étais (not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first
who I was).
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann 5

System
In the first part of his 1936 lecture series on Schelling’s Philosophical
Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), Heidegger seizes
on a point of contention that Schelling, anticipating objections to his
endeavor of developing a system of freedom, addresses in the opening
pages of his treatise: Can freedom be conceptualized within a philosophi-
cal system that aims at wholeness? What is the place of a concept of free-
dom in a “scientific world view”? Is there an essential antagonism between
the idea of freedom and that of system?1
Reacting not so much critically as in “counterpoint” to the Philosophical
Investigations, to recall a phrase used by Jean-Luc Nancy (55), Heidegger
sets out to show that, in laying claim to a unified totality of knowledge,
what Schelling calls Wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung or “scientific [i.e.,
philosophical] worldview,” such a system must deny freedom, since the
concept of freedom is not only one concept among others in the system
but rather the dominant central point of the system, always exceeding the
limits of the system’s claim to a totality of knowledge (Heidegger, 21).
26 Catherine Witt

It is also bound to reduce being to mere subjectivity—a gesture that, in

his view, typifies the deluded narcissism of Western metaphysics.2 While
treating the Philosophical Investigations as simultaneously the culmination
and abdication of German Idealism, Heidegger does not fully grapple
with its declared ambitions—namely, to provide an account of the rela-
tionship between being and thinking in a world where human freedom
(i.e., finite freedom) is defined as human beings’ faculty for good and
evil—nor does he take seriously the possibility of reading Schelling’s trea-
tise as an attempt to reformulate the tradition of theodicy that originates
in Leibniz by incorporating Kant’s concept of radical evil and thus admit-
ting the positivity of evil. Heidegger makes no secret of the fact that the
theodical aspect of the Philosophical Investigations are of secondary impor-
tance to him, as suggests his dismissive reference to Schelling’s project as
a “systemadicy” (Systematicee). For him, the treatise fails precisely because
it remains within the confines established by the tradition of theodicy:
“Schelling falls back into the rigidified tradition of Western thought with-
out creatively transforming it” (161).
What interests Heidegger in Schelling’s treatise is his acknowledgement
of the reality of evil and its radical challenge to systematic philosophy,
forcing Schelling to produce a critique of what he will later call negative
philosophy—namely, a philosophy that can only grasp what is understand-
able in terms of concepts. Following in Nietzsche’s footsteps, Heidegger’s
critique of systems conceived as the founding gesture of German Idealism
proposes a way of thinking (ein Denken) that aims at the undoing (Destruk-
tion or Abbau) of the metaphysics of presence. Nowhere is his analysis of
systems and of the history of system building more fully developed than in
his lectures on the Philosophical Investigations. What is a system? Heidegger
first states that, far from an arbitrary word, it is a deed: the original deed
of Greek culture (25). “System,” which, as Heidegger reminds us, comes
from the Greek etymon synistemi (“I put together”), refers to the deed of
arranging things in such a way that they either conform to a preestablished
order or take part in the projection of one. The system is the founding
development and ordering of what is knowable.3 As such, it is the task of
philosophy, if not always its sole and most pressing one. Heidegger also
underscores the historical specificity of systematic thinking, insisting that it
is a manner of rediscovering the human being, truth, and knowledge that
typifies the modern period (29). Indeed, the condition for the possibility of
forming a system and the will to take hold of being in its totality and for-
malize methods for engendering and exposing knowledge coincide with the
origin and existence of modern science in the “will to a mathematical system
of reason” (33). According to Heidegger, it answers a need for mathematical
 Passages through Baudelaire 27

certainty that is manifest in the respective claims of Descartes, Spinoza,

and Leibniz (with whose thought Schelling explicitly engages) to stabilize
and fix the mutability of the sensible world through concepts and reason-
ing borrowed from geometry. The historically determined recourse to the
system entails not only the precedence of certainty over truth, and method
over content, but also the founding of certainty, of what is truly knowable,
on the self-certainty of the ego cogito (30).
In discussing the case of German Idealism, however, where system is
understood as the requirement of absolute knowledge and where the sub-
ject finds itself at the center of the system, Heidegger shows that the devel-
opment of the system and the creative faculty of human reason proceed less
from the scientific work created by reason than from the capacity of human
reason to elaborate fictions, which, under the guise of metaphysics, legiti-
mate the central position of the human kind within a nature structured by
laws and regularities. In this respect, it is telling that, rather than turn to
Hegel’s development of an absolute system of absolute knowledge in the
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Heidegger should be drawn to Schelling’s
bold, if incomplete, task of containing the system of freedom within a
single work. What draws Heidegger to Schelling’s project is perhaps how
the failure of the system of freedom brings into question the possibility of
systematic philosophy itself. The process emerging from the impossibility
of completing the system also fascinates Heidegger, as suggests a passing
remark to the effect that the Philosophical Investigations, “Schelling’s efforts
from 1809 until his death, the silent work of these forty-five years” (21),
would consume the philosopher until the very end of his life, as if the leav-
ing open of Schelling’s system at the moment of his death only confirmed
the incompatibility of freedom and the system.
The works discussed in the subsequent pages of this essay propose
a critique of the system in German Idealism as the form in which phi-
losophy rationalizes experience through questioning the centrality of the
perceiving subject as a concept within the system. Although Baudelaire,
whose remarks on the notion of system will launch the critique, crudely
underestimates the inner differences between the thinkers grouped under
the label of German Idealism (notably Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling) and
thus fails to appreciate the freedom inherent in what Heidegger calls the
“deed” of system building, his poem “À une passante” and its treatment
of experience informed by the trope of the nescio will prove a valuable pas-
sageway onto an alternative philosophical and poetical tradition, includ-
ing Montaigne and Rousseau, for thinking about the relation between
writing, experience, and knowledge beyond the limits of systems and
their terms.
28 Catherine Witt

Experience
In Baudelaire’s work, the word system is narrowly associated with the
scientific (and Germanic) discipline of aesthetics. Philosophy, as attests
the poet’s occasional vituperations against French academics, specifically
those of the Hegelian confession, is treated with suspicion.4 The open-
ing pages of the 1855 Exposition Universelle exemplify one such invec-
tive against the limitations of art apprehended through the prism of
philosophy. Rehearsing Heinrich Heine’s disdain for the wisdom of “a
modern Winckelmann” and “those narrow-minded modern professors of
aesthetics,” Baudelaire takes to task the fallacies of philosophical systems,
denouncing not only the limitations of bookish learning, technical termi-
nology, and didactic ambitions but also their imperviousness to unfamil-
iar expressions of beauty, such as the strange appeal of Chinese works of
art, “bizarre, contorted in form, intense in color, and sometimes so fragile
as to be evanescent.”5 Baudelaire readily admits to having experienced the
temptation of philosophical systems, a bit of which he may have devel-
oped in reading Poe, but more likely the essays and Salons of exiled Ger-
man poet Heinrich Heine, whom he repeatedly mentions in these pages:6

More than once I have tried, like all my friends, to confine myself within a
system in order to preach freely. But a system is a kind of damnation which
forces us to a perpetual recantation; it is always necessary to invent another,
and the exertion required is a cruel punishment. And my system was
always beautiful, vast, spacious, convenient, neat, and above all smooth.
At least it seemed to me. And always a spontaneous, unexpected product
of universal vitality would come along and give the lie to my childish, anti-
quated knowledge, that pitiable daughter of Utopia. (Baudelaire 80–81;
Baudelaire OC2: 577)

Against the limited horizons of the systematic thinker, “the mad doc-
trinaire of Beauty . . . confined within the binding fortress of his sys-
tem” (577), Baudelaire champions the unrestricted outlook of the critic
as “man of the world” (l’homme du monde).7 For Baudelaire, in 1855,
Delacroix is this man. Anticipating the cosmopolitanism and curiosity
that will become distinctive to the “man of the world” as artist in Le
Peintre de la vie modern (The Painter of Modern Life), Baudelaire describes
him as a uniquely sensitive observer who gains insight into beauty from
his exposure to the variety of the natural world and his practice of con-
templation rather than from the philosophical “utopias” expounded in
books. Baudelaire envisions him as a solitary dreamer (un rêveur) or a lone
traveler (l’un de ces voyageurs solitaires) emerging from the forests of the
 Passages through Baudelaire 29

New World, whose solitude has endowed him with “a divine grace”—that
is, an intuitive, purely sensuous understanding of “universal beauty.” His
penetrating intelligence of exotic natural forms opens him in the moment
of aesthetic experience to being penetrated reciprocally by the world he
observes, allowing for his own imagination to become fertile ground:
“[T]his whole world of new harmonies will slowly enter into him, will
patiently penetrate him . . . all this unknown vitality will be added to his
own vitality; thousands of ideas and sensations will enrich his human dic-
tionary [son dictionnaire de mortel]“ (Baudelaire 79–80; Baudelaire OC2:
577). Baudelaire thus calls upon the beholder as “man of the world” to
lose himself in a fusion with the sensible world, the experience of which,
as suggested by the curious expression “enrichir son dictionnaire de mor-
tel,” mobilizes his body, language, and memory.8
Experience is Baudelaire’s answer to system. But what exactly is the
nature of the experience of which he writes so effusively? In a footnote
to the aforementioned passage from the 1855 Exposition Universelle,
Claude Pichois asserts that Baudelaire speaks from experience (il parle
d’expérience): “This is where one clearly sees what Baudelaire gained from
his journey of 1841–1842” (OC2: 1369). Pichois, who takes Baude-
laire’s figure of the cosmopolitan traveler at face value, refers to the poet’s
aborted voyage to Calcutta, which landed him briefly in the Bourbon
Island and Mauritius. If no mention of his voyage is made in Baudelaire’s
1846 Salon, then why refer to it in 1855, more than ten years after his
return? It is hard to read the 1855 Exposition Universelle solely as a record
of lived experience. Not only does the experience related by Baudelaire
evoke a mental journey and creative process, in which the sensuousness
of language (rather than of the world) plays a key role, but it is also medi-
ated through recognizable references to texts such as Rousseau’s Rêver-
ies du promeneur solitaire (the peripatetic dreamer) and Chateaubriand’s
Mémoires d’Outre Tombe (the lone traveler) that explicitly conceive of
experience as an immersion in sensory impression.9 The experience of
which Baudelaire writes is mediated through the memory of dealing with
the loss and rebirth of language as the medium of memory. What Pichois
attributes to lived experience of the world (Erlebnis) is thus perhaps more
aptly understood as Baudelaire’s reflections on the process of finding in
the writings of Rousseau and Chateaubriand the experience (Erfahrung)
of language as neither dead nor alive (“quelques milliers d’idées et de
sensations enrichiront son dictionnaire de mortel”) but as mortal language.
The attention Baudelaire pays to interpretation, translation, and dic-
tionaries in the opening pages of the 1855 Exposition universelle reveals
the importance of language in his exposition of a “critical method,” which
30 Catherine Witt

rests on the opposition of two ways of relating to words: that of poetry

and that of philosophical systems—namely, terminology. The question
raised by the passage pertains to three ways of making sense of the notion
of term: as a linguistic problem that takes terms as means and aims of
communication; as an epistemological problem inherent in philosophical
language that aims at formulating concepts, notional systems, and theo-
retical constructs without questioning their limits; and as a metaphysical
problem concerning the relation of “self ” to its term (understood liter-
ally as the end of experience) in the paradigmatic experience of death as
both the ultimate experience of the limit and the limit of experience. In
what follows, I propose to read Baudelaire’s poem “À une passante” as the
exemplary site of a relation between poetry and thought in light of some
of the concerns raised in the Exposition Universelle, taking the classical
trope of nescio (“I know not”) as a passageway through the poem onto
other texts and as a way of thinking about the freedom of poetry from the
logic of terms.

Nescio
« À une passante »

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, la douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!—Fugitive beauté

Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!

Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! (OC1: 92–93).

[“To A Woman Passing By”

The deafening street roared about me.

Tall slender, in deep mourning, majestically sad,
 Passages through Baudelaire 31

A woman passed me, one hand ostentatiously lifting

In balance her scalloped hem,

Lithe, noble, legs statuesque.

Absurdly on edge, I drank in from her eye—
That livid, hurricane-weather sky—
A fascinating tenderness, a murderous pleasure.

A flash of lightening . . . then night!

Fugitive beauty, in whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you nevermore, save in eternity?

Elsewhere! far from here! too late! perhaps never!

As where you went I don’t know; so you don’t know where I go.
You whom I would have loved. You who knew it!]

Baudelaire’s “À une passante” is a poem in which nothing happens—rien

ne se passe—save perhaps an event that is relegated to the rejet in the third
line: a woman passes by.10 The poem is a site of transience, rupture, and
disjunction rather than of encounter. Indeed, the promise of an encoun-
ter between the poetic subject and a mysterious passerby culminates in
the second quatrain in an exchange of glances, the reciprocity of which
is suspended for the duration of the poem, only to be displaced, in the
final verse, into the realm of hypothesis: “Ô toi que j’eusse aimé, ô toi qui le
savais!” The woman designated in the title of the poem is a figure trapped
in the eternity of the present progressive: she is forever caught in the
movement of passing and can only be reached in the transitory gesture
of the poetic dedication that gives the poem its title, “À une passante.”
What encounter the poem does suggest is but the fantasy of an encounter
that emerges retrospectively from a point in time or in memory (“Ô toi
que j’eusse aimé”) for which the occasion has passed. However, in stating
the condition for the encounter, it is also preserved as the experience of
the poem. The paradox underlying “À une passante” gives rise to mul-
tiple readings: the encounter with the woman is premised on her loss; the
death she is mourning is her own; or, in Benjamin’s words, the italicized
jamais in line 12 marks the high point of the encounter—“Das jamais ist
der Höhepunkt der Begegnung” (44). Giorgio Agamben, whose interpre-
tation of the poem is informed by the assumption that “poverty of human
experience” (the phrase is Benjamin’s) characterizes the modern age, sees
in the shock provoked by the missed encounter the expression of a new
commonplace: the creation of this commonplace is poetry’s response to
the normalization of what he terms the “destruction of experience.”11
32 Catherine Witt

The overarching structure of “À une passante” pits the death of the

poetic subject in the quatrains—a violent and extraordinary death inti-
mated by the word “crispé” and by the paronymous inscription of the
verb “tuer” in the feminine rhymes “majestueuse / fastueuse,” “statue /
tue”—against his rebirth in the tercets: “Dont le regard m’a fait soudaine-
ment renaître.” Correspondingly, the rhythm of the sonnet shifts from
the slow, heavily alliterative, syntactically drawn-out ascent suggested in
the quatrains to the fragmentariness of the tercets, which highlights the
poetic subject’s experience of dislocation. The stretching of antithetical
lexical fields across the sonnet further dramatizes the passage of the poetic
subject from life to death and back. Throughout, the poem avoids set-
tling in a given state. It hovers between movement (“passante,” “passa,”
“soulevant,” “balançant,” “agile”) and petrification (“statue,” “crispé,”
“fascine”); the motility of fashion (“balançant le feston et l’ourlet”) and
the immutability of statuary (“avec sa jambe de statue”); light (“livide,”
“éclair”) and darkness (“deuil,” “nuit”); fleetingness (“éclair,” “fugitive,”
“soudainement”) and temporal standstill (“éternité”).
The arresting experience of vertigo that ensues from the missed encoun-
ter at the midpoint of the sonnet is an experience in the least anecdotal
sense of the word. “Experience,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe insists, “pro-
vided that one understand the term in a strict sense—that of the Latin ex-
periri, a crossing through danger—and refrain from referring it to some
sort of ‘lived experience’ or to anecdote” (30).12 Its occurrence in the form
of an ellipsis immediately after the volta breaks the first hemistich of line 9
at its coupe to surge again at the caesura of the alexandrine with the inser-
tion of an exclamation mark and a dash. According to Lacoue-Labarthe’s
cursory reading of this passage, the caesura, which marks the poetic sub-
ject’s experience of vertigo (un émoi), stands in for the enigma of the
poem’s origin, that by which the poem extricates itself from the poetic
subject to achieve an ever more singular idiom (33). Rather than accept as
a given that modern poetry is founded on the “destruction of experience”
and, following Agamben, institute violence as a new commonplace meant
to fill the “void of experience,” Lacoue-Labarthe focuses his attention on
what remains of the relation between poetry and thought when poetic
language exposes the loss of the poetic subject. He attends to turbulent
lyricism, such as can be found in Hölderlin’s late works, Baudelaire’s “À
une passante,” and the lapidary poems of Celan, where language denies
the authority of the poetic subject and tends so near parataxis, so near
idiomaticity that it appears to reach the limit of sense making. Breaking
through in the midst of “À une passante” is thus the memory of an experi-
ence of transgression that challenges the very status of the poetic subject,
even while offering itself as the poem’s groundless founding experience.
 Passages through Baudelaire 33

What is there to say of a poem that, in converging on an ellipsis, cul-

minates in nothing? An answer to this question perhaps lies in the discreet
structuring of the tercets around the classical trope of nescio. Let it first
be said that the trope does not appear as such in “À une passante”—
Baudelaire never writes, “je ne sais.” Yet the nescio trope literally informs
the second half of the sonnet as much as it is implied through the conjur-
ing of a philosophical tradition pertaining to experience, knowledge, and
amnesia, the memory of which perceptibly haunts the poem. What the
nescio first introduces in “À une passante” is a sudden temporal shift from
the anecdotal past tense narrative of the quatrains to the amnesic present
of the penultimate line. It highlights the effacement of the poetic subject,
whose presence, in the second half of the sonnet, now frailly hangs on its
chiastic relationship with the “tu” of the silent passerby. The intertwine-
ment of “j’ignore” and “tu ne sais” gives resonance to the elusive trope. It
comes as a delayed, muted rumble, following the flash of lightening that
tears through the poem at its midpoint. But the nescio is also revealed
obliquely in “À une passante” by way of the “gloss” that Baudelaire’s 1859
Salon provides to the metaphysical issues at hand in the poem. This pas-
sage from the section on sculpture pertains to allegorical figures in funer-
ary statuary:

[T]he prodigious figure of Mourning, prostrate, disheveled, drowned in

the river of her own tears, its heavy grief crushing the dusty remains of an
illustrious man, instructs you that riches, glory, even fatherland, are pure
frivolity, when placed before this je ne sais quoi which no one has named,
nor defined, which man can only express through mysterious adverbs such
as: maybe, nevermore, always! And which contains, some people hope, infi-
nite beatitude, so desired it is, or unremitting anguish, the image of which
modern reason rebuffs with the convulsive gesture of agony. (Baudelaire
OC2: 669)13

In echoing the nescio quid or je ne sais quoi, a phrase used in theology as

well as in seventeenth-century aesthetics to indicate the impossibility of
conceptualization, the nescio trope inscribed in Baudelaire’s poem can be seen
as a means to underscore the ineffability of extreme experiences, such as the
apprehension of sublime beauty, divine grace, death, or existential vertigo.14
But the ellipsis in line 9 of the poem that holds the place of the nescio
quid also marks the point at which the poem ruptures its own limits to
open onto other texts. Indeed, the ellipsis that in the sonnet’s develop-
ment materializes the poetic subject’s crossing of a threshold, beyond
which he attains the possibility of his rebirth, can also be read as the
remembrance of a moment of amnesia described by Rousseau in the
“Second Walk” of Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. The scene in question
34 Catherine Witt

originates in a similar shock encounter. Descending across the meadows

from the heights of Ménilmontant, Rousseau reaches a pass in the hills
surrounding the village of Charonne known as la plus haute borne (in
English, “the Upper Milepost,” or more literally, “the upper limit”), when
suddenly he catches sight of a great Dane headed straight toward him. It
takes the promeneur a split second to surmise that his only chance of sur-
vival is “to leap into the air at precisely the right moment to allow the dog
to pass underneath [him]” (Reveries 38; Œuvres 1005). This improbably
elaborate thought having passed through his mind in a flash, Rousseau
blacks out: “This lightening plan of action [cette idée plus prompte que
l’éclair] . . . was my last thought before I went down. I felt neither the
impact nor my fall, nor indeed anything else until I eventually came to.
It was nearly night when I regained consciousness [il étoit presque nuit
lorsque je repris connoissance]” (38; 1005). That the line “Un éclair . . . puis
la nuit!” effectively condenses and reinscribes in Baudelaire’s sonnet the
memory of Rousseau’s amnesia is confirmed by the striking parallels that
run through both texts. When Rousseau comes round again, he does not
return to his senses—that is, to a cogent self—as much as he returns solely
to sensations. An ecstatic feeling overtakes his being: “I saw the sky, some
stars, and a few leaves. This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was
conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it
seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence” (Reveries 39;
Œuvres1005). The subject-object relation that governed his former per-
ception of the world breaks down. Objects are no longer obstacles. Rather
they become transparent and penetrable, as what he knew of his self dis-
solves into them. While Baudelaire explicitly echoes this feeling of delight
(“grand délice”) in “Le Confiteor de l’artiste,” where the poetic subject
similarly speaks of losing himself in the contemplation of nature, the
passage in Rousseau amplifies the themes associated with the death and
rebirth of the poetic subject that play an important role in “À une pas-
sante.”15 In Rousseau, the experience of loss of self evolves into an amnesic
confusion: “Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing;
I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of
what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I
was [je ne savois ni qui j’étois, ni où j’étois]; I felt neither pain, fear, nor
anxiety” (39; 1005). The trope of the nescio (here amplified into a nescio
quid, quis, ubi, unde . . .) liberates the subject from the temporal determi-
nations of memory, causality, and fear, letting its being emerge as a calm
presence to the world. The sentence attests to a relinquishing of the urge
to situate the self. The sonnet reiterates this dislocation by means of the
string of adverbial expressions that make up line 12: “Ailleurs, bien loin
 Passages through Baudelaire 35

d’ici! Trop tard! Jamais peut-être!” which includes some of the words that
Baudelaire identified in the section on funerary statuary of the 1859 Salon
as endowed with an ominous power to inspire mortal thoughts to human
beings. Rousseau’s experience of disembodiment and his account of how,
released from the controlling grasp of a rational self, his ego disperses into
the surrounding natural elements (“some stars . . . a few leaves”), is simi-
larly presented as a crossing of the limit from life into death and back. In
the account of the accident, this metaphysical boundary is materialized
by the stream of his own blood, which Rousseau recalls beholding with
utter indifference: “I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched
a stream [je voyois couler mon sang comme j’aurois vu couler un ruisseau],
without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me” (39;
1005). At this moment Rousseau’s ecstasy exceeds mere emotion. The
onomastic charge associated with the image of this red stream (rousse-
eau), left like a signature in the soil just as Rousseau imagines quitting
earthly life, underscores the symbolic significance of a self-alienation that
undermines the authority of a rational subject incapable of coming round
to recognizing himself. Further drawing out the metaliterary value of the
scene, one might claim that it alludes to the mythical crossing of the Styx
or Acheron into Hades by the ferryman Charon, whose name is echoed
by that of the village of Charonne where the accident takes place.
Reading Rousseau’s account of his own death as symbolic scene of birth
to a new relationship to language and writing is already suggested in the
opening lines of the “Second Walk,” which call attention to the possibility
of interpreting the reference to the downward slope along which Rousseau
proceeds, la descente de Ménilmontant, as a metaphor for his inclination to
write: “Having therefore decided to describe my habitual state of mind in
this, the strangest situation which any mortal will ever know, I could think
of no simpler or surer way of carrying out my plan than to keep a faith-
ful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that occupy them, when I
give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course,
unrestricted and unconfined [je laisse mes idées suivre leur pente sans résis-
tance et sans gêne]” (Reveries 35; Œuvres1002). Interestingly, the carefully
crafted structure of each promenade contradicts Rousseau’s assertion that
the thoughts transcribed in the Reveries are whimsical. It is also called into
question by a sentence at the beginning of the “Second Walk” in which
Rousseau states that, as a mature writer, his memory informs his writing
more than his imagination: “My imagination has lost its old power . . .
Today there is more recollection than creation in the products of my imagi-
nation” (35; 1002). Among the recognizable memories that transpire in
Rousseau’s “Second Walk” is that of reading Montaigne’s “De l’exercitation”
36 Catherine Witt

(2: 6; “Of Practice”), an essay that also centers on a near-death experience.16

The reference to Montaigne does not come out of the blue at this point in
the Reveries. Rousseau acknowledges his indebtedness to Montaigne as early
as the “First Walk,” where he likens his aspiration to study himself by mea-
suring the fluctuations of his soul to Montaigne’s meticulous but variegated
and unmethodical self-examination: “I shall content myself with keeping
a record of my [barometric] readings without trying to reduce them to a
system [tenir le registre des operations sans chercher à les réduire en systême].
My enterprise is like Montaigne’s” (Reveries 33; Œuvres1001). The essay
and the reverie certainly share an openness of form and suppleness of prose
that distinguishes them from the philosophical system’s commitment to
order and terminological language. But why return specifically to Mon-
taigne’s “Of Practice”? Rousseau is perhaps drawn to the reflexive nature of
the essay, which plays on the semantic correspondence of the words “essay”
and “exercitation.” Indeed, Montaigne’s concern in this piece is both to
defend the value of trying (essayer) and trials (épreuve) as a means of acquir-
ing an experiential knowledge liberated from the constraints of doctrine
and a priori thinking and to reflect on an experience of writing—that is to
say, writing the essays—which is no longer that of a “writing self” under-
stood as a rational ego. What Montaigne calls “moi” in the essays describes
an experience of writing more than it corresponds to the affirmation of a
concept of self accessible through language and reason.
The essay “Of Practice” dwells on the singularity of death as an experi-
ence that can be neither tried nor written about from experience. Unlike
pain, shame, or poverty, exposure to which is fortifying, gaining experi-
ence of death is impossible, since it cannot be repeated: “[B]ut as for
death, we can only try it once [mais quant à la mort, nous ne la pouvons
essayer qu’une fois]: we are all apprentices when we come to it” (Frame
267; Montaigne 389). Death, to which Montaigne figuratively refers as
a “passage,” can only be apprehended through experiences that approxi-
mate it, such as the passing from the state of wakefulness to that of sleep,
or the recollection of a near-death experience such as a violent fall. The
experience considered in “Of Practice” unfolds along the same lines as
Rousseau’s “Second Walk” and Baudelaire’s “À une passante.” Simply put,
the trajectory of a body in motion is violently interrupted, leaving this
body for dead. This is the barest instantiation of Lacoue-Labarthe’s ex-
periri. Montaigne, who is knocked off his horse, speaks of having been
“hit like a thunderbolt [foudroier]”: “So there lay the horse bowled over
and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces away, dead” (Frame 269; Mon-
taigne 391). Like Rousseau, his wounds are so severe that he initially
fails to recognize that the blood he sees gushing comes from his own
 Passages through Baudelaire 37

body. Similarly, the sensation that overcomes Montaigne upon feeling

his soul dislodged from his body is oddly pleasurable: “It was an idea that
was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all
the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that
sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep” (Frame
269–70; Montaigne 392). He recalls the disorientation of being able to
articulate words and thoughts fully disconnected from reason and even
the will to speak: “These were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion
by the sensation of the eyes and ears; they did not come from within me. I
did not know, for all that, where I was coming from or where I was going
[je ne sçavoy pourtant ny d’où je venoy, ni où j’aloy], nor could I weigh and
consider what I was asked” (Frame 271; Montaigne 395). The recollec-
tion of the fall itself is but a flash of lightening: “I had perceived that horse
bearing down in me . . . it seemed to me that a flash of lightening was
striking my soul with a violent shock [c’estoit un esclair qui me frapoit l’ame
de secousse], and that I was coming back from the other world” (Frame
271; Montaigne 396). Montaigne makes clear that what is at stake in
crossing the threshold between life and death is not the possibility of
taming death and asserting the self but rather the possibility of writing
to testify to one’s own death as something that resists appropriation. The
death of the concept of self, which the trope of the nescio emblematizes,
is the starting point of Montaigne’s response (que sais-je?) to the Socratic
injunction (gnothi seauton), the point from which he can reclaim, as he
does in the final pages of his essay, the authority to write about himself
without being bound to a given notion of selfhood: “What I write here is
not my teaching [ma doctrine], but my study [mon estude]; it is not a les-
son for others, but for me” (Frame 272; Montaigne 396) and again “It is
not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence” (Frame 274;
Montaigne 398). Far from being reducible to a private, accidental expe-
rience, Montaigne’s swoon, an experience condensed in the expressions
esclair and je ne sçavoy and remembered in Rousseau’s “Second Walk” and
Baudelaire’s “À une passante,” transpires as the condition for thinking
and writing a fragmented self that forgoes its conceptualization into an
object of knowledge.

Passages: Nekyia—Katabasis
The North American wilderness depicted in Chateaubriand’s Mémoires
d’outre-tombe (part I, book 7) brings to mind the exotic landscape of
which Baudelaire fantasizes in the opening pages of the 1855 Exposition
universelle. A traveler, Chateaubriand, is seen making his way through a
dense forest to the Niagara cataracts. In passing through an Indian village,
38 Catherine Witt

he notices that the women at work have slung their babies in nets from
the boughs of a copper beech. The grass is covered with dew; the breeze
is fragrant; the bolls of the cotton plants are bursting. When he arrives at
the “sublime disorder” (227) of the cataract, the account takes a strange
turn, as it insistently circles back to the possibility that he will fall into
the gushing waters.17 Thrice over the span of a few paragraphs the trav-
eler, Chateaubriand, imagines meeting his death. The first time, he feels
an inexplicable pull from the water (“I felt drawn, so to speak, towards
the flood, and had an involuntary desire to throw myself into it”) (227);
the second time, his horse, unnerved by a rattlesnake, bucks and nearly
throws him over the edge; the third time, he is left dangling off the cliff
for having ventured too far up the fall. These rehearsals of near-death
experiences, one of which closely plays out Montaigne’s fall from his
horse, do not lend to the account the credibility of anecdotal lived experi-
ence. Rather, the repetition of Chateaubriand’s confrontation with the
unbreachable in nature, here figured by the Niagara cataract, underscores
the symbolic significance of the passage to which he is drawn and the
metaphysical nature of this experience. The continuity between life and
death and the presence of the ancestors among their posterity is an aspect
of Native American eschatology that interests Chateaubriand, as indicate
the notes in book 7 documenting Indian rites. In the context of the work
as a whole, however, the experience of death is explicitly connected with
the autobiographical project, since, from the very preface, Chateaubri-
and posits his death not only as the condition for the publication of his
(mortgaged) Mémoires d’outre-tombe but also as an end of the awareness
of which shaped the writing process, conferring a mysterious coherence
upon the narrative: “My youth penetrating my old age, the grave experi-
ence of years saddening the frivolity of youth . . . have produced in my
accounts a sort of confusion, or if you please, a sort of undefinable unity:
my cradle has something of my tomb; my tomb has something of my
cradle” (6).
What is the significance of the precarious topos of the nescio—assuming
that falling and crossing count as “places”? Its reworking in and across
Montaigne, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Baudelaire reveals the nescio
as a fissured site of passage that allows for the relation between writing,
thinking, and being to be articulated independently of the categorical
distinctions of philosophical systems. The nescio rejects the ambition of
grasping the totality of knowledge but also the self as a totalizable and
totalizing entity. In his brief essay “La Naissance est la mort” Lacoue-
Labarthe returns to this idea, putting forward the claim that Western
literature takes as its premise the impossible memory of one’s death. As
a salient testimony to the origin of writing, he cites the famous 1947
 Passages through Baudelaire 39

conference at the Vieux-Colombier, during which Antonin Artaud ascer-

tained his death by electrocution at the hands of his doctors. Lacoue-
Labarthe also points out the immemorial nature of this myth of origin,
connecting it to Odysseus’s crossing into the Underworld, his Nekyia, as
well as to the trope of katabasis or descent into Hell of Orpheus, The-
seus, and Dionysos that constitutes primitive versions of the same myth.
Nineteenth-century lyric poetry insistently returns to this topos. In the
opening sonnet of Nerval’s Les Chimères, the poetic subject divests its
selfhood by asserting that poetry ensues from an encounter and return
from the dead: “And, twice victorious, I have crossed the Acheron (“J’ai
deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron”) (Nerval 363). Katabasis is the
trope that structures Rimbaud’s Saison en Enfer, as well as what lies at
the heart of the enigmatic death that Mallarmé claimed to have under-
gone, when in 1867 he wrote his friend Henri Cazalis, “fortunately, I
am perfectly dead.”18 Anabasis follows katabasis. The poet emerges from
death distinguished not as survivor but as witness to the possibility of a
passage between life and death and of a new relation to language, assur-
ance of which he gains in experiencing the porous nature of even the
most impenetrable limit. The nescio echoes the impossible memory of
this experience both within and across individual literary attempts (essais)
belonging to a tradition that includes Montaigne, Rousseau, Chateau-
briand, Baudelaire, and others, perhaps too hastily characterized as the
expression of modern subjectivity. Far from consolidating the writerly self
as ego, these texts share an astonishment at the loss of ego (“Un éclair . . .
puis la nuit!”); they break down the limits of the self as concept, allowing
thought to enter in a new relation with poetry.

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. 1978.
Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1993.
Baudelaire, Charles. Baudelaire as Literary Critic. Trans. Lois B. Hyslop and Francis E.
Hyslop. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1964.
———. Flowers of Evil. Trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2006.
———. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus.
Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974.
Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne. Discours sur l’histoire universelle; Oraisons funèbres. Paris:
Furne et Cie, 1853.
Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Chateaubriand. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Eds. Pierre Clarac and Gérard Gengembre.
Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1973.
40 Catherine Witt

Heidegger, Martin. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Joan
Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio State UP, 1985.
Heine, Henri. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1855.
Köhler, Erich. “Je ne sais quoi: Ein Kapitel aus der Begriffsgeschichte des Unbegreifli-
chen.” Romanisches Jahrbuch 6 (1953–54): 21–58.
Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Uni-
versal Theme. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “La naissance est la mort.” 1998. Lignes 22 (2007):
242–46.
———. La Poésie comme expérience. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Correspondance sur la poésie. Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gal-
limard, 1995.
Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald Frame. Stan-
ford: Stanford UP, 1958.
———. Les Essais. Eds. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-
Simonin. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’expérience de la liberté. Paris: Galilée, 1988.
Nerval, Gérard de. De Nerval: Selected Writings. Trans. Richard Sieburth. New York:
Penguin Classics, 1999.
Osmont, Robert. “Contribution à l’étude psychologique des Rêveries.” Annales de la
société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 23 (1934): 7–135.
Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Vol. 1. Paris: Gal-
limard, 1987.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Œuvres complètes. Eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Ray-
mond. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.
———. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Trans. Peter France. London: Penguin Clas-
sics, 2004.
Schelling, F. W. J. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: State U of New York P, 2006.
Tertullianus, Q. S. F. “De la résurrection de la chair.” Œuvres de Tertullien. Trans.
Antoine-Eugène de Genoude. Paris: Vivès, 1852.

Notes
1. Schelling writes, “According to an old but in no way forgotten legend, the con-
cept of freedom is in fact said to be completely incompatible with system, and
every philosophy making claim to unity and wholeness should end up with the
denial of freedom” (Schelling 9).
2. Andrew Bowie stresses the tendentiousness of Heidegger’s treatment of the
Philosophical Investigations, pointing out how he “fails to see ways in which
Schelling’s texts already begin to take one beyond the reflexive schema of Car-
tesian metaphysics” (93).
3. In its highest instantiation, for Heidegger, the system is the “jointure of Being
itself ” (32).
 Passages through Baudelaire 41

4. See Mon Cœur mis à nu XIX (OC1: 688) and “L’Art philosophique” (OC2:
598).
5. Baudelaire as Literary Critic 79, hereafter cited parenthetically as Baudelaire.
Baudelaire’s turn of phrase “quelquefois délicat jusqu’à l’évanouissement”
(OC2: 576) lends itself to two interpretations, since “évanouissement” can refer
either to the delicateness of the work of art or to the affective response of the
beholder, whom the sight of the object brings to a swoon.
6. It is common to credit Victor Cousin for giving currency to Hegel’s ideas
through his lectures of 1828–1829 at the École Normale in Paris and to see
Renan and Taine as his successors in proponing Hegelianism in the French
academic milieu of the 1840s. That said, Heinrich Heine, who had studied
with Hegel in Berlin in the early 1820s, was likely more instrumental in dis-
seminating the basic tenets of German Idealism in the literary and artistic
circles frequented by the likes of Gautier, Nerval (one of Heine’s translators),
and Baudelaire. “De l’Allemagne,” Heine’s essays on the history of German
thought from Luther to Hegel, first appeared in 1835 in volume 5 of Œuvres
de Henri Heine and were republished in volumes 1 and 2 of Œuvres complètes de
Henri Heine. These essays provide an account of the philosophical revolution
launched by Kant and give an idea of the momentous influence of his three
Critiques on Fichte and Schelling.
7. Baudelaire’s expression refers to a type radically distinct from le mondain, or
society person.
8. Along with Chateaubriand, these descriptions of a luxuriant nature bring to
mind the evocation of Delacroix’ paintings in the 1846 Salon. It is from Dela-
croix that Baudelaire holds the idea that “la nature est un vaste dictionnaire”
(OC2: 433; “nature is a vast dictionary”).
9. Baudelaire mentions Chateaubriand twice in the subsequent pages of the essay.
10. Keith Waldrop’s translation of “À une passante” enriches the sonnet’s resonance
with the addition of an adverb that Baudelaire cherishes in Poe: “one of the
most sonorous of all rhymes (nevermore)” (Baudelaire OC2: 335). His version
of the poem also highlights the nescio trope to which this section of the essay
attends closely.
11. “Modern poetry from Baudelaire onwards is seen to be founded not on new
experience, but on an unprecedented lack of experience . . . In Baudelaire, a
man expropriated from experience exposes himself to the force of shock. Poetry
responds to the expropriation of experience by converting this expropriation
into a reason for surviving and making the inexperiencible its normal condi-
tion” (Agamben 41–42).
12. My translation. Lacoue-Labarthe explores the etymology of the term that links
experience through the Indo-European root per to the idea of peril and crossing.
This explanation, to which the linkage between the German words Erfahrung
(experience as process), Fahrt (journey), and Gefahr (danger) forms a parallel,
is a commonplace also taken up by Jean-Luc Nancy in L’expérience de la Liberté
and, more recently, by Martin Jay in Songs of Experience.
42 Catherine Witt

13. My translation. Baudelaire’s idiosyncratic invocation of the je ne sais quoi takes

on the metaphysical valance that Bossuet gave to the phrase when, citing Chap-
ter 4 of Tertullian’s On the Resurrection of the Flesh, he used it to refer to the
unnamable decomposition of human remains: “[le cadavre] devient un je ne
sais quoi qui n’a plus de nom dans aucune langue; tant il est vrai que tout
meurt en lui, jusqu’à ces termes funèbres par lesquels on exprimait ces malheu-
reux restes!” (“Oraison funèbre de Henriette d’Angleterre” 424; “[the cadaver]
becomes an I-don’t-know-what that no longer has a name in any language; so
much is it true that all dies in it, right up to these funereal terms by which one
used to express these miserable remains!”)“”.
14. The terminological history of the je ne sais quoi as an aesthetico-religious con-
cept is hard to retrace. An article by Erich Köhler records the evolution of
the expression’s rhetorical, theological, and critical usages from Cicero through
Augustine to seventeenth-century aesthetic theory.
15. “ Toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou je pense par elles (car dans la grandeur
de la rêverie, le moi se perd vite!)” (OC1: 278; “All these things think by me, or
I think by them [for in the grandeur of reverie, the self quickly loses itself!]”).
16. Robert Osmont is one of the first critics to draw attention to the similari-
ties between the two passages. For Giorgio Agamben, both mark important
moments in the crisis of the concept of experience (Infancy and History 37–41).
17. Translations mine.
18. Mallarmé’s letter of May 14, 1867, to Henri Cazalis reads, “Tout ce que . . .
mon être a souffert, pendant une longue agonie, est inénarrable, mais heureuse-
ment je suis parfaitement mort, et la région la plus impure où mon Esprit puisse
s’aventurer est l’Eternité” (342; “All that . . . my being suffered, during a long
agony, is unrelatable, but fortunately I am perfectly dead, and the most impure
region where my Mind may venture is Eternity”)
CHAPTER 3

Otherwise than Being

Levinassian Ethics in Victor
Hugo’s “La Force des Choses”

Bradley Stephens

In the opening comments of the second of his two masterworks on

ethics, Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence (Otherwise Than Being,
or Beyond Essence, 1974), Emmanuel Levinas conceptualizes an ethical
relationship as one of displacement between self and Other. The move
beyond an individual position toward another demands that this rela-
tionship be cut loose from the empiricism of conventional thinking: “If
transcendence has a meaning, it can only signify the fact that the event of
being, the esse, the essence, passes over to that which is other than being . . .
Passing over to what is other than being, otherwise than being; not being
otherwise, but otherwise than being [Non pas être autrement, mais autre-
ment qu’être]” (3).1 Neither the modernist drive for a self-determined sys-
tem of values nor the postmodern disintegration of such absolutes could
permit a truly ethical moment, since they regard human agency as being
present and verified on the one hand and being absent and negated on
the other. Challenging both essentialist and gratuitous concepts of what it
means to be human, Levinas marks his essay as “a forgetting of being and
non-being” (223). Reacting against an enclosed and unconditional sense
of what is and what is not, Levinas focuses on a paradigm that is more
open-ended and inestimable, replacing a totalized sense of being with one
that was infinite, to recall his terminology.
Such a conceptualization of how the human subject can only transcend
its position by submitting to a condition that is beyond any familiar and
single-minded state of being would not be unfamiliar to the romantics.
44 Bradley Stephens

Indeed, Levinas shares with the romantic poets “a desire to ground the self
in something other, more comprehensive, and more responsible, than its
own rational intentionality” (Wehrs and Haney 30), although this shared
desire did not register with Levinas himself. Not only was he notoriously
suspicious of art and especially poetry for luring the reader into a purely
imaginary realm,2 but he also held the romantics at fault for constructing
what he perceived to be a violent and self-centered ego. Neither stance is
without explanation: Levinas’s mistrust of poetry unmistakably reflects
the Platonic tradition of his training in philosophy, while his unease with
the forceful self-interest of romanticism is to be expected given his family’s
suffering as Jews at the hands of Hitler’s nationalist ideology, which itself
was linked to the romantic legacy. Biographical considerations aside, the
broad consensus remains among friends such as Maurice Blanchot and
critics alike that, for all his strengths, Levinas “gives art too little credit
and criticism too much” (Haney 43), and “this antipathy is such that it
simply prevents any direct attempt to apply his work to the aesthetic, or
to the interpretations of works of art” (Eaglestone 99).
The impossibility of any neat translation of his thought into the aes-
thetic is, however, the key intrigue with Levinas’s ethics. The tensions
involved are revelatory both of what he means by autrement qu’être and
of how this notion is anticipated and reciprocated by a literary cultiva-
tion of meaning as indeterminate. The ability of literature not only to
facilitate but moreover to constitute an ethical encounter between self
and Other that is “otherwise than being” has been repeatedly recognized
in his thinking as an underdeveloped rather than unachievable potential.
This recognition has been especially astute following the so-called ethi-
cal turn in critical thinking of the 1980s with which Levinas himself is
so readily associated3: any desire for an ethics now had to reckon with
the (post)structuralist ideas of the world as text, in which meaning could
never be guaranteed due to the lack of automatic coincidence between a
signifier and its signified. In particular, moral philosophy has promoted
the ethical potential of narrative fiction thanks to the novel’s ability to
open itself ever outward rather than fold its narrative and structural ele-
ments neatly together. The multiplicity of genre and plurality of perspec-
tive that forms the novel’s arsenal, shot through a commonplace language,
exposes the both the text’s and the reader’s subjectivity to a diverse and
ever-flexible experience.4 But an equally exciting if perhaps less extensive
line of enquiry has been to pursue this widespread turn toward ethics by
using the lyric self as a point of departure. Marjorie Perloff argues that,
although “the possibility that poetry might deal with anything outside the
enclosed self is immediately brushed aside” by Harold Bloom and other
 Otherwise than Being 45

celebrated devotees of the literary canon, it is both possible and urgent to

reclaim the lyric voice that is today synonymous with nineteenth-century
verse as an outward-looking and ethical agent (174). The conventional
“I” of lyric, underpinned by the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, lends itself to
being transformed into a less self-certain and less self-absorbed voice so
as to enact a more productive relationship between the poetic subject and
its others.
In this chapter, I begin to explore the potential correlation between
Levinas and romanticism so as to further this retrieval of the lyric voice
for ethical discourse. I have argued elsewhere that any ethical evaluation
of lyric is problematic, given that its focus on a single poetic conscious-
ness threatens to reduce alterity to the Same more instantaneously than
narrative, but that this focus need not prohibit the lyric voice from insti-
gating its own ethical encounter with otherness.5 Pivotal to the recovery
of the lyric voice for ethics will be how the similarities between Levinas-
sian ethics and romantic poetics enhance an understanding of what is
entailed by thinking “otherwise than being.” I will argue here that roman-
tic lyric offers a means of writing the ethical against totalizing reason
by imprinting an irreducible otherness both within and across its own
subjectivity. Poststructuralist analyses of the human subject may have
refused all discussion of the lyric voice as being that of a unified and
centered self belonging to an outdated romantic ideal, but more recent
approaches have been more open to romanticism’s relevance to today’s
critical thinking. What Angela Esterhammer labels the “Romantic per-
formative” in language and what Richard Eldridge calls the “persistence
of Romanticism” in philosophical discussion both testify to a subsequent
resurgence of interest in the expressive and exploded romantic subject
as at once self-determining and yet self-negating in a cycle of perpetual
self-renewal.6 To take one observation that is notably compelling in light
of Levinas’s philosophy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
qualify the romantic subject through what they identify in the roman-
tic irony of the Athenaeum group in Germany as the “literary absolute,”
which “aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the subject,
and infinitizes this thinking” (26).
Nowhere in the French lyric tradition is this connection with Levi-
nas more capable of being tightened than in the work of Victor Hugo.
“If France can boast of any great philosophical poetry, it is probably
Hugo’s rather than Ronsard’s, Vigny’s, or Valéry’s” (15), although it is
the nature rather than the fact of Hugo’s philosophical ambitions that
encourages a Levinassian reading. Not unlike Levinas, Hugo believes
that human knowledge could only ever be an infinite work in progress
46 Bradley Stephens

rather than a finalized and complete form of understanding. Starting

with Hugo’s own philosophical viewpoints and then considering his
verse, I want to bring the reflections between his romantic conception
of human experience and Levinas’s ethics into sharper focus. My read-
ing of his verse will be in microcosm, of course, given both the length
of this chapter and the enormity of Hugo’s oeuvre, but it will concen-
trate on one of his most illuminating poems to demonstrate the reso-
nance with Levinas’s thinking. Not only did verse afford the poet the
opportunity for private reflection, but it also enabled him to complicate
those moments of intimacy and to rupture the unitary base upon which
an impression of totality may otherwise be achieved. In Hugo’s view,
poetry does not necessarily confine the lyric voice or voices “other” to it
within its own central subject position. Rather, poetry could also resist
any ultimate equivalence through the same creative powers that allowed
such self-absorption in the first place, taking apart and recasting its
own boundaries in a necessarily incomplete but resolutely formative
transcendence of self. Rather than be construed solely as a moment of
ontological foundation, poetry could engage a dislocation and dissolu-
tion of self in which the poet experiences an endless fluidity, which for
Hugo is the true meaning of the divine. In this context, Hugo’s famous
faith in the divine has far more in common with Levinas’s own readings
of the Talmud as a man of Jewish faith than it does with the dogmatic
religion of an institutionalized Church. Levinas’s will to contest onto-
logical notions of God “as if ontology and knowledge were the ultimate
domain of meaning” (De Dieu qui vient 11, n. 2) is paralleled by Hugo’s
conviction that the divine is only ever intuited and never known in its
infinite creation. God is forever Other.
To be sure, and somewhat contrary to his image as the ever-steady
Mont Blanc of the nineteenth-century literary landscape, Hugo fervently
believed that the world was not a static object that we could come to
know completely but a dynamic life force whose energies we would never
be able to master fully. Consequently, mortal being is not a state we find
ourselves in and that can be fixed in place but a condition that mobilizes
us as part of the “immeasurable miracle” of creation. “Being” for Hugo
becomes less a state than a continual relocation in which fixity could only
ever be an illusion, but in which the individual self is empowered through
the creativity that this indeterminism enabled. He writes in Proses philos-
ophiques: “[T]here are few great minds that resist the infinite” (Critique
685). Writing his abandoned preface to Les Misérables in the early 1860s,
he details a distinctly existential worldview of what he refers to at numer-
ous junctures as the great infini of a free human condition, in which the
 Otherwise than Being 47

only certainty is a lack of distinctive and unchanging being: “Nothing is

fully finished: everything that completes one thing gives rise to another,
and everything that is dead is born again . . . [I]nterstice is the only law
of being” (490–91).
Just as Levinas insists that the ethical thinker must pass over to what
is other than being in order to maximize human potential, so does Hugo
demand that no mind can be fully engaged with the world unless it accepts
transience as its true reality. Furthermore, his boundless notion of being is
vital to his famous conception of art. In the Préface de Cromwell (1827),
Hugo argues that the modern artist only engages with his times through
a dynamic approach that channels the nineteenth century’s democratic
spirit of autonomy and equality. Life did not sit comfortably within pre-
determined categories such as comedy and tragedy, or beautiful and ugly,
as the neoclassical tastes of the Académie française had dictated for nearly
two centuries. Rather, the romantic revolution recognized a world of con-
sonant relations between dissimilar and distinct forces that the artist must
energize. Opposites work into one another in art as in life, dispersing
and destabilizing the boundaries between categories without disintegrat-
ing them. Such is Hugo’s theory of the grotesque: “the sublime and the
grotesque, which intersect on stage as they do in life and in creation. . . .
Everything binds together and pulls apart, as in reality” (16–17). Ugli-
ness could become beautiful, and vice versa, since nothing is absolute
or self-contained in a universe of endless creation. Following this trans-
formative logic, any given category exceeds its own limits as part of the
harmonie des contraires, or harmony of contrasts. The notion of a coherent
and fully assured position is freed up into a far more mobile guise. The
resultant dissolution of fixed identity positions means that human being
itself cannot simply be thought of in binary terms of being and nonbe-
ing, of what finds itself in a particular place and what does not. Rather,
an altogether more dexterous mode of thinking is needed—hence Hugo’s
description of genius in William Shakespeare (1864) as l’homme océan,
or “ocean man,” whose thoughts are measured only by ever-receding
horizons, shifting surfaces, and unfathomable depths. Being and noth-
ingness, the instantaneous and the missing, are irresistibly drawn into a
flux et reflux, rather than sitting neatly side by side in a twofold logic of
meaning. In effect, Hugo primes a simultaneous movement of enclosure
and exclusion in how he conceives of our existence. He writes in Proses
philosophiques: “To categorize and to cancel are inherently linked. There
must not be too much affirmation or too much negation” (Critique 699).
This dynamic is driven in turn by endless transpositions that continually
dissolve and realign the frontiers between identities as part of an infinite
48 Bradley Stephens

cycle that will, as he writes in the “Préface à Cromwell,” “mix its creations
without confusing them for one another” (Critique 9).
As a philosophical hypothesis that resists systematization, this roman-
tic worldview anticipates Levinas’s more technical arguments in terms
of both experience as infinite and the need for a bold departure from
the paradigm of being. In his first magnum opus, Totalité et infini: essai
sur l’extériorité (Totality and Infinity, 1961), Levinas reveals himself to
be deeply suspicious of “Being.” He sees Western philosophy as having
become synonymous with ontology, the science of being at work from the
ancient Greek logos through to Cartesian rationalism and the Enlighten-
ment, and confirmed in his own century by the prominence of phenom-
enology through its champions Husserl and Heidegger. Phenomenology’s
study of conscious experience did not allow for anything transcendent
or exterior to that imminent reality, treating it as a totalized whole for
empirical enquiry. This philosophical method could not understand oth-
erness as something properly different from the self and separate from it.
The stifling economy of the Same needed to be ruptured so as to accrue a
more flexible form of human capital. Such a gesture involved a paradigm
shift not from totality to collapse, as Levinas believed much poststructur-
alist thinking to validate in the disintegration of subjectivity, but from
totality to infinity, “the incidence of a content that overflows its con-
tainer” (Totalité 265).
Crucially in this shift from being to otherwise than being, subjectiv-
ity for Levinas, as for Hugo, is transformed without being disempow-
ered. Contrary to the poststructuralist trend, Levinas does not accept that
human sovereignty is dethroned in favor of vast connecting structures
such as social conditioning and markers of identity such as race or gender.
As phenomenology had established, the external world can only ever be
the product of the individual consciousness, and this is our only vantage
point on experience. For Levinas, the human subject is moreover integral
to any ethical philosophy, for if the self is decentered from its own sub-
jectivity, then there can be no recognition of something other to it: both
would be part of an all-encompassing totality, which would prevent the
two from being separate from one another. “The Same and the Other at
once restrict and release themselves in this relationship, remaining entirely
separate. The idea of infinity demands this separation” (Totalité 75). As
he reiterates in Autrement qu’être, his approach thereby stipulates “a radi-
cal alterity of the other person that I do not simply conceive of in relation
to myself, but which I face with my egoism” (94). For alterity to remain
truly other and for its possibilities to remain infinite, subjectivity would
need to be dislocated but not destroyed: “[B]ecause it is still correlative
 Otherwise than Being 49

with being, negativity will not be enough to signify the other than being
[l’autre que l’être]” (10). As a result, ethical thinking needs to move away
from any ontological foundation and strive for a more uncertain mode of
knowledge: “It is not a case of affirming man’s ontological dignity, as if
essentialist thinking were enough to guarantee such dignity: on the con-
trary, it is about putting into question philosophy’s privileging of being
and of asking ourselves about the beyond” (36). The encounter between
self and Other involved a break that could not be understood as part of
a grounded and comprehensive whole. Only once notions of categorical
being gave way to a genuine sense of alterity and Otherness would an
ethical interaction be possible.
Notwithstanding these philosophical parallels between Hugo and
Levinas, what confirms a productive exchange between the two thinkers
is the linguistic paradox that thinking “otherwise than being” introduces
in Levinas’s approach. This irony is articulated by a young Jacques Der-
rida’s readings of Totalité et infini following its publication, in which he
critiques not the principle but the implementation of Levinas’s ethical
thinking. Although he admires Levinas’s refusal of totalizing logic when
acknowledging otherness as truly other, Derrida respectfully takes issue
with how the essay is written in the language of the very ontological tradi-
tion that it seeks to break away from. Nothing ultimately solicits the Greek
logos more than the Other for Derrida, since the appearance of something
foreign in our experience rightly demands our understanding (“Violence”
225–26). Nevertheless, the logocentrism of Western philosophy presup-
poses an objective and therefore entirely present meaning in its speech: a
“violence” that makes any experience of the Other fully knowable, rather
than outside or beyond its understanding. The question of how to allow
for otherness without making it equivalent to the familiar forces a pivotal
reconsideration in Levinas’s thinking of how poetic writing could facili-
tate the ethical encounter. In Autrement qu’être, even though he is by no
means explicit as to the potential place of poetry in the ethical language
he desires, there has been a clear progression from his earlier misreadings
in which the lyric self ’s alterity, “which takes itself to be other, is but
a play of the Same” (Totalité 26).7 Levinas acknowledges that the Same
cannot fail to try to appropriate the Other in its attempts to know it, in
spite of the fact that otherness can never be totalized. In discourse as in
thought, such an irony is only workable through an ever-changing mode
that supplants an absolute presence of meaning with an always deferred
presence: a mode in which the inevitable need to speak of the Other is not
denied but that constantly deconstructs the objective knowledge threat-
ened by this discursive framework. The ethical relation only begins when
50 Bradley Stephens

the immeasurable nature of the Other surpasses any fixed representation

of it. As a result, the imperative for Levinas becomes a displacement of
“the Said,” or le dit, with “the Saying,” or le dire. If totality must be revised
as infinity, then the product of totalization must give way to the process
itself as both ongoing and indeterminate. This displacement prioritizes
action over endpoint as a departure from “a philosophy which does not
see beyond being, and whose abuse of language reduces the Saying to the
Said and all meaning to vested interest” (Autrement 20).
Rather than a mapping of ethical frameworks onto the page, the ethi-
cal encounter as “otherwise than being” becomes an engagement. It is
neither contained nor described by a text but occurs in and through that
writing, and so “[t]here appears to be a kind of symmetry between lan-
guage as ethical relation and the language of poetry, both of which expose
us to regions of subjectivity or existence on the hither side of cognition
and being” (Bruns 206). In this respect, the importance Hugo first places
on the aesthetic in the Préface de Cromwell as a means of representing and
understanding this worldview helps foreground a major development in
Levinas’s thinking. The suggestion arises with Levinas that the lyric voice
of poetry is one that can remain individual and particular without being
totalized or becoming self-sufficient in its encounter with the Other. The
particularities and dislocations involved in such othering, along with their
ethical dimensions, are powerfully illustrated in Hugo’s “La Force des
choses,” or “The Way of Things.” Coming toward the end of the seventh
and final book in Les Châtiments (Castigations, 1853), this 242-line poem
provides an informative snapshot of Hugo’s philosophical perspectives as
they became clearer during exile. Retreating to the Channel Islands fol-
lowing Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état, Hugo launches a
scathing and very personal attack on the nemesis he had famously chris-
tened Napoleon le Petit. Yet while Les Châtiments is known for its satirical
stance toward the new emperor’s rape of the republican dream, the ways
in which Hugo turns that same sardonic gaze on himself as an exiled poet
must not be overlooked. Looking out from Jersey and surrounded by his
favorite stimulus, the swirling mass of the ocean, Hugo opened himself up
to what he saw as the world’s full transformative power. Fearing (wrongly)
that exile would be the death of him after enduring a not inconsiderable
amount of personal tragedy and political defeat,8 Hugo threw his very
existence into question, making his exile writing all the more pertinent
to a Levinassian reading. To borrow Claude Roy’s apt formulation, “this
man who is full of ideas is never full of himself ” (236).
As both a work of verse and a demonstration of his romantic world-
view, “La Force des choses” primes the self-reflexive impulses that would
 Otherwise than Being 51

upsurge at this formative middle point in Hugo’s life. Hugo places tre-
mendous pressure on the frontiers of the lyric self by preserving a zone of
uncertainty both within and beyond that subject position. What begins
as a self-assured assault on an illegitimate empire breaks apart into an
ever-shifting movement that bears witness to the boundless tide of natural
creation and to what has been called the “remarkable variety of tone and
invention” in Les Châtiments overall (Ireson 126). Far from the outcry of a
prophetic poet calling on a familiar God to invigorate his morally just war
on corruption, “La Force des choses” as the divine enigma of existence
eludes the poet’s attempts at knowledge and thereby elides his very sense
of self. Consequently, both Hugo’s thoughts and the ways in which he
expresses himself thwart closure, in order to invoke the mysterious forces
for which he finds himself becoming a conduit—a dynamic that cannot
be fully known and yet that cannot be resisted either. The poem works
against the lyric voice’s desire for a comprehensible meaning to his experi-
ence by consistently channeling these forces as a power that is quite apart
from the totalizing logic of human reason. The poet therefore finds him-
self caught in a constant to and fro between inscription and effacement of
self, which could be said to look forward to Levinas’s idea that “the subject
position is already a de-positioning” through the Saying.9
The key hallmark of this poem is the continued emphasis it places
on multiplicity. The poem crisscrosses history from nineteenth-century
Paris back to the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and this
interminable relocation gives rise to a great assortment of descriptive and
proper nouns that pluralize and relativize the very concept of identity: the
numerous terms that the poet uses to describe the criminals of the Second
Empire, ranging from escroc (crook) to gredins crasseux (filthy scoundrels);
the vast ensemble of flat-footed drones that he names in his portrait of a
crooked regime, from Cardinal Gousset to Troplong, president of the sen-
ate, all marching to a tyrant’s beat; the wealth of historical figures he calls
upon to detail this portrait, including the arch-diplomat Talleyrand and
the famous bandit Louis Mandrin; and the array of mythical characters
and cultural beliefs that complement this cast of many, from the Argo-
naut Augeas to the griffin-mare hybrid, the Hippogriff (a telling allusion
to the romantic harmony of contrasts). Such diversity is apparent in the
poem’s composition, incorporating a series of infusions and inflections
of tone. Hugo plays with the conventional form of the ode, embracing
and troubling this genre by parodying rather than praising imperial glory.
Yet toward the end the poem sings of nature’s wonder, putting the alex-
andrine meter to both satirical and aggrandizing effect. By the end, the
poet seems to proclaim his prophetic powers in recognizing the essential
52 Bradley Stephens

mystery of human existence. However, the poem itself undercuts and

“others” any sense of accomplishment with an insistence on plurality and
irony, even if this resolve can find itself downplayed in readings that stress
the poem’s obsession with progress.10
“La Force des choses” initially presents itself as the pronouncement
of a confident moral persona. The rhythmic use of anaphora at the start
suggests self-assertiveness as the poet describes the decline of decency
under a dishonest despot. “Que devant les coquins l’honnête homme
soupire; / . . . Qu’Hautpoul vende son sabre et Cucheval sa plume; / . . .
Que l’or soit le seul culte” (lines 26–31; “May the honest man before all
rogues sigh; May Hautpoul sell his sabre and Cucheval his pen; May gold
be all that is worshipped”). This mention of gold contrasts sharply with
the reference two lines earlier to “la servilité négresse et mamelouque”
(“negro and Mameluk slavery”), which to the poet’s mind retains more
dignity than those Frenchmen who have prostituted themselves into will-
ing servitude. Not only does this contrast establish a clear moral dualism
between dark and light, but it also exhibits one of Hugo’s characteristic
inversions of aesthetic value, associating darkness with morality and the
shimmer of gold with the shade of sleaze. When this binary reappears
over twenty lines later, the poet again insists on peeling back the empire’s
gilded appearance to reveal the degenerate truth beneath the surface:
“tout dorés au dehors, au dedans noirs de lepers” (53; “all gilded on the
outside, yet a leprous black within”).
However, that same buoyancy of moral self-righteousness comes under
threat at the precise moment when it should be reinvigorated—namely,
in its appeal to a divine power in the form of natural law. The regular
pace of the poem is fractured by an unprecedented instance of exclama-
tion: “O nature profonde et calme, que t’importe!” (57; “Oh nature pro-
found and calm, of what import is any of this to you!”). The poet loses
his self-control when he realizes that the world around him is apparently
indifferent to man’s tyranny, no matter which name that natural realm
is known by, be it the ideal wife in the form of the Egyptian Isis, who
conceals herself from the poet’s view under her veil, or an aging Earth
Mother in the guise of Cybele, from Neolithic times, who is impervious
to any appeal. For the poet, the harsh truth is that this divine power can-
not in fact be fully known. Rather than receive any clear-cut guidance in
the name of what is right, all that the poet hears are whispers from the
shadows. Almost instantaneously, the rhythm of the poem becomes more
erratic, not least through a sudden and intense series of enjambments,
mirroring the poet’s increasing violence as he turns his pen into a bloody
whip with which to skin the villains before him. The outraged poet defies
 Otherwise than Being 53

any respect for the divine by using the familiar form to turn his anger on
Mother Nature herself and her apparent indifference: “Toi, tu ne t’émeus
point” (80; “You, you hardly allow yourself to be moved”). The color red
rages into prominence through the imagery of blood conjured through
the bloody whip, forcing the neat divide between light and dark that
underpinned the poet’s moral validation to give way to the hue of rage.
To enhance the poet’s sense of alienation, this crimson filter is starkly
juxtaposed with both the green of nature’s lush growth in her maples and
conifers as well as the soft pinks of its rose flowers, themselves suggesting
an insensitive, even mocking, shadow of his scarlet mood. The poet’s tone
becomes increasingly scornful as he mourns the lot of the thinker, who
restlessly turns his hands upon themselves out of a frustration at his own
powerlessness and at nature’s invitation to remedy this impotence with a
seemingly trivial retreat into her splendors. The qualification of the fresh-
ness of her grass as âcre is double-edged, implying both sharpness and
bitterness of sensation. Referring to that prototype of the suffering martyr
thinker, Socrates, a succession of exclamations reinforces the poet’s deep
dismay at nature’s indifference to the cause he fights:

Que t’importe Socrate! et tu fais la ciguë.

Tu créas le besoin, l’instinct et l’appétit;
Le fort mange le faible et le grand le petit,
L’ours déjeune du rat, l’autour de la colombe,
Qu’importe! (142–48)

[Of what importance is Socrates to you, when it is you

who makes the hemlock!
You created need, instinct, and appetite;
The strong devour the weak, the large the small,
The bear lunches on rat, the falcon on dove,
And of what importance!]

What started as a broadside on Louis-Napoléon explodes into a vision of

universal and timeless injustice.
Yet a noticeable shift then occurs. The poem introduces a line break for
the very first time, indicating an alteration to come, and the poet decries
his own miscalculation: “Erreur! Erreur! Erreur!” (155). There is an ono-
matopoeic effect produced here, with the rolling and repeated consonant
sounds giving voice to an audible clearing of the throat, as if he needs to
rid himself of an infection. The inferno swiftly transforms into an Eden
through a collusion of the natural elements of air and matter, triggering a
wider mélange of energies. Now when nature acts, the abyss that the poet
54 Bradley Stephens

located as separating her from man is bridged both visually and aurally
through the rhyme of gouffres (gulfs) and souffres (suffers), which straddles
the next line break (169–70), although the negative connotations of these
words leave a lingering unease. The poet infers that reading, with its pro-
cesses of detection and decipherment, can acknowledge the importance
of nature’s never-ending creativity, thanks to the rime équivoque of livre
as both deliverance and book. By observing the world around him, man
may dismay at his inability to comprehend nature’s creation, but he can
nonetheless rejoice in his ability to participate in that same cycle of con-
ception and construction. “Une force inconnue, empruntée aux éclairs,
Mêle au courant des flots le courant des idées” (“An unknown force, come
from the light, mixes the current of ideas with the current of the waves”),
hence the achievements of Fulton, who invented the first steamship in
1803, Galvani, the electricity pioneer, and Volta, the inventor of the elec-
tric battery (176–88). Nature is, for the poet, a mother watching over
us and inspiring us to greater achievements than tyranny and vice, each
of which promises a greater understanding of the world’s mysteries. Her
endless processes of decay and birth liberate mankind from any sense of
permanence, undercutting the absolutist claim to knowledge.
Therein lies the forceful problematic of this poem, the implications of
which shape and necessarily reshape our readings as an ethical encounter
with the other. In a vision whereby categories constantly intersect and
invert, whereby names diverge and converge upon single identities, and
whereby registers separate and realign, the poet’s own self-confidence by
the close of his musings is surely defenseless against that same changeabil-
ity. As he paradoxically declares in the penultimate verse, he witnesses “cet
obscur amas de faits prodigieux / Qu’aucun regard n’embrasse et qu’aucun
mot ne nomme” (228–29; “this obscure heap of prodigious facts / That
no regard can take in and which no word can name”). The double nega-
tive emphatically throws into question the poet’s own position. Far from
imparting a definitive judgment in terms of comprehensible meaning, the
poet’s encounter with nature has triggered a fundamental play of alterity
on both a formal and thematic level, whose fluctuations erode the bound-
aries of his own being without being brought to settle within that frame
of self-identity. What Hugo’s vision entails here is how man is neither
neatly separate from nor completely integrated within the perpetuity of
the divine. Such fluidity is patently at work when the poet gives Mother
Nature yet another name, “Légion,” recalling the Gospels according to
Mark and Luke but reclaiming the notion of disordered multiplicity as a
divine rather than demonic vigor (232).11 This higher power is no rock-
solid foundation upon which to order existence; rather, it is the force that
 Otherwise than Being 55

keeps creation unrestricted and indeterminate. The conspicuous move

away from institutionalized religion that has been implied in the appeal
to a pluralized and feminine Almighty rather than a uniform and mascu-
line sovereign is reiterated in the final line. The fluttering of millions of
wings that the poet can intuit toward the end could just as easily refer to
an earthly paradise as to the cliché of an angelic domain, given the ono-
matopoeia of palpitation and papillon (butterfly).
The questions that this poem raises by its end as to our knowledge
of the universe, along with the double-edged satire in its tone, enact a
process of thought that conceives of existence as “otherwise than being.”
“La Force des choses” discloses the far broader attempt by Hugo across his
whole oeuvre to describe human experience in a language that resists the
ontological certainties of the Same, so as to harness the dynamism of the
divine. The lyric voice in “La Force des choses” is not simply discovering
the variability of his own persona: his reflections on the world around
him expose the vast realm of mystery in which human existence plays out.
The social pertinence of Hugo’s poem as a condemnation of the empire
resonates with the ethical imperative of his writing—namely, the accep-
tance that man can only unlock his full creative potential as a human
being when he becomes answerable to something beyond himself. “Race
d’Adam . . . chacune de mes lois vous délivre” (172; “Race of Adam . . . ,
each of my laws sets you free”). Since man is involved in that endless cycle
of creation, he is in part subject to it and unable to organize its ener-
gies through any mortal or finite relations of comprehension. The saying
takes precedence over the said. The truth of the poet’s encounter with
the romantic becomes uncontainable but must nonetheless be written.
Hugo’s lyric subsequently generates an irony of purpose that Levinassian
ethics would be obliged to identify with as a breach of the totalized think-
ing that equivocates otherness with the Same. It is on these terms that
the lyric voice of poetry has become ethically significant in contempo-
rary critical discourse, not least for empowering the voiceless in a society
that continues to confront hierarchies of gender and race.12 The parallels
between Hugo’s romantic approach and Levinas’s thinking confirm that
the ethical move beyond representative totality is only possible when it is
autrement qu’être.

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———. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée. Paris: Vrin, 1982.
———. “La Réalité et son ombre.” 1948. Les Imprévus de l’histoire. Paris: Livre de
poche, 1994.
———. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961.
Lunn-Rockliffe, Katherine. “Progress as Idea and Image in Victor Hugo’s Force des
choses.” Dix-Neuf 13.1 (2009): 36–54.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996.
Peyre, Henri. Victor Hugo: Philosophy and Poetry. Trans. Roda P. Roberts. Tuscaloosa:
U of Alabama P, 1980.
Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
Roy, Claude. Les Soleils du romantisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
Stephens, Bradley. Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and The Liability of Liberty. London:
Legenda, 2011.
Wehrs, Donald R., and David P. Haney. “Levinas, Twenty-First Century Ethical Criti-
cism, and their Nineteenth-Century Contexts.” Eds. Wehrs and Haney. Levinas
and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Ethics and Otherness from Romanticism through
Realism. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2009. 15–41.
Zhou, Xiaojing. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry. Iowa City:
U of Iowa P, 2006.
Zimmerman, Sarah. Romanticism, Lyricism and History. Albany: State U of New York
P, 1999.
 Otherwise than Being 57

Notes
1. All translations from French into English are my own.
2. See his essay “La Réalité et son ombre” (1948), where poetry’s bewitching quali-
ties are described as “the devil’s work” (125; “la part du diable”).
3. Encouraged by the nouveaux philosophes’ frustration with the political indif-
ference of the poststructuralists, this “turn” was accelerated in 1987 by revela-
tions concerning Martin Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi Party and Paul
de Man’s wartime writing for a pro-Nazi newspaper. The shift prioritized the
question of how an ethics of human behavior would be possible in an era of
poststructuralist thought. Influential critics like de Man had radically reshaped
Western knowledge of social structures and political power plays but in so doing
had shut down access to any area beyond or preliminary to these structures that
might help govern their workings. Given this historical context, Levinas’s work
was ideally positioned to become the seminal reference point; see Critchley
(2002).
4. The interest for ethical enquiry is clear: “The novelist presents us with indi-
viduality and diversity alike without any attempt to reduce either to the terms
of a singular scheme or totality. The novel thereby becomes the form for and
expression of free, democratic pluralism” (Gibson 8).
5. See my introductory comments, 18–19, and chapter 3, 85–90, in my compara-
tive reading of Hugo and Sartre (2011).
6. In addition, Sarah Zimmerman’s Romanticism, Lyricism and History is useful
for its account of how the romantic lyric resists the cliché of introspection and
social isolation in the name of greater ethical being.
7. Jill Robbins observes that here Levinas misunderstands Rimbaud’s famous dic-
tum “Je est un autre” [I is another] as “Je est mon autre” [I am my other], with
no genuine experience of the Other (123).
8. The death of Hugo’s eldest daughter Léopoldine in 1843 is well known as the
key event in Les Contemplations (1856), but this tragedy was one of several to
befall the poet in the first half of his life. Léopoldine’s death was, for example,
neither the first nor the last time that he would bear the pain of losing a child:
in 1823, his first son Léopold died at only three months old, while in 1846,
Claire Pradier, daughter of his long-term mistress Juliette Drouet, was lost to
illness.
9. “Déjà la position du sujet est dé-position” (Autrement 202).
10. Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe highlights that, where J. C. Ireson sees science
bestowing triumphant knowledge on man in the poem and Pierre Albouy
believes nature to resist man’s mastery, both supposedly resolute readings of
“progress” prove not to be incompatible with one another. However, when
Lunn-Rockliffe herself talks of Hugo “fusing” these different familiar narratives
into a grand narrative of progress (44), the strain that she mentions between
these micronarratives becomes threatened. Indeed, in drawing on the poem’s
length and stylistic evolution from discours to hymne to illustrate the notion of
progress unfolding, the poem’s sharp ironic edge and self-contortions become
somewhat attenuated.
58 Bradley Stephens

11. From Mark 5:9, and Luke 8:30.

12. Linda Kinnahan advances a persuasive feminist reading of the lyric subject’s
capacity for socially relevant innovation. More pertinent still, for Xiaojing
Zhou’s attack on how poststructuralist thinking negates the very subjectivity
needed by marginal identities to attain recognition, Levinas’s affirmation of
selfhood becomes pivotal: “For radicalized minorities whose subjectivity has
been deprived, the ‘I’ in lyric poetry can serve as a viable site for restoring indi-
viduality” (4).
CHAPTER 4

“Je est un autre”

Identity, Alterity, and Drug Use in
Baudelaire and De Quincey

Alain Toumayan

In Part V of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan

encounters, while in a state of altered consciousness attributed to a “brain
illness,” his alter ego whom he will take to be a kind of modern-day devil.
The novel also suggests that it might be an apparition of Smerdyakov—
himself Ivan’s alter ego—who had just confessed to Ivan that he was the
murderer of Ivan’s father and who had just committed suicide without
exculpating Ivan’s half brother Dmitry, who stands accused of the crime.
It is a fascinating scene in which the character introduces himself to Ivan
by reminding Ivan of something that he (Ivan) had intended but forgot-
ten to do; in other words, by reminding Ivan of a fact that only Ivan
himself could know. Ever the rationalist, Ivan, in his state of delusion,
attempts to place himself within the comfort zone of reason and intellec-
tual discernment. He wishes to verify whether the character is a figment
of his imagination, simply a hallucination, or whether the character has
some degree of reality or objective existence. It is an interesting prob-
lem, though a natural enough reaction for a person of his temperament
in such a situation. The “reality check” that Ivan will apply consists of
attempting to determine, in a very explicit exchange with his interlocutor,
whether his uninvited guest can represent to him something new, in other
words, something other. The test is thus premised on an “alterity” check,
a gauge of otherness. A curious, complex, and layered dialogue ensues
with Ivan scrutinizing and evaluating the words and thoughts of his guest
and trying to assess whether they reflect his own, or whether his guest
60 Alain Toumayan

offers him something that had not occurred to him previously (Karam-
azov 765).1 On the one hand, Ivan dismisses the apparition and asserts
the dialogical superiority conferred by his rational security thus: “You’re
me with a different face; you keep telling me what I think and are unable
to tell me anything new” (767). Yet, in the course of the conversation,
the guest does come up with something that Ivan doesn’t recognize, and
Ivan explicitly acknowledges the strangeness of the experience—“Wait,
you didn’t get that from me . . . It never occurred to me . . . Strange!”
(769)—whereupon, the guest both confirms this conclusion (as if to
underscore the point, he switches into French to do so) “c’est du nou-
veau n’est-ce pas?” and offers an explanation that appears to undermine
the principle of Ivan’s reality gauge (which had assumed an exclusion-
ary opposition of identity and alterity): “[I]n dreams and particularly in
nightmares, . . . a man may think up such artistic creations, such complex
and realistic visions, events or even a whole world of events . . . that Leo
Tolstoi himself could not invent.” The guest, in other words, explains
how he may both be a reflection of Ivan and present Ivan with some-
thing wholly other: “I may be a hallucination of yours, but just as in a
nightmare, I can say original things that have never occurred to you and
I don’t necessarily have to repeat your old ideas, even if I am nothing but
a nightmarish figment of your imagination” (769).
The terms of this extraordinary dialogue provide a framework within
which to examine in general the problem of identity and alterity as it
is posed in the literature on the modification of consciousness through
drug use in the early nineteenth century. The basic question that I will
consider in these narrative and poetic accounts of drug use is the one
posed by Ivan in this encounter: do the experiences of drug use provide
access to an authentic otherness with regard to the self or do they sim-
ply reflect, in modified or distorted form, known parameters of the self?
While I believe that this problem organizes virtually all the literature (and
numerous quasi-literary testimonials)2 on the subject of alteration of con-
sciousness via drug use, my examination here will focus on the manner
in which this problem is examined by Baudelaire (principally in Les Para-
dis artificiels) and by De Quincey in his Confessions of an English Opium
Eater, on which, of course, a substantial portion of the former text is
based. These two texts are among the most probing on the subject of drug
use and consciousness. In what follows, I will argue that the philosophi-
cal problem of otherness (as manifested in texts recording and examining
the experiences of drug use) is fundamental to Baudelaire’s poetics, both
in his own poetic practice and in his understanding of the poetic in the
broadest sense, extending indeed to his understanding of aesthetics in
 “Je est un autre” 61

general. In a similar vein, I will observe that it is principally through the

most explicitly “poetic” of De Quincey’s Confessions, the mysterious and
lyrical visionary prose poems in the Suspiria de Profundis, that the rela-
tion of otherness is most explicitly formulated and examined. In order to
examine this problem in Baudelaire’s and De Quincey’s texts, I will begin
by sketching a brief conceptual outline of Les Paradis artificiels.
Despite its heteroclite structure, Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels
(1859) can be organized according to a series of common axes that cor-
respond to the evaluation of the experience of the drug at various levels
of discursive abstraction. Thus at an initial level, Les Paradis artificiels
presents itself as both a Wikipedia-type entry on the origin and history of
hashish and a practical guide to its consumption. The theme and tone is
that of ritual initiation of the novice in a forbidden and mysterious prac-
tice. In this connection, Baudelaire dutifully informs his reader what the
substance looks and tastes like; details various forms, doses, and mixtures
of the drug; and preemptively calms the reader’s fears, doubts, and anxiet-
ies, asserting with avuncular confidence that it will neither kill the user
nor entail long-term deleterious health effects or adverse consequences:
“Vous pouvez avaler sans crainte; on n’en meurt pas. Vos organes phy-
siques n’en recevront aucune atteinte” (OC1: 410; “You can ingest it
without fear; it won’t kill you. Your body will suffer no adverse effects”).
In marked contrast to the solemn tone of the indictment of the drug at
the essay’s conclusion, the tone here is blithe and flippant.
At a second level, Les Paradis artificiels presents a record of unusual config-
urations of subjectivity and testimonials of original and strange experiences
of space and time. In a discourse that tends toward what could be character-
ized as an empirical or quasi-empirical catalogue of psycho-aesthetic curios-
ities, Baudelaire appears to chart the oddities of his internal geography and
to record and describe unusual creations and perceptions of his mind under
the influence of the drug, much as such poems as “Rêve parisien” (“Parisian
Dream”) and “La Chambre double” (“The Double Room”) chart the par-
ticular phenomenology, chronology, and geography of the dreamscape. The
reader’s role remains akin to that of a tourist or visitor who would marvel at
the unusual and interesting features of this psychological landscape. Indeed,
the rhetoric of travel and exploration is one of the organizing metaphors of
Baudelaire’s writings on hashish in Les Paradis artificiels. Having assisted
the novice with various preparatory procedures and issued a few precau-
tions, Baudelaire informs the reader, presumably about to be initiated to
hashish, “[V]ous êtes maintenant suffisamment lesté pour un long et sin-
gulier voyage. La vapeur a sifflé, la voilure est orientée, et vous avez sur les
voyageurs ordinaires ce curieux privilège d’ignorer où vous allez. Vous l’avez
62 Alain Toumayan

voulu, vive la fatalité!” (OC1: 410; “[Y]ou are now sufficiently primed for
a long and unusual journey. The whistle has sounded, the sails have been
trimmed, and you have over ordinary travelers the strange advantage of not
knowing where you’re headed. You asked for it! Long live chance!”). Then,
assimilating the imagery of travel with the language of drug-induced bliss,
he asks, “Quand partons-nous pour le bonheur?” (“When are we departing
for happiness?”) or, evoking the paradise of the work’s title, “[J]e me crus
arrivé à la terre promise” (417; “I thought myself arrived at the promised
land”). As will be examined more fully below, and as the latter quote sug-
gests (“je me crus”), Baudelaire imposes specific limitations on this image.
In fact, he specifically corrects the mistaken notion held by neophytes that
hashish has the ability to introduce the user to anything radically new or
other, to “un pays prodigieux . . . où tout est miraculeux et imprévu” (“a
marvelous place where everything is miraculous and surprising”) or “un
monde étrange” (408; “a strange, or foreign world”). In this presentation
of a catalogue or a series of snapshots of unusual and interesting features of
the internal landscape, Les Paradis artificiels provides a basic template and
outline of the genre of literary testimonials concerning drug use.
However, Les Paradis artificiels has a more abstract, theorizing dimen-
sion in which its claims could be characterized at once as psychological (or
para-psychological) and phenomenological. Baudelaire attempts a taxon-
omy or grammar of the particular alterations of consciousness effected by
the drug. The catalogue already described will be ordered and organized,
and the order that emerges can potentially shed light on the processes that
produce such mental effects. It is often observed that the modification of
normal mental faculties effected by the drug occurs in accordance with
certain principles and a certain order and logic. Various scenes, effects,
types of imagery (aquatic, for example), and experiences occur in regular
phases or in ordered sequence. The controlled or temporary alteration
of consciousness can thus serve to illuminate or clarify the normal and
proper functioning of the mind’s processes. Thus formulating the prem-
ise of a standard avenue of enquiry in psychology, the specific, tempo-
rary, or induced dysfunction of the mind is examined in order to shed
light on its normal function. Such an assumption underlies Baudelaire’s
theoretical postulation of “unity in variety” observed in the various phe-
nomena of hallucination and intoxication. It would explain such claims
as his repeated characterization of “Le Poème du Haschisch” as a “mono-
graph of intoxication” (404, 407, 426; “une monographie de l’ivresse”),
his rather prescient use of the words dictionnaire and langue in relation to
dreams (409), and his repeated references to spiritual, moral, psychologi-
cal, and psychic barometers (I, 401, 378, 379).3 In contradistinction to
 “Je est un autre” 63

the rhetorics of initiation and travel already observed, here the organiz-
ing principle seems to be that of experimental enquiry within a quasi-
scientific framework. Here again, while such an orientation is, no doubt,
a leitmotif—even a cliché—of drug testimonials,4 one should not forget
the specificity with which, in this examination, Baudelaire has framed
and anticipated what will be, after Freud and Saussure, the insight for
which Lacan is best known: that the dream and the unconscious mind in
general are structured like a language.
I return now to the problem of identity and alterity, which is more
abstract yet could be characterized as the philosophical or quasi-
philosophical orientation of Baudelaire’s text: the specific problem
defined by Dostoevsky in the episode of Ivan’s interview with the devil.
In various guises, explicit and implicit, literal and metaphorical, Baude-
laire and De Quincey (as well as Gautier and others) pose the problem of
whether the modification of the parameters of the self and of conscious-
ness through “natural” processes of the mind such as dreaming, through
“artificial” or drug-induced mental states, through pathological phenom-
ena, or through near-death experiences afford a view of, or some type of
access to, a true otherness with regard to the self. As is apparent in the case
of Ivan, this problem is most insistently outlined in specular and meta-
phoric terms, specifically as a challenge to show something new. However,
as some of the following examples will suggest, other manifestations of
alterity will present themselves.
A simple example from Les Paradis artificiels can illustrate this prob-
lem. The inadequacies of hashish already mentioned are assessed precisely
according to these terms and criteria. Submitting the drug to essentially
the same scrutiny that Ivan applies to his guest, Baudelaire bemoans that
hashish only distorts the known parameters of the self and does not afford
access to anything new or other: “Le haschisch sera, pour les impressions
et les pensées familières de l’homme, un miroir grossissant, mais un pur
miroir” (OC1: 409; “Hashish will provide, for the thoughts and sensa-
tions of man, a distorting mirror, but only a mirror nonetheless”). In
other formulations, interesting for the implication of manifestations of
alterity that are specifically denied about hashish, he asserts, “[L]e has-
chisch ne révèle à l’individu rien que l’individu lui-même” (440; “[H]ash-
ish doesn’t reveal to the individual anything but the individual himself ”),
thus implying that it was naively and erroneously assumed that it might
reveal something more, new, or other about the individual; in a similar
vein, Baudelaire will ascertain that the phenomena provoked by hashish
are “toujours fidèles à leur origine” (409; “always faithful to their source”).
Occasionally, Baudelaire’s formulas are whimsical and comic; examining
64 Alain Toumayan

the progression of intoxication in a hypothetical patient, he notes the

following phenomenon: “[U]ne voix parle en lui (hélas! c’est la sienne)”
(434; “[A] voice speaks within him [alas, his own]”). This parenthetical
“alas” then articulates the unrealized expectation that it might have been
an “other” voice, and the attendant disappointment in ascertaining that it
was not. Here again, the specific correlation of the framework of intersub-
jectivity or intrasubjectivivity of identity versus alterity with Ivan’s exami-
nation of his mysterious interlocutor is notable.
As most readers know, the limitations (and ultimate indictment) of
hashish are sketched by Baudelaire in contradistinction to the “authenti-
cally” supernatural faculty of dreaming. The dream, as Ivan’s guest has
pointed out, affords authentic, though occasional, access to a true oth-
erness of the self. Thus to examine and explain the specific limitations
of hashish, Baudelaire distinguishes two types of dreams (and articulates
a distinction that will be employed throughout the text to characterize
man’s moods (402) as well as two different classes of hallucinations (420–
21).5 The first, related to the effects of hashish, is but a reflection, a con-
tinuation, a distortion, multiplication, or enhancement of the dreamer,
different from everyday waking life only in degree; the second, distinct
from hashish, is unexplainable, absurd, different in kind, absolute, or
other. This authentic alterity of the dreaming faculty is expressed in such
characteristics as its supernatural quality (while there is “rien de posi-
tivement surnaturel dans l’ivresse du haschisch” [“nothing authentically
supernatural in the intoxication provoked by hashish”]), its divine origin,
and its magical properties. (In contradistinction to the distorting mirror
of hashish, man possesses in these naturally altered states of consciousness
“un miroir magique” [1: 402]).6
In this mysterious privilege accorded to dreaming as a mode of access
to an authentic otherness, Baudelaire follows quite closely De Quincey.
In the beginning of the Suspiria de Profundis—the 1845 and expanded
version of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater—De Quincey articu-
lates this problem, which will delineate the 1822 edition of the Confes-
sions, with its emphasis on opium itself, and the 1845 edition, which
emphasizes the natural tendencies of the mind as these are stimulated,
heightened, and uniquely revealed by opium usage. In the following
quotation from the beginning of the Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey
formulates an intricate specular metaphor to account for the manner in
which dreaming enables the mind to apprehend something that radically
exceeds the mind’s capacity: “And the dreaming organ, in connection
with the heart, the eye, and the ear, compose the magnificent appara-
tus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and
 “Je est un autre” 65

throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of
the sleeping mind”7 (Confessions 88). Like the magical mirror to which
Baudelaire likens it, “Agrippa’s mirror of the unseen universe” (114), or
the explanation offered by Ivan’s mysterious interlocutor, dreaming is pre-
sented as an agency capable of reflecting back to the dreamer something
more or other than the dreamer himself. It can mediate an otherness at
once dark, remote, inaccessible (“below all life”), and incommensurate in
terms of both space (the infinite) and time (eternities) and “fit it” within
the finite and limited horizons or “chambers” of the brain.8 The emphasis
of the second edition of De Quincey’s Confessions will be to expose “the
specific power of opium upon the faculty of dreaming, but much more
with the purpose of displaying the faculty itself ” (88). In the definition
of such a function, De Quincey thus outlines some possibilities in which
opium transcends the specific limitations of hashish that Baudelaire has
examined.
De Quincey’s attempt to analyze more fully and to elaborate the role
of opium in relation to the naturally creative faculties of the mind at work
in dreaming is examined in the Suspiria de Profundis through a series of
poetic visions, essentially some very complicated extended metaphors or
“visionary prose poems” (Confessions xvi). Among these is the figure of
an alter ego born of his opium dreams, a figure that he calls variously the
“Dark Interpreter,” the “dark being,” or, simply, the “Interpreter,” whose
function, as will be seen, transcends the simple mirror-image reflection—
distorted or enhanced—that Baudelaire has identified as a characteristic
of hashish. In the first case I shall consider, De Quincey examines this fig-
ure’s function by analogy with another example of specular apprehension
of an alter ego, the vision (and meteorological phenomenon) titled “The
apparition of the Brocken.” Here De Quincey begins by recalling popu-
lar lore in German and English romanticism: in a certain season, when
certain meteorological conditions are met, a specter will appear on the
Brocken Mountain in Germany. As in the scene of Ivan and his alter ego,
De Quincey subjects his double to careful examination—again, an “alter-
ity test”; as De Quincey notes, “in order to test the nature of this mysteri-
ous apparition, we will try two or three experiments on him” (154). This
scrutiny reveals that the apparition is no more than a distorting reflection
in which the clouds reflect the traveler and mimic his movements. The
specter is only, by natural atmospheric processes, an image of the traveler,
his alter ego. Yet, in attempting to determine this, something hidden has
come to light: “You are now satisfied that the apparition is but a reflex of
yourself; and in uttering your secret feelings to him, you make this phan-
tom the dark symbolic mirror for reflecting to daylight what else must be
66 Alain Toumayan

hidden for ever” (156). The encounter with the apparition thus appears
to have coaxed out of the traveler something unrevealed to him—not,
perhaps, exactly other, but hidden from view and unavailable to him. De
Quincey then explicitly associates the Brocken apparition with his own
Dark Interpreter. In so doing, he explains the latter’s capacity to elicit
from him something new, other, or alien. As noted, this is done by the
elaboration of an involved, extended metaphor. Explaining that the Dark
Interpreter is, indeed, initially only an alter ego (“he is originally a mere
reflex of myself ”), De Quincey goes on to demonstrate how the alter ego,
becomes, so to speak, an altered ego:

But as the apparition of the Brocken sometimes is disturbed by storms or

by driving showers, so as to dissemble his real origin, in like manner the
Interpreter sometimes swerves out of my orbit, and mixes a little with alien
natures. I do not always know him in these cases as my own parhelion.
What he says, generally is but that which I have said in daylight, and in
meditation deep enough to sculpture itself on my heart. But sometimes,
as his face alters, his words alter; and they do not seem such as I have used
or could use. No man can account for all that occur in dreams. Generally
I believe this—that he is a faithful representative of myself; but he also is
at times subject to the action of the god Phantasus, who rules in dreams.
(156)

De Quincey’s subsequent reflections elaborate somewhat ambivalent

characteristics of the Dark Interpreter, reflecting the ambiguity in the two
images. On the one hand, like the office of the tragic chorus at Athens,
the Interpreter’s role is “not to tell you any thing absolutely new, that was
done by the actors in the drama; but to recall to you your own lurking
thoughts—hidden for the moment or imperfectly developed, and to place
before you . . . such commentaries . . . as would or might have occurred to
your own meditative heart—had only time been allowed for its motions”
(157). On the other hand, the Dark Interpreter will tend, as the storms
that have altered the Brocken apparition, “to assume new features or
strange features, as in dreams always there is a power not contented with
reproduction but which absolutely creates or transforms” (157).9
Thus there appears a certain ambiguity regarding the true creative
potential of the Interpreter to proffer something novel or other. In the
more conservative of the two formulations, the comparison with the
Greek chorus, it appears that it explicitly fails Ivan’s test in that it does
not yield anything “new.” Yet it has still in a future projection breached
the dimension of time, mediating the otherness of the future to the extent
that it has afforded an elaboration or a commentary potentially available
 “Je est un autre” 67

but not actually realized due to time. This is one of the specific roles that
Ivan’s encounter with his alter ego serves in The Brothers Karamazov. The
interview with his alter ego affords the opportunity for Ivan at 23 to per-
ceive himself across the dimension of the future as “a Russian gentleman
of a certain type, no longer young, qui frisait la cinquantaine” (764).10
Another of the “visionary prose poems” in De Quincey’s Suspiria,
“Savannah-La-Mar,” develops further, through an extended metaphoric
narrative, the capacity of the narrator’s “Interpreter” to mediate an
inaccessible otherness. In an episode in which the focus is on the set-
ting rather than the action or dialogue, De Quincey and his interpreter
visit Savannah-la-Mar, a vanished city preserved intact and inviolate at
the bottom of the sea where it remains, in certain conditions, visible to
passing mariners: “This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all
her apparel mounted, streamers flying and tackling perfect, seems float-
ing along the noiseless depths of ocean: and oftentimes in glassy calms,
through the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches like an air-
woven awning above the silent encampment, mariners from every clime
look down into her courts and terraces, count her gates, and number
the spires of her churches” (158). The image is mysterious and elabo-
rate. Both Baudelaire and De Quincey repeatedly attest to the obsessive
mysteriousness and fascination of aquatic images in the hallucinations
provoked by both opium and hashish.11 In addition, the setting of the
submerged city, visited by the narrator and his interpreter through a for-
eign element, presents an extremely original and creative transformation
(to use Frank Bowman’s word)12 of the romantic predilection for melan-
choly images of ruined buildings, lost cities, and vanished civilizations.
But the principal function of the image, it seems, is to sketch both a
radical alterity and the manner in which, through the intercession of his
interpreter and opium dreams, the narrator is able to “cleave the watery
veil” and gain access to this impenetrable realm in the “loveliness of the
cerulean depths” (158). The anecdote expresses and encapsulates, with
admirable economy, some of the principal insights of De Quincey’s Con-
fessions: first, the preservation—intact and inviolate—of a vanished past;
second its fundamental inaccessibility, as expressed in the alien element or
medium that both protects and preserves it; third, its intermittent appear-
ance, though always as remote (“below all life”) and inaccessible through
an impenetrable medium of a glassy ocean;13 finally, the privileged access
granted to it via the agency of the opium dreams and of his interpreter.14
The significance of the visionary dream of Savannah-La-Mar can be
fully appreciated only in the metaphorical congruence it presents with
several other images explored in the Suspiria de Profundis: the image of the
68 Alain Toumayan

mind as a palimpsest (recording as it erases, preserving all even as it cov-

ers up), the permanence of past experience, the indelibility of childhood
experience, and thus childhood as source, origin, and foundation of the
self. Providing empirical confirmation of these images (which his opium
dreams have suggested in various episodes—the reappearance of Ann, for
example), De Quincey recounts a near-death experience of his mother as
a child who, in a near-drowning episode, “in a moment, in the twinkling
of an eye, every act—every design or her past life lived again—arraying
themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence” (145, 68–
69).15 In this context, these meditations indicate Savannah-la-Mar as
a metaphor of the self, specifically of an access to and recovery of the
past enabled by opium and guided by the interpreter. Here again then,
it seems, the terms framed by Ivan Karamazov have been met. Through
an elaborate narrative metaphor, De Quincey’s text demonstrates the
capacity of the interpreter to reveal to the narrator something new or
other—mysterious processes of the mind, hidden structures of conscious-
ness, unknown characteristics of memory—and through them to provide
a fuller understanding of the foundation of identity.
Thus, just as the interpreter opens an access to the future unavailable
to the waking consciousness, the opium dreams and the interpreter enable
a recollection and recognition of the past equally inaccessible to the wak-
ing and rational mind. The operative principle of the images presented
in the Suspiria de Profundis—the intact conservation of a forgotten past,
the indelibility of childhood experience, and childhood’s formative per-
manence in the manner of an imprinting—align De Quincey with Nerval
as well as Proust, for whom the same insights about the self, associated
with other experiences, are centrally situated in—and essentially associ-
ated with—confessional, testimonial, and autobiographical narratives.16
The principal insights that opium and the figure of De Quincey’s
interpreter afforded have related primarily to various dimensions of time
and, beyond that, to the problem of memory as it relates to the source
and origin of the self. But in general terms, the considerable philosophi-
cal prestige accorded to opium by De Quincey has no doubt influenced
Baudelaire, for whom the particular distortions of space and heightening
of other sensory perception effected by the drug will compose a fundamen-
tal element of his poetic and aesthetic vocabulary.17 Of particular interest
to Baudelaire in this connection is opium’s capacity to extend and deepen
the perception of space—“l’opium immense” (OC1: 133); “L’opium
aggrandit ce qui n’a pas de bornes, / Allonge l’illimité, / Approfondit le
temps, creuse la volupté” (OC1: 49; “Opium enlarges what is limitless /
Stretches the infinite / Deepens time, and stimulates desire”)—which is
a property that it shares with music, in Baudelaire’s view.18 In addition, it
 “Je est un autre” 69

confers an aura of depth, a sheen of philosophical significance and vertigi-

nous mystery to objects. The particular characteristics of such perceptions
are less striking in themselves than the fact that such experiences end up
providing a universal idiom of the aesthetic experience. Baudelaire’s aes-
thetic analyses often relate creativity, inspiration, and intoxication, as, for
example, in his analysis of Constantin Guys through Poe’s “Man of the
Crowd” where genius, inspiration, and the capacity to perceive the new
are associated with childhood, convalescence, and intoxication (2: 690).
The figures of opium intoxication develop and specify this further. Not
only do the figures of opium perception apply to those artists with whom
Baudelaire most closely identifies, besides Guys and De Quincey—Poe,
Delacroix, and Wagner—but, as the preceding list demonstrates, opium
supplies Baudelaire with an aesthetic idiom capable of describing, and
thus uniting, such disparate art forms as literature, painting, and music.19
Thus does opium provide a conceptual terminology that composes a
common denominator of the aesthetic and philosophical, in Baudelaire’s
oeuvre. Whether it be the experience, representation, or investigation of
man’s “minutes heureuses” (OC1: 37, 2: 331; “moments of happiness”),
“fêtes du cerveau” (2: 596; “mind’s celebrations”), and “belles saisons . . .
heureuses journées . . . délicieuses minutes” (1: 401; “lovely seasons . . .
joyous days . . . delicious moments”), which unite features of Baudelaire’s
poetic practice, his program in Les Paradis artificiels, and his analyses of
Poe and Delacroix, or the imperative—similar to the one articulated by
Ivan Karamazov—to encounter something other or new, to venture “au
fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau” (OC1: 134; “to the depths
of the Unknown to find the New”), the insights yielded by opium are
genuine and the conceptual language that it provides is authentic and far
reaching even if, as De Quincey starkly demonstrates and as Baudelaire
well knows, the price exacted for such understanding can be quite high.
Prior to being the ethical problem par excellence as defined in the
modern era by Emmanuel Levinas, the question of alterity is typically
posed in epistemological terms, as a structural enquiry into what is
known, knowable, unknown, and unknowable (with the various per-
mutations and combinations that these imply). It thus correlates well
with the romantic—and modern—trope of the poet as visionary. The
poetic meditation on the modification and alteration of consciousness
by dreams, madness, and drug use brings a layer of complexity and
abstraction to this common trope by expanding the epistemological
horizon, yielding insights not available by normal means, investigating
the status and significance of these insights, and, finally, illuminating
the very structure of the mind, the nature of consciousness, and the
sources of the self.
70 Alain Toumayan

Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76.
Bowman, Frank Paul. French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Clej, Alina. A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of
Writing. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings. Ed.
Grevel Lindop. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Andrew MacAndrew. New York:
Bantam, 1970.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2002.
Genette, Gérard. Figures I. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966.
James, Tony. Dream, Creativity, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford:
Clarendon, 2005.
———. “Les hallucinés: ‘rêveurs tout éveillés’—ou à moitié endormis.” Les Arts de
l’hallucination. Eds. Donata Presenti Campagnoni and Paolo Tortonese. Paris:
Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1981. 15–32.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “La Trace de l’autre.” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et
Heidegger. Paris: Vrin, 1974. 187–202.
McDonagh, Josephine. De Quincey’s Disciples. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Michaux, Henri. Oeuvres complètes. Eds. Raymond Bellour and Ysé Tran. Paris: Gal-
limard, 2001.
Poulet, Georges. Etudes sur le Temps humain IV: La Mesure de l’Instant. Paris: Plon,
1964.
Powers, Scott. “Writing against Theodicy: Reflections on the Co-Existence of God
and Evil in Baudelaire’s Poetry and Critical Essays.” Nineteenth-Century French
Studies 39.1–2 (2010–11): 77–98.
Terras, Victor. A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and
Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1981.
Van der Eng, Johannes. Dostoevskij Romancier: Rapports entre sa vision du monde et ses
procédés littéraires. The Hague: Mouton, 1957.

Notes
1. There is, of course, a fine irony in this situation insofar as Ivan’s rational secu-
rity will be premised upon the possibility of confirming or proving a hallucina-
tory encounter with himself. The point of view from which Ivan can evaluate
an encounter of himself with himself remains, of course, unspecified, a situa-
tion that no doubt foreshadows Ivan’s mental breakdown. This scene takes the
layered dialogism of Dostoevsky’s novel to a remarkable level of abstraction
and complication. About this scene, see the particularly fine reading of Joseph
Frank: “The involutions of Ivan’s conversation with the devil are so intricate
that it is impossible to give in brief any adequate account of their complexities”
(678). See also Johannes van der Eng, who writes, “The subtlest and cleverest
 “Je est un autre” 71

irony arises in the conversations between Ivan Karamazov and his devil” (72),
and Victor Terras (92–93).
2. A complete, or even partial, list of such testimonials is, of course, beyond the
scope of this study; however, a few notable examples would include Michaux,
Cocteau, Huxley, and Artaud.
3. Notice that a comparable method, similar claims, and the same terminology
orient Baudelaire’s analysis of music. Like intoxicating drugs, music elicits simi-
lar experiences in different minds: “Le lecteur sait quel but nous poursuivons:
démontrer que la véritable musique suggère des idées analogues dans des cer-
veaux différents” (OC2: 784; “The reader knows the purpose of our investi-
gations: to demonstrate that true music suggests analogous ideas in different
minds”). See also note 19.
4. Michaux’s various testimonials would provide good examples. He too describes
a type of “grammar” of intoxication, muses on the alter ego that his hallucina-
tions produce, and testifies to the sense of the “foreignness” of some of his
mind’s productions: “Ridicule, inoui et imparable, et que de ma vie je n’aurais
pu deviner” (642; “Ridiculous, incredible, and without equal, and that, in all
my life, I couldn’t have come up with”).
5. This distinction is comparable to, but also essentially different from, the one
drawn in nineteenth-century aetiology between illusions and hallucinations.
See Tony James, Dream 104, 119. See also Tony James, “Les hallucinés” 16–17.
6. Note then that the word artificial in the title functions in at least two distinct
ways, or, as Deleuze might say, in two distinct “series.” First, in an opposition to
natural in which artificial would mean “induced” or “provoked” as opposed to
“naturally occurring”; this distinction itself is then “raised” to a higher level in
which it would be opposed to such attributes as “supernatural,” “miraculous,”
and “mysterious” (or without apparent cause). Second, the word artificial, in
opposition to genuine, would mean “false” as opposed to “true,” “authentic,” or
“real.” This opposition too is placed in relation to a further, higher-level attri-
bute, which would be fantastic, divine, or magical.
7. Alina Clej associates this particular image with Freud (A Genealogy of the Mod-
ern Self 91).
8. It is interesting how closely De Quincey’s figures of radical otherness in this pas-
sage correlate with those examined by Levinas throughout his work, specifically
the infinite and the eternal.
9. Readers of De Quincey know how rigorously precise he is in his wording; thus,
when he here specifies the potential of the interpreter to “absolutely” create
or transform, it must be taken in the literal (philosophical) sense that would
then confirm the interpreter’s potential to provide something novel or other.
Indeed, as noted, it is precisely this capacity of the mind to create “absolutely”
(in dreams, hallucinations, and drug use) that is at issue—and in question—in
Baudelaire’s various analyses of hashish. Concerning the Brocken specter, see
McDonagh 180–81.
10. It is an interesting portrait, which should be more disconcerting to Ivan than
it is. The alter ego is a parody or caricature of Ivan; he is a loser and a good-
for-nothing, a man past his prime physically and intellectually and who has
72 Alain Toumayan

not amounted to anything. While well-bred, witty, and charming, he is also

a hanger-on, an entertaining parasite that people put up with but view with
irony, bemusement, and condescension. The guest is aware of this fact, yet
retains a certain degree of (wounded) pride. The portrait makes clear several
things that Ivan is incapable of recognizing: first, how closely Ivan’s potential
future self resembles his father; second, that the alter ego essentially paints a
picture of a man whose development appears stunted, as if his intellect could
carry him only so far in the development of human qualities; and finally, the
discrepancy between Ivan’s ethical and intellectual selves, a “dislocation” that,
as noted, is no doubt one of the keys to his subsequent breakdown (insofar as
Ivan dismisses his alter ego’s ideas as stupid and idiotic, the basis or perspective
from which he does so remains unacknowledged by him). What is particularly
interesting—and finely ironic—in this scene is Ivan’s failure to perceive the
alterity that he is specifically trying to detect; this, in itself, is suggestive of Ivan’s
condition. Here again, see Terras 93.
11. Such images, along with other striking characteristics of Savannah-la-Mar—
for example, the profusion of architectural detail and its mysterious silence—
are among the principal features of the dreamscape sketched by Baudelaire in
“Rêve parisien” (1: 101–3). For some interesting observations concerning on
Savannah-La-Mar, see McDonagh 163 and Powers 86–87.
12. “I suggest that we use the word ‘transformations’ to describe these movements
of topoi or ideas from discourse to discourse, text to text” (202, 204). Powers
represents Savannah-La-Mar as a ruin (86), a logical assumption given the site’s
history; however, De Quincey’s text clearly implies otherwise, and it seems to
me that the intact preservation of the city (“tackling perfect”) is important to
the understanding of the image.
13. Note how the appearance of Savannah-La-Mar is thus in the mode of a trace
(rather than as a sign); it is both immanent and transcendent, at once present
and radically foreign. See Levinas, “La Trace de l’Autre” 197–99.
14. Théophile Gautier’s supernatural short story “Arria Marcella” (1852) inge-
niously formulates some similar themes through analogous images. On a visit
to the site of Pompeii, the narrator, Octavien, in a dreamlike state, travels in
time to experience the life of the city prior to its burial under the volcanic ash
cloud of Mount Vesuvius. From a point of view that accommodates both his
modern and time-traveling selves, Octavien is able to “visit” unexcavated por-
tions of the city and to marvel at the privileged character of this unusual access.
15. The misreading of this insight by Poulet is quite interesting. He chooses to
focus on what he calls the “simultanéisme” in the experience of the totum simul
(“De Quincey was quite keenly aware of the metaphysical implications of this
concept of simultaneity”)—and this despite De Quincey’s explicit indication
of the totum as “the true point for astonishment” (Poulet 188). De Quincey’s
comments on this point couldn’t be clearer: “the true point for astonishment
is not the simultaneity of arrangement under which the past events of life—
though in fact successive—had formed their dread line of revelation. This was
but a secondary phenomenon; the deeper lay in the resurrection itself, and the
possibility of resurrection, for what had so long slept in the dust” (145).
 “Je est un autre” 73

16. Gerard Genette’s use of the image of the palimpsest in connection with Proust
is, of course, well known. See Figures I 51.
17. Tony James implies the impact that the reading of De Quincey had on Baude-
laire (Dream, Creativity, and Madness 121).
18. Baudelaire occasionally ascertains or implies music’s particular connection with
the perception of space. In Fusées, for example, he writes, “La Musique creuse
le ciel” (OC1: 653; “Music deepens the sky”); similarly, in Mon coeur mis à nu,
“La musique donne l’idée de l’espace” (OC1: 702; “Music gives the idea of
spaciousness”). The operative metaphors in his poem “La Musique” are spatial
images of vastness and depth. Similarly, in his analysis of Delacroix, Baudelaire
mentions Liszt’s characterization of Chopin’s music as “une musique légère et
passionnée qui ressemble à un brillant oiseau voltigeant sur les horreurs d’un
gouffre” (OC2: 761; “a light and passionate music that resembles a shiny bird
fluttering over the horrors of the abyss”). Finally, in his analysis of Wagner,
and in connection with the particular tendency of Wagner’s music to evoke
space and depth, Baudelaire associates Wagner’s music both to painting and
to the specific idiom of opium: “Aucun musicien n’excelle, comme Wagner,
à peindre l’espace et la profondeur, matériels et spirituels. C’est une remarque
que plusieurs esprits, et des meilleurs, n’ont pu s’empêcher de faire en plusieurs
occasions. Il possède l’art de traduire, par des gradations subtiles, tout ce qu’il y
a d’excessif, d’immense, d’ambitieux, dans l’homme spirituel et naturel. Il sem-
ble parfois, en écoutant cette musique ardente et despotique, qu’on retrouve
peintes sur le fond des ténèbres, déchiré par la rêverie, les vertigineuses con-
ceptions de l’opium” (OC2: 785; “No other musician excels like Wagner in
painting spaciousness and depth, in both a physical and spiritual sense. This is
a remark that several observers, and among the most probing, have made on
several occasions. Wagner knows how to express, by subtle shades, everything
that is excessive, enormous, and ambitious in the natural and spiritual man. It
sometimes seems, in listening to this ardent and overpowering music, that one
finds, painted against a background of darkness, torn by reverie, the vertiginous
creations of opium”).
19. Opium is one of the metaphors that Baudelaire uses to broadly characterize
Poe’s writing (2: 320). As his comments about Wagner show (see note 18), there
is a certain amount of cross-referencing that occurs when Baudelaire speaks of
opium, as if it were, literally, a synthetic aesthetic concept. This is even more
striking when, in his analysis of Poe, he references Delacroix (2: 317–18) while
in his analysis of Delacroix, he references Poe (2: 596), and, in both cases, the
principle of their connection is opium.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 5

“Poésie-boucherie”
Baudelaire’s Aesthetics and
Ethics of Execution

Ève Morisi

une caricature bien appétissante pour nous . . . quelque farce de boxeurs . . .

pleine de sang caillé (a caricature quite appetizing to us . . . some boxers’
farce . . . covered in congealed blood)1
La tête se détachait du cou, une grosse tête blanche et rouge, et roulait
avec bruit devant le trou du souffleur, montrant le disque saignant du cou,
la vertèbre scindée, et tous les détails d’une viande de boucherie récemment
taillée pour l’étalage. (The head detached itself from the neck, a big white
and red head, and it rolled noisily in front of the prompter’s box, showing
the bloody disk of the neck, the severed vertebra, and all the details of a
piece of butcher’s meat recently cut for the stall.)
—Charles Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire et généralement
du comique dans les arts plastiques”

Je te frapperai sans colère

Et sans haine, comme un boucher,
[ . . . ]”
(I shall beat you without rage
Or hate, . . .
As a butcher strikes his block.)
—Charles Baudelaire,
“L’Héautontimorouménos”

“Poésie de charnier et d’abattoir” (Guyaux 147; “Poetry of mass graves

and slaughterhouses”). This is the phrase with which Louis Goudall sum-
marized the 18 poems that Baudelaire published under the title Les Fleurs
76 Ève Morisi

du mal in the Revue des deux mondes in June 1855. That same year, with
an essay titled “De l’Essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les
arts plastiques” (“On the Essence of Laughter and on the Comic in the
Plastic Arts Generally”), the poet took full responsibility for his peculiar
thematic and imagistic tastes by declaring that the ugly was also home to
beauty: “Chose curieuse et vraiment digne d’attention que l’introduction
de cet élément insaisissable du beau jusque dans les œuvres destinées à
représenter à l’homme sa propre laideur morale et physique! Et, chose
non moins mystérieuse, ce spectacle lamentable excite en lui une hilarité
immortelle et incorrigible.” (OC2: 526; A curious and truly attention
worthy thing is the introduction of this unseizable element of the beauti-
ful even in works destined to represent man’s own moral and physical
ugliness to himself! And equally peculiar is the immortal and incorrigible
hilarity that this lamentable spectacle excites in him!) The complete book
of poems published in 1857 under the same title, Les Fleurs du mal, thor-
oughly illustrates this premise of the necessary relationship between the
beautiful and human ugliness and depravity. Baudelaire made it the basis
of an aesthetic project, which he notably developed through the staging of
bloodshed as a visual and aural spectacle. Analyzing the incidence of lethal
violence in the most graphic poems of Les Fleurs du mal will allow for a
better understanding of the poet’s famous—and infamous—aesthetic dic-
tum: “extraire la beauté du mal” (“extract beauty from evil/harm”). After
investigating Baudelaire’s fascination with the attractiveness supposedly
perceptible in chopped flesh, this essay will reflect on the detached moral
posture that the artist claims to adopt, if not to promote, in some of his
prose writings and poetry. Lastly, it will determine whether his works
written in blood successfully actualize his ideal of the phlegmatic dandy
and testify to an effortless self-distancing from brutality and pain.

Bloody Aesthetics
If one considers Baudelaire’s most gruesome verse alongside the excerpt
from “De l’Essence du rire” cited earlier, one finds that, far from simply
signaling that the repulsive is home to the beautiful in his compositions,
the poet makes a conscious effort to exalt the abject in them. This is per-
haps best exemplified by the well-known “Une Charogne” (“A Carrion”):

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride,

D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons
De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
Le long de ces vivants haillons.
...
 “Poésie-boucherie” 77

Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine

Qui vous mangera de baisers,
Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine
De mes amours décomposés! (OC1: 31–32)

[The flies swarmed on the putrid vulva, then

A black tumbling rout would seethe
Of maggots, thick like a torrent in a glen,
Over those rags that lived and seemed to breathe.
...
Speak, then, my Beauty, to this dire putrescence,
To the worm that shall kiss your proud estate.
That I have kept the divine form and the essence
Of my festered loves inviolate! (Flowers 38)]

Decay here replaces lethal violence. Yet this poem is a useful point of
departure on account of its self-referentiality. It functions as an ars poetica,
which Baudelaire specifically constructs around the reality of dead flesh.
Unexpectedly, this dead flesh, in which ugliness abounds, is associated
with aesthetic blossoming. It even conditions the latter. While the poem
is the memorial site of the beloved’s “forme et . . . essence divine” after
her death, the sun-putrefied carcass constitutes the initial matrix of the
perennial poetic form on which the speaker prides himself.
Does Baudelaire’s poetic writing at large testify to this slippage from
the infiltration of beauty into the horrendous, to the exacerbation of hor-
ror? The many bloody poems to be found in Les Fleurs du mal suggest that
it does. In “Le Tonneau de la haine” (“The Cask of Hate”), Baudelaire
stages a personified “Vengeance” whose “bras rouges et forts” are evoca-
tive of the archetypal butcher:

La Haine est le tonneau des pâles Danaïdes;

La Vengeance éperdue aux bras rouges et forts
A beau précipiter dans ses ténèbres vides

De grands seaux pleins du sang et des larmes des morts,

Le Démon fait des trous secrets à ces abîmes,
Par où fuiraient mille ans de sueurs et d’efforts,
Quand même elle saurait ranimer ses victimes,
Et pour les pressurer ressusciter leurs corps. (1: 71)

[The Cask of the pale Danaïds is Hate.

Vainly Revenge, with red strong arms employed,
Precipitates her buckets, in a spate
78 Ève Morisi

Of blood and tears of the dead, to feed the void.

The Fiend bores secret holes in these abysms

By which a thousand years of sweat and strain
Would spill, though Hate revived their organisms
In order just to bleed them once again. (Flowers 88–89)]

Gory and nightmarish, this allegorical vision takes on a paroxysmic

dimension through the hyperbolic quantification of the bodily fluids it
depicts—blood, tears, and sweat, all synonymous with pain—and the
redundant scenario it features: the slaughtering of the dead. Further-
more, both the opening image of the pallid, exhausted Danaïds and the
stretched and cumulative syntactic structure of this eight-line statement
testify to an annihilation (a liquidation, literally) of human shadows. The
flows of pain emanating from the dead are never to cease pouring out, we
are told. Ecstatic cruelty and an infinite consumption of flesh are con-
joined to represent a veritable scene of boucherie, in the figurative sense of
the term: a scene about la “mort sanglante et assurée d’un grand nombre
de personnes” (Grand Dictionnaire 1053; “bloody and assured death of a
great number of individuals”).
A number of other compositions illustrate this ferocious exacerbation
of bloodshed and testify to Baudelaire’s propensity to borrow from the
metaphorical meaning of boucherie. Among them is the well-known poem
“L’Héautontimorouménos” (“Heautontimoroumenos”). This piece stages
the mechanical assassination of a subject who falls prey to the blows of a
butcher-like self. While the butcher first seems to be used as an innocuous
figure of comparison—that of the dutiful worker devoid of hostility—he
is soon associated with a spectacular and disturbing violence:

Je te frapperai sans colère

Et sans haine, comme un boucher,
Comme Moïse le rocher!
Et je ferai de ta paupière,

Pour abreuver mon Sahara,

Jaillir les eaux de la souffrance.
Mon désir gonflé d’espérance
Sur tes pleurs salés nagera (1: 78)

[I shall beat you without rage

Or hate, as Moses struck the rock,
As a butcher strikes his block.
I shall make your tears assuage
 “Poésie-boucherie” 79

My drought, my desert in their tide.

You shall weep for my relief,
And on the salt waves of your grief
My longings swollen with hope shall ride (Flowers 97)]

As in “Le Tonneau de la haine,” the poet is quick to confer a mythologi-

cal and epic character on this killing through biblical references. Aquatic
images also serve the hyperbolic dimension of the scene, and a sadistic
impulse increasingly colors the rather perfunctory gesture evoked in
the first two lines, which are promptly destabilized by the blasphemous
comparison between the aggressor’s action and that of the prophet in
line three. “Mon désir gonflé d’espérance / Sur tes pleurs salés nagera”:
perverseness gives its force to Baudelaire’s predictive and grandiose tab-
leau and sets it in motion. Swelling, gushing, and swimming animate his
larger-than-life canvas, and a vitalist aesthetic of overabundance paradoxi-
cally emerges from the vicious murder progressively unveiled.
The poem titled “À une Madone” (“To a Madonna”) similarly inscribes
cruelty within the process of execution:

Enfin, pour compléter ton rôle de Marie,

Et pour mêler l’amour avec la barbarie,
Volupté noire! Des sept Péchés capitaux,
Bourreau plein de remords, je ferai sept couteaux
Bien affilés, et comme un jongleur insensible,
Prenant le plus profond de ton amour pour cible,
Je les planterai tous dans ton Cœur pantelant,
Dans ton Cœur sanglotant, dans ton Cœur ruisselant! (1: 59)

[And finally, to render you more real,

I shall make seven blades of Spanish steel
Out of the Seven Deadly Sins, and I
Shall mix my love with murderous savagery,
And like a circus knife-thrower, I’ll aim
At the pure center of your gentle frame,
And plunge those blades into your beating heart,
Your bleeding, suffering, palpitating heart. (Flowers 74–75)]

In these final lines, a triple alliterative network made of hard consonants

(p, k, t) and upheld by the anaphoric adverbial phrase of place “dans ton
Cœur” marks the sadistic climax of the gradation in violence that struc-
tures the poem; these lines reveal the antiphrastic meaning of “Bourreau
plein de remords,” marking the cold, if not self-satisfied, triumph of a
murderous desire presented as both irrepressible and ironically mystical.
80 Ève Morisi

To understand better the resort to knives, flesh, and blood character-

istic of slaughter (of boucherie understood figuratively) in Les Fleurs du
mal and to identify the motivation behind it, the poems just considered
benefit from being read in light of “De l’essence du rire,” which also refers
to bodily dismantlement specifically. This essay, whose subject matter is
the habilitation of caricature as a pictorial genre and the examination of
the mechanics behind human laughter, establishes a hierarchy of comic
forms that consecrates the “comique absolu” (OC2: 535). The “comique
absolu” is the alternate name of the “grotesque, une création . . . une
idéalité artistique” (535; “grotesque, a creation . . . an artistic idealness”),
which Baudelaire opposes to vile imitation.
The poet considers the first English pantomime he saw performed
(538) as the epitome of the “comique absolu.” Pierrot, its hero, finds
himself guillotined in the end (539):

Après avoir lutté et beuglé comme un bœuf qui flaire l’abattoir, Pierrot
subissait enfin son destin. La tête se détachait du cou, une grosse tête
blanche et rouge, et roulait avec bruit devant le trou du souffleur, mon-
trant le disque saignant du cou, la vertèbre scindée, et tous les détails d’une
viande de boucherie récemment taillée pour l’étalage. Mais voilà que,
subitement, le torse raccourci, . . . se dressait, escamotait victorieusement
sa propre tête comme un jambon ou une bouteille de vin, et, bien plus
avisé que le grand saint Denis, la fourrait dans sa poche! (539)
(After fighting and bawling like an ox that senses the slaughterhouse,
Pierrot was at last subjected to his destiny. The head detached itself from
the neck, a big white and red head, and it rolled noisily in front of the
prompter’s box, showing the bloody disk of the neck, the severed vertebra,
and all the details of a piece of butcher’s meat recently cut for the stall. Yet
all of a sudden, the shortened torso, moved by the irresistible monomania
of theft, drew itself up, victoriously embezzled its own head like a ham or a
bottle of wine, and, much more sensible than the great Saint Denis, shoved
it into its pocket!)

Baudelaire admiringly depicts this scene of boucherie-charcuterie in which

guignolesque gestures, noises, forms, and colors contribute to a sensory
landscape of a disconcertingly overdone nature. Sensorial profusion is a
defining feature of Baudelairean poetics, and the author is prompt to
draw this parallel between the caricatural mime show and literature. He
laments the weakness of words in the face of the force that emanates from
grotesque theatrical representations; “Avec une plume tout cela est pâle
et glacé. Comment la plume pourrait-elle rivaliser avec la pantomime?”
(540; “With a quill, all this is pale and icy. How could the quill compete
with pantomime?”). That is the question posed by the writer who aspires
 “Poésie-boucherie” 81

to equal “le vertige de l’hyperbole” (539; “the vertigo of hyperbole”) per-

ceived in this absolute comic, the “apanage des artistes supérieurs” (536;
“superior artists’ privilege”).
To rival this expressiveness of pantomime, he must first create the
motion and life of dramatic performance. Moreover, the quality of the
grotesque, deemed “féroce, très féroce” (538) by the author, must be
rendered. Baudelaire fulfills this twofold agenda by mobilizing three
key characteristics of slaughter: violence,2 colorfulness, and crudity. The
poetic text thus mimics Pierrot, a raw, vivacious, and dazzlingly excessive
figure:

Par-dessus la farine de son visage, il avait collé crûment, sans gradation, sans
transition, deux énormes plaques de rouge pur. La bouche était agrandie
par une prolongation simulée des lèvres au moyen de deux bandes de car-
min, de sorte que, quand il riait, la gueule avait l’air de courir jusqu’aux
oreilles. (538–39)
(Over his face’s white makeup, he had stuck crudely, without gradation,
without transition, two huge blotches of pure red. The mouth was widened
by a simulated prolongation of the lips with two crimson stripes, so that,
when he laughed, the mouth seemed to run all the way up to the ears.)

I take this passage to illuminate the almost caricatural exacerbation of

butchery identified in Les Fleurs du mal. This praise of redness, which func-
tions as the synthetic metonymy of the three principles of violence, colorful-
ness, and crudity and is combined with artificial exaggeration and motion,
confirms the aesthetic explosion coveted by the poet. It brings to mind
the enthusiasm for the colorists and caricature voiced by Baudelaire in the
Salons. The “artistic ideality” of the grotesque at play in pantomime, which
Baudelaire claims is matchless, is first and foremost a pictorial ideality.
In other words, the boucherie frequently represented in his poems
through a wealth of blood, limbs and organs, red blotches, and quartered
contours constitutes the site and the means of a visual emulation. Baude-
laire fuses the grotesque caricature whose force he extols in his essay on
laughter with the palette and the “désolation” (OC2: 760) of Delacroix’s
massacres, battle scenes, and Francisco Goya’s monstrous gloom. “À une
Madone,” for instance, encloses in a full-length portrait a statue-like vir-
gin saturated with finery that is turned into a series of vices and failings.
They tarnish her increasingly—before she is murdered. Through a syntax
made of accumulations, a prosody marked by alliterative redundancies,
and the imbrication of incriminating metaphors, Baudelaire translates in
writing the density characteristic of baroque iconography and has it pro-
voke the victim’s gradual destruction. A “Manteau . . . / Barbare, roide
82 Ève Morisi

et lourd, et doublé de soupçon” (“coat in the barbaric style, . . . Lined

with suspicion, made of jealousy / Encasing all your charms”) weighs
over the shoulders of the madonna-like mistress. Rococo materiality in
what the poet terms “le goût espagnol” (“the Spanish style”) here crushes
spirituality. Likewise, “L’Héautontimorouménos” dismembers the subject
through a sophisticated visual demonstration. In a well-known quatrain,
the poet manages to magnify the vision of the split body and its execution
through a kaleidoscopic perspective.

Je suis la plaie et le couteau!

Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et la victime et le bourreau! (1: 79)

[I am the ulcer and the lance;

I am the bruise; I am the blow;
I am the rack, the limbs also,
Hangman and hanged at once. (Flowers 97–98)]

Through a fixed and bare grammatical structure (subject, copula, attri-

bute), which Baudelaire mechanizes further with anaphora, the poet has
the reader visualize the vertiginous circulation of body parts and lethal
utensils, the opposition of which is symbolically reinforced through the
alternating feminine and masculine nouns. As we saw earlier, the dynamic
tableau that emerges at the beginning of the poem—from a bodily frag-
ment seized through an extreme close-up on the eyelid—also constitutes
a plastic tour de force.
A final instance of how Baudelaire maximizes the aesthetic potential
of butchery can be found in “Une Martyre” (“A Martyr”), a poem intro-
duced as the “dessin d’un maître inconnu” (“drawing by an unknown
Master”). A veritable frame, in the form of a pillow (made of “toile,” which
revealingly means both “cloth” and “canvas”), girds a woman’s severed and
bleeding neck, which the reader-viewer only discovers after apprehend-
ing the picture’s rich background and decorative components—in yet
another remarkable mise en abyme, these include paintings.

Au milieu des flacons, des étoffes lamées

Et des meubles voluptueux,
Des marbres, des tableaux, des robes parfumées
Qui traînent à plis somptueux,

Dans une chambre tiède où, comme en une serre,

L’air est dangereux et fatal,
 “Poésie-boucherie” 83

Où des bouquets mourants dans leurs cercueils de verre

Exhalent leur soupir final,

Un cadavre sans tête épanche, comme un fleuve,

Sur l’oreiller désaltéré
Un sang rouge et vivant, dont la toile s’abreuve
Avec l’avidité d’un pré. (1: 111–12)

[Amongst gilt fabrics, flasks of scent and wine,

Rich furniture, white marble, precious moulds,
Fine paintings, and rich, perfumed robes that shine
Swirled into sumptuous folds,

In a warm room, that like a hothouse stifles

With dangerous and fatal breath, where lie
Pale flowers in crystal tombs, exquisite trifles,
Exhaling their last sigh—

A headless corpse, cascading in a flood

Hot, living blood, that soaks, with crimson stain
A pillow slaked and sated as the mud
Of a wet field with rain. (Flowers 73)]

In this painting-with-words exercise, the poet does not retain the light-
hearted clownishness characteristic of the pantomime and the “comique
absolu” previously extolled. Instead, the aesthetic fecundation permitted
by the butcher-like imagery stems from the dark dimension of the gro-
tesque. The sacrificial character of executions often accompanies murder
in the poet’s works through the aggrandizement of slaughter and its after-
math and through the recurring figures of the victim and the executioner.
Joseph De Maistre’s writings loom behind this representation. Baudelaire
explicitly follows in De Maistre’s footsteps through his enigmatic title
“L’Héautontimorouménos,” a self-standing octosyllabic line that the
counterrevolutionary philosopher himself derived from Terence’s com-
edy.3 I will return later to this mysterious title and to the consecration of
both suffering and blood that Baudelaire borrows from the theocrat, after
examining the erasure of distress that appears to characterize Baudelaire’s
aesthetic treatment of bloodshed.

At the Butcher’s: From Spectacle to Experience

The pain and horror that characterize butcher-like executions in
Baudelaire’s verse are rendered paradoxically positive by the aesthetic
84 Ève Morisi

productivity and satisfaction they procure. This apparent tendency to sus-

pend one’s attention to another’s suffering and the historical and political
dimensions of the homicidal gesture in favor of the quality of artistic
creation and an enriched aesthetic4 perception is central to Baudelaire’s
writing after 1851. In Mon Cœur mis à nu, the poet claims not to have
any “convictions, as people of my century understand them” under the
emphatic heading “POLITIQUE” (OC1: 680). He also provocatively
conjoins “cruelty and voluptuousness,” presenting them as identical sen-
sations, “like extreme heat and cold,” and redefines capital punishment as
a noble sacrifice, with much exaltation:

La peine de Mort est le résultat d’une idée mystique, totalement incom-

prise aujourd’hui. La peine de mort n’a pas pour but de sauver la société,
matériellement du moins. Elle a pour but de sauver (spirituellement) la
société et le coupable. Pour que le sacrifice soit parfait, il faut qu’il y ait
assentiment et joie, de la part de la victime. Donner du chloroforme à un
condamné à mort serait une impiété, car ce serait lui enlever la conscience
de sa grandeur comme victime et lui supprimer les chances de gagner le
Paradis. (OC1: 683)
[The death penalty is the result of a mystical idea completely misun-
derstood today. The goal of the death penalty is not to save society, at least
not materially. Its goal is to save society and the guilty (spiritually). For the
sacrifice to be perfect, there must be consent and joy on the part of the vic-
tim. To give chloroform to a man condemned to death would be impious,
for it would take away his awareness of his greatness as a victim and would
put an end to his chances of reaching Paradise.]

The thirst for ferocity and the celebration of violence perceptible in Mon
Cœur mis à nu point to the imagery of bloodshed at play in the poems.
Here, Baudelaire’s persona valorizes the act of killing, “le sacrifice,” and
“la cruauté” on account of their mystical potential. He adopts the posture
of a dandy who ignores compassion in the face of brutality. This position-
ing arguably serves Baudelaire’s spirit of contradiction and provocation:
the dandy’s cold and “Éternelle supériorité” (OC1: 682) is the literary
challenger to “les poètes de combat” (691), such as Victor Hugo—whose
sentimentalist and abolitionist novel Claude Gueux Baudelaire proposes
to counter. By promoting extreme violence and pain through “un joli
feu d’artifice de monstruosités” (“lovely fireworks of monstrosities”), the
poet rejects the utilitarian and didactic nature as well as the sociopolitical
preoccupations of littérature engagée.5
Yet there are limits to this apparent relinquishment of gory execu-
tions in this poetic space, which seems to feature them only to “glorify
 “Poésie-boucherie” 85

the cult of images, [the] great, unique, primitive passion” (OC1: 701).
Upon closer examination, one perceives a profound discomfort in the
face of killing. Edward Kaplan rightly views Baudelaire’s provocative
excesses as a crude and strategic call for ethics (89), or what the poet
himself termed a “terrible moralité.” Several clues testify to the difficul-
ties that undermine his affected posture of detachment vis-à-vis death,
blood, and dismantled flesh. Through moments of interpellation, the
distance and distinction that separate the butcher from his meat—or
their pendants, the executioner and his or her victim—are blurred.
Doubt, irony, and laughter are the main manifestations of this suspen-
sion of clear differentiation.
“L’Héautontimorouménos” features each of these ruptures. In the
composition’s center, which a searing negative interrogation shatters, the
speaker who initially presented himself as a boucher-bourreau declares,

Ne suis-je pas un faux accord

Dans la divine symphonie,
Grâce à la vorace Ironie
Qui me secoue et qui me mord

Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!

C’est tout mon sang ce poison noir!
Je suis le sinistre miroir
Où la mégère se regarde. (1: 78)

[Am I not a jarring note

In the heavenly symphony
Since devouring Irony
Gnaws me, shakes me by the throat?

Hers is the shrillness in my voice;

Through my blood her poisons race.
I am the unholy mirror
Where the shrew can watch her face. (Flowers 97)]

In The Violence of Modernity, Debarati Sanyal has insightfully shown

that the poem reveals a “mise-en-scène for an oscillation that is both
within the self and between selves and others” (34).6 She asserts that,
ultimately, Baudelaire blocks the abolition of the boundaries between
subject and object, or between executioner and victim, by resorting to
“strategies such as intertextuality, irony and interpellation” (36). This
point is debatable, however, for if such strategies are indeed set up in
86 Ève Morisi

the poem, its progression prompts them to abort. The sixth stanza (“Je
suis la plaie”), arguably the most musical and the most noticeable on
account of its flowing syntactic and anaphoric structure, and the last
quatrain together seal a self-enclosed space within which a vertiginous
waltz of identity takes place. In a manner both chaotic and hermetic,
then, the text’s two alterities—the two types of external other (the ini-
tial tu and the “grands abandonnés”) and the double self—fuse in the
all-encompassing image of a tortured, autophagous self. It is sinisterly
prostrated in an irrevocable ironic posture:

Je suis de mon cœur le vampire,

—Un de ces grands abandonnés
Au rire éternel condamnés
Et qui ne peuvent plus sourire! (1: 79)

[I am my own heart’s vampire—

One of the vast abandoned host;
Laughter’s the doom of those we’ve lost
The power to smile forever. (Flowers 98)]

An unexpected interdependence between the “I” and the “you” there-

fore imposes itself surreptitiously in Baudelaire’s verse. It pierces through
many a smoke screen—sadistic-looking aesthetic pleasure, the dis-
tant dandy’s ideal, the stability that the sacrificial dynamic appears to
ensure, or the seeming “undifferentiation” between self and others.
“L’Héautontimorouménos” gradually unveils this involuntary solidarity
in suffering and evil. The poem symbolically opens with a title that signi-
fies “the self-tormenter” (where the “tu” is readily attached to the “je,”
in other words) and closes with the image of ceaseless “laughter,” which
Baudelaire’s 1855 essay defined as a contaminating phenomenon and as
the symptom of the illusory superiority of one subject over another.
Furthermore, the text pivots on its center, in accordance with a
dynamic of reversibility that Baudelaire borrows from the Maistrian
theorization of sacrifice, which he nevertheless subverts. The philoso-
pher prescribed the redemption of the sins of mankind and the guilty by
a “juste” who is put to death.7 Baudelaire proposes a markedly distinct
definition of reversibility: he turns the perpetrator of lethal violence
into its object. The quasi-divine status of the executioner is thereby
undone. In an unsteady configuration, a principle of nonsuperiority of
one being over another and the forced distribution of violence, pain,
and horror prevails. “L’Héautontimorouménos” is not a unique example
of this negative equality. Perhaps less overtly, other pieces in Les Fleurs
 “Poésie-boucherie” 87

du mal reveal the killer’s instability and vulnerability and the impossi-
bility of his absolute alterity vis-à-vis his victim. The speaker-poet who
often incarnates the executioner’s ally at first—be it through his com-
placent stare only—ultimately reveals himself as the potential target of
the killing. In the overall economy of Les Fleurs, this tendency to depict
the violence-prone subject as a final casualty is arguably reinforced, en
filigrane, by a recurring background figure: that of the poet-martyr. One
may give the example of “Bénédiction” (“Benediction”), “L’Albatros”
(“The Albatross”), or “La Fontaine de sang” (“The Fountain of Blood”).
In the latter sonnet, the speaker falls prey to a hemorrhage whose cause
and reality he cannot verify. The world that surrounds him profits from
his abundant bleeding, by which it literally quenches its thirst. From
a symbolic viewpoint, the “I” therefore evokes Christ. The subject’s
sacrifice—both imaginary and eminently real in its materiality—is
beneficial to the insatiable “cité,” which recomposes its geography and
drapes itself with color and exoticism (“îlots” [“islands”]) by vampiriz-
ing its victim. Arguably, in fact, this sanctified figure of the creator who
risks self-loss in dedicating his life to his art looms over Les Fleurs du
mal in its entirety.
This poet figure, caught between cruel intrepidity and relative frailty,
reappears in “À une Madone” and “Une Martyre.” “À une Madone”
recalls the intimate union and the oscillation that conjoin self and other
from the first line of “L’Héautontimorouménos” onward. The poem is
constructed around a specular ballet. The desired woman’s clothes—that
is to say her second skin—originate from an unexpected fabric: the speak-
er’s inner self. Through an original and metaphorical spatial configuration
(“au fond de ma détresse,” “dans le coin le plus noir de mon cœur,” “dans
ma Jalousie”; [an altar “of my misery,” “Out of my heart’s remote and
midnight pitch,” “made of Jealousy”]), the poet merges the body of the
idolized woman with the tormented man’s affectivity and figurative body.
The tyrannical “je” refuses to live alone in his suffering and therefore
mates with8 a “toi” he eventually kills with furor.
Do the seven knives planted into the idol’s heart toll the knell for the
assassinated lady or for the suicidal lover, however? For both, it would
seem. In the human anatomy that Baudelaire here recasts so that two indi-
viduals are interwoven in it, the other’s blood and death are engraved, so
to speak, in the speaking subject. Similar to “L’Héautontimorouménos,”
of which this poem may be said to provide a bisubjective version—that is
one that does not rely on a single, alienated self—“À une Madone” is engi-
neered by an incessant pronominal alternation, reinforced by two criss-
cross alliterative networks: the first centers on the plosive (t), reminiscent
88 Ève Morisi

of the aggressed “toi” and its cognates; the second on the softer phoneme
(m) and its derivatives, which echo the “moi.” The copresence of the two
symbolizes their failed opposition:

Je veux bâtir pour toi, Madone, ma maîtresse,

Un autel souterrain au fond de ma détresse,
Et creuser dans le coin le plus noir de mon cœur,
Loin du désir mondain et du regard moqueur,
Une niche, d’azur et d’or tout émaillée,
Où tu te dresseras, Statue émerveillée. (1: 58, my emphasis)

[Madonna, mistress, I shall build for you

An altar of my misery, and hew
Out of my heart’s remote and midnight pitch,
Far from all worldly lusts and sneers, a niche
Enamelled totally in gold and blue
Where I shall set you up, and worship you. (Flowers 73)]

A similar dynamic pervades “Une Martyre.” The speaker’s seemingly

free stare dominates the text and imposes a rhythm on it by identifying
meticulously the components of a crime scene. Yet the detachment, if
not the superiority, of the voyeur over the “cadavre sans tête” he discov-
ers ultimately proves illusory. While he does have the capacity to con-
template and recompose freely the bloody scene, thereby controlling it
from an empirical and an intellectual standpoint, the victim, in turn,
magnetizes him.
In sum, the other’s pain becomes one’s own, homicide turns into sui-
cide, and the desire to preserve or merge with the departed imposes itself
in Baudelaire’s execution-centered verse. While the spectacle of slaughter
may seem to be grasped from the outside, this exteriority is not durable.9
The plots of numerous poems in which killing and torn flesh are at issue
ultimately place the executioner in the position, if not in the skin, of
the victim; or they symbolically assimilate the beholder to the execu-
tioner, who, soon enough, may well morph into a victim. The massacres
staged in Les Fleurs du mal frequently conceal conjoined twins, in other
words. They point to an identity crisis or to the painful—and sometimes
monstrous—connection of two beings who struggle to be distinct from
each other.
 “Poésie-boucherie” 89

Baudelaire, Self-Critic
We have seen that the inflection of Joseph De Maistre’s concept of revers-
ibility and the symbiotic configuration that underlie graphic Baudelairean
violence call for a reconsideration of the sacrificial dynamic that some-
times appears to dominate these bloody poems. A question here arises: of
what nature is, then, the violence at play in these compositions?
As noted earlier, Baudelaire’s poetic violence is governed by a principle
of embedding or magnetism that conjoins the “je” and the “tu” (victim
and executioner, or flesh and butcher). Moreover, the two processes of
contagion and equalization it reveals are reinforced by the removal of the
reader’s privileged status, whose enjoyment of an adjustable or protective
distance vis-à-vis the performance of violence is short-lived and quickly
morphs into a “malaise.” These two facts lead me to name the bloody
violence at play in Les Fleurs du mal a “violence essentielle,” to borrow
the concept proposed by René Girard (49). In the analyses of Joseph De
Maistre and Girard, when sacrifice functions properly, it creates harmony
and secures the community’s peaceful union from the religious and socio-
political viewpoints. As Pierre Glaudes astutely puts it, for De Maistre,
sacrifice “offers an opportunity for the imaginary adhesion to a sacral-
ized order” (De Maistre 794; my translation). For Girard, it conditions
a sociopolitical stabilization in allowing human communities to evacuate
the latent violence that pervades them. Yet when this evacuation fails,
Girard notes, a total violence is born of an infinite contagion, of a “cata-
clysmic escalation” (50). This results in what the critic names a sacrificial
crisis. I would argue that, in addition to the exercise of violence of gar-
gantuan proportions, the graphic imaginary of killing that conjoins the
bourreau-boucher and the victim in Baudelaire’s poems reveals this failure
of the regulatory and orderly functioning of sacrifice. “La boucherie” is,
to some extent, the other name of the sacrificial crisis. Girard notes that
the smooth functioning of sacrifice requires a delicate contiguity between
the immolated victim and the human beings for whom it is substituted:
“The correct functioning of sacrifice demands . . . underlying the absolute
rupture, an appearance of continuity between the victim who is actu-
ally sacrificed and the human beings for whom this victim is substituted.
One can only satisfy these two demands at once through a contigu-
ity that relies on a necessarily delicate balance” (63). Baudelaire has an
explicit or symbolic interchangeability of the actors of violence replace
this delicate contiguity. Moreover, the poet radicalizes the disorder of the
modern sacrifice in featuring human victims—be they dehumanized—
contrary to what De Maistre had envisaged. Baudelaire further disrupts
this institution in failing to represent a category of actors who do not
90 Ève Morisi

partake in it, one way or another.10 Even inanimate objects somehow

morph into dynamic perpetrators or recipients of extreme violence: in
“L’Héautontimorouménos,” the speaker mixes, and thereby levels out,
not only the actors of violence but also the tools that carry it out (the
knife, the wheel), the act that incarnates it (the slap), and the aftermath it
produces (the wound). Within this almost absurd equalization in which
patient and agent, cause and consequence are undifferentiated, a loss of
meaning looms.
The implosion of order and coherence reemerges in other poèmes-
boucherie. As noted earlier, they are frequently based on an incongru-
ous reconfiguration of spaces and beings—imbricated bodies, divided
psyches, dispersed limbs, enlarged fragments. With their imposing mate-
riality, these dismemberments tend to confirm the collapse of the regula-
tory potential of violence in favor of its exponential proliferation.
The poet and poem do expose this abysmal spectacle, however. Thus
what I previously named the involuntary solidarity that characterizes the
infernal cycle of reflexive violence in Baudelaire’s writing knows a limit.
The nondetachment of the speaker-poet toward the “you” stops where he
extracts himself from the cycle of violence to lay this experience on paper.
Many poems signal, in remarkable self-referential moments, an exploita-
tion of violence.
In several notable occurrences, the writer indicates that the flesh and
blood displayed generate a poetic profit. In “Une Martyre,” the severed
head found on a nightstand is described as a “renoncule” (“buttercup”); “a
poetic fleur du mal,” in other words, as Debarati Sanyal has shown (107).
This poetic gain permitted by slaughter is not isolated. It resurfaces in “À
une Madone,” which explicitly features the process of poetic creation. In
this instance, the speaker’s “Vers polis” (“polished Verses”) operate as the
accomplice and sophisticated tool of the massacre. They contribute to
the monumentalization of the icon that, erected in abjection, makes the
poem: “Avec mes Vers polis, treillis d’un pur métal / Savamment constellé
de rimes de cristal / Je ferai pour ta tête une énorme Couronne” (1: 58;
And of my verse, like hammered silver lace / Studded with amethysts of
rhyme, I’ll place / A hand-wrought crown upon your head. [Flowers 73–
74]). What the speaker-poet later designates as his “art diligent” consists
of an accumulation of personifications. They aggregate metaphorically
to adorn the Madonna (“ma Jalousie . . . un Manteau” [“my Jealousy . . .
a Cloak”], “Ta Robe, ce sera mon Désir” [“Your Dress, it will be my
Desire”], “mon Respect de beaux Souliers” [“my Respect, beautiful Slip-
pers”]) and are produced by a single gesture: the “taill[e]” (lines 11 and
24), meaning “cutting” or “chiseling,” two gestures specific to both the
butcher and the sculptor (to the artist).
 “Poésie-boucherie” 91

Similarly, I would argue that in “L’Héautontimorouménos” the vio-

lence done to the body produces one of the key imagistic networks in
Les Fleurs du mal: that of marine flight. Its opening stanzas, discussed
earlier, underscore the brutal (prospective) act of striking an eyelid
repeatedly:

Et je ferai de ta paupière,

Pour abreuver mon Sahara

Jaillir les eaux de la souffrance.
Mon désir gonflé d’espérance
Sur tes pleurs salés nagera
Comme un vaisseau qui prend le large. (1: 78)

[I shall make your tears assuage

My drought, my desert in their tide.

You shall weep for my relief,
And on the salt waves of your grief
My longings swollen with hope shall ride. (Flowers 97)]

Here, the practice of massacre and dismantlement finds its formal echo
in the enjambment and the stanzaic rupture that follows “paupière,” as
well as in the inverted structure “Et je ferai de ta paupière, / . . . Jaillir les
eaux de la souffrance” and the early insertion of the purpose clause “Pour
abreuver mon Sahara.” Baudelaire actualizes the process of dislocation
at all levels, and, not incidentally, the result of this violence is “vaisseau
qui prend le large.” Symbolically enough, the fruitful Baudelairean para-
digms of the sea and maritime voyage, explicitly associated with poetic-
aesthetic ideality in the writer’s prose, demand that one pay the high price
of homicide-suicide.11
One could argue that this linkage of killing and art is a topos present
elsewhere in nineteenth-century literature. After all, art that costs one’s
life constitutes one of its commonplace themes, as testified by Balzac’s
“Le Chef d’Oeuvre inconnu” (“The Unknown Masterpiece”), Poe’s “The
Oval Portrait,” and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. But Baudelaire
radicalizes this narrative, not only by deploying an exacerbated color-
ist aesthetic and the revelation of the essential nature of violence, but
perhaps also by pointing to the similarities between the author and the
butcher as commerçant.
The question of commerce is indeed raised by the poems under con-
sideration. They point to a constant play of production, profit, and
92 Ève Morisi

circulation of objects (material or not) founded on blood and flesh.

Baudelaire makes the violence of the sacrificial crisis produce his allegories
and metaphors.12 From this contagious violence, he draws the devices
that define the poetic genre but also a poetic substance, since alienation,
the voyage, or the escape constitute the heart of Les Fleurs du mal. The
book’s five (then six) sections exhaust various modes of evasion in the face
of l’ennui, sin, and the world’s weightiness. Furthermore, the flamboy-
ant aesthetics of violence that typifies the poems channels the reader’s
fascinated attention. Baudelaire thereby establishes an exchange that also
characterizes commerce. From a symbolic standpoint, the poet, retailer of
flesh, earns a living by displaying human meat and blood. This is remi-
niscent of the writer-as-épicier to whom Baudelaire points in his Salon de
1846. This publication

already provides an impressive example of Baudelaire’s equally original

and refined ways of dealing with the art- -and socio-political discourses
of his time. In the introductory dedication to the bourgeois, he pretends
to defend the modern bourgeois above all from the educated classes and
the artists who despise them . . . , and to stand up for a union of modern
art and the new ruling classes. Anyone, however, who has an ear for ironic
implications and undertones will not fail to notice that the author of this
dedication is merely seeking a new, up-to-date form of an address to the
bourgeoisie to replace the hackneyed insults leveled at the ‘capitalist’, the
‘grocer’, the ‘philistine’, an address to the reader that invites the latter to
enter into the reading as if into the entrance of the shop where the wares of
art can be brought to the client. (Oehler 15; my emphasis)

The author’s awareness of and implicit concern for his era’s rampant mate-
rialism and prosaism resurface in the poems, in which he covertly inscribes
himself within the socioprofessional category he despises. Arguably, the
first sense of boucher, a worker who kills, carves up, and sells his meat,
finds itself annexed by the figurative meaning of the term in Les Fleurs du
mal. Yet its literal sense appears to reemerge symbolically, both through the
notable materiality that the poems highlight and through the writer’s own
display of his exploitation of lethal violence. With this self-denunciation,
Baudelaire’s “critique d’art” adds a new stratum to the violence he repre-
sents. While it is more visible in violated or dismembered bodies, it also
pervades a surreptitious mercantile dynamic that affects poetry itself. By
sporadically unveiling the latter form of violence, the writer ratifies the
failure of sacred violence already perceptible in his subversion of sacrifice
and in his instauration of an essential violence. He affirms the secular
nature of this violence-boucherie whose sacrificial appearance heralded
 “Poésie-boucherie” 93

mysticism. The ultimate violence is that which is done to mystical vio-

lence itself. Although the classical and the Christian mythology present in
“Le Tonneau de la haine,” “L’Héautontimorouménos,” “À une Madone,”
or “Une Martyre” seem to aspire to a sanctification of bloodshed, the
brutality staged by Baudelaire fails to be validated by some transcendent
order.

Conclusion
While many of Baudelaire’s graphic poems feature a persona supposedly
indifferent to others’ agony, and while he transforms the death penalty
into a sacrificial act to be celebrated in Mon Coeur mis à nu and in his
prose projects, the depths of Les Fleurs du mal show that bloodshed and
the imaginaire of execution are entities that can be neither related nor
exalted without difficulty. Indisputably, gory killing and dead bodies
constitute a reservoir of powerful images that enables Baudelaire’s poetry
to rival other modes of representation, dramatic and visual. This bloody
imaginaire, however, is not solely a privileged point of access to “la beauté
dans le mal” and to artistic ideality. Baudelaire also turns it into an ethical
site. The coldhearted figure of the dandy-artist, the “insensible jongleur,”
appears not so coldhearted in many of the poems under consideration.
Paradoxically enough, what looms behind the garishness of the scenes
is an impossible distancing from killing. Indeed, Baudelaire proposes
configurations of lethal violence in which the other always points to the
self—the self of the speaker-poet or of the reader. Thus his texts institute
a painful solidarity between subjects that one thought to be distinct, if
not at odds with one another. The sacrificial appearances of Les Fleurs du
mal should therefore be relativized. Baudelaire’s violence is contagious. It
is not a source of stability. It does not refer to the efficient functioning of
sacrifice but to its dérapage. Even when the poet seems to extricate himself
from a ubiquitous essential violence by laying out a space from which he
can signal that he is exploiting it, he reinforces the failure of the sacrificial
dynamic: far from generating salvation or appeasement, the violence of
his poetic slaughters remains terribly worldly, relying heavily on material-
ity and the absence of purification. The examination of bloodshed thus
reveals, first, Les Fleurs du mal’s interpenetration of aesthetics and ethics
and, second, the prosaic nature of a lethal violence that struggles to deliver
its promised mysticism. Ultimately, this poésie-boucherie may well be the
versified realization of an anthropological project briefly mentioned in
Mon Cœur mis à nu: the fascinated and worried investigation of the “goût
de la destruction” (OC1: 679; “taste for destruction”), which Baudelaire
94 Ève Morisi

deemed to be shared by all. This exploration of “l’indestructible, éter-

nelle, universelle et ingénieuse férocité humaine” (OC1: 693; “man’s inde-
structible, eternal, universal, and ingenious ferocity”) makes visible both
the poetic dimension of ethics and the ethical dimension of language, as
Baudelaire conjoins more spectacularly than any other modern poet the
examination of the deadly practice of execution and artistic execution.

Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Eds. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews. New
York: New Directions, 1989.
———. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76.
“Boucherie.” Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. Ed. Pierre Larousse. 17 vols.
Paris: Administration du grand dictionnaire universel, 1866.
De Maistre, Joseph. Œuvres. Ed. Pierre Glaudes. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007.
Girard, René. La Violence et le sacré. Paris: Hachette, 2006.
Guyaux, André, ed. Baudelaire. Un demi-siècle de lectures des Fleurs du mal (1855–
1905). Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007.
Kaplan, Edward. “Baudelairean Ethics.” The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire. Ed.
Rosemary Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 87–100.
Oehler, Dolf. “Baudelaire’s Politics.” The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire. Ed.
Rosemary Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 14–30.
Pachet, Pierre. “Baudelaire et le sacrifice.” Poétique: Revue de Théorie et d’Analyse lit-
téraires 20 (1974): 437–51.
Sanyal, Debarati. The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form.
Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2006.

Notes
1. All citations of Baudelaire’s poetry and prose are taken from the 1975 Pléiade
edition of his complete works. The translations of his poems are from The Flow-
ers of Evil edited by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews. All other translations are
my own.
2. Baudelaire himself notes that the “distinctive sign” of the “comique absolu” is
violence (538).
3. In Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, De Maistre writes that “tout méchant est un
HÉAUTONTIMOROUMÉNOS” [“every wicked man is a HEAUTONTI-
MORUMENOS”] (539).
4. In the etymological sense of “which pertains to sensation.”
5. In “Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages,” Baudelaire also incriminates “the
great poetic heresy of modern times. This heresy is the idea of direct utility” (OC2:
263).
6. In “Les Foules,” Baudelaire writes, “Le poète jouit de cet incomparable priv-
ilège, qu’il peut être à sa guise lui-même et autrui” (1: 291; “The poet enjoys
 “Poésie-boucherie” 95

this incomparable privilege, that he can as he wishes be himself and another”).

In this context of lethal violence, such a privilege seems to turn into a curse.
7. “Le juste, en souffrant volontairement, ne satisfait pas seulement pour lui, mais
pour le coupable par voie de réversibilité” (De Maistre 693; “The just man, by
suffering voluntarily, satisfies not only for himself but also for the guilty man by
means of reversibility”). The concept of reversibility is central to De Maistre’s
reflection, since it enables him to answer a crucial question regarding divine
justice: why do innocent people suffer?
8. Literally, since the imagery of sexual consummation runs through the text: “Ta
Robe, ce sera mon Désir, frémissant, / Onduleux, mon Désir qui monte et qui
descend, / Aux pointes se balance, aux vallons se repose, / Et revêt d’un baiser
tout ton corps blanc et rose. (1: 58; “As for the intimate part of your attire, /
Your dress shall be composed of my desire, / Rising and falling, swirling from
your knees / To your round hills and deep declivities” [Flowers 74]).
9. Similarly, Pierre Pachet highlights the indistinction that characterizes focaliza-
tion and subjectivity in Spleen de Paris: “a soul and a conscience are expressed
there, but in such indeterminate conditions that any situatable individuality,
even if it be the paradigm and mirror of all others, faints away there” (446).
10. “Violence . . . unleashes itself on beings that sacrifice should have preserved,”
says Girard about the sacrificial crisis (66).
11. “Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely and eternally pleasant? Because
the sea offers at one and the same time immensity and movement. Six or seven
leagues represent for man the ray of eternity. There we have a diminutive infin-
ity. What does it matter if it suffices to suggest the idea of total infinity? Twelve
or fourteen leagues (on the diameter), twelve or fourteen leagues of liquid in
movement suffice to give the highest idea of beauty that is offered to man in his
transitory binnacle” (OC1: 696).
12. As noted previously for “L’Héautontimorouménos.” Regarding “Une Martyre,”
Debarati Sanyal rightly has shown that Baudelaire “displays a female body that
has been produced through the interwoven violence of allegorization, prostitu-
tion, commodity production, and textual—as well as visual—consumption”
(112).
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CHAPTER 6

Absolutely Absolute
Mallarmé, Blanchot, and the
Absence de livre

John McKeane

What do the words “thinking poetry,” as Heidegger might have put

it, “say?” Two things: on the one hand, that at key moments philosophy
can be found thinking the assumptions and stakes of poetic language,
and on the other, that poetry itself, in a way reaching beyond the confines
of ordered philosophical enquiry, might itself think. In order to assess
how these two propositions relate to one another, we shall look at the
(philosophical) reading of nineteenth-century (philosophical) poetry,
and particularly Mallarmé, by Maurice Blanchot.1 In other words, we
shall explore the response provoked by this poet’s thinking of an initiative
ceded to words and a writing that is already exposed to a (philosophical)
outside, which Blanchot calls “±± Poetry: dispersion that, as such, finds
its form.” (Infinite 360).2 Elsewhere in his work, we read that “[t]o write
in ignorance of the philosophical horizon—or refusing to acknowledge
the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words
that mark this horizon—is necessarily to write with facile complacency
(the literature of elegance and good taste). Hölderlin, Mallarmé, so many
others, do not permit this” (Disaster 103). It is noteworthy that two poets
(and not Heidegger, whom he has just been discussing) represent this
philosophical demand, and we shall explore how the second of these
poets in particular plays a crucial role as Blanchot elaborates what he
calls “l’absence de livre.”3 I contend that the asymmetrical relationship
between presence and absence proposed by l’absence de livre involves an
alteration rather than a simple application of philosophy and that this can
98 John McKeane

be tracked in Blanchot’s move away from the critical essay and toward
fragmentary writing. This move has implications in several domains: the
literary text is thought of otherwise than as locked inside itself by a pure
self-reflexivity, and in the moments when Blanchot intervenes politically
in the period 1958–68, the political is brought toward an uncertain space,
beyond its usual boundaries.
Before coming to Mallarmé, it will have been noted that the preced-
ing quotation couples him not only with Hölderlin—whom we shall not
discuss for lack of space—but also with “so many others.” In this gesture
we can see that, in the very act of yoking together two canonical reference
points, Blanchot is concerned to retain space for the unnamed and the
multiple (which is of course not the same as rejecting canonicity out-
right, in a logic to which we shall return).4 This retention perhaps has in
mind Blanchot’s work on another presence in nineteenth-century French
poetry, a presence consisting in two parts: the positive idealist Poems by
Isidore Ducasse, and the ultraviolent Chants of Maldoror written under
Ducasse’s pseudonym, “le Comte de Lautréamont.” It seems possible to
signal this presence without wholly filling in the space created by the “so
many others” gesture insofar as, for Blanchot, the work of Lautréamont/
Ducasse is significant precisely because from the onset it takes place in an
indirect relation to the name, and on a further level because the notions
of metamorphosis, collectivity, and plagiarism discussed in this work
undermine the claim of authorial substantiality. This author is therefore
already “so many others,” and Blanchot’s reading accordingly provides a
mode of response to multiplicity, to ever-differing otherness: rather than
being a self-identical absence, it is presented as what he calls “l’œuvre de
l’absence d’œuvre” (Infinite 353; “the work of the absence of [the] work”).
But this is not the limit of Lautréamont’s (let us use this name, bearing in
mind the above, as the Chants of Maldoror dominate Blanchot’s approach)
importance for our current purposes of determining on the one hand
how far for Blanchot nineteenth-century poetry was already exposed to its
philosophical other, and on the other what the precise mode of Blanchot’s
own readings of this poetry might be, whether of a critical, philosophical,
or less determinate genre. Before we begin to look at Blanchot’s reading
of Mallarmé leading up to and in The Infinite Conversation’s closing text,
“L’Absence de livre” (1969), let us therefore briefly take into account the
work Lautréamont and Sade.
With 1963’s adapted edition of this work, Blanchot reassesses his place
within the tradition of literary criticism:5 he was involved in the project
of establishing an “International Review” that aimed to be both Marxist
and fragmentary and was soon to abandon his regular chronicle in the
 Absolutely Absolute 99

Nouvelle Revue Française.6 In the essay “How Do Things Stand with Criti-
cism?” (trans. altered), which prefaces the second edition of Lautréamont
and Sade, we can read that “[c]ritical discourse has this peculiar character-
istic: the more it exerts, develops, and establishes itself, the more it must
obliterate itself; in the end it disintegrates” (Lautréamont 2). Here we can
see that a reassessment of criticism that would eventually constitute a
break comes about by a radicalization of a logic already contained within
this genre. This logic, of course, is one of secondariness, the effacement
of the writing self before the other, and the duality that forms the root
of both criticism and crisis. The difficulty that arises from this point is
that of finding an alternative mode of writing that avoids declaring its
own legitimacy as an alternative, which would be to undo the careful
impersonality and secondariness of criticism. In other arenas in the same
period, Blanchot’s notion of neutral writing will come into play at this
point; in the reediting of the work on Lautréamont a different strategy
emerges, consisting in underlining certain passages even while the propo-
sitions they contain are unaltered. This takes place notably where the text
discusses Lautréamont’s sarcasm, mockery, and irony.7 In one instance
of several, the underlining is added here: “[Sarcastic power is] an eternal
laughter, which turns all things on their head, even itself, an overturning
so extensive and pushed to such a point of instability that, through it, all
frameworks are exceeded, even the transcendent framework that is God.
Irony, the entirety of Maldoror testifies, is the very experience of the meta-
morphosis sought at the heart of language, lucidity attempting to lose itself
in order to seize itself ” (Lautréamont 145, original emphasis, translation
altered). The underlining here, then, represents not simply otherness, but
otherness in the same, the silent consequence, excrescence or accretion,
of the “metamorphosis sought at the heart of language” that is discussed
propositionally.
However, in case we understand from this that Blanchot’s reassess-
ment of criticism is limited to a gentle crumbling of the edifice, let us see
how another element is added by the motif of fragmentation, separation,
or fission. In the new edition of Lautréamont and Sade the long section
on Lautréamont is broken up into short sections of between one and
eight pages in length, to which titles are given, thus prizing the sections
or fragments further away from one another. The most striking title is
the first, “The Demand for Separation” (Lautréamont 43). This seems
to pull in the same direction as the neutral, ironizing underlinings seen
above; however, the motif of fragmentation is useful because it allows us
to recall that the position adopted in 1949 is maintained: “[T]he critic, as
an approximation of his name would have it—to criticize is to separate, to
100 John McKeane

disjoin—is a destroyer. He necessarily separates the work” (Lautréamont

45). In other words, the critic’s radicalization of his or her own logic, the
fragmentation of her own position, should not lead her to abandon a
demanding interrogation of events as they present themselves: the capac-
ity for responsibility must be retained even as suspension is explored. This
is where Blanchot’s conception of a double language comes into force: it
sketches out a complex, self-suspensive movement while remaining able
to accomplish the work of totalization in cases where the only alternative
would be privilege and particularism. The stakes of such a double lan-
guage, and the complexity of its conception, are such that we must now
turn away from the notable role of Lautréamont in Blanchot’s writing, to
see how this language is explored via the fundamental place reserved for
Mallarmé.
Mallarmé has been shown to be crucial for a major early stage of
Blanchot’s literary criticism, in the 1940s, and this is also the case as this
mode of writing gives way to fragmentary reflections.8 Yet it is far from
clear precisely when this shift takes place, and indeed whether it ever
does entirely—for instance, The Book to Come, which chooses the fig-
ure of Ulysses to allegorize itself (he who takes pleasure in exposure to
the alluring other while avoiding [Mallarméan] shipwreck), might seem a
straightforwardly critical collection, were it not for its unusual attention
to chance and futurity, dissipation and rupture, mobility and acceleration.
What we can say is that Blanchot’s progressive but uncertain adoption of
fragmentary writing cannot be fully understood without reference to his
discussion of Mallarmé’s Book in The Book to Come and of the subsequent
notion of “l’absence de livre,” which for a time provided the working title
of The Infinite Conversation and is discussed by that work’s culminating
text, “L’Absence de livre.”9 In the earlier work, Blanchot presents Mal-
larmé as offering a model of impersonality and anonymity, of an abdica-
tion of the self that opens to the other by way of a tension between self
and other, rather than by any essential, thoroughgoing otherness, which
would—paradoxically enough—itself be closed to any other other.10 In
the essay “Ecce liber” (to which the subtitle “Behold the Book” is added
in the English translation), this debate is linked to the question of the
Mallarméan Book in the wake of Jacques Scherer’s Le “Livre” de Mallarmé:
Premières recherches sur des documents inédits (Mallarmé’s “Book”: Initial
Research on Unpublished Documents). Blanchot takes issue with Scherer’s
assertion that the Book was a real project intended to succeed, and indeed
from the title “ecce liber” on, he attacks Scherer’s presentation of what
some might see as “insignificant slips of paper” (Book to Come 231, trans.
altered) as the mythical Book. Blanchot’s own position is that the Book is a
 Absolutely Absolute 101

category expressly designed to be unpresentable, to exist only in the mode

of alterity and futurity, “identified with the announcement and expecta-
tion of the work it is, without any other content than the presence of its
infinitely problematic future” (Book to Come 234).11
It seems clear that, by invoking the austere, withdrawn authority of
Mallarmé’s Book, Blanchot is seeking to short-circuit any facile cham-
pioning of a new, fragmentary mode of writing—for instance the now-
familiar claims of nonlinearity and noncontinuity. This aesthetic claim
finds its counterpart in the political realm when Blanchot seeks to dis-
engage himself from any institutional leftist discourse, writing that “[h]
umanism is a theological myth.” (Infinite 248) Bearing these warnings in
mind, we can note these invocations of the Book nevertheless take place
in the context of a political radicalization in his thought after De Gaulle’s
return to power in 1958 and the “Declaration on the Right to Insubordi-
nation in the Algerian War” in 1960 (a year in which a swathe of coun-
tries won their independence from France), which he was instrumental in
drafting. Thus following the erection of the Berlin wall, he writes, “The
problem of division—of fracture—as Berlin poses it . . . is a problem that
one can only formulate adequately, in its complete reality, by deciding
to formulate it in a fragmentary way (which does not mean in a partial
way). In other words, every time we evoke a problem of this kind . . . we
should remind ourselves that to speak about it fittingly means speaking
of it while letting our sudden lack of words and thought speak” (Political
Writings 73–74, original emphasis). In brief, Blanchot is searching for a
mode of writing that at once retains the complexity of Mallarméan with-
drawal and suspension and is flexible enough to recalibrate itself in order
to allow the irruption or penetration of contemporary events (he also
writes on Yuri Gagarin’s spacewalk and the Cuban missile crisis and later
responds to May 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King). But
these two demands, that of today and that of tomorrow, are not simply
posed beside one another inertly or statically: instead, they form a com-
plex, hybrid unity, and this conjunction is what is most compelling about
Blanchot’s work in this period. It is expressed on numerous occasions,
just one of which is this: “It is as if we always had to think—speak—the
world twice, first in view of unity and in relation to the advent of totality,
and a second time by affirming difference and the demand for discon-
tinuity.”12 This mode of conjunction is a crucial factor in the change in
Blanchot’s writing, as it adopts fragmentary and at times dialogic form:
it is in one of these dialogues or entretiens that we read, “[T]hese two
experiences of speech, these two movements that must be maintained
together—one being the work of equalization . . . , the other being what
102 John McKeane

in advance excludes itself from this equal truth” (Infinite 64). For our cur-
rent purposes, let it suffice to say that the mode of writing toward which
Blanchot is moving, drawing on Mallarmé’s Book and later developing
its “absence de livre” in close proximity to the poet, strives to respond
to both demands more than it does to respond to either, in and of itself.
Having looked at the ways in which Blanchot’s reading of Lautréamont
seeks to leave the genre of criticism and how a key part of this process is
(dis)embodied by the writing on Mallarmé in The Book to Come, not to
mention how along the way the notion of a self-enclosed poetic or literary
genre is corroded by Blanchot’s thinking, let us now turn to “L’Absence de
livre.”13 Early on in the article, Novalis’s conception of the absolute art-
work is mentioned; this refers back to Blanchot’s article on Jena roman-
ticism, “The Athenæum,” where he argues that that group’s project of
bringing together heterogeneous fields (literature, philosophy, politics,
life itself ) broaches the question of totality, but in the act of doing so also
opens onto something more fragmentary. He writes that “this becoming
self-conscious that renders literature manifest . . . leads literature to lay
claim not only to the sky, the earth, to the past, the future, to physics
and philosophy—this would be little—but to everything, to the ‘whole’
that ‘acts in every instant and every phenomenon’ (Novalis). Yes, every-
thing. But let’s read carefully: not every instant as it occurs, nor every
phenomenon as it is produced, only the whole that acts mysteriously and
invisibly in everything” (Infinite 355, trans. altered). A similar logic is at
work in “L’Absence de livre” and the reading toward which it moves after
mentioning Novalis, which brings together Hegel and Mallarmé in a curi-
ous embrace. Blanchot draws out from the interaction of the two a dual
model of language that is both total and fragmentary, two aspects that
rely closely on one another. In other words, on the one hand he implies
the exposure to philosophy of Mallarmé, here playing the role of a high
representative of poetry (this exposure is also that of the article itself,
whose fragments are also compressed essays). On the other, the argument
is that philosophical totalization (and also the political one, as we should
not forget Hegel’s importance for Marxist thought) in fact opens onto a
withdrawal, provoking the question “[w]hat would the question of every-
thing signify, then, if not the affirmation that in the whole [tout] the par-
ticularity of everything [tout] is still latent?” (Infinite 12). In other words,
when the idea of the absolute or total work is pursued rigorously, such
pressure is placed upon it that it begins to fragment, to become dissolved
and absolved. As we saw in the passage already quoted, “the whole . . .
acts mysteriously and invisibly.” For Blanchot, this sense is present in the
term absolute: remarking on his own use of it in a discussion of Kafka, he
 Absolutely Absolute 103

writes, “[T]he word absolute is apposite here, as it means separated, as if

separation, when understood rigorously, could tip over into the absolutely
separated, the absolutely absolute” (L’Espace littéraire 92–93).14 My title’s
reiteration of these final words suggests that Blanchot’s aim in the texts
under examination is to open onto an absolute that is ab-solved or with-
drawn from itself, which is to say, can only be said by deferral, repetition,
or fugue, by what is added to—or removed from—the absolute by the
expression “absolutely absolute.”
The wide-ranging nature of “L’Absence de livre,” divided into 19
numbered fragments, is remarkable: the varying discourses that can be
grouped together as belonging to what he calls the Book include theology,
the continuity of time, the overarching concept of law, representational-
ism (“the presence of a content or a signified,” Infinite 423), and even
textual self-reflexivity (“the development of a system of relations that is
always already there, if only as a possibility to come,” Infinite 423). Blan-
chot’s text is also broad enough to accommodate multifarious contesta-
tory notions: thus the category of l’absence de livre speaks to an écriture
that can be linked to that of Derrida and others in the 1960s–1970s, ano-
nymity (which his political texts of 1958–68 had practiced), an “exterior-
ity” that will also feature strongly in the language of Foucault and Levinas,
and madness understood as something escaping medical objectification. I
signal the heterogeneity of Blanchot’s text in this way in order to establish
some context for my insistence on the terms livre and absence de livre but
also to underline the risk that hasty readings of Blanchot might under-
stand the second set of terms simply as modes of opposition to the first, if
the complex interaction of these two groupings is not explored. In truth,
this asymmetry is already apparent in the notion of l’absence de livre,
which is not a purely negative phenomenon, a neatly symmetrical partner
of the livre—as the distinction from l’absence du livre shows (ruling out
“absence of the book” as a translation). Hill remarks of the formulation,
“As with the expression ‘absence d’œuvre,’ the syntax adopted for ‘absence
de livre’ is not without some significance. For by depriving the book of
any grammatical article, definite or indefinite, the phrase refers to the idea
of the book as in effect always already under erasure; Blanchot’s writing
thereby endows the word absence with dynamic qualities that change it
from a substantive into something more nearly resembling a verb form.”
(Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 184–85).15 Such dynamism or motility
will be important as we consider the movement of deferral and mutual
implication between livre and absence de livre but also in terms of how
l’absence de livre differs from any fixed instance of itself.
104 John McKeane

In order to reach such a point, we need to examine the relation

between Mallarmé,16 the dominant figure in this essay, and Hegel, who
is also present at numerous points; this will allow us to understand the
essay’s strange admixture of other references.17 The first mention of the
two comes via a description of the livre at the highest point it can reach
while remaining within the circumscriptions of knowledge and culture:
“The book is the a priori of knowledge. We would know nothing if there
did not always exist in advance the impersonal memory of the book . . .
The absolute of the book, then, isolates a possibility that claims to be
without origin. This absolute that will later tend to be affirmed with the
romantics (Novalis), then more rigorously with Hegel, then still more
radically, though in a different way, with Mallarmé, as the totality of rela-
tions (absolute knowledge, or the Work)” (Infinite 423, trans. altered).
Over the course of the following fragments the relation of the livre and
the absence de livre is explored in depth. A distinction drawn between “a
book of knowledge” (Infinite 424) and the artistic “œuvre” tells us that
the latter is “already outside the book process: as though the work . . .
were oscillating, suspended between itself (the totality of language) and
an affirmation that has not yet come about.” (Infinite 425) If Blanchot
appears to be privileging the literary here, it is on the strict condition that
any notion of a self-present literary genre be suspended, and a relation
to the futural elaborated in its place. This is the sense in which an asym-
metrical relation between the livre and the absence de livre is established,
opening onto the repetitions and recalibrations of fragmentary writing,
its doubling without doubling back.
The mode of relation suggested by l’absence de livre can be clearly seen
in three instances, which we can take to represent the kernel of this essay.
The first is an expression that is crucial if we are to understand that the
change in Blanchot’s writing of this period was not a privileging of the
political at the expense of literary experimentation, or vice versa, but
rather an extension of both, taking us beyond any zero-sum calculation:

The more the Work takes meaning and acquires ambition, retaining in
itself not only all works, but also all the forms and all the powers of dis-
course, the more the absence of the work seems about to be thrust forward,
without, however, letting itself be designated. This occurs with Mallarmé.
With Mallarmé the Work becomes aware of itself and thereby seizes itself
as that which coincides with the absence of the work; meaning that the lat-
ter then deflects it from ever coinciding with itself and therefore consigns
it to impossibility. This is a movement of detour whereby the work disap-
pears into the absence of the work, but where the absence of the work also
increasingly escapes by reducing itself to being no more than the Work
which has always already disappeared. (Infinite 423–24, trans. altered)
 Absolutely Absolute 105

Thus while the experimental or suspensive sense of this absence (whether

of livre or œuvre) can only come into play after presence has been given
its due (after the possible has been named, after the Œuvre has taken on
more sense[s]), this second sense remains asymmetrical: by definition, it
can only ever “see[m] about to be thrust forward.”
The second instance of a dynamic, not simply oppositional, relation
between the livre and its absence can be seen around the thematic of mad-
ness. In this case Mallarmé’s relevance is signaled by the phrase “ce jeu
insensé d’écrire” (“this mad game of writing”), the first epigraph to The
Infinite Conversation, which then features intermittently throughout the
work before appearing on numerous occasions in “L’Absence de livre.”18
Blanchot writes that the “absolute of voice and of writing” addressed by
Mallarmé’s conception of this senseless, mad Œuvre is not something
positively or empirically available, as we can read here: “The Work as
book leads Mallarmé beyond his name. The Work in which the absence
of the work holds sway leads he who is no longer called Mallarmé to
the point of madness. If we can, let us understand this to the point of
as the limit that, once crossed, would be decisive madness: whence we
would have to conclude that the limit—‘the edge of madness’—is, . . .
as non-madness, more essentially mad: this would be the abyss—not the
abyss, but the edge of the abyss” (Infinite 428, original emphasis, trans.
altered).19 Blanchot here is insisting not on a championing of the irratio-
nal at the expense of reason, as for instance the antipsychiatry movements
of the 1970s or the more recent “mad pride,” but rather underlining that
in the asymmetrical interaction of the two, the withdrawal of absence
(here madness), its diffuseness or intermittency, in fact means that one
is unable to reserve a part of the Work that would not be touched by it.20
This does not mean that the Work ceases to exist, however, or that its
influence in its own domain is overturned in any traditionally contesta-
tory way. As Blanchot writes of the law (which we have already seen to be
an instance of the Book or Work), and in the last sentence of The Infinite
Conversation (but significantly barring a footnote and a detached frag-
ment), “[t]he law is the summit, there is no other. Writing remains outside
the arbitration between high and low” (Infinite 434, my emphasis).
The third instance of asymmetrical relation in “L’Absence de livre” is
the anonymity strangely proposed by both Hegel’s and Mallarmé’s names,
each in a separate way:

Just as the Book takes the name of Hegel, in its more essential (more
uncertain) anonymity, the work takes the name of Mallarmé, the differ-
ence being that Mallarmé not only knows that the anonymity of the Work
is its trait and the indication of its place, not only withdraws in this way of
106 John McKeane

being anonymous, but also does not call himself the author of the Work: at
the very most he proposes himself, hyperbolically, as the power—the never
unique or unifiable power—to read the nonpresent Work, in other words
the power to respond, by his absence, to the always still absent work (the
absent work not being the absence of the work [l’absence d’œuvre], being even
separated from it by a radical break). (Infinite 428–29, original emphasis)

If Mallarméan anonymity is “more essential,” it is because Hegel is associ-

ated not simply with the name but with a sort of anonymity based on the
dialectical, dispersed nature of that name: “Hegel does not die . . . : every
system still names him” (Infinite 429). His name can be said to be hidden
in plain sight. And in addition to the clear roles assigned to the Livre and
the Œuvre, where the latter includes a suspensive function unavailable to
the first, something more is at play here. This is to say that Mallarmé’s
anonymity is an absence responding to an absence—perhaps a potlatch or
a disarmament treaty?—a doubling whereby the Œuvre addresses, with-
out making directly available, a mode of waiting (“the always still absent
work”) too radical to be included even in the conceptual limit-case of
l’absence d’œuvre.
My insistence on the suspensive nature of l’absence de livre is not an
attempt to ignore its pressing demand or the notable distortion effects,
as it were, that it produces within the field of Blanchot’s writing, while
necessarily remaining outside it. Rather, its challenging, self-absolving
(or “absenting”) logic should be pursued for two reasons, both of which
can be seen in the statement that “the ‘absence of the book’ [l’absence de
livre] . . . does not constitute a concept, any more than does the word
‘outside,’ the word ‘fragment,’ or the word ‘neutral,’ but it helps con-
ceptualize the word ‘book’” (Infinite 429). The first reason is that the
absence de livre runs in parallel to the fragment, the main form of his
later period, and the “neuter,” its salient concept. The second reason can
be seen insofar as this process of suspension, withdrawal, or ab-solution
does not exclude the claims of a politically demanding modernity: we are
told that the absence de livre “helps conceptualize the word ‘book.’” In
truth, conceptualize barely does justice to the ambition and complexity of
Blanchot’s relation to the authority of the Book as it features in this article,
whose two dominant figures are Hegel and Mallarmé, the Philosopher
and the Poet, two totalizing presences who have little to do with fragmen-
tation and dialogue understood simply as difference and multiplicity, on
a model of liberal inclusiveness. However, while Blanchot’s writing in this
period is far from such a conception of literature, neither can a descrip-
tion of it as secretly fascinated with authority ultimately suffice. Instead
of these binary poles, the asymmetrical mode of relation that l’absence
 Absolutely Absolute 107

de livre addressed in this culminating article of The Infinite Conversation

can be expressed thus: on condition that the logic of ab-solution is set in
chain, even such totalizing, absolute figures as Hegel and Mallarmé can be
exposed to the outside that Blanchot is seeking to address. This emphasis
can explain the presence in the article of various models of primary and/
or hyperbolic authority: “what Hölderlin calls the anorgic” (Infinite 431),
Kabbalah, the Torah, and the broken Tablets of the Law and what Blan-
chot calls “[t]he ‘first’ writing,” which is “alterity itself, a severity and an
austerity that never authorizes, the burning of a parched breath infinitely
more rigorous than any law” (Infinite 432).
The beginning of Blanchot’s last major œuvre, whose positioning
in relation to Mallarmé’s “obscure disaster” hardly needs underlining,
will be placed under the sign of this asymmetrical relationship between
inside and outside: “♦ The disaster ruins everything, all the while leav-
ing everything intact” (Disaster 1). As he writes elsewhere apropos of
Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, any culminating moment is always suscep-
tible to a repetition that extends and exhausts it: “[T]he book closed,
all questions answered and all answers organized in the whole of a suf-
ficient or founding speech—then, writing, there would no longer be any
reason or place for writing, except to endure the worklessness of this
then” (Infinite 272, original emphases, translation altered). In this state-
ment we can see that such an unworked then only comes about by dint
of a particular relation to totality, and yet that such totality, if brought
to its term, will always end up at such désœuvrement. In other words,
we can see here the sense that, as the rhythms, repetitions, or différance
created by the fragments of The Step (Not) Beyond (first published 1973)
and The Writing of the Disaster (first published 1980) will later show, the
demands of today always give way to those of tomorrow, and tomorrow,
and tomorrow.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “Le Théâtre de Baudelaire.” Essais critiques. Paris: Seuil, 1964.
41–47.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: State U of New
York P, 1988.
Bident, Christophe. “R/M.” Trans. Michael Holland. Paragraph 30.3 (November
2007): 67–83.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2002.
———. La Condition critique: Articles, 1945–1998. Ed. Christophe Bident. Paris:
Gallimard, 2010.
108 John McKeane

———. L’Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955.

———. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Min-
nesota P, 1993.
———. Lautréamont and Sade. Trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall. Stanford: Stan-
ford UP, 2004.
———. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
———. The Step (Not) Beyond. Trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany: State U of New York
P, 1992.
———. Political Writings, 1953–1993. Trans. Zakir Paul. New York: Fordham UP,
2010.
———. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1986.
David, Angie. Dominique Aury. Paris: Scheer, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
———. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” 1971. Margins of
Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton: Harvester, 1982. 207–72.
———. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Continuum, 2004.
Hill, Leslie. “Blanchot and Mallarmé.” Modern Language Notes 105.5 (December
1990): 889–913.
———. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. London: Routledge, 1997.
———. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism.
Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 2010.
Holland, Michael. “From Crisis to Critique: Mallarmé for Blanchot.” Meetings with
Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture. Ed. Michael Temple. Exeter: Exeter UP,
1998. 81–106.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Musica ficta (Figures of Wagner). Trans. Felicia McCarren.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory
of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester.
Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.
Laporte, Roger. “Tout doit s’effacer. Tout s’effacera.” Lignes 11 (1990): 13–21.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Correspondance: Lettres sur la poésie. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
McKeane, John, and Hannes Opelz. “Introduction: The Absolute, the Fragmentary.”
Blanchot Romantique. Oxford: Lang, 2010. 1–54.
Scherer, Jacques. Le “Livre” de Mallarmé: Premières recherches sur des documents inédits.
Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
Sollers, Philippe. “Littérature et totalité.” L’Écriture et l’expérience des limites. Paris:
Seuil, 1968. 67–87.
Steinmetz, Jean-Luc. Mallarmé: L’Absolu au jour le jour. Paris: Fayard, 1998.

Notes
1. This reading sits in a context formed by figures such as Georges Poulet and Julia
Kristeva; closer to Blanchot are Derrida’s “The Double Session” and “White
Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” and, despite the hostility he
 Absolutely Absolute 109

displays to Blanchot elsewhere, Philippe Sollers, who states that “thus Hegel
saw the end of history in the form of a closed book: Mallarmé, for his part,
opens the book, disperses it, turns it over [le retourne]” in a 1965 seminar, “Lit-
térature et totalité” (80, original emphasis, my translation).
2. The double plus/minus “±±” symbol precedes various fragments in this work,
perhaps suggesting the calculating work of addition and subtraction that goes
on before writing takes place or that the statements that follow have a nei-
ther positive nor negative but neutral status. In later works (some of which are
quoted in this chapter), a lozenge—♦—occupies this position at the start of the
fragments.
3. The “absence of the book” is not an ideal translation, as Blanchot could have
written “l’absence du livre” if this had been his meaning. Given that “absence
of book” does not work well in English and what’s more does not convey the
complex sense of an absence that the Book makes available (see discussion later
in the essay), I have chosen to retain l’absence de livre. This means also doing so
for Blanchot’s text of the same name.
4. For an overview of Blanchot’s reading of other nineteenth-century poets, see
McKeane and Opelz. Elsewhere, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe presents rigorous
accounts of Romantic legacies via the readings of Wagner by Baudelaire, Mal-
larmé, Heidegger, and Adorno in Musica ficta. He writes, “It is from Wagner’s
arrival on the French stage that, at least in the matter of aesthetics, the arrival in
France of German metaphysics and the divulgence of speculative romanticism’s
fundamental theses must be dated. And it is Baudelaire who first experiences its
shock” (6, original emphasis).
5. The English translation, Lautréamont and Sade, is of the original 1949 version.
Only a handful of references to this edition exist in writing on Blanchot.
6. He had been central to the review since its relaunch in 1953 and had placed his
essay from the first issue as the opening to The Space of Literature. He stopped
writing regularly for the NRF in the mid-1960s and by 1969 had stopped alto-
gether, in part due to political differences concerning his involvement in May
1968.
7. The work’s section on Sade is not altered in the way we see apropos of Lautré-
amont. Nonetheless, he remains important for Blanchot’s thinking, as is shown
by an article published in 1965 and collected in The Infinite Conversation as
“The Insurrection, The Madness of Writing” (trans. altered).
8. See Holland. For an overview of this reading from the 1940s to the 1980s, see
Hill’s “Blanchot et Mallarmé.”
9. Blanchot wrote to Dominique Aury at the NRF, “I would be grateful if you
were willing to accept the text attached here for the review. Its title could or
should be the title reserved for my next book, named ‘the absence of the book,’
and featuring the very many fragments that the NRF, in its untiring good faith,
has engaged me to update [poursuivre la mise au jour]—as well as to adjourn
[l’ajournement]. Unfortunately this gives us a somewhat voluminous volume, as
necessarily happens in the vicinity of ‘the fragmentary’” (qtd. by Angie David
in Dominique Aury 365). The letter’s date is probably 1967 rather than David’s
suggestion of 1959.
110 John McKeane

10. A succession or fugue therefore seems be set in chain by otherness; without rais-
ing the large issue of Blanchot’s close friendship with and writing on Levinas,
it is useful to note the former’s statement in this context that “[t]he outsider
[l’étranger] . . . does not know that he is an outsider. And he isn’t, since in the
region where he exists, the region of the anonymous and the impersonal, there
is no ‘oneself ’ that would be able to declare itself an outsider” (La Condition
critique 285, my translation).
11. This mode of thinking is also present when we read “The phrase ‘a throw of
the dice will never abolish chance’ only produces the meaning of the new form
whose disposition it conveys. But exactly by doing that, from the moment there
is a precise correlation between the form of the poem and the assertion that
pervades it and underlies it, necessity is reestablished. Chance is not liberated
by the breakdown of regular verse: on the contrary, to be precise, it is subject
to the exact law of the form that responds to it and to which it must respond”
(Book to Come 233, trans. altered).
12. In letter of March 11, 1963, to Elio Vittorini (Laporte 287). My translation.
13. To further contextualize this notion, we can note that it recalls and sometimes
overlaps with Blanchot’s earlier categories of “absence d’œuvre” and “désœuvre-
ment” (worklessness); it gestures toward Derrida’s thinking (cf. “The End of the
Book and the Beginning of Writing” in Of Grammatology, 6–26; and “Hors
livre,” translated as “Outwork, Prefacing” in Dissemination, 1–66). Some years
after Blanchot first used the expression, it was (almost) reproduced by the “plus
de livres” (no more books) slogan of May 1968.
14. My translation. This sense of the term has been noted by various acute read-
ers of Blanchot: Roger Laporte writes, “[t]he Latin absolvere means to detach,
untie, release. An absolute event is one where the chain is broken, where his-
tory itself breaks down and is thereafter unable to rejoin its tranquil course”
(20, my translation). In one instance of several in their work, Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy write of Jena Romanticism’s project as “the genre of all literature [le
genre de la littérature] . . . [an] infinitely new Work. The absolute, therefore, of
literature. But also its ab-solute, its isolation in its perfect closure upon itself ”
(11, original emphasis).
15. “The ‘absenting’ of the book” is another gloss provided by Hill in Radical Inde-
cision, 187 (original emphasis).
16. Regarding the relation of the two writers, Christophe Bident points out that
Barthes substituted Mallarmé’s name for Blanchot’s in the 1964 version of an
essay first published in 1954 (“R/M” 78). The amended version reads “This
pure murder of Literature, which since Mallarmé we know provides the mod-
ern writer with his torment and his justification” (“Le Théâtre de Baudelaire”
46–47, my translation).
17. There is a historical precedent to the linking of Hegel and Mallarmé, causing
Blanchot to write, “It is not some contemporary interpreter who, in giving
Hegel’s philosophy its coherence, conceives of it as a book and thus conceives
of the book as the finality of absolute Knowledge; Mallarmé does it already at
 Absolutely Absolute 111

the end of the nineteenth century” (Infinite 429). On Mallarmé’s probable but
unproven readings of Hegel in the 1860s, see Steinmetz 81–136.
18. It is the first of five epigraphs, the next three being drawn from Blanchot’s own
work, and the fifth—added by Blanchot only at page-proof stage—his transla-
tion of a Nietzsche quotation (we learn this from the page proofs held at the
Houghton library at Harvard, MS Fr 497). Interestingly, the Mallarmé and
Nietzsche quotations do not bear quotation marks, unlike the middle three, all
of which are from Blanchot’s own work: it is as if to speak through another’s
name is more direct than to rewrite the words of one’s own text.
19. Here Blanchot draws implicitly on the reader’s understanding of Mallarmé’s
crisis of the late 1860s. The “horrible vision of a pure work” dating from a letter
to Coppée of 1868 is suggestive of the Book (Correspondance 380).
20. Blanchot’s friend Georges Bataille also imagines a scenario where completion
gives way to madness: “in a portrait of him as an old man, I imagine seeing
exhaustion, the horror of being in the depths of things—of being God. Hegel,
at the moment when the system closed, believed himself for two years to be
going mad” (110). If this moment is conceived of as horrific, it is surely not
because the transformation is wholly successful but rather because it leaves a
certain remainder, an ironic margin consisting in the observation that if Hegel
has become God, then God is nothing more than Hegel. This thought is found
in Blanchot, apropos of a different figure: “In becoming God, Saint-Fond
simultaneously makes God become Saint-Fond” (Lautréamont and Sade 30).
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 7

Blank Phenomenality
Claire Chi-ah Lyu

I would like to approach the enigma of Mallarmé’s blanc and would

like to do so by examining poetry’s relationship with the act of salut as
both salutation and salvation. I advance that le salut is the way in which
le blanc gives itself to us: its phenomenality. How so? In his preface to Un
coup de dés Mallarmé writes that “the ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume impor-
tance and are what is immediately most striking.” (Poems 121). The blank
shows up first, as if to greet us, just as “Salut” appears first and welcomes
us when we open Poésies. And so I ask, how does the blank give itself, and
how do we, Mallarmé’s readers, receive it? Further, if salut is the phenom-
enality of le blanc, what does this tell us about the language of poetry and
even about everyday life?
The French word salut comes from the Latin salus—which means
“good health, safety, the state of being unharmed and intact”—and points
to an originary well-being. Salutation, or greeting, is to call by name in
order to wish good health; salvation is to make safe, protect, rescue, from
which we derive the notion of religious redemption. I take as a point of
departure two models of poetic naming, one proposed by Blanchot in
“Literature and the Right to Death” and another proposed by Deguy in
“Apparition du nom” (“Apparition of the Name”), both of which relate
naming to salut in distinct ways. I then look briefly at how Derrida’s “How
to Name” reads Deguy’s “Apparition of the Name.” From a philosophical
treatment of salut, I turn to poetic treatment of salut—Baudelaire’s “A une
passante” and Jaccottet’s “Le cerisier” (“Cherry Tree”)—to come finally
to Mallarmé’s “Salut” and so reflect upon le blanc salut that Mallarmé’s
poetry might be addressing to us.1

* * *
114 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

We name in order to know something, to gather a particular under a

genus. Yet knowledge is not the very first thing we have. Descartes calls
our attention to a state we may experience before we know: “When the
first encounter of any object surprises us, and we judge it to be new, or far
different from what we knew before . . . we admire it, and are astonished
at it. And because this may fall out before we know at all whether this
object be convenient or no, me thinks admiration is the first of all the
passions” (53).2 Admiration prompts us “to consider with attention the
objects which seem rare and extraordinary,” because it has “neither good
nor evil for its object, but only the knowledge of the thing admired” (71,
70). It is a state of complete absorption before any evaluative judgment is
formulated in terms of “good” or “evil.”
Since knowledge in the West goes back to the knowledge of good and
evil (biblical tradition) and the knowledge of truth and error (philosophi-
cal tradition), admiration in Descartes precedes knowledge. It enables
knowledge since it “disposes us to the acquisition of sciences,” but it can
also impede knowledge when it becomes excessive (76). For then “all the
body [becomes] unmovable like a statue and . . . one can only perceive the
first represented face of the object, and consequently not acquire any fur-
ther knowledge of it” (73). Admiration for something initiates an interest
in it. As “the first of all the passions” it arises in a “first encounter,” allow-
ing us to “perceive the first represented face of the object.” But this initial
interest soon turns into a desire to know the object. In fact, Descartes
makes it clear that reason must overcome the admiring absorption as we
mature: “[W]e ought afterwards to endeavour as much as we can to be
rid of it [admiration]. For it is easy to supply the want of it by a peculiar
reflection and attention whereunto our will may always oblige our under-
standing, when we conceive the thing represented is worth the labour”
(76). Our passive absorption with a phenomenon must give way to active
cognition: we are to move from spontaneous and unknowing admiration
to learned and knowing consideration.
Descartes’s account of admiration interests me for the possibilities it
leaves open. I see three. First, admiration is downgraded because it is not
yet knowledge, but in coming before knowledge, it gains priority. Could
a state of stillness that precedes the onset of reasoning constitute a condi-
tion of possibility for knowledge? Can stillness lead to a way of “know-
ing” otherwise than through the knowledge of good and evil or truth and
error? Second, Descartes calls by the same word attention two opposing
states: the unknowing admiration (“to consider with attention the objects
which seem rare and extraordinary” 71; my emphasis) and the knowing
consideration (“to supply . . . by a peculiar reflection and attention” 76;
 Blank Phenomenality 115

my emphasis). Would attention be a mode of apprehension that moves

between passive reception and active inquiry, ignorance of good and evil
and knowledge of good and evil, and thus, a state of being that is at once
pre- and postlapsarian? Or neither, since it would be unhinged altogether
from the matter of good and evil? If so, could attention be a way of know-
ing otherwise I alluded to? Third, could admiring attentiveness offer one
way of describing the reaction of a reader opening for the first time the
pages of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés?
Valéry’s words relating his first encounter with Un coup de dés seem to
echo Descartes’s: “I dare say that I was the first man to see that extraor-
dinary work”; “I was struck dumb by this unprecedented arrangement”
(308); “Confronted by this intellectual invention, I felt a complex of
admiration, resistance, passionate interest, and analogies springing to life”
(309). Valéry reports what Mallarmé said later when showing him the
corrected page proofs of Un Coup de dés, which were soon to be published
in Cosmopolis: “Don’t you think it is an act of sheer madness?” (310).
And, in fact, we know that Lichtenberger at Cosmopolis asked Mallarmé
to write a preface to prevent possible criticisms by conservative readers.3
Mallarmé’s preface begins, “I would rather that this note not be read,
or if glanced, that it be forgotten; to the skillful Reader, it imparts little
that is situated beyond his penetration; but it may prove a hindrance
to the inexperienced one, who must apply his gaze to the first words of
the Poem . . . The ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume importance and are what is
immediately most striking” (Poems 121). Would the two kinds of reader,
“the skillful Reader” and “the inexperienced one,” present two kinds of
approach, unknowing admiration and knowing consideration? Whatever
the case, it is certain that both types of reader encounter the blanks first:
they are “immediately most striking.” But how does this encounter take
place? For with its blanc, Un coup de dés continually resists our attempt
to read and recast it in a language we know—the language of knowledge
of Descartes, philosophy, and critical theory—not only because it might
be “madness” but also because it “pulverizes,” to use Kristeva’s expression
(272), the fundamental unit of logos: it disperses and opens up the sen-
tence to le blanc.
It might seem that nothing is more capable of escaping the philosophi-
cal approach and discourse than le blanc of Un coup de dés. If I attempt,
however, to explore the enigma of Mallarmé’s blanc in a volume of essays
on philosophical approaches to nineteenth-century French poetry, it is
to take up the possibility Descartes leaves open but does not pursue or
perhaps pursues otherwise by means of the cogito: an alternative mode of
reading by way of attentiveness. It is also to follow the direction Mallarmé
116 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

gives in his preface when he speaks of reading in a manner of counter-

reading or “blanking” out, wishing that reading give way to not reading
and forgetting: “I would rather that this note not be read, or if glanced,
that it be forgotten.” It is to pay attention to le blanc that initiates reading
and to salute what “hind[ers]” us and yields “little that is situated beyond
penetration.”

* * *

What does philosophy say about naming and salut?

Mallarmé takes center stage in Blanchot’s view of naming. In “Litera-
ture and the Right to Death” Blanchot interprets Mallarmé’s poetics by
way of Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s statement concerning Adam’s
naming the animals in Genesis. He asserts that the language of literature
perpetuates Adam’s first speech act by “recall[ing] the first name which
would be the murder Hegel speaks of ” (“Literature” 326):

I say, “This woman.” Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and all poets whose theme is
the essence of poetry have felt that the act of naming is disquieting and
marvelous . . . For me to be able to say, “This woman,” I must somehow
take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent,
annihilate her . . . In a text dating from before The Phenomenology, Hegel,
here the friend and kindred spirit of Hölderlin, writes: “Adam’s first act,
which made him master of the animals, was to give them names, that is,
he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures).” Hegel means
that from that moment on, the cat ceased to be a uniquely real cat and
became an idea as well . . .
Of course my language does not kill anyone. And yet, when I say, “This
woman,” real death has been announced and is already present in my lan-
guage; my language means that this person, who is here right now, can
be . . . suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence
or presence . . . My language does not kill anyone. But if this woman were
not really capable of dying . . . I would not be able to carry out that ideal
negation, that deferred assassination which is what my language is. (“Lit-
erature” 322–23)

Blanchot’s “this woman,” unnamed and absent, comes back as “a flower”

a few pages later: “I say a flower! But in the absence where I mention
it, through the oblivion to which I relegate the image it gives me, in
the depths of this heavy word, itself looming up like an unknown thing,
I passionately summon the darkness of this flower” (“Literature” 327,
original emphasis). These words of Blanchot’s recall Mallarmé’s in Crise de
vers: “I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice casts every
 Blank Phenomenality 117

contour, insofar as it is something other than the known blossom, there

arises, musically, the very idea in its mellowness, what is absent from every
bouquet” (Divagations 210). “This woman,” negated, also has Mallarmé’s
dancer in “Ballets” in the background: “Namely, that the dancer is not a
woman dancing, for these juxtaposed reasons: that she is not a woman,
but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form;
knife, goblet, flower, etc., and that she is not dancing.” (Divagations 130,
original emphasis).
In a later essay titled “Orpheus’s Gaze” Blanchot gives a name to
“This woman”—Eurydice—and identifies a movement of irremediable
loss at the heart of poetic experience. Orpheus goes down to Hades to
save Eurydice, but in disobeying the gods and turning to look at her, he
plunges her back into death for the second and last time. He turns to
address Eurydice, longing to save her, but this address does not save but
kills. Salutation does not lead to salvation; quite the contrary: it leads
to eternal death. Paradoxically, Blanchot sees in Orpheus’s fatal look the
movement par excellence of poetic inspiration: “To look at Eurydice . . .
in the impatience and imprudence of desire which forgets the law: that
is inspiration” (“Orpheus” 173, original emphasis); “Not to look [at
Eurydice] would be infidelity to the measureless, imprudent force of his
movement, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth . . . but
wants her in her nocturnal obscurity . . . wants to see her not when she is
visible, but when she is invisible . . . wants, not to make her live, but to
have living in her the plenitude of her death” (“Orpheus” 172). Orpheus
turns, Blanchot asserts, because he desires Eurydice not in her “daytime
truth” but in her “nocturnal obscurity,” just as naming “a flower!” con-
jures “the darkness of this flower” (“Literature” 327). His gaze addresses
not Eurydice coming to life (“not to make her live”) but death coming
to life in her (“to have living in her the plenitude of her death”), just as
naming “this woman” unleashes death (“real death has been announced
and is already present in my language” [“Literature” 323]). The Orphic
moment of murderous gaze and murderous naming splits salut apart, and
the fissure within salut inaugurates poetic writing for Blanchot: “Writing
begins with Orpheus’s gaze” (“Orpheus” 176).
Accordingly, in structuralist and poststructuralist theory, Mallarmé
emerges as the poet of nothingness, and his blank space becomes the
symbol of terrifying sterility of the white page and the absent book. In
his introduction to Writing Degree Zero Barthes states that Mallarmé per-
formed “the ultimate of all objectifying acts: murder,” which the writings
of the modern era carry all the way through: “[W]e know that the whole
effort of Mallarmé was exerted towards the destruction of language, of
118 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

which Literature would be, so to speak, the corps . . . [F]irst the object of
a gaze, then of creative action, finally of murder . . . [writing] has reached
in our time a last metamorphosis, absence: in those neutral modes of
writing, called here ‘the zero degree of writing,’ we can easily discern a
negative momentum” (5, translation modified). De Man too sees the
poetic act as Orphic annihilation, when he asserts that Mallarmé’s poetry
consists in “safeguarding the movement of consciousness at the expense of
the object, to save consciousness by killing the object” (71).4 There is, de
Man writes, “an extremely acute form of self-consciousness,” stemming
from “a necessary sacrifice of the sensuous object” (70). So the absolute
self-reflexive subject rises from the annulment of sensuous objects: for de
Man the condition for attaining poetic language (sacrifice) is parallel to
the condition that Descartes adduces for the cogito (radical doubt). But
the Cartesian cogito and poetic consciousness are also worlds apart: Blan-
chot insists on obscurity rather than on clarity, and more important, on
death, endless dying, and désœuvrement of the one who speaks rather than
on the certainty of the I firmly grounded in “I think therefore I am.”5
In either case, however, consciousness speaks and names by way of sac-
rifice. In the philosophical lineage from Descartes, Hegel, and Kojève to
Blanchot, Barthes, and de Man naming assassinates. Salutation negates,
sacrifices salvation in the language of reason and knowledge.
Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” appeared in The Work
of Fire in 1949, and “Orpheus’s Gaze,” in The Space of Literature in 1955.
In 1966, 1967, and 1968, three texts appear that refer, or seem to refer,
directly to Blanchot’s previously cited passage on naming and dying. Der-
rida’s fourth chapter of Speech and Phenomena (1967) and Barthes’s “The
Death of the Author” (1968) continue to elaborate on the link between
writing and death.6 Deguy’s “Apparition of the Name” (1966), however,
does not. The new direction Deguy takes interests me, for it makes pos-
sible another reading of Mallarmé, and all the more so, since it reflects on
poetic naming and its relationship to salut.
Deguy writes that poetry attests to the essential relationship between
the two meanings of salut. He speaks of Dante’s Beatrice, the figure par
excellence of salut as both salutation and salvation: “She is the one who
salutes in the Vita Nuova, the one who saves in the Commedia. Dante
received from her le salut” (245).7 The convergence of the two saluts is
the “extraordinary event,” “properly poetic,” that defines poetry in three
ways (246). First, it gives the poetic name “Beatrice,” which is “the salut,
in the secret, the singular bivocality of this word” (245). Second, it gener-
ates the poetic text Vita Nuova, “the book written to found the double
meaning of salut” (246). And third, it marks the poet as uniquely capable
 Blank Phenomenality 119

of tuning into the event of convergence, which remains imperceptible to

others: the poet “hear[s] the meaning of a name thanks to the paradig-
matic apparition that this name was designated to name without anyone’s
knowledge, and for which [the poet] was waiting” (246). Unlike others
the poet receives deeply, because doubly, le salut.
The poet, Deguy affirms, is the “one who has the passion for the ety-
mon, the one for whom sound, meaning, name, apparition are but one,
namely: what is here, present in its presence” (246). Etymologically, Bea-
trice comes from the Latin beare, which means “to bless.” We have the
following in the Vita Nuova: “and passing along a street, she turned her
eyes . . . and in her ineffable courtesy . . . greeted me with exceeding vir-
tue, such that I then seemed to see all the terms of beatitude” (Dante 49).
Beatrice, who confers and is herself beatitude, actualizes the “etymon” of
her name. She is “apparition of the name”—happening as event, name,
being, all at once—for the poet, who is the true namer. He knows what it
means to name, while others do not: “[T]he glorious lady of my mind,”
the speaker says, “was called Beatrice by many who did not know what it
meant to call by a name” (Dante 47, translation modified).
“Apparition of the Name” closes with three statements on poetic nam-
ing: “The poem’s ‘etymological’ naming welcomes the epiphany of the
present in hearing the original sense buried in the letter of the names
already given . . . ‘Poem’ is naming capable of saluting such a manifesta-
tion, receiving and giving le salut, since salut is exchange, saluting. Poetic
naming thus cannot be arbitrary, but must wait to receive le salut in order
to salute in return” (247, original emphasis). For Deguy naming is com-
ing to presence (“present in its presence”; “the epiphany of the present”)
in an act of reciprocity (“receiving and giving”; “exchange”; “in return”).
A poem is a site of conversion between the two meanings of salut.
The contrast is clear between Deguy and Blanchot. On the one hand,
Beatrice, the name of the resplendent presence of the woman who confers
beatitude; on the other, “this woman,” the obscure and absent Eurydice,
or the nameless dancer or flower, who yields to death. On the one hand,
naming as salvation; on the other, naming as sacrifice. On the one hand,
conversion between the two saluts; on the other, negation between the
two saluts. In this regard it is instructive to read Derrida’s “How to
Name,” which is devoted to Deguy’s “Apparition of the Name.” For Der-
rida différance traverses salut. One salut infinitely differs from and defers
the other: “‘the singular bivocality’ of the word salut must as it were part
with itself forever . . . Absolute heterogeneity, irreconcilable difference
between the two saluts . . . To be able to call, oneself as well as another . . .
it is necessary that le salut of salvation or health, le salut of redemption
120 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

or resurrection never be assured. Not that it is out of the question, but

it is necessary that it always could be refused, threatened, forbidden, lost,
gone” (217–18, original emphasis). Disjunction threatens the security
and safety of conjunction. In passing from Deguy’s conversion to Blan-
chot’s negation to Derrida’s diversion, the two saluts seem to grow further
apart from and even indifferent to each other. And yet Derrida writes
that the “threat [is] also . . . chance” (213) and that the “possibility of
the non-salut of salvation . . . must haunt le salut as calling” so that there
can be “a poetic chant that promises a chance to call” (218). The fragile
relationship between the two saluts is what allows poetry to call and to
name. The imminent separation and the immanent distancing in blanc
of the two saluts are the condition of possibility for poetic naming. Le
blanc emerges within le salut, opening the space of poetry as marked by
the drama of threat, loss, and negativity in the philosophical treatments
of Blanchot and Derrida.

* * *

What story does poetry tell about salut and blanc?

Here is Baudelaire’s “A une passante”:

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!—Fugitive beauté

Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?

Ailleurs, bien plus loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!

Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! (OC1: 92–98)

[“To a woman passing by”

The deafening street was howling all around me.

Tall, slender, in deep mourning, majestic grief,
 Blank Phenomenality 121

A woman passed by, with fastidious hand

Raising and swinging festoon and hem;

Agile and noble, with a leg like that of a statue.

And I drank, contorted like a madman,
From her eye, livid sky where hurricane germinates,
Softness that fascinates and pleasure that kills.

A flash . . . then night!—Fugitive beauty

Whose glance suddenly made me reborn,
Shall I not see you again till eternity?

Elsewhere, very far from here! too late! never perhaps!

For I do not know where you flee, you do not know where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, o you who knew it!]8

Salutation, as exchange of glances, happens in the middle of the son-

net. “Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!—Fugitive beauté” (“A flash . . . and
night!—Fugitive beauty”) recounts with delay the salutation experienced
as visual and linguistic blackout between the quatrains and the tercets.
An eclipse, an ellipsis, a blanking out: salutation occurs as blanc. But the
“passante,” like Blanchot’s “this woman,” has already passed or passed by.
The poem, a salutation addressed “à une passante,” may not, as a letter,
arrive at its destination. With blanc at its core, the poem risks becom-
ing blanc itself. But under immense threat salutation does take place in
the exchange of glances, recalling Derrida’s statement that the “threat [is]
also . . . chance” (“How to Name” 213).
So Baudelaire’s “passante” presents deep affinities with, while recasting,
Dante’s Beatrice. Both greet while passing by, administering the stunning
shock of love. Baudelaire’s woman, though, is anonymous, ambiguously
wrapped in black, unlike Beatrice bathing in luminous splendor. If the
Vita Nuova tells of the rapture of first sight continually renewed through
subsequent encounters, “A une passante” records the memory of the last
and only sight of a woman forever lost in the crowd.9 If the Vita Nuova
hinted at the dual force of love that enlivens and weakens,10 “A une pas-
sante” insists on duplicity at every level: the woman embodies movement
(“agile”) and immobility (“a leg . . . of a statue”), rhythmic order (“Raising
and swinging festoon and hem”) and disorder (“hurricane”), life (“made
me reborn”) and death (“pleasure that kills”). If Beatrice is the figure of le
Bien leading to the path of goodness (“when she appeared from any direc-
tion . . . there arose in me a flame of charity that made me forgive whoever
might have offended me” [Dante 63]), the “passante” is an ambivalent
122 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

figure of le Mal dooming the poet to stray. The poet errs “crispé comme
un extravagant” (“contorted like a madman”), and “extravagant,” from
the Latin vagus, means “wandering, errant.” If Dante’s speaker experi-
ences rapture that transports him to an other, higher realm, Baudelaire’s
speaker faces the reality of being left behind here: he receives no salvation
but only a momentary, fatal salutation.11
The contrast between Baudelaire and Dante brings to light a deep
structure of many dilemmas in our life: to go there or stay here, to pass
over to or be passed over by, rapture or preterition.12 These oppositions,
however, are often neither clear nor complete. In the Vita Nuova, the
poet-speaker describes his rapture in ambiguous terms. When asked, “To
what end do you love this lady of yours . . . ?” he responds, “[T]he end
of my love was indeed the greeting of this lady . . . and in that greeting
lay my beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires” (Dante 79–81).
Beatrice’s salutation is not a means to salvation; it is itself already salva-
tion. The poet is transported not so much to “over there” than to “here.”
In Beatrice’s greeting one finds “the end of [the poet’s] love” and “the end
of all [his] desires.” Rapturous commotion is also peaceful rest: no desire
compels to go further, elsewhere. Would this be love beyond desire? I
am intrigued by the possibility of love based less on desire and lack and
more on contentment and sufficiency. Often theorized as stemming from
desire generated by lack, love proceeds in a similar manner as knowledge:
the subject possesses or dispossesses an object. What mode would love
have if based on contentment and sufficiency?13 Attention, more so than
knowledge, I think. If so, le blanc could be conceived not only as lack and
absence, as it has often been, but also as a state of sufficiency and open
attention that does not close itself up in self-sufficiency. The blank would
welcome us and provide a place in which to think, dwell, and be at home
for a while.14
A particularly vivid example of le blanc as restful dwelling is given to us
by Jaccottet in “Le cerisier” (“Cherry Tree”). The poet narrator perceives
a cherry tree from across a field and receives a salut:

On this occasion it was a cherry tree; not the limpid speech of a blossom-
ing cherry, but one laden with fruit, glimpsed on a June evening on the
other side of a cornfield. And once again it was as if I had seen someone
appear over there and start to speak, but without doing so, without making
any sign; someone, or rather something, and a “thing of beauty” at that.
Had it been a human figure, a woman walking, say, my delight would have
involved an element of disquiet followed almost immediately by the need
to run and join her—unable to speak at first, and not merely because I
was out of breath from running—and then the need to hear her speak, to
 Blank Phenomenality 123

reply and to envelop her in the web of my words or to become enveloped

in hers. And thus, with luck, quite another story would have begun . . .
But encountering the cherry tree, I felt no desire to join it, conquer it,
possess it. There was no need to do so. It had happened; I had already been
joined, conquered. There was absolutely nothing more to expect or to ask.
This was another kind of encounter, another kind of speech. Even harder
to grasp. (7–8)

The cherry tree is not Beatrice, not “une passante,” not “a woman walk-
ing.” It is not a human being, not even an animal, but a tree. Jaccottet’s
speaker tells of “another kind of speech” that does not spring from the
original script of Adam’s naming the animals and is not knowledge’s lan-
guage of possession or dispossession. The speaker says he could speak the
language of knowledge but that he will not: “I would have been better
advised to go and pick the fruit, you will say, rather than to make so
much fuss about it. And I do pick cherries . . . But that is something quite
different” (13). The cherry tree’s salut presents itself in a dynamic that
is other than the conversion, negation, or diversion of Dante, Deguy,
Blanchot, Derrida, and Baudelaire. There is no drama, compulsion, or
ecstasy of desire, no jouissance or disappointment: “There was absolutely
nothing more to expect or to ask.” The here and now are sufficient. The
speaker reaches a resting point, a humbler and quieter blanc, that is not
marked by the drama of opposing or differing forces. This blanc does not
lend itself to, and cannot be caught by, the texture of human language
(“the web of my words”). It is different: it is “another kind of encounter,
another kind of speech,” because it stands outside the net of différance.

* * *

The poet-narrator in “Le cerisier” comes to a resting point (le blanc) in

greeting and being greeted (le salut) by a cherry tree. He experiences le
blanc in le salut, or to put it another way, le blanc gives itself to him as le
salut. Le salut is the phenomenality of le blanc. Jaccottet’s text, in disclos-
ing the phenomenality of le blanc by way of le salut, enables us to turn
finally to Mallarmé’s “Salut” and ask, how does le salut relate to le blanc in
the poem, and what does this tell us about naming in Mallarmé’s poetics?

“Salut”

Rien, cette écume, vierge vers

A ne désigner que la coupe;
Telle loin se noie une troupe
De sirènes mainte à l’envers.
124 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

Nous naviguons, ô mes divers

Amis, moi déjà sur la poupe
Vous l’avant fastueux qui coupe
Le flot de foudre et d’hivers;

Une ivresse belle m’engage

Sans craindre même son tangage
De porter debout ce salut

Solitude, récif, étoile

A n’importe ce qui valut
Le blanc souci de notre toile. (OC1: 4)

[“Salutation”

Nothing, this foam, virgin verse

Only to designate the cup:
Thus, far off, drowns a Siren troop;
Many, upended, are immersed.

We navigate, O my diverse
Friends, myself already on the poop,
You the sumptuous prow to cut
Through winter wave and lightning burst;

A lovely drunkenness enlists

Me to raise, though the vessel lists,
This toast on high and without fear

Solitude, rocky shoal, bright star

To whatsoever may be worth
Our sheet’s white care in setting forth.] (Poems 3)

The poem has “Rien” (“Nothing”) in the first line and “Le blanc
souci” (“white care”) in the last. Two forms of blancs—nothingness and
whiteness—frame the poem. The poem titled “Salut” emerges out of and
culminates in le blanc and so links le salut and le blanc in an intrinsic
manner.
There are two references to salut: the words of salutation in the apos-
trophe of the second quatrain (“ô mes divers / Amis”; “O my diverse /
Friends”) and the act of salutation in the toast of the first tercet (“De
porter debout ce salut”; “to raise . . . / This toast on high”). “This toast,”
or “ce salut,” has a deictic and points to the only other term with a deictic:
 Blank Phenomenality 125

“cette écume” (“this foam”). But “cette écume” gives way to “vierge vers”
(“virgin verse”), evanescing into “vierge vers” and “vierge vers”—that is,
into woman and verse. “Salut”—as “ce salut” and “cette écume”—passes
as woman and poem in front of us like Dante’s Beatrice and Baudelaire’s
“passante” while alluding also to a siren song with its fatal shipwreck
(“une troupe / De sirènes” [“Siren troop”]; “récif ” [“rocky shoal”]). How-
ever, against this backdrop of drama involving female figures, the poem
foregrounds neither love nor woman but friendship between men (“divers /
Amis” [“diverse / Friends”]): “Nous naviguons, ô mes divers / Amis, moi
déjà sur la poupe / Vous l’avant fastueux qui coupe / Le flot de foudre
et d’hivers” (“We navigate, O my diverse / Friends, myself already on
the poop, / You the sumptuous prow to cut / Through winter wave and
lightning burst”). The address “ô” separates “Nous” (“We”) into “moi”
(“myself ”) and “vous” (“you”) so that a toast and its greeting can take
place. By creating and bridging the distance between “moi” and “vous,”
salutation relates “Solitude” to the community of “notre toile” (“Our
sheet”) in the last stanza.
How does salut occur in the poem and how does it relate to nam-
ing? Drunkenness moves the speaker, as if by a movement of swaying
boat (“tangage” [“vessel lists”]), to deliver a toast: “Une ivresse belle
m’engage / Sans craindre même son tangage / De porter debout ce salut”
(“A lovely drunkenness enlists / Me to raise, though the vessel lists, / This
toast on high and without fear”).15 The words “m’engage” (“drunken-
ness enlists / me”) and “tangage” (“vessel lists”) rhyme, and we hear the
sound “engage” in both of them. In “tangage” we hear also “t’engage”:
drunkenness engages me as well as you. The play of sound and meaning
between “m’engage” and “tangage” / “t’engage” hints at another pair of
homonyms: “l’engage” / “langage.” There is movement (“tangage”) that
engages me (“m’engage”) and you (“t’engage”) and also another: it, him,
or her (“l’engage”). It is language (“langage”). Through its rhyme and
suggestive play of homonyms the poem discloses language as capable of
relating the self to the other in a community of friendship. The poem
proposes “another kind of speech,” to borrow Jaccottet’s words, than the
one told by Hegel, Kojève, Blanchot, Barthes, and de Man. Besides the
solipsistic drama of a language that names and gives death (in first or last
love, shipwreck, sterile blank page), there is also the shared and ordinary
joy of a language that greets and celebrates life (in friendship, leisurely
boat ride, champagne toast).
But how does this nonsolipsistic language of relationship give itself to
us in the poem? The word langage is named nowhere and yet is suggested,
perhaps even heard almost. The poem brings about language not by
126 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

naming it before us but by making it greet us. In proposing to greet rather

than to name, “Salut” enacts Mallarmé’s poetics of suggestion: “To name
an object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment . . . The ideal is to suggest
the object” (Selected Prose 21). “Salut” inaugurates Poésies as space where
language suggests and is suggested, salutes and is saluted, more than it
names and is named. Amid the reverberating syllable “vers” throughout
the two quatrains (“vierge vers,” “l’envers,” “divers,” and “d’hivers”), we
discern another homonymy: “coupe” as “the cup” of champagne (1.2)
and “coupe” as the verb “to cut” (2.3). The pairing of “coupe”-“coupe”
brings together the blank space of “belle ivresse” and the blank space of
poetry that cuts and divides through versification. Toasting, versifying,
and greeting mingle in a poetics of salut in the blank space. The language
of this poetics of salut makes itself available in le blanc but only if we hear
attentively with our ears and mind—that is, only if we read.
Our exploration of poetic naming in Mallarmé allows us to return
to philosophy’s conceptual naming in Hegel. Hegel’s passage on Adam’s
naming the animals to which Blanchot refers reads, “[I]n the name its
empirical being as a concrete internally manifold living entity is cancelled,
it is made into a strictly ideal, internally simple, [factor]. The first act by
which Adam establishes his lordship over the animals is this, that he gave
them a name, i.e., he nullified them as beings on their own account, and
made them into ideal [entities]” (221–22, original emphasis). Naming
turns a singular existence into a general category. But in life when we
greet a person or a friend we honor a unique person in that moment: we
address the very entity that naming must erase in order to name. Greet-
ing and naming go in opposite directions. And yet we greet and name
at the same time all the time: it is one of our basic daily activities. But
we observe also that two absentminded persons can greet one another.
This may be one way in which the theoretical murder scenario of Hegel,
Kojève, and Blanchot plays itself out in daily life.
Mallarmé’s “Salut” may be a greeting that counters automatism that
deadens and reduces language to banal exchange. Mallarmé writes that
verse “makes up for language’s deficiencies” (Divagations 206)—that is,
it jolts us out of language fallen into automatism, or ennui, as Baudelaire
would say, which he denounces as the worst of the devils, the modern
day Satan, in his opening poem “Au lecteur” of Les fleurs du mal. A poem
is language that has been carefully thought and crafted, waiting to greet
and be greeted by a reader. Whether in religious or secular context, a
poem engages in a poetics of salut that counters ennui in that it reveals
itself anew each time we read it. To meet the familiar as if for the first
time, this is what greeting (and love, too) is about in life. The poetics
 Blank Phenomenality 127

of salut shows us how to renew the old by modifying existing conven-

tional genres (e.g., greeting expression or lyric poetry) in such a way that
words and sentences cease to mean in conventional ways and start to
mean otherwise. Language no longer kills the object but instead brings
it alive by disclosing its phenomenality—that is, by making apparent the
way in which the object gives itself to us and greets us. When a poem greets
us, it becomes fresh, strange; it becomes suddenly, newly readable. And
it demands attention and asks us to greet in return, inviting us to read
otherwise in a manner that is perhaps similar to the mode of “knowing
otherwise” in Cartesian admiration. What Mallarmé’s blanc salutes and
saves by way of suggestion may be the incipient moment and space of
attentiveness before automatism sets in, before naming turns into killing.
Mallarmé’s poetics of salut and blanc suggests its own affinity with
and distance from the different forms of salut we have seen. In the threat
of shipwreck and pulverization in Un coup de dés we hear echoes of the
dramatic saluts couched in terms of “good” (Dante’s Beatrice) and “evil”
(Baudelaire’s “passante”), which have as backdrop the Christian notion
of salvation. But in “Salut” drama subsides, all the while being hinted at
in “Solitude, récif, étoile” (“Solitude, rocky shoal, bright star”). We are
brought to an ordinary, secular setting of a champagne toast at a friendly
festivity. The “place” in “Nothing will have taken place but the place”
opens not only as a space of terrifying annihilation and struggle between
“good” and “evil” or “here” and “there” but also as a space of quietude and
nondifférance beyond all commotions as in Jaccottet’s “Le cerisier.”
At the theoretical level, our preceding observations on Mallarmé’s
blanc shows that language does not give itself solely in terms of a gener-
alized absence through death as Blanchot, following Hegel and Kojève,
has stated. Blanchotian perspective concerns itself mostly with object and
phenomenon and remains inattentive to phenomenality. But when we
turn from object and phenomenon to phenomenality, absence opens as
welcome. Language gives itself less as death and more as salut, as Deguy
writes. In fact, language constantly faces both possibilities, and this may
be why it has been described as both deadening (Blanchot) and enliv-
ening (Deguy). When, suddenly, we hear the “hail to you” in the ordi-
nary “hello,” salvation in salutation, or blessing in Beatrice, the everyday
becomes a vita nuova: formulaic address and exchange are converted into
benediction.16 Poetry is a form of language through which this experience
of conversion and renovation is staged and becomes available to the act of
reading in its attentiveness.
If we were, at the risk of blunt generalization, to articulate a diver-
gence between philosophy and poetry, we might venture to say that
128 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

philosophical theorization, as language of knowledge, gravitates toward

the name in order to come to terms with the primal scene of language,
which it interprets as murder, sexual copulation, and absence; and that
poetry, as language of admiring attention, orients itself toward the appear-
ing of the name in order to greet in return the name that greets and to
“give and receive le salut,” as Deguy says. This may be the other side of the
story—poetry’s—of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry
in Plato. And yet, in generalizing broadly, we discover that philosophy
and poetry converge, too: both pay tribute to the enigma of the begin-
ning and of the openness in which we dwell, if only for a moment, in a
first encounter and that alone initiates. Aristotle’s wonder as the begin-
ning of philosophy, Descartes’s admiration as the first of all passions, and
poetry’s blanc are all modes of genuine attention: they are ways of saluting
and saving all phenomena that give themselves to us in their fragile and
ephemeral initial exuberance, in their blank phenomenality.
Whether devastating, dramatic, and strange or benign, quotidian, and
familiar, Mallarmé’s blanc, from “Salut” to Un coup de dés, comes to meet
us, inviting us, each time we read or greet, to offer attentiveness both
spontaneous and learned, unknowing and knowing—a blanc salut.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 49–55.
———. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1968.
Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Ed. Hanna Arendt.
Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 155–200.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Literature and the Right to Death.” The Work of Fire. Trans.
Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 300–344.
———. “Orpheus’s Gaze.” The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1982. 171–76.
Chambers, Ross. “The Storm in the Eye of the Poem: Baudelaire’s ‘A une passante.’”
Textual Strategies: Some Readers Reading. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. New York: MLA,
1986. 156–66.
Cole, Rachel. “Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace
Stevens, and the Ethics of Satisfaction.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 383–97.
Dante. Vita Nuova. Trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: Notre
Dame UP, 1995.
Deguy, Michel. “Apparition du nom.” Actes. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 245–47.
De Man, Paul. “Process and Poetry.” Critical Writings 1953–1978. Ed. Lindsay
Waters. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1989. 64–75.
 Blank Phenomenality 129

Derrida, Jacques. “The Double Session.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chi-
cago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 173–286.
———. “How to Name.” Recumbents: Poems. By Michel Deguy. Trans. Wilson Bal-
dridge. Middleton: Wesleyan UP, 2005. 191–221.
———. La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénomé-
nologie de Husserl. Paris: PUF, 1967.
Descartes, René. “Admiration.” The Passions of the Soul. Article 53. London: A. C.,
1650. The CGU Descartes Web Project. 28 Apr. 2012. http://net.cgu.edu/philoso-
phy/descartes/index.html.
Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 2004.
Hegel, G. W. F. System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of
the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4). Ed. and trans. H. S. Harris and T. M.
Knox. Albany: State U of New York P, 1979.
Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking? Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper,
1968.
Jaccottet, Philippe. Cherry Tree. Trans. Mark Treharne. Birmingham: Delos P, 1991.
Kaufmann, Vincent. Le livre et ses adresses: Mallarmé, Ponge, Valéry, Blanchot. Paris:
Klincksieck, 1986.
Kristeva, Julia. La révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXème
siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Seuil, 1974.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Poems. Trans. Henry Weinfield. Berkeley: U of Cali-
fornia P, 1994.
———. Divagations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Cambridge; Harvard UP, 2007.
———. Mallarmé: Selected Prose, Poems, Essays, and Letters. Trans. Bradford Cook.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1956.
———. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003.
Valéry, Paul. “Concerning A Throw of the Dice: A Letter to the Editor of Les Marges.”
Trans. Malcolm Cowly and James R. Lawler. The Collected Works of Paul Valéry.
Ed. Jackson Mathews. Vol. 8. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1956.
Waters, William. Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003.
Winspur, Steven. “The Pragmatic Force of Lyric.” YCGL 42 (1994): 142–47.

Notes
1. For examinations of poetry’s address to its readers, see Kaufmann and Waters.
2. References to Descartes indicate article, not page, numbers.
3. Editorial notes, OC 2: 1318.
4. For another interpretation of Mallarmé in this line of thought, see Derrida’s
“The Double Session.”
5. See Hart’s account of obscurity in Blanchot (Chapter 4 in particular).
6. Barthes’s “La mort de l’auteur” was first published in 1968 in Mantéia V.
7. Translations of “Apparition du nom” are mine.
8. Translation mine.
130 Claire Chi-ah Lyu

9. Benjamin speaks of love “not at first sight, but at last sight” in “A une passante”
(“On Some Motifs” 165).
10. The poet-speaker in the Vita Nuova trembles when Beatrice appears: “At that
moment my spirits were so destroyed . . . that no spirits remained alive but
those of sight” (Dante 71–73).
11. See Chambers for a compelling reading of “A une passante.”
12. I am grateful to Chambers for this formulation.
13. For a reflection on the relationship between poetic containment and content-
ment, see Cole.
14. Heidegger speaks of thinking in relation to calling and naming especially in
part two, lecture I.
15. Mallarmé offered the poem as a toast on February 9, 1893, at the seventh ban-
quet of la Plume.
16. See Winspur for a reading of the salutary effect Mallarmé’s “Salut” (and also
lyric in general) has on the reader.
CHAPTER 8

Mallarmé’s Tragico-
Poetic Modernism
Emile Fromet de Rosnay

Introduction
The strongest challenge to the legacy of nineteenth-century
poetics—that is, modernism and postmodernism, what might be charac-
terized as a depersonalized, fragmented and open aesthetic—has been the
recognition that the void created by its linguistic, aesthetic, and herme-
neutic crisis is a paradoxical resublimation of art.1 In the void of “deper-
sonalization,” or “impersonality,” where the author “renounces” any
authorial agency and thereby relinquishes the initiative to words (“[cède]
l’initiative aux mots” [Mallarmé OC2: 211]), the poet comes to the real-
ization that all is “fiction,” since the absolute is unattainable, and poetic
creation is only possible through a purification of language. However,
according to Slavoj Žižek, this depersonalization leads to a resacralization
of the sublime literary space via its own negation, in that the utopian
space of Mallarmé’s “nothing will have taken place but the place” (“Rien
n’aura eu lieu que le lieu”), “for a priori structural reasons [because of
Mallarmé’s use of the futur antérieur], can never be realized in the pres-
ent tense (there will never be a present time in which ‘only the place itself
will take place’). It is not only that the Place it occupies confers sublime
dignity on an object; it is also that only the presence of this object sustains

This essay builds on earlier work (Fromet de Rosnay “Mensonge” and Mallarmésis) in light of
Slavoj Žižek’s Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? There, Žižek
discusses Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous poem “Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A
Throw of the Dice Will Never Get Rid of Chance”).
132 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

the Void of the Sacred Place, so that the Place itself never takes place, but
is always something which, retroactively, ‘will have taken place’” (Žižek,
Fragile 31). Because it is too late to recuperate the present, for Žižek,
the hopelessness of the future anterior forecloses resistance and prevents
any possibility of political change from occurring. This type of critique
is perhaps the strongest to have been made against the claims of radical
literary aesthetics and poetics upon which rest a great deal of postmodern
theory and philosophy, and, with respect to Mallarmé scholarship, such
a perspective needs to be addressed before claims can be made about the
revolutionary or political nature of Mallarmé’s work. On this last point, I
am thinking in particular about Jacques Rancière’s writings on Mallarmé,
such as in Mallarmé: La Politique de la sirène or, more recently, Politique
de la littérature.2
One can approach the problem of resacralized aesthetic space through
the question of the tragic, since this concept implies the sacred, the sac-
rificial and redemption, and freedom and determination, notions that
have been connected to the problem of modernist aesthetics. I will be
referring to post-nineteenth-century poetics as “modernist poetics” or
“modernist aesthetics.” The term poetics (from poiêsis) denotes a broader
notion, including poetry and other artistic practices. Poetry might be
privileged here, in the discussion of Mallarmé (especially in terms of his
poetic activity and theories thereof ), but poetry is a part of poetics as
“pro-duction,” a general theory of human productivity and the bringing
into the world (aleitheia, unveiling) of truth.3 I distinguish “modernism”
and “postmodernism” for historical rather than aesthetic reasons. Aes-
thetically, the distinction between Joyce’s Ulysses, Kandinsky’s paintings,
Duchamp’s urinal, or Schoenberg’s music on the one hand and the nou-
veau roman, Godard’s Weekend (1967), Boulez’s music or, pop art on
the other, according to criteria of modernism/postmodernism (such as
with McHale’s epistemological versus ontological “dominants” as it per-
tains to the novel) seems arbitrary and reflects institutional constructs.
It is increasingly apparent that, with some distance now from the twen-
tieth century, we are dealing rather with a question of continuity. Philo-
sophically speaking, the concerns of Derrida, Deleuze, or Baudrillard rely
heavily on questions nascent in the nineteenth century, even in Hegel,4
and certainly in Mallarmé reflecting on philology, Rimbaud in his corre-
spondence and in his poetry, and of course Nietzsche. Where we cannot
conflate modernism and postmodernism is historically. Postmodernism
is post–World War II, and in terms of the history of culture, there is a
clear demarcation. But that is precisely the point—historically in this lat-
ter sense means “institutionally.” The distinction is perhaps more valid
 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 133

where culture and thought meet society and power (but these always
meet). Power is becoming more and more “postmodern” in the vulgar
sense, but only in specific ways: the fluidity of markets, capital, consumer
identity, the work force, and so on. Capitalism and neoliberalism are still
the dominant ideologies today, and these are still marching to the drum
of progress and economic rationality, which has little direct relation to
cultural postmodernism, although Žižek has shown similarities between
postmodern culture and the new economy (Žižek “Ongoing” 292–94).
Thinking in terms of continuity rather than in terms of break—indeed,
modernity can be characterized as a series or continuity of such breaks
or splits, both politically and epistemologically—highlights the relation-
ships between radical poetics and aesthetics as a legacy or tradition (the
latter being an important question for Mallarmé, with the impossibility
to recuperate it [Mallarmé OC1: 473]). Such a legacy goes back to the
Renaissance and the shifting epistemological and hermeneutic paradigms
of the seventeenth century. Yet a continuity of breaks necessitates histori-
cal specificity. Key for twentieth-century philosophy was a redefinition of
problem of the tragic. The tragic has everything to do with poetics, which
is at the beginning of Western aesthetics with Aristotle’s Poetics. In the
centuries following the Enlightenment, with the German idealists and the
romantics, the tragic has been treated directly (by Schelling, Nietzsche, or
Benjamin, for example) or indirectly (by Hegel, Derrida, Foucault), and
emerges as a key problem, since it touches upon the subject of freedom
and determination.
Exploring the connection between the tragic and modernist aesthetics
is thus key. The nihilism of modernity has affected not only aesthetic pro-
duction but also the thinking about the destiny of humanity. In an early
work, The Man without Content, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben
points to art having been reduced to the criteria of the aesthetic judgment,
showing how these have overcome the content of art. Such a process is
the product of Western epistemological shifts,5 in which the destiny of
art is the product of Western scientific categories, leading to at least two
consequences. Poetics are no longer seen as aleitheia (unveiling the truth)
but rather as bound to notions of the human and physis (nature). The
poetic “act” becomes synonymous with human nature. Consequently, an
emphasis upon artistic technique (and work more generally) as part of
such nature was foregrounded to the detriment of content and experi-
ence. This is important for rethinking Théophile Gautier’s “art for art’s
sake” movement that inaugurates modernism and that in many ways con-
nects early modernists like Baudelaire and Mallarmé to later “postmod-
erns,” whether we are looking at Beckett or Ponge, John Cage or Cindy
134 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

Sherman, in that form is directly in question in these works, though in

different ways and in varying degrees of contextualization and socio-
historical emphasis. Beyond the reason modernist aesthetics have been
defined by the problem of nihilism, what sort of role does the tragic play
in this? Mallarmé’s writings have become emblematic of such problems
of nihilism—whether discussed in Derrida’s Dissémination, in Foucault,
or in Badiou. For perhaps no poet is more associated with the problem
of nihilism—in the sense of the death of content and the author and
the failure of transcendent signification—than Mallarmé. His poetry and
writings on poetic creation are imbued with the problem of the tragic and
salvation in light of such nihilism.
Mallarmé uses the terms salut [“salvation”] and rachat [“redemption”]
in such connection when describing his poetic process: rachat in French
can refer to the redemption of humanity and atonement, but initially
to repurchasing (or “buying back,” “redeeming”), and Mallarmé fre-
quently refers to his contemporary culture’s association between mean-
ing and economics, as when he refers to the “high commerce of letters”
(OC2: 218; “haut commerce des lettres”). This salvation, which escapes
the business of literature, is connected to pure silence: “There has to be
something occult deep inside everyone, I entirely believe in something
that is absconded, signifying closed and hidden, that inhabits the com-
mon.”6 An unsettling mystery lies hidden within day-to-day language. As
he expresses it in a letter to Maurice Barrès, such an inaccessible secret
holds a “rachat par l’Art” (“a redemption through art”).7 This salvation
comes about by self-destruction and relinquishing of poetic powers,
which otherwise could only lead to the “monster of impotency,” and by
leaving language to speak for itself. This impotence betrays the poetic-
romantic ideal of expressing the “Notion” in one’s mind. Since language
is uncontrollable and cannot ever express such a Notion, leaving language
to do the task is paradoxically the cure: indeed, it is a “homeopathic” cure,
whereby, similia similibus,8 the poet as “craftsman” or “artist for the sake
of art,” uses language to purify an ailing language, given that language was
what contaminated the Notion in the first place.
One can quickly see the romantic roots of this view of depersonali-
zation, at least in its nineteenth-century beginnings: the idea of relin-
quishing implies an initial disappointment. Far from eliminating the
subjectivity of the poet, the subjectivity of “art for art’s sake” rather comes
through a dialectically negative mode. This at once entails a mythopoet-
ics and a new mimesis: on the one hand, we have a poetics about poetry
(and a “poetry of poetry”) and a simultaneous mythologization of such a
process through poetic language and of language itself; on the other hand,
 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 135

we see the invention of a new mimesis wherein form is what is imitated

rather than content (i.e., “nature” or “reality”). The goal of such a poet-
ics is to create a literary space where the “virtual” (OC2: 211) is favored
over the actual, in the sense that poetic language doesn’t simply actualize,
express, or externalize the poet’s mental world, as with the romantics,
but rather that language becomes its own self-expression, self-curing and
for its own sake. The reader who encounters such poetry can actively
participate in the dynamic experience of language. Such poetic language
creates an open, potential space rather than one requiring interpretation
according to the common notion of communication where the sign is
the equivalent of the concept. Mallarmé sees in this poetic process a post-
metaphysical salvation. Such salvation of humanity through art, explored
through the idea of the tragic, must take into account the dialectically
negative subjectivity of depersonalization.
Mallarmé’s ambiguous, loaded term salut thus refers to humanity’s sal-
vation through art’s openness. The term can also be linked to the Aristo-
telian notion of sotêria (salvation, preservation), a concept transmuted by
philosophers like Hegel in his dialectical notion of “Aufhebung.” Hegel’s
philosophy of the dialectic and becoming runs parallel to his notion
of the tragic with respect to the problem of freedom and is a pivotal
nineteenth-century notion for the tragic, in that henceforward sotêria and
catharsis (purification) can be seen as dialectical processes. According to
Peter Szondi, the tragic is the unity of salvation and annihilation (53–56).
Uncannily, in reflecting upon modernist poetics, he states that it is not
“annihilation that is tragic, but the fact that salvation becomes annihila-
tion; the tragic does not take place in the hero’s downfall, but rather in the
fact that man meets his demise along the very path he took to escape this
demise” (59). The very Mallarméan tragic problem of signification is thus
less about the “crisis in verse”9 as a failed signification (a type of “anni-
hilation”), but rather that this failed signification can become a form of
redemption.10 Sotêria, employed in reference to tragedy in Aristotle’s Poet-
ics,11 is a preservation of the potential in the actual. Nineteenth-century
tragedy was associated equally with lyrical poetry and drama, especially
among the German idealists like Hölderlin and Schelling. For Schelling,
the tragic implies a paradoxical expression of free will precisely as a dia-
lectical process (Schelling 247, qtd. in Szondi 10). For Hölderlin, it is the
very weakness of the tragic that is its freedom (Hölderlin qtd. in Szondi
12). For Agamben, sotêria’s preservation implies a radical otherness in
which it is the “impotential” that is retained in the actual, thereby chang-
ing the way we think of actuality, and thus of freedom and determina-
tion (Agamben, Potentialities 184). This can realign our understanding of
136 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

the tragic. Nevertheless, a full development of the tragic is apparently of

secondary or indirect concern for contemporary philosophers in dialogue
with modernist poetics, in part because thinking about the dialectic is
tied to the tragic, but not every form of the dialectic is tragic (Szondi
55). Rethinking the tragic in nineteenth-century lyric poetry can help
us reevaluate contemporary philosophy. Looking at the way this poetry
has been appropriated in contemporary thought shows that what Mal-
larmé called an “Acte,” which is a linguistic-poetic preservation of impo-
tential, reflects the hitherto unthought relationship between subjectivity,
language, and the tragic as drama—drama as “acted,” as the mimesis of
action, and modern subjectivity as identified with agency—and belies a
redemptive logic in contemporary philosophy.
Why then is the tragic important? Benjamin sees the tragic as prob-
lematic precisely because it is the destructive confrontation or union of
opposites (hence dialectic), and he sees the Trauerspiel (“mourning play”
of German baroque drama) as an alternative that can recuperate history
because it reflects important political and religious discourses that could
not be resolved through the synthesis of tragedy, which is ideologically
driven. Benjamin’s critique of tragedy can help us understand the attempt
at the destruction of history, of the present, and the creation of sublime
space and its dialectical logic. The renunciation of personality in Mal-
larmé has a tragic tone emerging from the anguished subjectivity of the
impossibility that characterizes modernist poetics (or theories of poetic
production). Such a poetics manages to maintain the sublimity of art in
the face of increasing crisis, and it is this struggle that causes the poet-
ics and poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé to have their tragic tone. It is the
story and the illustration poetically of tragic failure and anguish related to
impossible poetry. This happens not just on the level of signification and
the evocation of tragic themes and imagery but also on the level of its very
historical materiality, a process that anticipates the twentieth century’s
modernist and postmodernist poetics.

Toward a Tragico-Poetic Modernism

Even though one can claim an important place for the tragic as a stand-
alone concept, it is necessary to reconsider aesthetic definitions if we are
to approach Mallarmé’s work from the perspective of the tragic. Szondi
points out that the German idealists were the first to see the tragic from
a truly philosophical perspective, as a concept rather than from purely
aesthetic concerns. Though Szondi points out the importance of this
distinction between the tragic and tragedy, the latter being “the imita-
tive instinct as art’s origin and catharsis as tragedy’s effect” (Szondi 1),
 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 137

he nevertheless only analyses drama tragedies without looking at how a

philosophy of the tragic might be configured in other genres and in cul-
tural discourse more generally. Hegel perpetuated the aesthetic distinc-
tion between drama, lyric poetry, and the epic, but he nevertheless left
a space for reflection upon the tragic as a concept that is distinct from
aesthetic concerns. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, certainly contin-
ues this philosophical approach when he posits the tragic in opposition
to Aristotelian tragic-cathartic pity and Wagner’s “drama” by affirming
heroic, playful (“agonistic”12), and Dionysian creativity.
Though we are dealing with aesthetic objects, the concern here is
less aesthetic than what the concepts in view contribute to the tragic as
a philosophical concept that takes on the problem of human freedom
and necessity. Reevaluating how we think about redemption and salva-
tion (sotêria) is still important, especially since Nietzsche will define his
“affirmative” tragic in opposition to the life-denying catharsis, albeit in a
different form of redemption. Benjamin critiques Nietzsche for having
abandoned history by focusing solely upon aesthetics (Benjamin 102–4).
But we are seeking another approach here, one that understands that the
aesthetic and the tragic are inseparable, something that is only implicit
in these philosophers. From the nineteenth century on, tragedy is then
no longer exclusively a problem of a specific genre. The novel as much as
poetry (especially lyric poetry) participates in it, in that the tragic becomes
a key philosophical notion (one thinks of Lancelot’s love for Guinevere,
Manon Lescaut, and Frankenstein). However, we can go back as far as the
myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to see that, at least thematically, poetry,
especially through the poet, has been connected to the tragic.
For Mallarmé, the tragic process is tied to a mythological drama—
Orphic or otherwise—that is specifically about aesthetic experience as
such. He evokes the Orphic descent with a “master” going, at midnight,
into the underworld only to gather tears in the “Sonnet en –Yx” (or, “Ses
pures ongles OC1: 37) and has his hero Igitur make a similar catabasis at
midnight in the unfinished prose piece Igitur (474, 483–85). As already
mentioned, the aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to a specific type
of literary genre. The nineteenth century saw at once the birth of the
prose poem and the explosion of traditional verse forms, and the Mal-
larméan project involves the fragmentation and multiplication, hyper-
extension, virtualization, and transgression of all genres. Such a process
decenters not only genre but also consequently traditional interpretative
strategies and the ontological status of the subject more generally. The
latter occurs because the problem of the tragic is expressed less through
narrative development (indeed, it is decidedly against any type of “tale,”
138 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

or “récit”13) than through thematic suggestion in often static, atempo-

ral literary spaces—whether in poetry, prose, or the incomplete drama
Hérodiade—and the subject (thematic, human) is no longer tangible. It
is rather the tragic concept of the “Notion” in Mallarmé’s work that is at
play that some have argued is Hegelian (“Notion” or “Concept” being the
translation for Hegel’s Begriff ). The Notion is to be distinguished from
the German Idee, which is “the absolute unity of the notion and objec-
tivity” (Hegel sect. 213) that also “has turned out to be the identity of
the theoretical and the practical Idea” (Hegel sect. 824).14 One must not
reduce the importance of the tragic to considerations of genre or aesthet-
ics only. Though it is aesthetic as “perception,” certainly as it deals with
catharsis (which has everything to do with audience), such “perception”
should be focused less on artistic form than on subjective positions or
phenomenological experience. The Notion is key for the latter, as some-
thing seized, opposed to which is the objective matter, the combination
of which is Hegel’s Absolute Idea, which for Mallarmé, as we will see, is
only possible through a recognition of the Notion as a necessary illusion,
a feminine lack that incites the poet (like Eurydice).15
Several references might come to mind regarding the tragic and its
connection to aesthetics, starting obviously with Aristotle’s Poetics, which
discusses tragedy as the ultimate form of mimêsis. Mimêsis is the imita-
tion of things, of nature; it is the unveiling (aleitheia) of truth, and poet-
ics (poiêsis) is the creative part of this. Tragedy is the ultimate form of
imitation because it confronts the audience with the problem of human
freedom and destiny. How is Oedipus fated to do certain things, and how
much freedom does he have against such a fate? While traditionally such
questions ultimately refer to redemption, German idealists, Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, and others have changed the way this question can be seen.
When Szondi says that, in distinguishing between tragedy as genre and
the tragic (a philosophical question), since Aristotle “there has been a
poetics of tragedy, and only since Schelling has there been a philosophy
of the tragic” (Szondi 1), this means that Aristotle subsumed the tragic
under the umbrella of poetics. From Schelling on, the tragic is seen in
and of itself, requiring a theoretical-philosophical approach. Yet even an
idealist and contemporary of Schelling, Hegel, still insisted upon genre
when talking about tragedy. Wagner will, of course, do so as well when
he elaborates and creates what has been attributed to him as Gesamtkunst-
werk or “total artwork” (which for him is the tragic opera).
Despite this separation of aesthetic questions and the outlining of a
theoretical conception of the tragic, we have to bear in mind the relation-
ship between literature and thought, so that we see that poetics comes
 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 139

back into the question through the back door, so to speak. For since the
twentieth century, it has been unacceptable to separate the literary and
the philosophical. This is what Derrida insists upon in Dissemination,
when talking about the problem of mimesis precisely in terms of the lit-
erary history of philosophy, something echoed in David Farrell Krell’s
introduction to his Tragic Absolute. It is important here to qualify the
rhetorical or literary if we are attempting to delimit the definition of the
tragic as genre; yet it is equally important to recognize that the literary
and the philosophical (i.e., reason) are inseparable. However, poetics in
the aesthetic-formal sense cannot limit the object of the tragic.
We therefore have to include the “poetic” when dealing with the tragic,
but with an awareness of the problematic nature of how poetics are con-
nected to human praxis (action), one of the meanings for the word “Acte”
(the other translating the Greek “drama”). In view of the “tragico-poetic”
when trying to rethink modernism, it is possible to say that the exclu-
sive view of the tragic as uniquely drama—something Aristotle started by
focusing exclusively on “poetics” and not incorporating the Poetics within
his metaphysics16—has impeded a proper development of the notion
of the tragic, because drama was distinguished from the epic and the
lyric, the former involving a rich and multifarious world, and the latter
the inner world of the subject. Not only is it possible to redefine tragic
drama beyond Aristotle’s narrow definition (time, place, nobleness of
character—Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot come to mind), but
we can also use the terms of the tragic to think about naturalist or realist
fiction, which in their turn can also be seen as epic. Likewise, the lyric
subject of romantic poetry is increasingly “tragic” in temperament, and
nowhere is this more apparent than in the poetry of Mallarmé, where the
tragic “agon” becomes not only a central theme but also a reflection upon
the formal problems of poetic composition, through the entanglement
of language and chance (“le hasard”). Such a problem reflects the preoc-
cupations of the day,17 especially for Mallarmé, concerned as he was with
both linguistic uncertainty and philosophical contingency more gener-
ally. Likewise, central to Nietzsche’s philosophy of the tragic, is the prob-
lem of contingency as the life-affirming acceptance of chance to which he
binds the imperative of interpretation.
Such an interpretation takes into consideration the problem of aes-
thetics, which for Mallarmé is one of readership tied to salvation, since
it is the “common” that will salvage linguistic experience in the very act
or performance of reading and rewriting. Such an “acte” is tragic in that
it implies the impossibility and determination that is structurally simi-
lar to Schelling’s notion of freedom, where the determinism of fate is
140 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

the paradoxical freedom to act (Szondi 7–10). In terms of signification

in Mallarmé, the inevitable loss of signification—like Orpheus’s inevi-
table loss of the Notion-Eurydice (as soon as the poet tries to capture
the Notion, “she” goes back into the obscurity of death or language)—is
bound to the process of creation. Indeed, the loss defines the process of
creation because it is also a process of destruction: the very act of trying
to express the Notion is the destruction of the Notion. But what is left
behind is something else, language, which becomes autonomous. This
is what Mallarmé means by relinquishing the initiative to words, and
it is the virtuality of words that will salvage the linguistic experience for
humanity.
So, while Mallarmé’s tragic salut is redemption, and the experience
of language is an anguishing, negative one, language will somehow sur-
pass this negative experience to emerge pure—free of signification in the
traditional sense, and free of human involvement. The reader will come
along and “salvage” this language; language will bring the reader closer to
a rythmos, and closer to the “idea,”18 and humanity will be a more open
experience. The language of anguish (whether it’s the “angoisse” of the
“Sonnet en –Yx” or the drowning master-poet of the Coup de Dés) used
in Mallarmé’s poetry is itself tragic, stemming from a lack of freedom,
from the tragic recognition of inevitability. Any attempts to get out of
this inevitability are bound to repeat it, just as Oedipus meets his destiny
on the road he takes to get away from it. A strange logic of anticipation
propels the master into the realm of signs even though he is tragically
destined, knowing he will not salvage Eurydice, that he will only ever fail
to recuperate the Notion, as the master on the “Sonnet en –Yx” who “has
gone to draw tears from the Styx.”19
Yet it is the attempt to reach the notion that is a sign of freedom, some-
thing that is the touchstone of the German idealist view of the tragic.
For Mallarmé, perhaps following Hegel, this is about desiring the Notion
and realizing its impossibility but then coming to a third place of recog-
nition, which has him saying that “it is necessary that nothing exist so
that I may embrace her and believe in her totally”20 (Mallarmé, OC1:
1067–68). This matches the logic that we can see in Mallarmé’s Igitur,
when he says that the Acte was impossible, but that it was nevertheless
accomplished: “Mais l’Acte s’accomplit” (“But the act accomplishes [or
completes] itself ”), because speech (“parole”) happens in spite of thought-
negating chance (OC1: 476). Though undertaken under the folly or mad-
ness (“folie”) of belief, such speech activated the Acte, “whatever might
have been the power [puissance] that guided it,” and negated “chance.”
So the “Idea was necessary” (Mallarmé uses Notion and Idée almost inter-
changeably [Mallarmé, OC1: 477]).21
 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 141

If we are talking about freedom then, it is a freedom where a sacrifice

is required. “Mais l’Acte s’accomplit” refers precisely to the poetic “opera-
tion,” and in modernity, this is in line with nature (physis) in conjunction
with language. Language is at once natural and artificial for Mallarmé and
will take over from where the poet left the scene (relinquished his power).
Mallarmé attempts to mold a perfect language free of human interven-
tion, except through the means of the poetic craft, which amounts to
abolishing one type of chance (“hasard”) and replacing it with another,
that of language as pure as it comes to the reader. The anguish of the poet
is his “impotence” (the “monstre de l’impuissance” already mentioned),
that very thing that allows him to create, and he does this homeopathi-
cally. The act virtualizes literary space, making it sublime, in the Kantian
sense of the natural, in a new way: less a question of marveling at its
technical prowess, we are mystified or awed by it, unable to account for
it by our reason. It is cut off from the origin in the poet. Yet an agency is
retained, a linguistic-poetic preservation of the poet’s impotence, reflect-
ing an unthought relationship between subjectivity, language, and the
tragic as drama. There, drama is “acted,” is the mimesis of action, but of
an action that is strictly determined according to poetic creation itself,
rather than human drama as we see normally in Greek tragedies. If, for
Mallarmé, this mimesis of action occurs through a mythologization of the
poetic act, this is because modern subjectivity is identified with agency.
Content is evacuated and “action” is put on the plane of poesis, or the
human productive potential, aligned with human nature. Our “freedom”
is hence determined by such productive potential. The tragic “impuis-
sance” of the poet is redeemed through poetic practice.22
A redefinition of tragic-poetic modernism must therefore be exam-
ined in conjunction with the question of the subject, to which any aes-
thetic or poetics are bound. Such determination by subjectivity, even if
negatively (cf. Ricœur, for instance, in Soi-même comme un autre), is most
often expressed through the impersonal, or depersonalization, whether
in Baudelaire and his wake, Rimbaud’s “JE est un Autre,” T. S. Eliot’s
attack on personality, Barthes’s “death of the author,” and so on. A truly
postsubjective turn needs to be careful of this negatively reoccurring sub-
ject, even or especially when it is supposedly destroying subjectivity. Why
was it important to destroy the subject? Once this subject is effectively
destroyed, its primal status can be set aside, as an unnecessary error that
helped us understand the next step. A poet such as Mallarmé took this
step but looked back as Orpheus did to his subjective other, the Notion-
Eurydice while exiting the underworld, and she died. Let us say that he is
haunted by this loss. “Death of the author” arguments that so character-
ize modernism and postmodernism23 can all thus be seen as symptomatic
142 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

of this negative subjectivity. The “death of the author” is thus no longer

seen as a critique of outdated hermeneutics but is rather itself a symptom
of modernity and prolongs something that had already begun with the
“art for art’s sake” movement in the mid-nineteenth century. We must
therefore be careful, as with Benjamin when he discusses Nietzsche (Ben-
jamin 102–4), not to set aside history. This is no less the case when we are
dealing with the question of decreation or “désœuvrement.” The notion
of désœuvrement (or inoperativeness), a concept developed by Jean-Luc
Nancy that Agamben associates with “decreation” in The Coming Com-
munity, is interesting because what Agamben tries to do with these con-
cepts “is to conceive of potentiality not merely from the perspective of the
completed work, from the perspective of the actual, but also in its own
right” (de la Durantaye 23). Mallarmé’s notion of the virtual is in this ter-
ritory, yet with a tragic turn.
As we have seen, the tragic relates to the problem of nihilism. Is this
particularly modernist form of the tragic the other side of nihilism? If
nihilism is life denial and the realization of the nothingness of systems,
then the tragic surely has a part in it. The tragic, in its particularly Nietzs-
chean sense, is the affirmation of life as pure chance, and the acceptance
of the eternal return of the same—those very things that metaphysical
and rational systems try to deny by attempting to uphold truth, systems,
totalities. When these inevitably fail, this leads to nihilism. This is no less
the case when it comes to the Enlightenment rationalistic and scientific
turn, which for Nietzsche24 was simply a replacement for religion (we can
thus distinguish between religious nihilism and scientific nihilism).

Conclusion: History of Form, Form as History

Modernism is in many ways an attempt to account for such a nihilistic turn.
Whether it is Mallarmé discovering the nothingness of poetry (based on his
realization that language fails to grasp his all-important Notion/Idea), or
the very antirational traditions in the post-Enlightenment—romanticism,
the avant-gardes, Surrealism, and so on—or the sort of radicalism/animal-
ism of the Collège de Sociologie, nihilism has been a central notion in the
development of modernism. Of course, there are exceptions, especially in
Anglo-Saxon modernism: one could even say, from a Nietzschean perspec-
tive, that T. S. Eliot’s reactionary politics are the suppression of his own
nihilism, thereby reaffirming nihilism in a backward way. In thinking
through modernism and the question of nihilism, more can be done by
reexamining Agamben’s approach to this in The Man without Content, as
well as Heidegger’s in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”
 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 143

For Agamben, nihilism has occurred because of the dominance of

the criteria of the aesthetic judgment. If for Aristotle tragedy is mimetic
poetry—and this would have meant mimetic representation, or as an
actualization (energeia) of potential (dynamis)—this has been insuffi-
ciently understood, as Agamben has shown. For Agamben, the model
of actualization is inadequate in accounting for potentiality—and the
poetics of modernism, such as Mallarmé’s, are a poetics of virtualization
and decreation. We can reformulate the notion of the tragic to better
understand the problem of modernism in this way: modernist tragico-
poetics are a mimesis of representation itself, where the criteria of the
aesthetic judgment have emerged to the exclusion of the revealing of truth
or aleitheia. Such poetics are the tragedy of a postmetaphysical representa-
tion, and this representation is the crux of modern philosophical quanda-
ries, whether we are talking about nineteenth-century philosophers like
Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, or twentieth-century ones like Heidegger
and Derrida. This self-representation inevitably becomes a reflection of
and upon form, leaving aside content. For Mallarmé, the problem of the
tragic is thus understandably more on the plane of poetic creation than
on that of represented reality, whatever that may be. This latter “reality”
is subsumed by a dialectical textual process that becomes the story of lan-
guage. This story is not the final point of arrival for thought, as Mallarmé
would have it with respect to his Notion. It is simply another example of
the crisis of modernity, where what is human has been reduced to the for-
mal criteria of rationalism, in this case where the criteria of the aesthetic
judgment have only apparently evacuated history. Indeed, the form of
modernist poetics is the form of history in that it reflects the domination
of formal criteria.
Beyond the idea that the Mallarméan aesthetic and the modernism it
inspired is a resublimation of art through destruction, as Žižek describes
it, this destruction also needs to be thought of in terms of its violence.
Is this a sacrificial violence, like the tragic? Is it a founding violence, and
if so, is it legitimate to associate modernism with such violence? This
is particularly topical today, in reaction to Walter Benjamin’s book on
the Origin of the Trauerspiel—and reactions to it by Dominick LaCapra
(264)—or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Derrida-
inspired work on the literary absolute and on Heidegger. A constellation
exists in response to Carl Schmitt’s theories of sovereignty (starting with
Benjamin’s book): in particular, Jacques Derrida’s Force de loi and Gior-
gio Agamben’s Homo sacer, both of which deal with Schmitt and with
Benjamin’s text on the latter. The important question is to see how art
connects to originary violence, which includes the tragic, and the form of
144 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

power that violence takes, the type of violence that is required to unset-
tle power. In a little-known, untranslated article on Benjamin, Georges
Bataille, and the Collège de sociologie, Agamben discusses how Benjamin
saw the potential for fascism in the Collège’s very antifascist configura-
tion (“Bataille e il paradosso della sovranità,” later incorporated into the
“Threshold” between parts 2 and 3 of Homo Sacer). There, the violence
of transgression is no longer really sacred because it occurs in an already
desacralized world. The same can perhaps be said of Mallarmé’s desacral-
ization of the traditional literary space, and the ensuing resacralization
and resublimation can no longer be naively viewed as a radical critique
but must be viewed as determined by historical forces that characterize
modernity—namely, biopower, insofar as biopower expresses itself as
excessive formalism of the criteria of the aesthetic judgment. To what
extent these questions connect to economics warrants further investiga-
tion, especially with respect to Mallarmé’s idea of the “haut commerce des
letters.” This connection between Mallarmé and economics, undertaken
by Bourdieu, Rancière, and Catani, can be redrawn through the tragic,
in that it can help better ground the question epistemologically and can
better situate the tragic historically.

Works Cited
Acquisto, Joseph. French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. 1970. Trans. Georgia Albert. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999.
———. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
———. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. 2000.
Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 1963. Trans. John Osborne.
London: Verso, 2003.
Bertrand, Jean-Pierre, and Pascal Durand. La Modernité romantique. De Lamartine à
Nerval. Paris: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2006.
De la Durantaye, Leland. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford: Stan-
ford UP, 2009.
Fromet de Rosnay, Emile. “Le mensonge impossible. Mallarmé et sa ‘Notion.’” Les
Cahiers Stéphane Mallarmé 2 (2005): 33–57.
———. Mallarmé’s “Acte” as Impossible Sacrifice. Proc. of the Rhetoric, Politics, Eth-
ics Conf., April 2005, U of Ghent. Belgium. http://www.rpe.ugent.be/Frometde
Rosnay_paper.doc.
———. Mallarmésis. Mythopoétique de Stéphane Mallarmé. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2011.
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Goodkin, Richard E. The Symbolist Home and the Tragic Home: Mallarmé and Oedi-
pus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984.
Haas, Andrew. “The Bacchanalian Revel: Hegel and Deconstruction.” Man and World
30 (1997): 217–26.
Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller, 2 vol. London: Allen &
Unwin, 1969.
Kosman, Aryeh. “Acting: Drama as the Mimêsis of Praxis.” Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics.
Ed. A. O. Rorty. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 51–72.
Krell, David Farrell. The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005.
Kristeva, Julia. La Révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle,
Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Seuil, 1974.
LaCapra, Dominick. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 2004.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. L’Absolu littéraire. Théorie de la lit-
térature du romantisme allemand. Paris: Seuil, 1978.
Malabou, Catherine. “The Eternal Return and the Phantom of Difference.” Parrhesia
10 (2010): 21–29. Accessed October 1, 2012. parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia10/
parrhesia10_malabou.pdf.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Poems. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
———. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Holling-
dale. New York: Vintage, 1967.
———. The Nietzsche Reader. Eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006.
Norman, Barnaby. “The Tragedy of Nature: The Sunset and the Destruction of Meta-
phor in the Writings of Mallarmé and Derrida.” Parrhesia 9 (2010): 80–93. http://
parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia09/parrhesia09_norman.pdf.
Rancière, Jacques. Mallarmé. La politique de la sirène. Paris: Hachette, 1996.
———. Politique de la littérature. Paris: Galilée, 2007.
Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1990.
Robillard, Monic. Le désir de la vierge: Hérodiade chez Mallarmé. Genève: Droz, 1993.
Rupli, Mireille, and Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau. Mallarmé. La grammaire et le grimoire.
Geneva: Droz, 2005.
Schelling, F. W. J. The Philosophy of Art. Trans. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989.
Szondi, Peter. An Essay on the Tragic. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
London: Verso, 2001.
———. “The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution.’” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2005): 292–323.
146 Emile Fromet de Rosnay

Notes
1. According to Bertrand and Durand, modernism, contrary to being a perceived
reaction to romanticism, actually begins with the romantics, with their focus on
poetry for its own sake.
2. Rancière follows in the avant-garde tradition of making such claims. Julia
Kristeva takes a similar approach to Mallarmé in La Révolution du langage
poétique.
3. For a discussion of this, see Agamben’s The Man without Content.
4. Andrew Haas, in “The Bacchanalian revel: Hegel and deconstruction,” argues
that Hegel was already aware of some of the “postmodern” concerns later
directed against him.
5. Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses appeared three years before Agamben’s
The Man without Content and was already an important contribution to prob-
lems of epistemology in the West.
6. My translation of “Il doit y avoir quelque chose d’occulte au fond de tous,
je crois décidément à quelque chose d’abscons, signifiant fermé et caché, qui
habite le commun” (Mallarmé OC2: 229–30). See also Le Mystère dans les lettres
(Mallarmé OC2: 229–34) and my discussion of this (Fromet de Rosnay Mal-
larmésis 15–131).
7. Letter to Barrès, September 10, 1885 (Mallarmé, OC1: 785).
8. In a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, he states that he wanted to cure himself
of the “monster of impotence” and uses the homeopathic term similia similibus,
“the same with the same” (Mallarmé, OC1: 748).
9. See “Crise de vers” (OC2: 204–13).
10. Far from being an arbitrary connection, the idea of failed signification and
tragic annihilation are in fact intertwined. For Szondi discussing Hölderlin, in
art, “nature no longer appears ‘properly,’ but through the mediation of a sign”
(Szondi 12).
11. This is Aristotle’s “sôtêria dia tês katharseôs” (“salvation by purification”) (Poet-
ics 17, 1455b15)
12. Cf. “Homer’s Contest” (Nietzsche, Reader 95–100).
13. “on évite le récit” (OC1: 391; “one avoids the tale/account”).
14. Cf. Fromet de Rosnay 2005.
15. No doubt a problematic question from the perspective of gender. Cf. Robillard.
16. See Kosman 62–63.
17. For a recent study of Mallarmé and linguistics, see Rupli and Thorel-Cailleteau.
18. Cf. Acquisto.
19. “no ptyx, / abolished bauble, sonorous inanity / (Master has gone to draw tears
from the Styx / with that one thing, the Void’s sole source of vanity)”; transla-
tion of “nul ptyx, / Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore, / (Car le Maître est allé puiser
des pleurs au Styx / Avec ce seul objet dont le Néant s’honore)” (Mallarmé
Poems 68–69).
20. My translation of “il faut qu’il n’en existe rien pour que je l’étreigne et y croit
totalement.” Cf. Fromet de Rosnay 33–57).
 Mallarmé’s Tragico-Poetic Modernism 147

21. My translations of “et l’Acte (quelque soit la puissance qui l’ait guidé) ayant nié
le hasard, il en conclut que l’Idée a été nécessaire.”
22. An interesting parallel might be drawn with the biopolitical “form of law” that
Agamben critiques (Homo Sacer 40–43).
23. Counterexamples only reaffirm the subjective destabilizing tendency of mod-
ernism/postmodernism. Proust, for instance, might affirm the subject, but only
as problematized through the fragmentation of memory.
24. For instance in Nietzsche, The Will to Power 12–14.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 9

Mallarmé and the

Ontologization of
the Poem
David Nowell Smith

At the beginning of his CÉLÉBRATION DE la poésie, Henri Meschon-

nic argues that we must “think the poem (penser le poème) and defend
it from philosophy. This concerns the poem as ethics and politics of the
subject, in opposition to art and to philosophy. In opposition even to
poetry itself ” (13). Central to this is the distinction between le poème and
la poésie, the latter of which, a construction of “art” and “philosophy,”
“essentializes” poems in their particularity and diversity. In his 1978 essay
“La situation d’un langage poétique,” he had argued that such “essen-
tialism” had fixed poetry into “a name-heavy [nominale] syntax,” leaving
poetry “impoverished” as it approaches a kind of “theological naming
[nomination théologique]” (27). If this earlier essay has not yet offered so
neat a distinction between le poème and la poésie, approaching the prob-
lem as part of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, his later
work is concerned by how this problem inheres within poetry itself. The
transmutation of le poème into la poésie is either the preliminary essential-
ization that permits the poem to be mastered by philosophy or the way in
which philosophy’s mastery has been internalized into poems themselves.
In either case, the category of poésie has subsumed poems into philoso-
phy’s terms in advance.
We find similar concerns in a recent intervention by Simon Jarvis, who
summarizes laconically, “It is hard to know what poetry is. What poetry
is, is, therefore, a philosophical question” (931). Asking “What is poetry?”
implies in advance that poetry is the kind of thing that is amenable to
150 David Nowell Smith

“what is . . . ?”–style “philosophical” questioning. Jarvis insists on verse as

a category, with its “specificity that is irritating to philosophers and theo-
rists alike”; Meschonnic, by contrast, while agreeing that one “should not
more ignore meter than verse itself does,” considers verse forms to be first
and foremost a “cultural code.” What poetry demonstrates, be it through
its employment of this “code” or through its own addresses and speech
acts, is “the primacy of discourse,” a discourse that inheres over and above
its words and verses (Meschonnic Critique 710).
A key figure in Meschonnic’s defense of the poème from la poésie is
Stéphane Mallarmé. At first this might seem strange—is not Mallarmé
the philosopher-poet par excellence, so renowned for a poetics of imper-
sonality, far removed from discursive communication? For Meschon-
nic, this received idea of Mallarmé as philosopher-poet results from a
“Mallarmé cult” that, with “Jakobson on one side [and] . . . Heidegger
on the other,” has blotted out the “Mallarmé who is actually speaking”
(Meschonnic Mallarmé 38).1 In the place of Mallarmé himself, in other
words, “the Mallarmé-effect” (33) a partial reading that favors “two or
three themes from Mallarmé (the impossible Livre . . . the “elocutionary
disappearance of the poet,” connected up with the death of the author
and the purported death of the subject; the poem as rarefied difficulty)
and in particular the model of the Coup de dés” and ignores others: the
opposition of nommer and suggérer, for instance, or “le poème, énoncia-
teur” (Meschonnic, Célébration 86).2 But there is a risk here of responding
with a partial reading of one’s own. Mallarmé’s verse continually works
the expressive possibilities given to it by the syntax, prosody, and lexis
of the French language; yet he also laments, in the Crise de vers, “Les
langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs manque la suprême” (OC 363;
“The languages which, being several, are imperfect, lack the supreme”)
and offers a speculative model of “le double état de la parole, brut et
immédiat ici, là essentiel” (OC 368; “the double state of the word: brute
and immediate here, essential there”). The great virtue of Meschonnic’s
critique of the “Mallarmé-effect” is that it forces us to ask how this specu-
lative dimension to Mallarmé’s thinking about poetry arises out of the
discursive particularity of his poems. Heather Williams has recently noted
that “Mallarmé’s intellectual reputation . . . as a serious critical thinker” is
safe but worries that “philosophy” rather than poetry “has been used as a
yardstick for Mallarmé’s achievement” (Williams 15). What is at issue is
precisely what he called the “double état de la parole,” whereby the discur-
sive fabric of the poem becomes the site for a transposition from the “brut
et immédiat” to the “essentiel.” This, I shall argue, is what constitutes
Mallarmé’s significance in “thinking poetry.”
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 151

* * *

Central to Meschonnic’s defense of Mallarmé from his “cult” is the

attempt to interrupt not only the “Mallarmé-effect” but the “Mallarmé-
Heidegger-effect” (Meschonnic, Mallarmé 38). According to this “effect,”
Mallarmé is recast as a poet who “poetizes the essence of poetry,” such that
his language becomes a quasi-theological “naming” of being (Heidegger,
Hölderlin 138–39).3 Meschonnic does not deny that certain moments in
Mallarmé lend themselves to such a reading. When, for instance, Mal-
larmé writes to Verlaine of the “explication orphique de la Terre, qui est
le seul devoir du poëte et le jeu littéraire par excellence” (OC 663; “the
orphic elucidation of the Earth, which is the sole task of the poet and the
quintessential literary gambit”), it is hard not to hear an echo of Fried-
rich Hölderlin’s dichterisch wohnt der Mensch auf dieser Erde, taken up by
Heidegger as a “poetic dwelling” (Heidegger, Way 211ff.). The same can
be said of his response to Léo d’Orfer’s request for a definition of poetry:
“La Poésie est l’expression, par le langage humain ramené à son rythme
essentiel, du sens mystérieux des aspects de l’existence: elle doue ainsi
d’authenticité notre séjour et constitue la seule tâche spirituelle” (Mal-
larmé C2: 266; “Poetry is the expression, by human language returned to
its essential rhythm, of the mysterious sense of the facets of existence: it
thus endows our stay [on earth] with authenticity and constitutes the sole
spiritual task”). In these instances, “earth,” “existence,” and “authenticity”
are aligned with the poet’s singular vocation: “le seul devoir du poëte”; “la
seule tâche spirituelle.” It is this that permits Sartre to complain, “The
subject of all his poems (we can say, without paradox: even the vers de cir-
constance), is Poetry” (162), but also for Blanchot to claim that Mallarmé’s
poetry traces “the essence of language” itself (306).
As we have seen, Meschonnic contests that both readings—whether
dismissive or laudatory—disregard the “Mallarmé who is actually speak-
ing”; but neither they nor Meschonnic pick up on what I take to be the
central point of contact between Mallarmé and Heidegger. This is not the
sacralization of the poet’s task, nor the essentialization of poetry, but rather
what Heidegger calls “ontological difference,” the difference between
being (das Sein) and beings (Pathmarks 97; das Seiende). Meschonnic’s
dismissal of Heidegger’s “essentialism” recalls Theodor Adorno’s famous
criticism that he “ontologizes the ontical.” And yet Adorno is getting at
something quite different. Says Adorno, “The breath of this philosophy
turns entity into an ontological state of facts, a dimmed and hypostatized
expression of the impossibility to conceive Being without entity—just as
entity, according to Heidegger’s basic thesis, cannot be conceived with-
out Being” (Negative 116). For Meschonnic, Heidegger has “an already
152 David Nowell Smith

worked-out idea of poetry,” which ensures that “the poem made out of
language” will furnish the “pure poetry” Heidegger seeks (Meschonnic,
Langage 348). Adorno’s critique takes the opposite route: Heidegger
claims that certain particular entities quite simply are essences, as evi-
denced by Being and Time’s dictum, “the essence of Dasein lies in its exis-
tence” (Heidegger, Beaten Track 67) and thus “categories such as Angst . . .
are transfigured into constituents of Being as such, into things superior to
that existence, into its a priori” (Adorno, Negative 119).4 What Adorno
sees as a disingenuous “sleight-of-hand maneuver” (121) is the crux of
Heidegger’s thinking: given the “impossibility to conceive Being without
entity,” how can we effect the transition from our encounter with enti-
ties to an insight into the being of such entities? In Mallarmé’s terms, “La
divine transposition, pour l’accomplissement de quoi existe l’homme, va
du fait à l’idéal” (OC 522, Mallarmé’s emphases; “The divine transposition,
for whose accomplishment man exists, goes from the fact to the ideal”).
Mallarmé’s transposition “du fait à l’idéal” pertains not only to his
thinking about poetry but also to his poetic practice. The poet’s vocation
is to

rechercher, devant une brisure des grands rythmes littéraires . . . et leur

éparpillement en frissons articulés proches de l’instrumentation, un art
d’achever la transposition, au Livre, de la symphonie ou uniment de
reprendre notre bien: car, ce n’est pas de sonorités élémentaires par les
cuivres, les cordes, les bois, indéniablement mais de l’intellectuelle parole
à son apogée que doit avec plénitude et évidence, résulter, en tant que
l’ensemble des rapports existant dans tout, la Musique. (OC 367)
[seek out, faced with a fragment of great literary rhythms . . . and their
scattering in shivers that are articulated into an instrumentation, for a
means to achieve the transposition, into the Book, of the symphony or
rather to take back what is ours: for it is not elementary sonorities by brass,
woodwind, strings, but undeniably the intellectual word at its apogee in
which music, as the ensemble of relations that exist in everything, must
fully and openly result.]

The Livre is in this respect itself an “ontologization of the ontic”: as an

actually existent literary artifact it is an entity, and yet it also embodies
(OC 380; “l’expansion totale de la lettre” “the total expansion of the let-
ter”). When later in “Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel” he says, “La fabrica-
tion du livre, en l’ensemble qui s’épanouira, commence, dès une phrase”
(OC 380; “the fabrication of the book, in the ensemble which will come
into bloom, starts with a phrase”), his concern is with how this phrase
can be forged in such a way as to open on to the “expansion totale de la
lettre”—how, that is, this ontic instance of language can exceed its purely
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 153

ontic determination. And for Heidegger, too, the question of ontologi-

cal difference is crucial to the relation between the poem in its generic
determination, which in “The Origin of the Work of Art” he terms Poesie,
“the linguistic work in the narrow sense,” and Dichtung, the poem’s onto-
logical vocation, a “projective saying” that “allows [the] open to happen
in such a way . . . that now, for the first time, in the midst of beings, it
brings them to shine and sound” (Beaten Track 45). To claim that a poem
can bring such beings to shine and sound, or can provide “un compte
exact de purs motifs rythmiques de l’être” (OC 345; “a precise account
of the pure rhythmic motifs of being”), is an “ontologization” not simply
in Adorno’s pejorative sense—that one gives “ontological” weight to an
“ontic” entity—but also in that what is at issue is precisely the transposi-
tion from our experience of the world and that which exceeds the world
and conditions it, and does so through attending to the ontic particularity
of the poem’s medium. And finally, just as Mallarmé tells Cazalis in his
famous letter of April 1866, “En creusant les vers à ce point j’ai rencon-
tré . . . le Néant” (Mallarmé, C1: 207; “In digging up lines of verse to this
degree I encountered . . . the Nothing”), Heidegger argues that insofar
as Being is not a being, “[t]he ontological difference is the ‘not’ [Nicht]
between beings and being,” a “nothing” anterior to all difference or rela-
tion (Pathmarks 67).
Within the framework of ontological difference, we could say that
between the imperfect language at our disposal and the “motifs ryth-
miques de l’être” would lie an insurmountable gulf: the poem’s verbal
medium thus becomes an obstacle to its own vocation. This, for Yves
Bonnefoy, is the central problematic of Mallarmé’s poetry. Words are the
“toys of chance,” whose “denotation hides their object,” and are thus ill
equipped to bring us to encounter the world itself. And yet they are all
poets have. Mallarmé’s poetic practice signals the attempt to overcome
words, precisely through an engagement with their prosodic, syntactical,
and semantic density: the obstacle that language at first represents is thus
transformed into a “path” (Bonnefoy 188).
For Bonnefoy, this attempt to overcome words is what leads Mal-
larmé to seek “ecstasy by recourse to silence” (192), a phrase in which
the “Mallarmé-Heidegger-effect” would seem, as it were, in full effect.5
Not only does this pass through an encounter with the “nothing”/Néant;
both characterize this encounter, which is the basis of the poem’s “onto-
logical” dimension, as paradigmatically silent. Again, we note an analogy
with Heidegger: in Being and Time, authentic Dasein speaks through a
“keeping-silent” (Beaten Track 342); in his later writings on language he
suggests that the originary “saying” (Sage) that renders possible human
154 David Nowell Smith

speech (Sprechen, under which he, in fact, includes writing) comes to

sound in this speech as the “peal of stillness” (Geläut der Stille) (Way 206).
Just as Heidegger suggests that this peal of stillness becomes audible in
poetry when, “be it speech or writing, the silence is broken,” for Mallarmé
the poet would set into motion, through his or her instrumentation of the
“tumulte des sonorités” “la restitution, au silence impartial . . . de tout . . .
l’appareil” (OC 649; “the restitution into the impartial silence . . . of the
whole . . . apparatus”). For both, the transposition from silence to sound-
ing becomes the movement that poetry would trace.
This focus on silence has led many critics to identify in Mallarmé a kind
of Platonism. Bonnefoy’s claim that “Mallarmé’s language continually
searches in his poems to evoke essences, in as atemporal and rarefied manner
as possible” is indicative of this tendency (184, my emphasis).6 This is not
to deny the highly sensuous nature of the poetry itself, however: rather, it
is through sheer “overflow” of its “sensory aspects” that Mallarmé’s poetry
becomes the “path” to the “Idea” (191). Indeed, Meschonnic himself sees
an analogous role for silence in Mallarmé’s poetry, not as Platonic Ideal,
but as a “figure of interiority” (Mallarmé 31). Crucial in this is not only
the move away from transcendent forms and into interior experience but
also the interpretation of this silence not as speculative, as it were, but as
a figure. This he contrasts to a second silence: that of the poems’ prosody.
Silence serves as an “accompaniment to the verse,” a palpable feature in
the poems’ sonorous and visual texture, bringing into relation oral and
visual and offering from the poem’s margins a “counterstructure.” In the
place of an opposition between material and ideal silences, Meschonnic
distinguishes the exterior silence of the metrical pause to silence as a “met-
aphor” for interior experience.
Such is Meschonnic’s determination to explain away what appear at
first as speculative claims for poetry. When Mallarmé, in Mimique, says
that “c’est au poëte, suscité par un défi, de traduire! le silence aux après-
midi de musique” (OC 310; “it is up to the poet, aroused by daring, to
translate! the silence of afternoons of music”), or speaks in his letter to
Pierre Louÿs of “la musique humaine silencieuse que puisse traduire les
mots” (Mallarmé C8: 200; “the silent human music that words can trans-
late”), “translation” would consist in bringing subjective interiority into
verse. But what of that other silence with which Mallarmé closes Mim-
ique: “Entre les feuillets et le regard règne un silence encore, condition et
délice de la lecture” (OC 310; “between the leaves and the gaze reigns one
further silence, the condition and delectation of reading”)? This silence
is experienced (“délice”) but is not purely experiential: it belongs neither
to text nor to reader but stands between them, and from this “between”
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 155

conditions their relation. We find, moreover, an implicit teleology: we

feel the délice of reading as we read back toward this silence—a silence
that in La Musique et les lettres he sees as “impartial.” In this latter essay,
Mallarmé says that poetry strives for the “restitution” of “tout l’appareil”
into this silence, in order that “l’esprit essaie à se rapatrier” (OC 649; “the
mind tries to repatriate itself ”). Not only is this silence nonhuman; the
human spirit is exterior to itself and is only returned to itself through this
silence. This is why Blanchot will identify in the “silent essence” of Mal-
larmé’s poetry “a passage [cheminement], a deployment of pure relations,
or pure mobility [soit la pure mobilité]” (305).
Again, this silence is in fact double: on the one hand indicative of
subjective interior experience, on the other of a presubjective, even prehu-
man “deployment of pure relations.” This might appear to risk transform-
ing Mallarmé into a systematic philosopher. And yet, these problems are
equally being worked through in his poetry, as can be seen in his 1865
portrait of St. Cecilia:

“Sainte”

À la fenêtre recélant
Le santal vieux qui se dédore
De sa viole étincelant
Jadis avec flûte ou mandore

Est la Sainte pâle, étalant

Le livre vieux qui se déplie
Du Magnificat ruisselant
Jadis selon vêpre et complie:

À ce vitrage d’ostensoir
Que frôle une harpe par l’Ange
Formée avec son vol du soir
Pour la délicate phalange

Du doigt que, sans le vieux santal

Ni le vieux livre, elle balance
Sur le plumage instrumental,
Musicienne du silence.(OC 53–54)

[At the window concealing

The old gilded sandalwood that is pealing
From the viol once shining
With flute or mandolin
156 David Nowell Smith

Is the pale Saint, opening

The old book which unfolds
From the Magnificat once flowing
At vespers and compline:

At the stained glass window

Rushed against by a harp
Formed by the Angel in her evening flight
For the delicate tip of the finger

Which, without the old sandalwood

Or the old book, she rests
On the instrumental plumage:
Musician of silence.]

Written for Cécile Brunet, godmother to Mallarmé’s daughter Geneviève,

on the occasion of her name day (November 22, although it was com-
pleted some weeks late), this homage to St. Cecilia, patron saint of music,
is at once a pièce de circonstance (in Mondor’s and Jean-Aubry’s phrase; OC
1469) and a deep meditation on the relation between verse and music.
The circumstantial here forms the basis for a working-through of some of
Mallarmé’s abiding “ontological” concerns. But central to these concerns
is poetry as a medium, not simply in its conjuncture of music and silence,
but also in its offer of its own “frame” in place of that of the stained glass
window. For Bertrand Marchal, the poem succeeds insofar as it “renders
palpable” the stained glass window itself, which it manages as it “mani-
fests not [the window’s] function, but [its] functioning” (95). Yet to grasp
such function requires an exploration of how the poem itself functions:
as Roger Pearson has perspicaciously noted, the poem’s symmetries in
lexical movement and stanzaic structure are both self-reflection and self-
reflexivity. This is what allows him to establish the symmetry between the
poem and the “vitrage d’ostensoir” as modes of framing Saint Cecilia’s
appearance (62–64).
Crucially, if the window’s framing is spatial, in the poem we find
spatial and temporal figures in counterpoint, in order to establish its
frame. This is perhaps most readily evident in the dense verbal pattern-
ing “Sainte” exhibits: the programmatic symmetries of “À la fenêtre” and
“À ce vitrage,” “Le santal vieux” and “Le livre vieux,” “De sa viole” and
“Du Magnificat,” the anaphora of “Jadis,” or the concluding inversion of
“sans le vieux santal / Ni le vieux livre.” But we also find it in the poem’s
curious temporality. On the one hand is a grammatical stasis: there is only
one main verb in whole poem is the “est” that describes the saint (line 5),
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 157

and its place at the beginning of the line highlights its stand-alone qual-
ity. And yet this stasis is continually subject to syntactical and paratactic
tremors, so its apparent atemporality is generated out of the poem’s own
temporal movements.
The point at which this temporal-atemporal tension is most apparent
is in the moment of its ostensible resolution. For Pearson, the poem’s self-
referential character means that it becomes itself “Musicienne de silence,”
and this is “because so many of the poem’s beauties are implicit, like sacred
mysteries enfolded in the white spaces between its words” (64). This is
problematic partly for a slippage in Pearson’s argument—the poem is at
first the vitrage and now suddenly the musicienne within the vitrage—but
mainly because silence and white spaces are tacitly here divested of local
rhythmic value. Like Joseph Acquisto, I would suggest that in this poem
“music is transferred into other realms, dispersed within the sounds of the
poem itself and translated into visual representation in the poem’s images”
(48–49). Critically, it is not only music that enters the poem’s prosodic
texture but silence. This is particularly remarkable in the tension between
speech and scansion in the word musicienne (in everyday speech it has
three syllables, but within the verse itself, with its diarèse and e muet taken
into account, it has five: “mu-si-ci-en-ne”). The tension between these
two modes of pronunciation would mimetically come to stand for the
very silence St. Cecilia’s music allows us to hear: first, by a striking com-
pression of the line (in experiential, if not metrical, time) and, second,
insofar as its metrical effect both demands vocal performance and—the
two vocalizations mutually excluding one another—precludes it.
In “Sainte,” then, metrical silence and experiential silence converge,
as over two decades later Mimique will demand they must. This has led
Marchal to observe “something prophetic in the final line of Sainte, inso-
far as it offers, like a predictive formula, Mallarmé’s entire ‘musical’ aes-
thetics” (95). In a final Platonizing gesture, Marchal suggests that this
music is not “a simple phonetic exploration but, metaphorically, the har-
mony of an ideal word [parole]” (96); we have seen, however, that the
“ideal word” cannot be so easily abstracted from the poem’s sonority and
recuperated as “metaphor,” precisely because the sonority of the poem, its
instrumentation of language, is irreducible to “simply phonetic explora-
tion.” The distinction Mallarmé makes between “sonorités élémentaires”
and the instrumentation of “la parole intellectuelle” is not that of phonetic
matter to semantic ideality but of the instrumentation of “les cuivres, les
cordes, les bois” to the instrumentation of language as a whole.7 “Sainte”
becomes “prophetic” insofar as it performs the two depictions of silence
we encountered in Mimique: both “condition” and “délice,” belonging
158 David Nowell Smith

both to prehuman opening of meaning and to the human experience of

language.
And finally, we can note that the silence the poem engenders, as met-
rical gap but also as experience, is indelibly rhythmic. From within the
constraints and conventions of meter, the poem’s rhythms exceed this
meter, refuse to be reassimilated into its measure. But in this the poem
engenders a broader rhythmicity: performing its words’ impulse into and
withdrawal from vocalization, “Sainte” would trace a properly rhythmic
movement of silence into sound.8 The “rhythm” is thus displaced from
a metrical to an “ontological” plane—and indeed “rhythm” is a motif
that recurs throughout Mallarmé’s discussions of the poet’s task, includ-
ing each aphorism on poetic vocation cited thus far in this essay. The
poet completes the transposition into the Livre by standing “devant une
brisure des grands rythmes littéraires” and in so doing brings language
back to “son rythme essentiel,” so as to produce “un compte exact de purs
motifs rythmiques de l’être.” And when he speaks, in the letter to Verlaine,
of the “explication orphique de la Terre,” he continues, “car le rythme
même du livre, alors impersonnel et vivant, jusque dans sa pagination,
se juxtapose aux équations de ce rêve, ou Ode” (OC 663; “for the very
rhythm of the book, whilst impersonal and alive all the way to its pagina-
tion is juxtaposed with equations of this dream, or Ode”).
Just as he does with silence, Mallarmé approaches rhythm in a bifocal
manner: both within the poem and as the “rythme essentiel” of “le langage
humain.” And as is the case with silence, this latter conception of rhythm
is itself double. On the one hand, “tout âme est un nœud rythmique”
(OC 644; “every soul is a rhythmic knot”): the articulation of the subject
is thus a rhythmic articulation; on the other, the “motifs rythmiques de
l’être” belong not to man but to being itself—something stressed by the
quip that follows: “[I]l me plaît de les partout déchiffrer” (OC 345; “I
like to decipher them everywhere”). These “motifs rythmiques” are not
simply in the human soul but are “partout” and can only be traced if we
first decipher or decode them, a figure that merely serves to reaffirm their
provenance from somewhere beyond or before human experience.
The dispute Meschonnic holds with the “Mallarmé-Heidegger-effect”
comes down in large part, I would suggest, to how to read Mallarmé’s con-
ception of rhythm. Blanchot identifies in Mallarmé’s account of rhythm a
thinking of “the essence of language which uses things by transforming them
into their absence and by opening this absence to the rhythmic becoming
which is the pure movement of relations” (306–7). The rhythmic becom-
ing of language, in other words, lies in its movement between presence
and absence. It takes present beings and renders them, through the logic
of linguistic representation, absent: “[N]ature is transposed by language [la
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 159

parole] in the rhythmic movement that makes it disappear incessantly and

indefinitely” (310). In this Blanchot sees Mallarmé as offering a corrective
to Heidegger, whose attentiveness to language, he says in a footnote, albeit
“extremely salient, is an attention to words considered in isolation.” For
Mallarmé, by contrast, “language is not made of words, even pure ones: it
is that into which words have always disappeared and that oscillating move-
ment of appearance and disappearance” (320).
Rhythm, as the oscillation between presence and absence, appear-
ance and disappearance, would constitute the “anterior space” to human
experience—anterior, that is, to the prosodic patterning of spoken lan-
guage, its intonation contours and cadences. Meschonnic also envisages
rhythm as beyond the prosody of speech, as the “organization of meaning
in discourse” (Critique 70). One asserts the primacy of language before
experience, the other discourse as the way in which language is constituted
out of experience. Where Blanchot sees the implicit disappearance in all
linguistic signification as originary, Meschonnic ripostes, “Discourse is
not the usage of signs, but the activity of subjects in and against a history,
a culture, a language” (71).
This explains Meschonnic’s resistance to the motif of “the impersonal”
in Mallarmé, most famously formulated in Crise: “L’œuvre pure implique
la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le
heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés” (OC 366; “the pure work implies the
elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words,
[which are] mobilized by the clash of their unevenness”). For Blanchot
this “disparition élocutoire” is in fact a disappearance even of the poem
as empirical thing: “The work is the wait for the work. Only in this wait
is the impersonal attention gathered together whose path and place is the
space proper to language” (307). For Meschonnic, by contrast, imper-
sonality is a figure for “the poet’s work in order to give ‘the initiative to
words’” (Mallarmé 45). But it is striking that Meschonnic should replace
céder by donner: “the poet’s work” is characterized by a bestowal rather
than a letting-be. Moreover, when he complains, “always Mallarmé’s ‘dis-
parition élocutoire du poète’, never his ‘poème, énonciateur,’” it is not
clear that the two contradict one another as easily as he would imply.
For if enunciation has been displaced from poet onto poem, this implies
precisely that initiative has been ceded to the words; that the site of the
poem’s meaning lies not in the poet’s utterance but in the coherence of the
strands within the poem itself, understood as agency of the poem rather
than the poet.
But Meschonnic’s insistence on a Mallarmé “who is actually speak-
ing” is salutary: to take the poem’s enunciation as wholly impersonal, the
index of an impersonal movement of language, overlooks the fact that,
160 David Nowell Smith

as Kaufmann has remarked, “Mallarmé’s texts all necessarily contain a

discursive dimension . . . and represent and even over-expose their enun-
ciative aspect as an integral element of the gesture they proffer” (21).
Kaufmann further suggests that the critical “aporia” or “embarrassment”
when faced with the poèmes de circonstance “goes hand in hand . . . with
the absence of reflection on the discursive or generic reality of Mallarmé’s
texts” (24). That is, the circumstance provides a communicative context
for the poem, so that the poèmes de circonstance present themselves as
communicative acts; the Livre, by contrast, supposedly far removed from
all communication, is more germane to the hermetic, autochthonous
œuvre that Mallarmé the philosopher-poet would have set in motion. Yet
as we saw in the poem to Cécile Brunet, the “circumstantial” context can
nevertheless serve as a starting point for posing the same questions that
elsewhere Mallarmé will broach through statements on poetics. That the
two are in constant dialogue can be seen from the opening stanza to his
“Éventail (de Mme Mallarmé)”:

Avec comme langage

Rien qu’un battement aux cieux
Le futur vers se dégage
Du logis très précieux. (OC 57–58)

[With for language

Nothing by a beating at the air,
The future poem leaves
The very precious home.]

Published in 1891, this first stanza appears almost as a parody of Crise de

vers’s “double état de la parole.” The language of this “futur vers,” “brut
et immédiat ici,” is simply “un battement aux cieux”; the sheer futil-
ity of attempting to beat something that is immaterial (the sky) if not
ethereal (the heavens) becomes a figure for the transposition Mallarmé
would elsewhere effect. On top of this, the stanza ends with a teasing
pun: “précieux,” through its rhyme with “cieux,” breaks down into “pré-
cieux” (anterior to the heavens). Not only would this cause a temporal
disjunction with the “futur vers”; insofar as it attempts to translate the
silence that conditions our relation to ourselves and the world, the prov-
enance of this future verse would indeed be a “logis très pré-cieux.” The
self-referentiality, and indeed self-deprecation, characteristic of this poem
and central to its délice, sits uneasily with any poetics of impersonality;
and yet, from this highly personal, playfully parodic discursive context,
Mallarmé is reflecting on those same “ontological” problematics that
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 161

consume his prose writings: in particular, effecting a transposition back

from the rhythms and gestures of discourse to “les purs motifs rythmiques
de l’être.”
The poem’s parody obtains its piquancy from the worry that no poem
can effect this transposition: “battement des cieux,” as well as describing
the language that would grasp the ungraspable, also describes the action
of waving the fan to create a current of air. The extravagance of terming
this “cieux” points to the disjuncture between the literal and symbolic
connotations the poem is straddling; and so we hear this disjuncture as
an undercurrent troubling the rather arch self-parody, as a Néant between
its registers, which, structuring their relation, would at once demand and
refuse to be overcome, just as in “Sainte” the poem required and pre-
cluded vocalization. The playful tone at once hints at consolation and
devastation; it is in the space between the two that the poem opens up, I
would suggest, that the “ontologization” Mallarmé seeks to effect would
be situated.

* * *

In defending le poème from la poésie, and Mallarmé from his “cult,”

Meschonnic aims not simply to defend the individual discursive context
of a particular poem from essentialization but also to articulate an ontol-
ogy of language as discourse in opposition to the model of the dyadic
sign. This is what is at issue in his and Blanchot’s divergent accounts
of rhythm at the basis of language: rhythm, for Meschonnic, is what
binds discursive meaning together, whereas for Blanchot rhythm belongs
ultimately to signification, anterior to all discourse. But this opposition
leaves both thinkers blind to crucial aspects of Mallarmé’s thinking on
poetry and his poetic practice: Meschonnic’s insistence on the poems’
discursive gestures ignores the extent to which Mallarmé is trying to trace
a linguistic movement in excess of discourse; Blanchot’s model of signi-
fication deafens him to the discursive features through which Mallarmé
would grasp this excess.
There are two problems here. As we have seen, Mallarmé grasps silence
and rhythm, beyond their prosodic value, as both experiential but extralin-
guistic (“la musique humaine silencieuse”) and as linguistic but preexperi-
ential (“le langage humain ramené à son rythme essentiel”); Meschonnic
and Blanchot each focus on one at the expense of the other. But what is
at issue is not simply the kind of rhythm and silence Mallarmé outlines
in his speculative account but also their relation to prosody. There is no
reason a focus on Mallarmé’s employment of discursive and “circumstan-
tial” prosodic features—intonation, address, gesture—should entail that
162 David Nowell Smith

language itself is in essence discourse. But conversely, to grasp the specula-

tive, or ontologizing, dimension of Mallarmé’s poetry and poetics as an
excess over discourse does not mean that he disregards the discursive fab-
ric of words. That is, Mallarmé’s “transposition” from the highly personal
address of “Sainte” and “Éventail” to the impersonality of the “motifs
rythmiques de l’être” does not preclude us from situating this transposi-
tion within the poems that are “actually speaking” or “the complexity of
communication” they imply.
At this juncture, I would like to return to the affinity between Mal-
larmé and Heidegger. In the same year that Blanchot leveled his com-
plaint that Heidegger only gives “attention aux mots considérés à part,”
Heidegger was himself using the “Schwabian archaism” of Be-wëgung,
which his translators have rendered as a “way-making movement,” to
grasp language as joining together a prehuman articulation of meaning
(Sage) with human discourse (Sprechen) (Heidegger Poetry 130–31). Like
Blanchot, he grasps this prehuman articulation as the oscillation between
presence and absence. But at this point Heidegger’s and Blanchot’s anal-
yses trace diametrically opposite paths: Blanchot attributes this move-
ment to the capacity of signification to make present beings disappear,
whereas Heidegger argues that this movement is anterior to signification
and conceives it as a movement into presence through which beings dis-
close themselves “as” entities that “are.” Signification, moreover, becomes
for Heidegger derivative not only to this originary “showing” but also to
what in Being and Time he had termed “discourse”: the way in which we
inhabit a language, rather than treating it as a system of lexemes bound
together by a grammar. In the 1959 essay on “The Way to Language,”
we find a movement into the “sounding” of speech: the term sounding
(Lauten) is deployed precisely to resist the split into sound (Wortlaut) and
sense, into bodily experience and linguistic signification. Heidegger’s play
of Be-stimmung, playing on the etymological root of “determination” in
Stimme, the voice, shows how he aims to see the sensuous and epistemic
aspects of language to arise in one movement.9
The movement from “saying” into “speech” is thus double: a move-
ment into sounding, and into semantic and syntactic determination. In
this, Heidegger seems to be attentive to the two different distinctions
we found in Mallarmé: that between the “purs motifs rythmiques de
l’être,” which Heidegger would ascribe to a “linguistic essence” that is
“nothing human” (Poetry 121; Way 205), and the “nœud rythmique,”
by which Mallarmé defines the human soul, and that between a rhythm
that belongs to language itself and the prosodic rhythms of speech. In his
thinking of rhythm, like his thinking of silence, Heidegger is attending to
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 163

the same three strata that Mallarmé’s own accounts imply: the prosodic,
the experiential, and the ontological.
In the letter to Verlaine, Mallarmé suggested, as cited above, that “le
rythme même du livre, alors impersonnel et vivant, jusque sans sa pagina-
tion, se juxtapose aux équations de ce rêve, ou Ode”—that is, the Livre
becomes the encounter between an impersonal rhythm and our attempts
to grasp it through the rhythms of spoken language. The guiding ques-
tion his poetry and poetics pose is how the poet’s technical repertoire—be
it through versification or communicative, discursive gestures—can, as
a deployment of spoken rhythms, restitute this originary rhythm. Hei-
degger, too, continually asks how we, inhabiting everyday language, can
come to grasp the movement that language is. For Heidegger, this takes
place through an encounter with the limits of our verbal language, and it
strikes me that “Éventail” and “Sainte” gesture toward something simi-
lar: as the meter sets speech and scansion into conflict, with the poem’s
“music” inhabiting the fault lines between the two, or as the gulf between
registers ceases to provide bathos and becomes an abyss. Moments like
this suggest that, if we are to grasp Mallarmé’s ontologization of poetry,
both in its grandiosity and in its attentiveness to the intricacies of human
communication and poetic technique, then the affinity between Mal-
larmé and Heidegger may be a good place to start.

Works Cited
Acquisto, Joseph. French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006.
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge,
1973.
———. “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry.” Notes to Literature. Trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 109–49.
Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.
Bonnefoy, Yves. “La clef de la dernière cassette.” Sous l’horizon du langage. Paris: Mer-
cure de France, 2002. 179–207.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
———. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.
———. Off the Beaten Track. Trans. Julian Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
———. On the Way to Language. 1971. Trans. Peter Hertz. New York: Harper and
Row, 1982.
———. Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
97–135.
164 David Nowell Smith

———. Poetry, Language, Thought. 1971. Trans. and ed. Alfred Hofstadter. New
York: Harper and Row, 2001.
Jarvis, Simon. “For a Poetics of Verse.” PMLA 125.4 (2010): 931–35.
Kaufmann, Vincent. Le livre et ses adresses. Paris: Klincksieck, 1986.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Correspondance I: 1862–1871. Eds. Henri Mondor and Lloyd
James Austin. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.
———. Correspondance II: 1871–1885. Eds. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin.
Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
———. Correspondance VIII: 1896. Eds. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin.
Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
———. Oeuvres Complètes. Eds. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1992.
Marchal, Bertrand. Lecture de Mallarmé. Paris: José Corti, 1985.
Meschonnic, Henri. Célébration de la poésie. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2001.
———. Critique du rythme. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982.
———. Le Langage Heidegger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990.
———. Introduction to “Mallarmé au-delà du silence.” Stéphane Mallarmé, Écrits sur
le livre. Eds. Christophe Romana and Michel Valensi. Paris: L’Éclat, 1986.
———. Pour la poétique V: Poésie sans réponse. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.
Nowell Smith, David. Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics. New
York: Fordham UP, 2013.
Pearson, Roger. Unfolding Mallarmé. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Stéphane Mallarmé: La lucidité et sa face d’ombre. Paris: Gallimard,
1986.Williams, Heather. Mallarmé’s Ideas in Language. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2004.

Notes
1. We should note here, however, that in its sweeping gestures the polemic pays
scant regard to the fundamental disagreements between these thinkers.
2. We can compare with Vincent Kaufmann’s complaint that critics “reduce Mal-
larmé’s œuvre to a handful of his most famous poems, to which are then added
the Coup de dés, Igitur, and a few extracts (always the same ones) from his ‘theo-
retical’ writings” (11). Ironically, Meschonnic himself only refers to a handful
of examples, notably le poème, énonciateur and the distinction between nommer
and suggérer. In fact, it is a charge that any attempt to address the debates that
have sprung up around Mallarmé’s work, including the present one, will find
hard to avoid.
3. If beyond the scope of the current essay, the relevance to contemporary poets is
crucial to his polemic: René Char, Saint-John Perse, Michel Déguy, and Yves
Bonnefoy, all of whom are accused of celebrating “poetising” at the expense of
poems and “naming” at the expense of a broader rhetorical and allusory palette.
4. At this juncture, Adorno is taking issue with the Heidegger of Being and Time,
rather than the Heidegger of the Hölderlin readings. However, he will offer
more or less the same critique of Heidegger in his essay “Parataxis: On Hölder-
lin’s Late Poetry,” which is directed specifically at the Hölderlin readings.
 Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem 165

5. For Heidegger, ecstasy, or ec-stasis, is the standing-outside-oneself through

which humans can encounter the “nothing” of their existence and thus start
to grasp their own being-in-the-world. Meschonnic suggests that Bonnefoy’s
openly stated belief that there is “an ‘essence of the poetic’” (cited in Meschon-
nic Célébration 123) constitutes “the diffuse mark . . . of the status of language
and poetry for Heidegger” (123–24).
6. He is speaking of Hériodiade at this juncture. For a comprehensive literature
review of the Platonizing tendency in Mallarmé criticism, see Williams 15–18.
7. Marchal takes this to repudiate any notion of “making music with words” (95).
It strikes me that Mallarmé is trying to complicate this analogy by broadening
our understanding of what words are and can be; a music made of words would
be far removed from instrumental music but would not thereby become purely
“intellectual.”
8. This gives the lie to Meschonnic’s rather facetious dismissal of the silence of
Mallarmé’s “writing”: “Mallarmé, interiorizing the written, . . . appeared for
some to push to an extreme a writing that was so written that it could now
no longer be anything other than mute. The only problem: they forgot about
rhythm” (“Mallarmé” 51). For this simply ignores Mallarmé’s attempt to grasp
a nonexperiential rhythm at the excess of sonority, to see rhythm and silence as
coinciding with one another.
9. For more on Heidegger’s account of language as movement into sound, see
Nowell Smith.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 10

Poetic Form and the

Crisis of Community
Revisiting Rancière’s Aesthetics

Alison James

The recent work of Jacques Rancière reorients our understanding

of literary modernity away from common assumptions about intransitive
language and develops a compelling account of the political dimension of
literature. Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible” (partage
du sensible) inscribes the aesthetic, in the general sense of the sensory per-
ception of time and space, at the heart of politics. This “basic concern . . .
to point out the aesthetic dimension of the political experience” (Ran-
cière, “From Politics” 13) is the thread that connects Rancière’s historical
and political research in The Nights of Labor (French original published
in 1981) to his later account of the “aesthetic revolution.” In this second
context, the “aesthetic” is defined in a narrower sense as a “specific system
of art, opposed to the representative system” (Rancière, Guénoun, and
Kavanagh 12). It is the “aesthetic regime” that allows the emergence of
“literature” as a “historical mode of visibility of the works of the art of
writing” (Rancière, Mute Speech 32). Literature, in this particular histori-
cal mode, operates in a space constituted by tensions or contradictions:
between autonomy and heteronomy; between the “democratic” indiffer-
ence of style to subject matter and the affirmation of a specific “poetic”
mode of language; between the chaotic dispersal of “orphaned” speech
and the incorporation/incarnation of speech as hieroglyph; or between
the two extremes of art becoming life and life becoming art.
168 Alison James

While Short Voyages to the Land of the People (French original pub-
lished in 1981) considers literary and cinematic representations, it is
the publication in 1996 of Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren that marks
Rancière’s decisive shift from the aesthetics of politics to the politics of
aesthetics. Rancière’s concise study of Mallarmé is the site of a strategic
engagement with important strands in twentieth-century thought. Mal-
larmé has been described as a witness to the “literary experience” wherein
language encounters its own dissolution (Blanchot); he has been admired
for his staging of the suspension, deferral, and dissemination of meaning
in writing (Derrida). Countering Blanchot, Rancière’s opening polemical
gesture is to reject the received view of Mallarmé as an obscure writer, as
an aesthete writing in an ivory tower, or as the failed poet of the impos-
sible Book (Rancière, Mallarmé xv–xvi). In reevaluating the poet usually
taken to embody the quest for literary intransitivity, Rancière targets the
dominant conception of literary modernity. His argument differs from
that of Sartre, who diagnoses Mallarmé’s withdrawal from the world of
action as a form of violence so total that it is transformed into “the impas-
sive idea of violence” (Sartre 133). Mallarmé’s politics is not, for Rancière,
Kristeva’s “revolution of poetic language” that transposes political anar-
chism into the purely textual realm of signifying practices (Kristeva 433–
36). Nor does Rancière locate Mallarmé’s politics primarily in the poet’s
analyses of contemporary culture, the fashion journal La Dernière mode
(1874–75), or the more politically oriented prose writings (cf. Catani).
Rather, he identifies Mallarmé’s response to his moment as immanent in
poetic form itself, in the very difficulty of Mallarmé’s poems, which set
themselves the arduous task of resuscitating “forms-of-world” through an
arrangement of words (Mallarmé 44).
The book on Mallarmé lays the groundwork for Rancière’s subsequent
accounts of literature in The Flesh of Words and Mute Speech (1998), fol-
lowed by The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000)
and The Aesthetic Unconscious (2001), as well as the essays collected in
Aesthetics and its Discontents (2004) and The Politics of Literature (2007).
These works all cast Mallarmé and Flaubert, and sometimes the modern-
ist trinity Flaubert-Mallarmé-Proust, as the principal actors in the drama
of contradictions that defines the realm of the aesthetic. After the col-
lapse of the “representative regime” that defined and distributed genres
according to a hierarchy of represented subjects, these writers simultane-
ously lay bare the contradictions of the literary paradigm and produce a
work of art of and from these contradictions (Mute Speech 36–37). They
maintain the distinction of a literature that nevertheless always threatens
to dissolve back into what Rancière, following Hegel, calls “the prose of
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 169

ordinary life” (Hegel 1: 245). Mallarmé’s “writing of the Idea” figures in

Rancière’s narrative as the poetic counterpart to Flaubert’s prosaic “book
about nothing” (Mute Speech 128). Emma Bovary’s death preserves the
purity of literature against the very “democracy” that defines both Flau-
bert’s own poetics and the “new art of writing [that] makes any subject
matter equal to any other” (Rancière, “Emma Bovary” 237). In the case of
Mallarmé, community rather than democracy is Rancière’s operative term.
At the most general level, community is implicated by definition in all
acts of writing, since Rancière’s concept of the partage du sensible links
all social forms to the configuration of sense experience (see Robson 88).
More specifically, in Rancière’s reading of Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic
Education, the aesthetic regime of art sees in aesthetic experience “the
promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the
community” (Rancière, “Aesthetic Revolution” 133).
If art, as a reconfiguration of the sensible, institutes the space of a
promised community, Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé links this virtual
future to present reality: “If Mallarmé’s writing is difficult, it is because
it obeys a demanding poetics, one which responds to an acute awareness
of the complexity of a historical moment and the way in which in this
moment, the crisis of verse was linked to a crisis of the ideal and of the
social” (Mallarmé xvi). In emphasizing this triple crisis of verse, ideas,
and social forms, Rancière gives surprisingly little weight to the first of
the three terms. Despite the attention he accords to Mallarmé’s “Crise de
vers” (“Crisis of verse”), the fate of metrical forms matters to Rancière pri-
marily as a sign of the death of those archetypes and forms (the Platonic
eidos) that formerly grounded representation: “The anecdotic crisis of the
venerable Alexandrine refers back to the more serious blackout of the sky
of Ideas” (Mallarmé 11). What, then, is the precise status of poetic form
in Rancière’s work on aesthetics? To reverse Rancière’s initial problematic,
what is specifically poetic about Mallarmé’s politics of literature? These
questions serve as my point of departure for a consideration of the rela-
tion of poetic form to the idea of aesthetic community.
Rancière’s writings on poetry have received less attention than his
political thought, his work on film, or his aesthetics more generally.1 The
following pages situate Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé within his larger
account of modern lyricism and romanticism. The Flesh of Words and
Mute Speech trace continuities within poetic history but reveal a certain
indifference to questions of poetic form. Finally, I will relate Rancière’s
reading of Mallarmé to the formal history of French poetry proposed
by the contemporary poet Jacques Roubaud, whose book La Vieillesse
d’Alexandre (1978; “Alexander in Old Age”) develops a different account
170 Alison James

of the nineteenth-century “crisis of verse.” This comparison brings to light

the significance of Mallarmé’s legacy for poetry and poetics and invites us
to reconsider Rancière’s assessment of poetic modernity.

“No One Mentioned Verse”2: Poetry

and the Aesthetic Regime
A difficulty confronts us at the outset: Rancière often uses the term
“poetry” in its broadest sense, first as the Aristotelian category of poiesis
(Mute Speech 6), then, in the modern context, as a synonym for liter-
ary practice in general. Moreover, Rancière is interested less in the ques-
tion of poetic genres as such than in kinds of enunciation that can be
related to modes of political subjectification (Rancière, Flesh 13). It is
the lyric emancipation of the subject that frames Rancière’s account of
modern poetry in the opening chapter of The Flesh of Words: “[T]he mod-
ern lyric revolution is not a way of experiencing oneself, of experiencing
the profundity of one’s inner life, or, conversely, of immersing it in the
profundity of nature. It is primarily a specific method of utterance, a way
of accompanying one’s saying, of deploying it in a perceptual space, of
giving it rhythm in a walk, a journey, a crossing” (Rancière, Flesh 12).
Romantic lyricism is defined as a way of relating a subject position to the
perception and organization of space. Wordsworth’s wandering traces a
path that both unites and divides, tying the poetic “I” to the world of sim-
ple things (clouds, daffodils) while demarcating poetic movement from
political action (Rancière, Flesh 19–20). The age-old difficulties of the
poet’s relationship to politics, notes Rancière in his preface to the edited
volume La Politique des poètes (The Politics of Poets), are exacerbated by the
modern lyric paradigm that links political and poetic emancipation under
the sign of liberty (Rancière, Politique 9–11, 16; see also De Gandt 88).
Wordsworth’s passage from revolutionary enthusiasm to disenchantment
allows Rancière to establish the essential link between lyrical subjectivity
and political engagement, as well as the necessary undoing of this relation
that is the condition for lyricism’s autonomy (Rancière, Short Voyages 22).
The first section of The Flesh of Words, “The Politics of the Poem,” out-
lines a partial history of modern lyricism, from Wordsworth to Mandels-
tam via Byron, Pushkin, Rimbaud—and Mallarmé, whose poetry marks
an important point of transition. This tradition links an emancipated
subject to a utopian territory understood as “the identification of a per-
ceptual space that one discovers while walking with the topos of the com-
munity” (Flesh 18). Baudelaire’s poetry emerges from the economy of sin
and the idea of a poetic nature composed of “living pillars” (Flesh 55); in
Mallarmé’s poetics, nature is simply what is there, while poetry is the trace
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 171

of a purified language inscribed on the white page. Mallarmé inaugurates

the avant-gardist invention of the future, both preserving and transform-
ing the romantic legacy by linking the pure poetic act to a future com-
munion with the crowd (Flesh 40, 65). Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé
is Rimbaud, for whom the poem does not have its own space; “the poem
is caught without recourse in the evil of language” (Flesh 56).
Curiously, it is in reading Rimbaud—the poet who supposedly does
not believe in the separation of “commercial” and poetic language—that
Rancière develops the most complete formal analysis of a poem, empha-
sizing the meter and sound of the poem “Voyelles” (“Vowels”) and their
relation to the body (Flesh 42–44). Peter Hallward argues that Rancière’s
relative inattention to questions of artistic form is a political matter: “He
is less interested in the formal rigour of a Flaubert or a Mallarmé, say, than
in the quasi-democratic range of reference or inclusion that it allows”
(Hallward 40–41). Beyond the question of reference, Rancière does con-
sider modes of figuration that incorporate ideas as words, the tropology
that presents truth as image (Mute Speech 57). The role of form neverthe-
less remains paradoxical: the idea of poetry as a specific mode of language,
one of the two great principles of the modern paradigm of literature (Mute
Speech 36), can apply equally to verse and prose writing. Style, conceived
in Flaubert’s terms as an “absolute manner of seeing things” (Mute Speech
115) both makes possible the “democracy” of a literature that takes the
whole world as its object and establishes the boundary that separates liter-
ature from other forms of discourse. Against Sartre’s distinction between
the transitive language of prose and the intransitive language of poetry,
Rancière affirms that “the identification of literature with a specific state
or use of language has no real linguistic relevance, and it cannot ground
any specificity of literature or its political involvement” (“Politics of Lit-
erature” 11). Against Alain Badiou’s opposition between the antimimetic
singularity of the poem and aesthetic discourse about poetry, Rancière
asserts that there can be no meaningful distinction (within the aesthetic
regime or within Mallarmé’s poetics) between the prose text “Crise de
vers” and the “Sonnet en x” (Rancière, Aesthetics 101).
Rancière’s account of the aesthetic regime, then, encompasses a his-
tory of lyric subjectivity but does not oppose poetry and prose, or even
verse and prose, but rather the poem and the novel. Even this last distinc-
tion remains unstable, for it is the representative regime, not the aes-
thetic one, that depends on a hierarchical system of genres linking forms
of expression to the subject represented. On the one hand, the aesthetic
regime subsumes all literary genres within a generalized category. On the
other hand, it is the “false genre” of the novel (“From Politics” 7) that
172 Alison James

exemplifies the democratic break of the aesthetic with the representative

regime as well as the romantic shift to a generalized poetics of expres-
sion. Hence Rancière’s curious indifference to the evolution of metrical
form, even when this evolution clearly marks the rupture of the aesthetic
and representative regimes. In Mute Speech, Rancière summarily dismisses
Victor Hugo’s metrical enjambments and his revolutionizing of poetic
language—the “liberty cap” (bonnet rouge) put on the dictionary. For
Rancière, Hugo’s exemplary romantic “poem” is the novel Notre Dame
de Paris, which identifies the power of the word with the mute language
of stone (Mute Speech 42). It is on the undifferentiated prosaic ground of
romantic expression that the modern notion of “style,” as a specific mode
of language, ultimately emerges.
Here we encounter the Hegelian dilemma in which art’s fulfillment
entails its dissolution, through either its fall into the “prose of the world” or
its self-transcendence into the realm of the immaterial idea. According to
Rancière, Flaubert’s work reaches the first of these extremes: the absolutiza-
tion of style encounters its cancellation in the realm of stupidity (bêtise), or
what Mallarmé calls “universal reportage” (Mute Speech 127, 129). For Mal-
larmé, on the contrary, poetic expression of the Idea must be distinct from
the ordinary forms of communication. In Rancière’s account the impos-
sibility of the Mallarméan Book points to the other extreme of literary het-
eronomy: the dissolution of literature into the immaterial life of the spirit
(Mute Speech 135). Rancière’s aim is not to immure literature in aporia
but rather to define its territory as the intersection of complex tensions
(Mute Speech 146–47). Nevertheless, his philosophical reading of Mallarmé
focuses on the poem’s allegorical confrontation with its own idea.

“There Is No Prose”: Mallarmé

and the Poetics of Crisis
In the first chapter of Mallarmé, Rancière puts forward two interpretative
keys to the “mystery” of Mallarmé’s poetry: the arabesque, “the supple line
of the phrase which slips from grasp,” and the hypothesis as the logic that
takes the place of narrative (Mallarmé 2). Rancière’s opening reading of
the sonnet “À la nue accablante tu” (“Hushed to the Crushing Cloud”)
does not engage with previous critical debate on the poem’s grammati-
cal ambiguities—for instance, the question of whether “cela” in “ou cela
que” is a demonstrative pronoun (that) or the passé simple of celer (“con-
cealed”), with “naufrage” (“shipwreck”) as its subject (see Marchal, Lecture
251–55). Instead, Rancière emphasizes the global syntactical organization
of the poem, the double “pivot,” in the commas surrounding the word
“écume” (“foam”) and the “ou cela que” (“or else”) that articulates the
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 173

unfolding alternative—the scenario of the “sepulchral shipwreck” versus

the movement of the siren. He also considers the poem’s meaning within
the architecture of the Poésies as a whole, where its penultimate position
reinforces its thematic and formal mirroring of the opening poem “Salut”
(“Toast”)—another sonnet of octosyllabic lines that makes explicit the
metaphorical function of foam, navigation, drowning sirens, and ship-
wrecks. Both poems deal with the poetic act, or what Mallarmé elsewhere
calls the “Restricted Action” of the poem (Rancière, Mallarmé 5, 7). Up
to this point, Rancière remains fairly close to previous interpretations,
including Badiou’s reading of “À la nue accablante tu” in terms of the
thinking of the event (Badiou 108–12).3 Rancière’s fundamental argu-
ment, however, involves a reformulation of the poem’s initial hypothesis:
the ship of poetry might have disappeared into the sea of the public’s and
the era’s indifference; or else, the vain abyss of the era and the public, hun-
gry for the grandeur of “some high perdition,” can only bury the fragile
siren of the poem in its depths (Mallarmé 5–6). Rancière opts for the
second term of the alternative, preferring the allegory of the little siren—
which does not necessarily drown but rather appears and disappears in
an ephemeral self-presentation—to that of the grandiose shipwreck. The
siren is thus the emblem of the poetic act and its relation to the historical
moment: “The siren is no longer a deceptive being of fiction, it is the act,
the suspension itself of fiction: the transformation of the narrative into a
vanishing hypothesis . . . So what the siren metaphorizes, what the poem
carries out, is very precisely the event and calculated risk of the poem
in times and a ‘mental milieu’ which are not yet ready to welcome it”
(Mallarmé 6–7). Rancière’s reading of “À la nue accablante tu” condenses
a number of traits that characterize his approach to poetry more gener-
ally: the identification and interpretation of figures that incorporate ideas
as material forms (in Mallarmé’s case, the metaphors and symbols that
bring the idea into being as a theatrical gesture of presentation [Rancière,
Mallarmé 12–16]); an attention to the unfolding and dislocations of syn-
tax rather than aspects of prosody or meter; and (in contrast to Badiou’s
“inaesthetics”) an emphasis on the continuity between the immanent
logic of the poem, the poet’s own reflections on his art, and a larger set of
discourses on aesthetics. Mallarmé’s reflections on the social role of poetry
(notably in the prose texts of Divagations and La Musique et les lettres) pro-
vide the basis for Rancière’s political reading of the poems: in this view,
the poet is solitary only because he awaits the conditions that will unite
him with the human community as a whole (Mallarmé 33). Pursuing the
same line of thought in the essay “The Intruder,” Rancière insists that the
“pure” language Mallarmé seeks “is already in itself a community power,
174 Alison James

a ‘poem of the human race as a whole,’ in the words of August Schlegel”

(Politics of Literature 81).
Yves Delegue, writing on philosophers’ fascination with Mallarmé,
rightly observes that Rancière shares with other thinkers (Badiou, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe) the ambition of formulating Mallarmé’s philosophy
in order to dispel its mystery (Delegue 132). Yet Rancière’s reading is
philosophical not in the sense of identifying the abstract concepts behind
the writing but rather in identifying poetic practice itself as a mode of
thought (Mallarmé 44–45). This approach is congruent with much of the
existing literary scholarship on Mallarmé, notably Pierre Campion’s Mal-
larmé: Poésie et philosophie (1994), and above all Bertrand Marchal’s La
Religion de Mallarmé (1988), which identifies the ideological substrate of
Mallarmé’s poetics in a unified vision of humanity, language, and society
and in its utopian orientation toward the future (Religion 557). However,
where these literary approaches aim primarily to interpret Mallarmé’s
work, Rancière’s analysis is directed toward the larger question of the con-
stitutive contradictions of the aesthetic. Mallarmé’s recasting of the prob-
lem, according to Rancière, involves a double imperative: the poem is the
religion of the future but is not permitted any incarnation that would
guarantee this religion and this poem. The radical consequence is what
Rancière defines as “Mallarmé’s paradox”: “[T]he poem must contain,
uniquely in the materiality of its arrangement, the incorporation which
guarantees it. Its form must simultaneously be the body and the idea of
its idea” (Mallarmé 58).
Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé reveals in succinct and persuasive form
both the political potential and political limits of poetry within the aes-
thetic regime of art. However, his philosophical emphasis on Mallarmé’s
writing of the idea leads to what Jacques-David Ebguy calls the “forgetting
of the letter” (Ebguy par. 58). More precisely, what is (almost) forgotten
in Rancière’s Mallarmé is not form as such but specifically verse—meter,
rhyme, rhythm. As Pierre Campion argues in his review of Rancière’s
book, Mallarmé reinterprets verse in terms of a dramatic presentation of
rhythmic events, in which images, meter, rhyme, enjambment, syntactic
inversion, and the organization of words on the page produce twists and
turns that mimic the movement of thought (Campion 468–69, 471).
Campion focuses on concrete syntactic and metrical disjunctions such
as the placement of a preposition in a metrically accented position or the
prosodic ambiguity of lines that confront the reader with two different
possibilities of articulation (Campion 476–77). If Rancière is inattentive
to such prosodic effects, it is because he tends to view traditional meter
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 175

as a mere remnant of the old regime of representation and its system

of forms and genres (Mallarmé 57). Combining the nautical metaphors
of Vigny’s La Bouteille à la mer (The Bottle at Sea) and Mallarmé’s Un
coup de dés (A Dice Throw), Rancière renders the alexandrine either as the
container of the old poetic message cast into the ocean of the era or as
the tiller of the boat, sabotaged by the vers impair (the line with an odd
number of syllables) and free verse (Mallarmé 54). To the extent that Ran-
cière does describe the evolution of forms, he traces a progression from
the fictional scenario condensed in the sonnet (“À la nue accablante tu”)
toward the visual choreography of Un coup de dés. In the latter poem, the
arrangement of words on the space of the page is a performative imita-
tion of the movement of pure thought, but—and here Rancière draws
on and reformulates Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé’s “Mimique” (Der-
rida 254–55)—it can only imitate an already fictional model of thought:
the allegory of the boat and the throw of the dice (Mallarmé 56–57).4
What interests Rancière in this case is the poem’s spatial form, understood
in terms of a mimesis that confronts the absence of a model. When he
describes modes of representation under the old regime of belles lettres,
Rancière often speaks of the literary forms of this system as if they were
merely arbitrary markers of the hierarchy of represented content. In
another text on Mallarmé, he describes romanticism’s “apparent” contin-
uation of metrical measure as a veil that masks the profound transforma-
tion of the aesthetic revolution (“Rime” 120). In the Hegelian narrative
of Mute Speech, Hugo’s enjambments appear as a shoring up of the old, as
scaffolding that announces the inevitable disappearance of metrical form
(Mute Speech 135).
Mallarmé, as “Crise de vers” shows, has more time for Hugo’s poems:
“Hugo, dans sa tâche mystérieuse, rabattit toute la prose, philosophie,
éloquence, histoire au vers, et comme il était le vers personnellement, il
confisqua chez qui pense, discourt ou narre, presque le droit à s’énoncer”
(Mallarmé, OC2: 205; my translation; “Hugo, in his mysterious task,
folded all prose, philosophy, eloquence, history back into verse, and,
since he was verse, personally, he confiscated from anyone who thinks,
expounds, or narrates, almost the right to speak”). What Hugo embod-
ies here is not just the alexandrine but more unconsciously the idea “que
la forme appelée vers est simplement elle-même la littérature; que vers
il y a sitôt que s’accentue la diction, rythme dès que style” (2: 205; my
translation; “that the form called verse simply is itself literature; that
there is verse as soon as diction is heightened, rhythm as soon as there is
style”). In this syntagmatic displacement that postulates the paradigmatic
176 Alison James

equivalence of verse, literature, rhythm, and style, we find an echo of Mal-

larmé’s response to Jules Huret’s Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Enquiry
on Literary Evolution):

Le vers est partout dans la langue où il y a rythme, partout, excepté dans les
affiches et à la quatrième page des journaux. Dans le genre appelée prose, il
y a des vers, quelquefois admirables, de tous rythmes. Mais, en vérité, il n’y
a pas de prose: il y a l’alphabet et puis des vers plus ou moins serrés: plus
ou moins diffus. (2: 698)
[Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere,
except on posters and the fourth page of the newspapers. In the genre
called prose, there are lines of verse, sometimes admirable, in all kinds
of rhythm. But in truth, there is no prose: there is the alphabet and then
verses that are more or less tight, more or less diffuse.] (my translation)

Nevertheless, verse and prose are perhaps not so easily merged as the
Huret interview suggests. In the prose text “Solennité” (“Solemnity”),
Mallarmé enumerates insights inspired by Banville’s poem Le Forgeron
(The Blacksmith), first of all “[q]ue tout poème composé autrement qu’en
vue d’obéir au vieux génie du vers, n’en est pas un” (2: 199; my transla-
tion; “that any poem composed otherwise than in view of obeying the
old genius of verse, is not a poem”). Mallarmé comments specifically on
Banville’s harmonizing of rhyme with the rhythm of the alexandrine. This
leads him to more general observations on the mysterious law of Rhyme
that, through its necessary doubling, guards against the domination of the
one over the multiple.
In the essay “La rime et le conflit” (“Rhyme and Conflict”), Rancière
takes up this idea of rhyme as guardian and as conflict but immediately
moves away from poetic form itself to the idea of form and then to the
idea of the idea: “[T]he essence of poetry is rhyme, but not rhyme as the
resemblance between two word endings, rhyme as an idea of language
and an idea of the idea” (121–22; my translation). We might object that
rhyme is for Mallarmé precisely the resemblance of sounds, “identité de
deux fragments constitutifs remémorée extérieurement par une parité
dans la consonance” (OC2: 201, my translation; “the identity of two con-
stitutive fragments recollected from outside through a parity in conso-
nance”). The passage from “Solennité” does not replace the old principles
of meter with a new conception of rhyme, as Rancière seems to suggest;
rather, it lauds the importance of rhyme within the French system of
versification. It is Rancière, not Mallarmé, who is more interested in the
idea of rhyme than in rhyme itself, just as he redefines the crisis of poetry
in philosophical and political terms. While Rancière links the difficulty of
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 177

Mallarmé’s poetry to the demands of a historical moment, what remains

unclear is the precise nature of the connection between social crisis and
poetic forms.

“The Territory to Live”5: Poetic

Form and Collective Life
Mallarmé’s “Crise de vers” is first and foremost a commentary on the
place of the alexandrine at the end of the nineteenth century: “Les fidèles
à l’alexandrin, notre hexamètre, desserrent intérieurement ce mécanisme
rigide et puéril de sa mesure; l’oreille, affranchie d’un compteur factice,
connaît une jouissance à discerner, seule, toutes les combinaisons pos-
sibles, entre eux, de douze timbres.” (2: 206, my translation; Those faith-
ful to the alexandrine, our hexameter, are loosening from within that rigid
and puerile mechanism of its beat; the ear, freed from a contrived counter,
finds pleasure in discerning, on its own, all the possible combinations,
between them, of twelve timbres.) Both “Crise de vers” and Mallarmé’s
Poésies occupy a crucial place in Jacques Roubaud’s La Vieillesse d’Alexandre
(1978), a book that recounts the story of the old age and paradoxical sur-
vival of the alexandrine. According to Roubaud, “Crise de vers” offers a
precise analysis of contemporary practices, from the variable distribution
of alexandrines within the poem to “polymorphous” experiments in free
verse. But Mallarmé’s text is also, Roubaud stresses, an anticipation of the
future and a general theory of verse; it contains both a diagnosis and a
utopian vision of literary modernity.
La Vieillesse d’Alexandre adopts an exclusively metrical point of view
that offers, as Roubaud acknowledges, only a partial account of poetry
(Vieillesse 13). Nevertheless, this limited formal reading is not diamet-
rically opposed to Rancière’s philosophical and political concerns. In
emphasizing the evolution of verse form, Roubaud does not exclude the
problem of social crisis. Rather, he inscribes the question of meter, num-
ber, and measure at the heart of the human relation to language. As the
place of mediation between individual expression and the collective, met-
rical form is inherently for Roubaud a matter of what Rancière calls the
partage du sensible—that is, a system that makes visible both the existence
of a shared common space and the divisions that define distinct places
and portion (Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics 12–13). Roubaud’s reading
of Mallarmé suggests a way of both extending and contesting Rancière’s
account of modern poetry.
The opening chapter of Roubaud’s book suggests a path between poetry
and politics via a reading of Rimbaud’s poem “Qu’est-ce pour nous, mon
cœur” (“What Is It to Us, My Heart”), connecting Rimbaud’s destruction
178 Alison James

of metrical form to revolt against social order at the time of the com-
mune (Vieillesse 26). However, far from discounting the alexandrine as
the remnant of an obsolete system, Roubaud emphasizes its place as the
cornerstone of the French poetic tradition and as the privileged metrical
line in Mallarmé’s Poésies. Roubaud’s second chapter offers a formal typol-
ogy of Mallarmé’s “irregular” alexandrines. Roubaud observes that Mal-
larmé’s transgressions of traditional metrical rules are limited in number
(affecting around 5 percent of his alexandrines) and mostly involve local
violations of the unity of the hemistich (Vieillesse 37–39). Yet for this very
reason, they gain in intensity and significance, positioning Mallarmé’s
poetry in the line of a continuous evolution in French poetry, in relation
to Hugo and Baudelaire rather than Rimbaud (Vieillesse 46). Roubaud’s
commentary, although restricted to meter (and to one particular metrical
form at that), does not reduce poetry to the mechanics of verse; on the
contrary, as he points out, Mallarmé states that the mere observance of
the rules will produce only a “simulacrum” of poetry. Yet the role of verse
is not to gesture toward an idea of language, as in Rancière’s account.
In Mallarmé’s reference to the new liberated alexandrine, composed of
nonhierarchical combinations of 12 timbres, Roubaud finds a vision of
poetry’s future: “We find here a marvelous and utopian Schoenbergian
definition of a new alexandrine . . . in which all the possibilities of the
number twelve would be in play” (Vieillesse 53, my translation).
Roubaud’s account of poetic modernity differs from Rancière’s in a
number of important respects. Crucially, the “Hugolian Revolution” is a
matter not of prose but rather of the new rhythmic complexity that Hugo
brings to the alexandrine, thus creating new metrical possibilities that are
never fully realized (Vieillesse 103–4). While Rancière’s modern triad of
Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust places the question of verse in the back-
ground, Roubaud’s “triangle of poetic modernity” is composed of Mal-
larmé, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont (Vieillesse 97). The latter two occupy
radical positions of destruction and abolition that transform the relation
of verse and prose, poetry and nonpoetry, while the ghost of meter contin-
ues to haunt the poetry of the twentieth century. Mallarmé, in Roubaud’s
narrative, is less the inaugural poet of the avant-garde than an isolated
figure, the only one to grasp the full implications of a crisis that threatens
the fundamental proximity of verse and language (Vieillesse 111). The les-
son that Roubaud draws from Mallarmé is not the disappearance of meter
into the idea of language or the language of the idea but, on the contrary,
the primacy of metrical organization in our relation to language: rhythm
implies meter (Vieillesse 111). While Mallarmé’s reflections on free verse
and the prose poem open the way to a generalization of the concept of
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 179

verse, Roubaud nevertheless insists that Mallarmé is also concerned with

boundaries: his conception of verse excludes narrative and retains a link
to the metrical tradition (Vieillesse 58). In Roubaud’s reformulation of
Mallarmé’s phrase (“in truth, there is no prose”), the survival of verse is
essential for the existence of literature: “In truth, there is no prose alone,
without verse, nothing that justifies ‘narrating, teaching, even describ-
ing’” (Vieillesse 197, my translation).
Roubaud goes on to offer a detailed analysis of poetic form in the
twentieth century—the free verse of the surrealists; the maintenance of
the alexandrine in Valéry, Aragon, and Queneau; and the new crisis in
verse at the end of the 1950s. This story, as well as Roubaud’s own poetic
attempt to solve to the crisis in verse—his renewal of the sonnet form, his
debt to medieval lyricism, his use of Oulipian constraints—lie beyond
the scope of this essay. What deserves emphasis here is Roubaud’s sus-
tained exploration of the connection between poetry, memory, and the
collective, a link suggested in La Vieillesse d’Alexandre but given fuller
development in his other writings.6 In an article for the review Change in
1970, Roubaud claims that metrical form constitutes a model and hence
a theory of a given language, encoding the organization of sound in that
language’s utterances (Roubaud, “Quelques thèses” 17). In Poésie, etcetera:
Ménage (Poetry, Etcetera: Cleaning House, 1995), Roubaud develops the
claim that poetry is both a personal and interpersonal art of memory,
which mediates between internal and external memory through the pro-
cesses of composition, memorization, and recitation (Roubaud, Poésie
106, 145). Poetic form condenses and transmits the state of a language,
its capacity for expression and signification at a particular moment (Poésie
101–2). Meter, based on repetition and return, is an essential site of this
mnemonic function; it is the place of articulation between the individual
poetic utterance, the history of a language, and the community of speak-
ers. Poetry, defined as “the memory of language,” implies a form of life.
The disappearance of verse form is inseparable from a crisis of community.
I will conclude by drawing attention to two areas in which Rancière’s
aesthetic history of literature and Roubaud’s formal history of verse both
converge and diverge. First, both the philosopher and the poet formulate
the problem of modern literature in terms of an intrinsic contradiction.
Rancière’s “contradictions of literature” define the territory of literature’s
possibilities, between the indifference of form to subject matter and the
affirmation of poetic language. Roubaud diagnoses a “prosodic contra-
diction” that has yet to be resolved: the crisis in verse replaces the tradi-
tional poetic tension between meter and rhythm with a rupture between
these two elements (Vieillesse 202). Second, both Roubaud and Rancière
180 Alison James

understand the Mallarméan crisis as a triple crisis of verse, ideas, and

social forms, although they give different emphases to the three terms.
Roubaud’s analysis of the complex place of verse in modern poetry brings
to light the inadequacy of Rancière’s position on the dissolution of genre
within the “aesthetic regime,” while giving more specific grounding to
the essential link between poetry and community. The crisis in verse, for
Roubaud, is experienced as an exile from language and from the com-
mon—a fact that accounts for the current divorce between poetry and
its potential readers (Vieillesse 199). However, Roubaud rediscovers the
old alexandrine in the street, in newspaper headlines, in political slogans,
and in popular song (Vieillesse 196–97). Verse, meter, and rhythm remain
inseparable from the forms of collective life. In an ironic reversal of Mal-
larmé’s comments to Huret, verse is everywhere, especially on posters and
on the fourth page of the newspapers.
Mallarmé’s poetry and poetics have become an interpretative battle-
ground for poets and philosophers alike. Mallarmé is a key figure for
the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, which, as Vincent
Kaufmann has argued, link the project of the total Book to the political
utopia of the ideal community (Kaufmann 4–5). After the moment of the
avant-garde, poets continue to mobilize different aspects of Mallarmé’s
poetics: verse or rhythm, musicality or visual gesture. If Roubaud appeals
to Mallarmé as a thinker and poet of the alexandrine, Henri Meschon-
nic uses Mallarmé to defend his own theory of rhythm against metrical
approaches that, in his view, privilege language over the poetic subject
(Meschonnic 7–8). Anne-Marie Albiach’s poetry explores the visual cho-
reography of the page, while Jacques Réda rejects such typographical
experiments, as well as Roubaud’s “arithmetic” conception of meter, in
favor of an elastic versification that he compares to the “swing” of jazz
(Réda 63, 74, 88). From Jean-Marie Gleize’s recasting of Hugo’s “black
dogs of prose” as a postpoetic “prose in prose” (“prose en prose comme
poésie après la poésie”) (Gleize, Chiens noirs; A noir 228), to Roubaud’s
defense of metrical form for its vital ties to memory, contemporary poetry
seeks to develop the latent possibilities of the romantic and Mallarméan
legacy. What is at stake in this contested literary landscape is precisely the
Ranciérian question of the partage du sensible—of the lines that both con-
nect and divide the commonality of language and the specificity of a sub-
ject’s self-realization in the poetic utterance. Meter, as Roubaud shows, is
the name of one of these lines. The distinction between prose and verse is
not an obsolete problem but remains a central question for poetry in the
aesthetic regime.
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 181

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———. “Quelques thèses sur la poétique (I).” Change 6 (1970): 7–21.
———. La Vieillesse d’Alexandre: Essai sur quelques états récents du vers français. Paris:
F. Maspero, 1978.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Mallarmé, or, The Poet of Nothingness. Trans. Ernest Sturm. Univer-
sity Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1988.
 Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community 183

Notes
1. See, however, the articles by Campion, Delegue, Ebguy, and Kollias, as well as
Bosteels 171–74.
2. “Personne ne fit d’allusion aux vers” (Mallarmé, OC2:219).
3. For Rancière’s response to Badiou’s reading of Mallarmé, see Rancière, Politics
of Literature (183–205). See also the articles by Ebguy and Bosteels.
4. For an analysis of Rancière’s and Derrida’s views on the mimetic, see Dubreuil,
“Pensées fantômes.”
5. “Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui / Magnifique mais qui sans espoir
se deliver / Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre / Quand du stérile hiver
a resplendi l’ennui” (OC1:36; Collected Verse 67; “A swan of old remembers it
is he / superb but strives to break free woebegone / for having left unsung the
territory / to live when sterile winter’s tedium shone”).
6. On Roubaud’s poetics of memory, see the critical works by Consenstein, Pou-
cel, and Puff.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 11

Baudelaire with Badiou

Event and Subjectivity in
“L’Héautontimorouménos”

Joseph Acquisto

To love poetry is to love not being able to choose.

—Alain Badiou, Conditions 88

The clash between philosophy and literature does not need to be resolved.
On the contrary, only if we think of it as permanent and new does it
guarantee us that the sclerosis of words will not close over us like a sheet
of ice.
—Pierre Macherey, The Object of Literature 2

In her recent book Uses of Literature, Rita Felski opposes “grand

theory,” and the “autonomous, difficult art” it tends to favor, to “the het-
erogeneous, and politically variable, uses of literary texts in daily life.”
Such a division poses an implicit challenge for reflection on the rela-
tionship of philosophy to literature. Taking a lead from Felski’s effort to
“build better bridges” between the two, I would like to reflect specifi-
cally on the ways in which nineteenth-century French poetry and con-
temporary French philosophy enter into a dialectical relationship that
helps us navigate between the Scylla of—overly?—hermetic philosophi-
cal approaches and the Charybdis of potentially unreflective “common
sense” approaches. Felski seeks to demonstrate that both theoretical and
commonsense approaches can be “powered by, and indebted to, many
of the same motives and structures” (Felski 13). We may say the same of
philosophy, in that it springs from basic questions about how life should
be lived, yet seeks answers that refuse simplistic or too commonly held
186 Joseph Acquisto

views in order to cast new light on lived experience, and even to change
that experience through the very act of reflecting on it.
Continental philosophy has recently seen a renewed engagement with
literature. I focus in this essay on the work of Alain Badiou and his recent
interpreters since, for Badiou, poetry arguably plays a more important
role than it has in the work of any French thinker since the early writings
of Derrida. Badiou’s is not a philosophy of literature, nor is his writing on
poetry an attempt to use poems as examples of philosophical concepts.
Rather, poetry is one of the “conditions” of philosophy for Badiou. He
confronts it on its own terms, seeking not to describe it but rather to elab-
orate the way it can generate truths. The very use of such a term suggests
the distance between Badiou and the deconstructionists, whom he terms
“sophists.” We may justifiably assert, then, that we have entered a new
era in terms of the relationship of philosophy to poetry, one distinct both
from Heidegger’s use of poetry (which Badiou criticizes for its “suturing”
of philosophy to the poem)1 and from deconstructive approaches.
Badiou rejects postmodern epistemology and calls for a return to a
conception of truth that is situated and multiple but still very real: a con-
cept of truth, that is to say, which strongly resembles what contemporary
literary studies would affirm as the particular kind of truth that litera-
ture can offer. Thus there is potential here for a renewed site of dialogue
between literature and philosophy, with lyric poetry at the heart of the
encounter. Badiou seeks, via poetry, a relationship to truth that is imper-
sonal and nontotalizing; he thus avoids the risk of poetry disappearing
into an overly systematic philosophy. Poetry becomes for Badiou a vehicle
for philosophy but remains separate from it and capable of entering into
dialogue with it on equal terms. Since the poem refuses to be totally sub-
sumed within abstract thought, and since it is yet an important condition
for precisely this kind of thought, it can serve as a particularly pertinent
site for dialogue between theory and “common-sense” approaches to lit-
erature. My reading of Badiou will extend beyond his most frequently
analyzed poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, and seek to engage his ideas in light
of a poem by Charles Baudelaire.
As we begin, it is helpful to consider Pierre Macherey’s characteriza-
tion of the relationship of philosophy to literature. He cautions against
philosophically inflected readings that would make literary texts “admit
to having a hidden meaning that sums up their speculative purpose” and
claims that such readings should rather be “a way of revealing the plu-
ralistic constitution that necessarily makes [literary works] amenable to
differentiated modes of approach. For there is no more a pure literary dis-
course than there is a pure philosophical discourse; there are only mixed
 Baudelaire with Badiou 187

discourses wherein language games that are independent in their systems

of reference and their principles interact on various levels” (Macherey,
Object 5). While Badiou would reject the notion of philosophy as lan-
guage games, his own work does allow us productively to examine that
“pluralistic constitution” of both philosophy and poetry, without which,
admittedly, one discipline would have very little to say to the other. A
poetic event as Badiou conceives it can produce truth; here Badiou’s ideas
resonate with, and help us understand, Macherey’s assertion that “if lit-
erature does deal with truth, the truth in question has no value other than
that conferred upon it by literature. It is the truth of its style” (Object
132). Badiou will affirm that a poetic event produces a truth that is not
reducible to paraphrase and that cannot simply be co-opted by philoso-
phy; this is not, however, to say that literary truth is of no interest to
philosophy. Rather, as Badiou repeatedly asserts, poetry is one of the con-
ditions of philosophy, precisely because of the truth procedure it sets in
motion and that cannot be achieved in any other way.
It is not that poetry and philosophy become one at the point where the
truth procedure is activated but that Badiou is seeking, as Jean-Jacques
Lecercle argues, a “fourth position” beyond the other types of relation-
ship between philosophy and poetry that Badiou traces, these being the
romantic tradition, the aesthetic tradition stemming from Aristotle, and
the “Platonist gesture of exclusion” (Lecercle 210). The fourth position
“would maintain the separation between the poem and philosophical dis-
course but would accept that the poem is the site for the production of
truths (we remember that, for Badiou, truths always come in the plu-
ral: the concept of Truth is empty)” (Lecercle 210). Lecercle goes on to
identify why Badiou’s engagement with poetry is especially appealing to
the literary critic, which for Lecercle is that Badiou’s is “a poetics of the
anti-lyrical, of the impersonal, as opposed to the effusions of an affected
subject . . . Badiou’s poetics does not take as its elementary unit of poetic
thought the single work or the personal author, but what he calls the
artistic configuration, truths . . . Badiou’s originality . . . is the articula-
tion of the two seemingly independent words, ‘poem’ and ‘thought’. This
is of special interest to literary critic, at least if he takes his task seriously,
and holds, as I do, that literature thinks” (Lecercle 215). What Badiou’s
engagement with poetry has the potential to do, then, is to offer a precise
articulation of the way in which poetry thinks, the precise kinds of truth
it produces and the ways in which that occurs. Badiou’s rigor can help us
explain what those who engage with literature often posit intuitively that
poetry’s importance goes beyond the aesthetic and the ethical in ways that
both reinforce its specificity and align it with other forms of knowing.
188 Joseph Acquisto

Badiou’s four conditions of philosophy are poetry, mathematics, poli-

tics, and love: “As a fiction of knowledge, philosophy imitates the math-
eme. As a fiction of art, it imitates the poem. As the intensity of an act,
it is like love without object. Addressed to all so that all may be in seiz-
ing the existence of truths, it is like a political strategy with no stakes in
power. Through this fourfold discursive imitation, philosophy knots into
itself the system of its conditions” (Conditions 23). He claims that phi-
losophy “assembles” Truth in two different ways. The first is the one more
typically associated with philosophical reasoning—that is, “definitions,
refutations, proofs, conclusive force” (Conditions 12). The second, coter-
minous with and equal to the first, chimes with the way literary critics
might typically describe the functioning of literature:

Or else philosophy proceeds by metaphors, the power of images and per-

suasive rhetoric. What is involved this time is to indicate the void of cat-
egory of Truth qua limit-point . . . This time art is called upon, not for
its possible intrinsic worth, not for any imitative or cathartic aim, but to
elevate the void of the Truth to the point at which dialectical progression
is suspended . . . We might say that art is imitated in its ways with a view
to producing a subjective site of the Truth. Let’s call this treatment at the
limit a fiction of art. The Truth is the inexpressible of this fiction. (Condi-
tions 12–13)

The notion of the limit point indicates an important aspect of poetry’s

contribution to the generation of truth, as François Wahl makes clear.
The poem for Badiou, Wahl writes, “is neither a collection of objects, nor
the expression of a subject, nor the exhibition (but the disorientation) of
language. The poem testifies to a crisis in Truth insofar as it deploys an
impersonal and non-totalizing thought in which the multiple is attested
to in its fundamental inconsistency” (Wahl xxv). The poem gets us beyond
a merely personal or subjective notion of truth, all the while testifying not
to some homogenizing universality but rather to a multiple, compossible
notion of truth that exceeds our ability to give it voice except in the lin-
guistic structures of the poem itself, so that the crisis in verse becomes
a crisis in truth, not in order to unhinge poetic meaning, but rather to
challenge extant paradigms for the expression of truth, creating an “event”
that refuses to be incorporated into previous forms of expression.
Thus Badiou seeks to avoid both deconstructionist skepticism about
the existence of truth beyond discourse and the traditional unilateral con-
ception of truth: “The sophist says that there are no truths, and that there
are only techniques for making statements, and places of enunciation. It
is philosophically legitimate to respond, with the operation of the empty
 Baudelaire with Badiou 189

category of Truth, that there are truths. It is no longer legitimate to say,

like the dogmatist, that there is a single place of Truth, and that philoso-
phy itself reveals this place. Such a riposte is excessive, overstrung and
disastrous” (Conditions 18). While there is truth, then, it is not transcen-
dent but rather manifests itself in the plural. As Peter Hallward indicates,
“what Badiou calls a truth is the process that, sparked by a break with
routine, persists in an affirmation whose progressive imposition trans-
forms the very way things appear in the situation” (2). And, as Daniel
Bensaïd reminds us, “the fact that the site from which truths might be
grasped must remain empty has the notable consequence that the strug-
gles between philosopher and sophist can never end. It is, in effect, a
struggle between the philosopher and his own shadow, his other, who is
also his double. The ethics of philosophy consists in keeping this dispute
alive” (97). Commitment to truth is thus a commitment to dialogical dis-
pute from which truth can emerge. This is a notion of truth for which the
modern literary text, in its constant opening toward interpretation, is par-
ticularly well suited to serve as condition; poetry for Badiou is, in Pierre
Macherey’s words, “a machine-to-cause-thinking” (“Mallarmé” 112).
From poetry as a condition for philosophy we move to the notion
of the poetic event, which Ernesto Laclau summarizes as “grounded on
that which is radically unrepresentable within the situation, that which
constitutes its void . . . The event is the actual declaring of that void, a
radical break with the situation that makes visible what the situation itself
can only conceal” (121). It is from the event, beyond the situation, that
truth emerges, in a view not unlike Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm
shift. As Ernst van den Hemel emphasizes, the event “shows the inherent
impossibility of any world-view to encompass the infinite totality of exis-
tence. Stronger still, the construction of any world-view must inherently
contain the possibility of such an event. All new world-views or philoso-
phies that are constructed, immediately and automatically contain the
structural event-possibility which will reveal their incompleteness” (van
den Hemel 23). It is thus the poetic event that produces change, in a
process analogous to events produced by politics, mathematics, and love,
but that is never subsumed by any of these other conditions of philoso-
phy. The event is sustained by individuals who seize its importance and
who, as Peter Hallward indicates, “develop the implication of this event
and hold firm to its consequences: by doing so they constitute them-
selves as the subjects of its innovation. A subject is someone carried by
his or her fidelity to the implications of an event” (Hallward 2–3). Like-
wise, Gabriel Riera emphasizes that the relationship of the subject to the
event is established through fidelity to that event: “[T]he subject does not
190 Joseph Acquisto

preexist the event but, rather, that the event is what makes possible a pro-
cess of subjectivization . . . [A] truth emerges as the outcome of a process
in which a ‘generic subset’ of a situation coalesces and is then sustained by
a subjective fidelity to the event” (Riera 4).
Poetry thus occupies a unique place in Badiou’s thought, since while
philosophy depends on it as one of its conditions, one could also suggest
that poetry thus remains in the service of philosophy according to Badiou
rather than entering into dialogue with it on equal terms. Still, the poetic
event refuses to be totally subsumed within abstract thought, and in that
sense it could be said to surpass it via its status as event and generator of
subjectivity through fidelity. This would seem, in turn, to give an espe-
cially powerful role to the act of reading as a manifestation of fidelity
to the event. Does Badiou’s thought on poetry hold promise, then, for
informing literary analysis? Those hesitant to affirm this might very well
point to two obstacles—namely, the questionable value of Badiou’s own
literary analysis and the extremely limited scope of the corpus of poems to
which Badiou makes reference. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has offered insight-
ful critique of what Badiou is able to make of Mallarmé’s poetry at the
level of critical analysis as opposed to philosophical insight:

If Badiou’s reading of the work of art, in terms of immanence and singular-

ity . . . entirely satisfies the student of literature, his reading of Mallarmé’s
poems is barely an explication de texte, at least as we literary critics know
it . . . [I]t is because Badiou takes the poem as his privileged object (an
entirely convincing move) that the limitations of what remains a prosaic
reading clearly emerge. The answer to this, in Badiou’s terms, might be
that you cannot name the unnameable, that in which a truth reaches its
limits (PM 42): what Badiou looks for in the poem is precisely this, which
lies beyond the signifier. (216)

As far as questions of corpus are concerned, Badiou has written insight-

fully on Rimbaud, Pessoa, and, more frequently, on Mallarmé, but on
very few other poets, and even the analyses of Mallarmé are restricted to a
very few poems—namely, those focusing on shipwreck. Pierre Macherey
notes Badiou’s restricted canon and inquires about its implications for his
theory of truth:

Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Reverdy, and Aragon are excluded, as well as

Vielé-Griffin, Rodenbach, or Verhaeren, no doubt considered too nar-
rative, or too “expressive” to be treated as machines-to-cause-thinking.
Badiou’s use of this severe principle of selection is obviously meant as a
way to escape the trap of a generalized aesthetics that would pose the ques-
tion of the relation of art to truth in the abstract. From his point of view,
 Baudelaire with Badiou 191

it is not art qua art that produces truths, and, indeed, most of the time, it
does not produce any, as it adheres to the mission of edification or enter-
tainment . . . As for truth, it is only produced in some exceptional cases,
which bear witness, by their exceptional qualities, to the will of rupture
that defined the poetic event in its essence: Mallarmé being its unique and
irreplaceable testimony. (114)

The point of these observations is not to take Badiou to task for not
being a literary critic, but rather to inquire about the extent to which
his thought, which places so much emphasis on the multiple, the sur-
prising, and the destabilizing, can be extended, in an act of fidelity,
to both wider and deeper commentary on poetry. Can, or should, the
kinds of reading implied in Badiou’s theory of subjectivity through
fidelity to the event, and in his remarks on Mallarmé, be usefully set
in dialogue with other poets? While no one would deny the revolu-
tion in poetic language established in the late Mallarmé, I propose to
inquire whether Baudelaire’s poetry might also be fruitfully considered
as a truth-producing event.
It is important to remember that for Badiou, truth and knowledge
are distinct categories, as Gabriel Riera notes: “Truth is not what knowl-
edge produces but rather what, in a given situation, exceeds the sets of
knowledge (savoirs) available. Truth is what escapes knowledge . . . : the
result of an event that ‘makes one-multiple on the one hand from all
the multiples that belong to its site, on the other from the event itself ’”
(L’être et l’événement 200) (Riera 74). If we are to propose a practice of
literary reading based on Badiou’s conception of poetry, it is here that we
would need to begin—that is, in the dialogic process set in motion by an
act of reading that knows itself to be incomplete but that seeks, through
fidelity to the poem-event, to articulate that truth in what we might call
a situation of reading, which would hold until another evenemental read-
ing arises to challenge it. Thus the poem is both single (the text itself )
and multiple (the plurality of readings it generates, the refusal of a single
exegesis that would adequately account for the poem’s meaning). Here we
arrive at an important intersection between epistemological and ethical
concerns, for the abstractions that Badiou’s discussions of truth might
generate never remove themselves from the more grounded concerns of
ethics, and here Badiou’s thought has potential to enter into dialogue with
the contemporary ethical turn in criticism. In fact, the event demands
an ethical response, as Ernst van den Hemel has emphasized: “In the
moment of an appearance of an event, a person is faced with an ethical
choice. One can either deny that that which happened is new and try to
force that what happened [sic] back into existing parameters, or one can
192 Joseph Acquisto

embrace the form under which this truth appears, and draw the conse-
quences. Drawing the consequences means here starting to reconstruct
the situation along the lines of the event and bringing about truth through
the process of naming . . . Fidelity to an event means to start structur-
ing the situation from the new viewpoint” (van den Hemel 23–24). If
there is such a thing as a poetic event, then reading is the primary mode
of response to it, and thus reading practices are guided by the principle
of fidelity, which involves the courage to follow the text where it leads
without trying to force it into a situation, which in this case would be
a predetermined theoretical model. Although Badiou’s main interest in
literature is as a condition for philosophy, we are already beginning to
see emerge from his own philosophical model a dialectical relationship
between text and theory that refuses to let poetry be subsumed within
philosophy, indeed that suggests that allowing it to do so would be an
act of infidelity to the event. If we are able to sustain this relationship, we
have the potential for an approach to poetry that is theoretically rich yet
mindful of the importance of letting analysis be guided by, and judged
in light of, the text as it exists beyond any theoretical construct or any
“suturing” of philosophy to the poem.
In order to investigate the extent to which Badiou’s thought allows
us to move beyond his own narrow canon, I propose to examine one of
Baudelaire’s most baffling poems, “L’Héautontimorouménos” (“The Man
Who Tortures Himself ”):

Je te frapperai sans colère

Et sans haine, comme un boucher,
Comme Moïse le rocher
Et je ferai de ta paupière,

Pour abreuver mon Sahara,

Jaillir les eaux de la souffrance.
Mon désir gonflé d’espérance
Sur tes pleurs salés nagera

Comme un vaisseau qui prend le large,

Et dans mon cœur qu’ils soûleront
Tes chers sanglots retentiront
Comme un tambour qui bat la charge!

Ne suis-je pas un faux accord

Dans la divine symphonie,
Grâce à la vorace Ironie
Qui me secoue et qui me mord?
 Baudelaire with Badiou 193

Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!

C’est tout mon sang ce poison noir!
Je suis le sinistre miroir
Où la mégère se regarde.

Je suis la plaie et le couteau!

Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et la victime et le bourreau!

Je suis de mon cœur le vampire,

—Un de ces grands abandonnés
Au rire éternel condamnés
Et qui ne peuvent plus sourire! (OC1: 78–79)

[I shall strike you without anger

And without hate, like a butcher,
As Moses struck the rock!
And from your eyelids I shall make

The waters of suffering gush forth

To inundate my Sahara.
My desire swollen with hope
Will float upon your salty tears

Like a vessel which puts to sea,

And in my heart that they’ll make drunk
Your beloved sobs will resound
Like a drum beating the charge!

Am I not a discord
In the heavenly symphony,
Thanks to voracious Irony
Who shakes me and who bites me?

She’s in my voice, the termagant!

All my blood is her black poison!
I am the sinister mirror
In which the vixen looks.

I am the wound and the dagger!

I am the blow and the cheek!
I am the members and the wheel,
Victim and executioner!
194 Joseph Acquisto

I’m the vampire of my own heart

—One of those utter derelicts
Condemned to eternal laughter,
But who can no longer smile! (Flowers 263–65)]

The most influential readings of this poem have been Paul de Man’s
deconstructive analysis of Baudelairean irony (208–28) and Leo Ber-
sani’s psychoanalytical approach (90–105).2 I would like to suggest that
this poem can fruitfully be considered as an event in Badiou’s sense.
First, it operates on a level of complexity comparable to that of Mallar-
mé’s late sonnets, despite Baudelaire’s straightforward syntax and decep-
tively simple rhetoric. More important, since the poem resists attempts
to account for it fully through a single theoretical approach, it partici-
pates in the unspeakable nature of the event in that it offers us a pos-
sibility for the emergence of a multiple yet ultimately unspeakable truth
within the situation of Baudelaire’s more conventional first-person lyric
poems. Given the difficulties we explored earlier of producing anything
that could be called a “Badiousian” reading of a poem, I offer the fol-
lowing analysis in an attempt to be faithful to the poem-event and to
continue to attempt to give voice to the unnameable truth in the poem,
using Badiou as a guide.
Lyric subjectivity has a most unusual status in the poem, for the
first person hides more than it reveals about the subjectivity it puta-
tively represents. What happens to the “je” here is far more than simple
doubling or splitting of the self. Badiou claims that Mallarmé’s sonnet
“A la nue accablante tu” performs several kinds of vanishing; a similar
concept might be applied here, where the poem quickly assimilates the
“tu” to the “je,” thus performing the vanishing of the second person by
establishing its equivalence with the “je.” The poem is also structured
to perform the vanishing of time, as the future tense of the first three
stanzas disappears in favor of an eternal iterative present. This lack of
discernible temporality is reinforced by the reference to eternity in the
penultimate line as well as by the seven stanzas, a number traditionally
associated with the infinite and eternal. The lyric subject is doubled, to
be sure, but equally significant is that the poem itself is doubled. What
we have is really two poems: the first three stanzas stand united by the
je-tu relation and the actions in future tense, while the last four stanzas
shift from action to naming and to a single subject existing in an eternal
present. These shifts are mirrored by the structural changes from simile
in the first part to metaphor in the second, from a verse structure favor-
ing enjambment and syntactical inversions to a more straightforward
prose-like verse structure in the second part. Each part thus stands on
 Baudelaire with Badiou 195

its own and in relation to the other part; the structure performs the
same singularity in duality as the first-person subject.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the turning point of the poem, the
middle stanza, focuses on the notion of harmony, which is itself both single
and double: a chord is a single harmonic unit although it consists of at
least three discrete pitches. The word accord, for that matter, is also mul-
tiple in meaning: the poet is the false chord, but accord can also be read as
agreement, suggesting that there is a false agreement between the poet and
irony. While he represents the two initially as separate, they, like the “je/
tu,” are not really distinct, as indicated in the progression in interiorization
from shaking (no penetration of one by the other) to biting (one enters
the other) to being in the voice (a more complete subsumption) and on
through irony’s becoming equivalent with the poet’s blood or life force. It
is at this point, when irony has not simply affected but rather taken over
and become one with the poet, that the series of “je suis” statements ensues.
In other words, just at the moment when the “je” is no longer present to
itself, it begins naming itself as those famous pairs of opposites. Far from a
doubled self, what we have is really no self at all. When the poet says “I am
X,” he has already affirmed that “I” is irony, that it is no longer the poet who
is speaking at all.3 The poet also seems to say “I am a metaphor” and, by
the rich set of contrasting metaphors, he affirms a more general contention
that we might phrase, not as “I is another” à la Rimbaud but rather as “‘I’
is a metaphor.” The only way of giving voice to the subject, then, is in a set
of poetic operations such as metaphor and irony, which leads us to suggest,
more radically still, “‘I’ am a poem,” since the poet, while established via
metaphor, also becomes transparent, like the “miroir” of line 19, whereby
his voice is emptied of its own subjectivity in order to become the pure
speaking voice of the poem itself. What speaks as a “je” by the end is not so
much a speaking subject as a poem itself. These acts of naming make the
poem far more complex than, for instance, “Le Cygne,” which closes with
the poet thinking of a long series of exiles, which ends with “bien d’autres
encore” (1: 87), where the poet retains his status as unified speaking sub-
ject. This is not to say that the poem can be reduced to a self-referential
function, however, since the “I” still does remain, named under the sign of
metaphor. Just at the crucial moment when we might wonder how to tell
the dancer from the dance, or indeed whether “ceci n’est pas un poète,” the
poet remains, his subjectivity emerging through the event that is the poem
itself. There is thus in Baudelaire what Badiou has identified in Mallarmé
as a “disappearance of disappearance” that forces us to be faithful to the “I”
as metaphor, to the emergence of the subject exclusively through a poetic
process; the subject that emerges in this way refuses to be bound in by any
more narrow or more literal characterization.
196 Joseph Acquisto

Unlike “Le Cygne,” with its infinite opening onto the poet’s private
and unrevealed thoughts of exiles, “L’Héautontimorouménos” does come
to an end, via the interruption introduced by the dash in the last stanza,
which interrupts what might have been an infinite series. We can now
turn back to Badiou’s comments on truth production, taken from the
section of Conditions dedicated not to poetry but to mathematics, to illu-
minate the evenemental structure of Baudelaire’s poem. Badiou writes the
following of interruption: “A truth arises in its novelty—and every truth
is a novelty—because a hazardous supplement interrupts repetition. As
indistinct, a truth begins by surging forth. But this surging forth directly
sustains the undecidable . . . For barely has the event appeared than it
has disappeared” (Conditions 123). The truth of the multiplicity of the
poem has surged forth from its central stanza, whose consequences are
enumerated throughout the remainder of the poem until the interrup-
tion brings an end to the poem under the sign of the eternal. It is easy
to see that the “surging forth” of the central stanza is sustained by the
undecidable as it is articulated in the remaining stanzas, which play out
the multiplicity of the notion of the faux accord, as I have suggested, and
also allow the poem as event to speak in its own name, to speak its own
multiplicity, so that the “je” is both the speaking subject and the poem
itself, each in its undecidable multiplicity. This notion of a subject that
both is and is not a subject in a traditional sense finds its echo in Badiou’s
comments on subjectivity in terms of subtraction: “A subject is that which
disappears between two indiscernibles, that which is eclipsed in the sub-
traction of a difference without concept . . . As a fragment of chance, the
subject crosses the distance-less gap that the subtraction of the indiscern-
ible inscribes between two terms. In this regard the subject of a truth is
genuinely in-different: it is the indifferent lover” (Conditions 124). The
Baudelairean ironic subject vanishes in the poem both by the equivalence
between subject and irony and by the disappearance into the series of
opposing metaphors, and yet we could say that this subject also thereby
performs the vanishing of vanishing, since the subject is in fact reconsti-
tuted as this play of opposites, now removed from any traditional trap-
pings of emotional investment that mark the lyric subject. The “subject of
a truth” as the “indifferent lover,” to use Badiou’s terms, now joins the two
halves of the poem: the subject of multiple truth that articulates itself at
the end now accounts for the indifference of the subject as he articulates
himself at the beginning of the poem, “sans colère / Et sans haine.” Thus
oneness depends on multiplicity; a truth, Badiou writes, “is subtracted
from every recollection of the multiple in the One of a designation”
(Conditions 125). If the series of opposites form the “recollection of the
 Baudelaire with Badiou 197

multiple” in the poem, the “One of a designation” corresponds to Irony as

it melds with the poet, and as the poet melds with the poem. Truth, as we
know, cannot be named within the situation according to Badiou. So the
poem remains as a poem, even beyond the truth of its event, and poetry
is not subsumed into philosophy but is, on its own terms, a “machine-
to-cause-thinking,” remaining a truth in its iterative present rather than
becoming the representation of that truth, since for Badiou, “a truth can
only be represented in the future perfect” (Conditions 125).
In this sense Baudelaire’s poem prepares the ground for a new notion
of individual subjectivity but also a rethinking of political subjectivity,
an aspect that is not immediately present in “L’Héautontimorouménos”
but that will assume greater importance in the prose poetry. The break-
down of the individual lyric subject as it occurs in this poem lays impor-
tant groundwork for a reconception of the political subject, as a glance at
Badiou’s recent work on the twentieth century in conjunction with our
study of this poem reveals: “The individual, truth be told, is nothing. The
subject is the new man, emerging at the point of self-lack. The individual
is thus, in its very essence, the nothing that must be dissolved into a we-
subject. The affirmative reverse of the sacrificial evidence of the individual
is that the ‘we,’ constructed by a truth—whose stakes as well as support
is the new man—is immortal. It is immortal by virtue of the fact that it
exists not as a perishable nature but as an eternal recurrence; an occur-
rence as eternal as Mallarmé’s dice-throw” (Century 101). The fall into
laughter, which for Baudelaire is coextensive with the fall into original sin,
could also now be construed as a fall into politics, which we note is not
without its direct connection to poetry via the comparison to Mallarmé.
The theological and the political conjoin around the poetic, which is also
now imbued with a renewed sense of the ethical:

Art bears witness to the inhuman within the human. Its aim is nothing
short of compelling humanity to some excess with regard to itself . . .
[Today] we hear calls for a humanist art, an art abhorring what man is
capable of doing to his fellow man, an art of human rights. It is certainly
true that . . . the fundamental art of the century doesn’t care a jot about
man. Quite simply because it considers that man in his ordinary state does
not amount to much, and that there is no need to make such a fuss about
him—all of which is quite true. The art of the century is an art of the overhu-
man. (Century 160–61)

Baudelaire’s lyric subject in “L’Héautontimorouménos” prefigures this

new human and new art, staunchly antihumanist yet faithful to the event
of the fall into laughter, politics, and multiplicity, yet remaining present
198 Joseph Acquisto

as a subject despite and in fact through that multiplicity that sustains fidel-
ity to truth. Again, it is not a question of representing that truth but
rather of bringing it into existence via the condition of the poem itself.
In Conditions Badiou summarizes a “fourfold disjunction” about truth
(131); Baudelaire’s poem corresponds at each point to this characteriza-
tion. First, truth proceeds from the givenness of experience; Baudelaire’s
poem’s speaker, situated in intersubjective relationship presents himself
in situation from the outset of the poem. Second, “there exists no single
predicative trait capable of subsuming and totalizing the components of a
truth” (131); the unsummarizable nature of the poem points toward this
unnameable aspect of the truth it brings about. Third, “conceived in its
incompletable being . . . a truth is an infinite multiple” (131). As we have
seen, the poem ends by interruption rather than completion, and even
this interruption opens onto the infinite. Fourth, “the capacity of a truth
to spread itself as judgement on knowledge is restricted by an unnameable
point, one that cannot be forced without inducing disaster” (131). The
series of names in the poem ultimately serves to point to the unnameable,
the plurality of metaphors leading to the subject that exceeds them all,
just as the truth ultimately exceeds any attempt at giving it expression, at
least in the present. The poem points to a lack of closure within the ges-
ture of its own closure, its completion within the boundless infinite, in a
subject that is both particular and universal, singular and plural, coexten-
sive with the poem itself that brings that truth, and thus the subject, into
existence via the break with the situation of the traditional lyric subject.
Failure to account for the newly articulated complexity of the sub-
ject is ethically problematic for Badiou; it is a failure with both aesthetic
and ethical consequences, as the following characterization of evil reveals:
“Evil is the disaster of a truth, one that comes when the desire to force the
nomination of the unnameable is unleashed in fiction. It is commonly
said that Evil is the negation of what is present and affirmed, that it is
murder and death, that it is opposed to life. I should rather say that it is
the denial of a subtraction . . . Evil is not the non-respect of the name of
the Other; it is much more the desire to name at any price” (Century 127).
Baudelaire’s poem resists the urge to name, or rather, through a series of
metaphors, shows that the unnameable is irreducible to any name and
surpasses it. The unnameable created via the poem generates the subject.
Thus we are able to go beyond what Badiou would call the “sophistry” of a
deconstructionist approach, since the event goes beyond any reduction to
language and constitutes a subject whose fidelity to the event now implies
a fidelity to the poem, an ethical imperative to seek new readings of the
poem rather than to allow it to settle into a situational reading that would
 Baudelaire with Badiou 199

seek to impose hermeneutic closure. The poem as event always resists that
forcing into the situation, thus imposing an imperative to fidelity through
reading. Baudelaire’s poem reinforces the kinds of criteria that Badiou sets
forth for arriving at truth and thus could be said to function just as well
as Mallarmé’s late poetry in terms of a “machine-to-cause-thinking.” This
is not to claim that the poem is reduced to a merely instrumental role but
rather that the poem and thought work together, the demonstration of
which is among Badiou’s most important contributions to literary analy-
sis.4 While it is true, as Jacques Rancière reminds us, that Badiou nei-
ther “excludes the possibility that the poem be self-sufficient in orienting
thought” since “this task is reserved for philosophy” (227), nor reduces
the poem to its philosophical function, after the philosophical operations,
the poem remains as event, continuing to call readers to fidelity to it.
And it is at this point that Badiou’s ideas open themselves out onto other
thinkers’ work. I have already suggested some of the similarities between
Badiou’s work on literature and that of Pierre Macherey. That resonance
can be clearly seen in these remarks by the latter: “Language, as ordered
by nature when it breaks its rules, or, perhaps as ordered by nature when
it introduces rules by disordering it, is an irreplaceable source of revela-
tion because it gives access, not to the living reality of things, but to the
emptiness of their death. It is out of kilter with a world that has lost its
stability and its solidity because it had been emptied of its content and
its meaning” (Macherey, Object 225). This description of the workings of
language seeks to account for poetic language’s disordering of experience
in ways not unlike Badiou’s characterization of the event that surges from
within the boundaries of the situation that is unable to contain it. The
emptiness of the world is the void that for Badiou would be an important
aspect of the very role of philosophy in cooperation with poetry and its
other conditions. In fact, having worked through Baudelaire’s poem, we
are in a better position to understand the following definition of philoso-
phy offered by Badiou: “Philosophy is the evocation, under the category
of Truth, of a void that is located in accordance with the inversion of a
succession and the other-side of a limit. To do so, philosophy constructs
the superposition of a fiction of knowledge and a fiction of art. It con-
structs an apparatus to seize truths, which is to say: to state that there are
truths and to let itself be seized by this ‘there are’—and thus to affirm the
unity of thought” (Conditions 14). This definition positions philosophy
as seizing and being seized, the doubleness and the violence of which
resonate with “L’Héautontimorouménos,” and it thus becomes, as I have
been suggesting, fruitful to read Baudelaire’s poem along with the ones by
Mallarmé that Badiou typically quotes as a site for “the superposition of a
200 Joseph Acquisto

fiction of knowledge and a fiction of art” as an intriguing manifestation of

the “unity of thought” even in its multiplicity as generated by the poem.
Between Baudelaire and Badiou has emerged an approach to poetry
and truth that gets us beyond rhetorical reading into territory that lies
at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and a particular kind of athe-
istic negative theology that retains something of Baudelaire’s notion of
a fall from grace without the possibility of redemption. The dark vision
of subjectivity as a violent encounter places the poem solidly within the
eternal present without hope for a future. As Gabriel Riera has remarked
in relation to Badiou’s poetics, “today, the imperative of the poem consists
in having finished with the figure of the promise, the return of the gods,
and the reenchantment of the world. Philosophy, according to Badiou,
must rid itself of all nostalgia; it cannot suspend its vocation in the hope
of a return of the gods” (Riera 7). Badiou’s philosophy calls for fidelity
to the event. In the case of a poem, that implies an imperative to reading
that would take lived experience into account via the ethical imperative
inherent in Badiou’s ideas, all the while acknowledging the complexity of
any viable account of truth in its compossibility and multiplicity. Baude-
laire’s poem negotiates this terrain via an easily understood vocabulary
and syntax, which, when taken as a whole, produce a complex reality that
refuses to be reduced to any one kind of reading. The stakes are high, but
fidelity to the complexity of experience as produced by the poem requires
that we not retreat from that complexity into a notion of reenchantment;
rather, we can only seek to be faithful to truth as an “infinite multiple”
(Conditions 131) and follow those implications wherever philosophy, via
poetry and its other conditions, may lead.

Works Cited
Badiou, Alain. The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
———. Conditions. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008.
———. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: State U of New
York P, 1999.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. William Aggeler. Fresno: Academy
Library Guild, 1954.
———. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76.
Bensaïd, Daniel. “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event.” Think Again: Alain
Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward. London: Continuum,
2004. 94–105.
Bersani, Leo. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
Buvik, Per. “La notion baudelairienne de l’ironie.” Revue Romane 31.1 (1996): 87–98.
De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.
 Baudelaire with Badiou 201

Hallward, Peter. Introduction. Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy.
Ed. Peter Hallward. London: Continuum, 2004. 1–20.
Hemel, Ernst van den. “Included but Not Belonging: Badiou and Rancière on Human
Rights.” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 3 (2008): 16–31.
Laclau, Ernesto. “An Ethics of Militant Engagement.” Think Again: Alain Badiou and
the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward. London: Continuum, 2004. 120–37.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Badiou’s Poetics.” Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of
Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward. London: Continuum, 2004. 208–17.
Macherey, Pierre. “The Mallarmé of Alain Badiou.” Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its
Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. 109–15.
———. The Object of Literature. Trans. David Macey. New York: Cambridge UP,
1995.
Rancière, Jacques. “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics.” Think Again: Alain
Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward. London: Continuum,
2004. 218–31.
Riera, Gabriel. Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions. Albany: State U of New
York P, 2005.
Sanyal, Debarati. The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.
Wahl, François. “The Subtractive: Preface.” Conditions. By Alain Badiou. Trans. Ste-
ven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008. vii–xl.

Notes
1. See Badiou, Manifesto 61–77. Gabriel Riera explains that for Badiou, sutur-
ing “evinces not only a metaphysical nostalgia for a lost origin (Heidegger’s
understanding of metaphysics as the forgetting of being signaled by Plato’s
philosophy), but also a narrow comprehension of technology that condemns
mathematical rationality to a matter of ‘logistics’” (Riera 5).
2. More recently, Debarati Sanyal has proposed a reading of the poem through the
lens of trauma theory, arguing that “the poem ‘acts out’ a process of interioriza-
tion, wherein a incompatibility between self and world reveals incompatible
registers within the self ” (Sanyal 33).
3. Per Buvik, who responds to de Man’s reading by noting the distinction between
the ironic and the comic as separate categories in Baudelaire, reminds us that
“according to the poet, man is by definition ironic” (Buvik 92). We could
extend this further and say that, in this poem, man is irony.
4. Jean-Jacques Lecercle indicates that “Badiou’s originality . . . is the articulation
of the two seemingly independent words, ‘poem’ and ‘thought’” and adds that
“this is of special interest to a literary critic, at least if he takes his task seriously,
and holds, as I do, that literature thinks. Badiou is the thinker of poetry as
thought. And as such he has truly found a fourth path, or site, for the relation-
ship between poetry and philosophy, beyond the aporia of the contrast between
pathos and logos, between auratic or lyrical vaticination and the exclusion of
thought from poetry” (Lecercle 215).
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 12

“Mesure parfaite et
réinventée”
Édouard Glissant Reinvents
Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

Hugues Azérad

Aesthetics is not the fateful capture of art by philosophy. It is not the

catastrophic overflow of art into politics. It is the originary knot that ties a
sense of art to an idea of thought and an idea of the community.
—Rancière 33

A close look at Glissant’s La Terre, le Feu, l’Eau et les Vents. Une

anthologie de la poésie du Tout-Monde reveals that, though poetry occupies
an important place overall, nineteenth-century French works have been
selected sparingly. Baudelaire is represented by three prose poems—“Les
fenêtres,” “Les Foules,” and “L’Étranger”; Hugo is represented by “La
Pitié suprême” as well as an extract from La Légende des siècles; there is an
extract from the second song of the Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont;
Mallarmé’s sonnet “Ses purs ongles” appears; and, finally, Rimbaud is rep-
resented by “Les Assis” from Poésies, “L’Éclat” from Une saison en enfer,
et “Génie,” taken from Illuminations. Unlike other important poets writ-
ing in French—such as Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, and Michel
Deguy, for whom Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarmé are vital—Glissant
seems at first sight rather indifferent toward his nineteenth-century

All my thanks go to the translator of a first draft of this article, Michele Lester, and to Marion
Schmid, Jean-Pascal Pouzet, Jean-Pol Madou, Jean-Luc Tamby, and Bernadette Cailler, for
sharing with me their thoughts on Glissant.
204 Hugues Azérad

predecessors. romanticism, the symbolists, the Parnassians, and the “Else-

where” so dear to the nineteenth century1 apparently have but little to say
to the Martinican poet. For the explicit reasons he gives in his first major
work on poetics, L’Intention poétique (“Poetic Intention,” 1969),2 Glissant
was concerned to distinguish himself from this kind of poetry, in spite of
the revolutionary aspects of some of its most important figures (especially
Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Lautréamont). His decision to turn roundly
on such a groundbreaking tradition was of course a boldly independent
move, but as we will see, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud not only
left traces in his own poetry3 but were subject to continued scrutiny and
evaluation of his theoretical and aesthetic works. As Glissant reveals him-
self, “I had to pass through the ‘schoolroom’ influence of Rimbaud’s and
Mallarmé’s poetics and this required carrying out an appraisal of my own
relationship to their poetics” (Introduction 116).
This article does not intend to look into the influences upon the work
of a poet who has discarded the very idea of “influence” by subsuming
it under his poetics of relation, where everything is connected to every-
thing else in a nonhierarchical, horizontal pattern and where theory and
practice are one and the same. Glissant is adamant not to centralize tradi-
tion. For an author whose poetry will be measured against the yardstick
of the landscape that he set himself the task of expressing—that is, the
Caribbean archipelago—the very notion of “influence” poses an ethical
problem: Glissant deflects such a notion by the tactical use of something
he calls deviation, or “contre-poétique” / “poétique forcée” (“counterpoet-
ics / forced poetics”) (Discours 402). For the Martinican thinker, poetry
needs to concern itself with more important matters than its own his-
tory. Its ethics, its existence, its beauty are derived from the impossibility
of expressing that which all the same has to be brought into the world:
the trauma of the slave trade, history as absence, and a false identity
imposed by colonization. Instead of allowing himself to be carried along
by poetic currents, Glissant began by writing against the tide of French
poetry, whose limitations he defines not so much as the “outmoded rags
of psychology” (Intention 22) (already swept away by Rimbaud, Lautré-
amont, and Mallarmé) but as a geographical and linguistic inability to be
other, to be within that Tout-monde4 that poetry could only sense but not
express or even wish for.
In order to understand the interplay between poetry and poetics in
Glissant, we must follow the traces some prominent nineteenth-century
French poets have left in his writing and assess the resonances between
their philosophy and aesthetics and his own. In Rimbaud and Mallarmé,
Glissant found poets for whom aesthetics and philosophy were central to
their work and who were committed to poetry as literature in its absolute
 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée” 205

form. Their presence in Glissant’s writings must therefore not be read as a

breaking away or countercurrent but rather as a continuation and expan-
sion of their poetics, as well as an absolute belief in poetry as a force of
regeneration—the only force capable of inspiring hope and giving form
to a community.
We will concentrate principally on Glissant’s readings of Rimbaud
and Mallarmé in his major work on poetics, L’Intention poétique, in order
to assess how he reinvents nineteenth-century French poetics through a
process of a “perpetual” reading (which preserves the dynamics of the
“perpetual” revolution that Rimbaud and Mallarmé embody) (Prabhu
119). By placing it in the Tout-monde, in which every work exists only in
the presence of others, the nineteenth-century poetry Glissant appraises
finally gains a place to which it may—albeit unconsciously—have aspired.
Glissant’s aesthetic positioning toward tradition must therefore be seen at
once as a political gesture and as a philosophical reconfiguration. Glissant
reestablishes aesthetics as a productive mode of writing (what he calls his
poetics, developed across a series of five books) and as a privileged way
of philosophical thinking (his philosophy of relation brings his poetics of
relation to its final, almost “universalizing” stage as the title of his pen-
ultimate book, Philosophie de la relation. Poésie en étendue (Philosophy of
Relation: Poetry Spread Out), indicates).5 We wish to suggest that it is by
“thinking” the poetry of his nineteenth-century precursors whose “poetics
of thought” he analyzes that Glissant develops his own “pensée poétique”
(“poetic thinking”), which can be considered the motivating force behind
all his books.

Rimbaud: The “Voyant” Struck Down

Glissant’s reading of some of the nineteenth century’s most revered poets
brings forth aspects of their poetics that were hitherto hidden. Rim-
baud and Mallarmé, he argues, frequently succumb to nostalgia and shy
away from any true recognition, remaining barricaded in their own sub-
jectivity, dreaming (of ) the world without seeing its complexity. With
Baudelaire and Rimbaud, a first attempt at freeing poetry from itself,
from its Western muse, took place, but a “curse” rests upon it: “Baude-
laire explored depth, Rimbaud brought self-knowledge—and then the
muse departed . . . Rimbaud was one of the founders of a renaissance . . .
which brought not so much the philosopher and the poet closer together,
but poetry closer to an understanding of the world. And yet, it was
cursed” (60).
Even though Glissant sends Rimbaud “on his way” just as the poet in
“Génie” had exhorted his own faithful readers and followers to “le héler,
206 Hugues Azérad

le voir et le renvoyer” (“hail him, see him and send him on his way”),
Rimbaud serves as a foil to his own poetics, to the extent that he “always
wanted, within the dialectic of site and formula, to give reasons for what
he was trying to do” (60). Whether in his “Lettres du voyant,” in his
Saison en enfer or in Illuminations, Rimbaud personally experienced the
tragic discrepancy between his “desire” and history: an encounter that
was never to take place. Glissant is mindful not to present Rimbaud as a
repressed colonizer/colonialist or a “poète nègre,” despite the ambiguous
rhetoric of “Mauvais sang” (“Bad Blood”). Nor does he portray him as
someone radically opposed to colonialism. Rimbaud’s “je est un autre” (“I
is an other”), he argues, cannot work as long as that other labors under the
historical and ideological yoke of the West. This phrase is only valid in a
Western setting, Glissant seems to imply: its apparent leap of generosity
toward the other annihilates it, denies it its opacity; an “I” with which,
in turn, the other wants to have no truck. Rimbaud’s fulgurant poetics
marks the beginning of a movement that is not, however, sufficient in—
or unto—itself.
Glissant contends that the curse upon Rimbaud’s head is not peculiar
to him; it arises out of an internal, irreconcilable contradiction, which is
also a historical impasse: “Not the solitude which is a part of being a poet,
not the incomprehension to which his art had destined him, but this
contradiction: to move toward a total grasp of the Other and the world
and at the same time to examine more and more intensely something
we might call intimacy. Whence the hellish tension which is one way of
resolving the conflict” (60). Rimbaud did not open up his poetry enough
to the tensions he perceived: if poetry could henceforward aim at express-
ing the entirety that is the world, the world of the other, the poet himself
balks at this opening outward, barricading himself again within his own
vision, hence the “tension” that arises as history and biography bear down
upon the poet and his work. Rimbaud does not entirely follow his poetic
aims to their end, as he always harbors the desire to resolve the conflict
instead of turning it into a new way forward. His dream, though full of
truths and reality, defeats him, for he falls prey to disillusion in the face
of history. Rimbaud the man was not to follow Rimbaud the poet, and
his poetry no longer adhered to the real but was tunneled into an “escape
route,” sublime though it was. Rimbaud was to be in a way floored by his
own poetic “ability,” which was too far ahead of its time: “Rimbaud knew
that . . . his work illuminated latent tendencies, that the lesson of his time
was not decided, that he was a materialist accompanied by an underlying
idealism, a poet of the world encircled by ‘psychological’ or descriptive
poetry and that he proposed an ‘entirety’ while suffering the burden of a
long tradition of individualism” (60).
 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée” 207

This poetic baggage that Rimbaud had been so keen to shed, the psy-
chological surroundings and idealistic temptations with which he strug-
gled so much, were more than he could bear: his poetry fails because it
could not find a satisfactory escape route from “the world’s grasp” and
not because his initial vision was wanting. Glissant here introduces the
fundamental principal of his poetics, upon which all his later work was to
draw: relation takes priority over poetry, which must speak the world in
its entirety, shaping its poetic language out of everyday speech but with-
out foregrounding itself. Though Rimbaud had intuited the “formula” for
poetry, that soil (in order to bear fruit) has still to be enriched by “place,”
the work of the communal, which is a part of relation (Glissant refers
here to the poem “Vagabonds”). Worse than his own failure, Rimbaud’s
true legacy actually became a curse, that of being misinterpreted: “His
curse lay in not outliving these contradictions. A seer brought low by the
progress of poetics, he unwillingly bequeathed to many who would follow
him, not his vaulting ambition of ultimately defining and encapsulating
poetics, but the Romanticism . . . of that very curse” (60).
For Glissant, who borrowed many terms and images (one need only
think of the “Bateau ivre,” which is an iconic picture of drifting in his
work) from Rimbaud and whose own work toward “démesure” (“the
boundless”) was encouraged by the poet’s “dérèglements de tous les sens”
(“unleashings of all senses”), the fault inevitably lies with “tradition.”
French poetry at the time of Rimbaud was still adhering to the latent
romanticism he set out to excoriate. Glissant’s reading thus runs contrary
to the critical discussion of Rimbaud—in fact, it goes against the grain of
the poet himself: “With Rimbaud—and his kind before or after him—
yes, of course the West is inviting the world . . . The Other, that I am,
is implied (in its totality) in the I of this Other. But the poet’s promises
disappeared in the bloody conquest” (62). Tradition is no longer seen as a
matter of filiation and descendancy (implying a vertical hierarchy, giving
legitimacy to conquest) but of transversal relation.
In Glissant’s poetics, individuality has been discarded and with it the
baggage of Western poetry; the world and the other take precedence: “[S]
ensitivity is sharpened by knowing, the individual is only ‘complete’ in his
relation to the Other . . . Poetry would galvanize (I-the Other, sensitivity-
knowledge, nature-history, solitude-participation) the relation of Man to
Man and to the world. But it cannot express mankind on its own, nor
can it create a being (with a subjectivity that is garrulously lyrical) nor a
picture of the world (seen in the flattened reflection of realism)” (61).
Poetry therefore is to be neither lyricism nor mimesis, because the real-
ity it expresses is “Other” and because the I can only exist in relation
to the other. The impersonality of poetry according to Glissant will not
208 Hugues Azérad

allow a subjective or metaphysical chasm, which he considers unneces-

sary and dubious. How at the same time can the world, revealed in all
its complexity, be put into words? How can unity be ensured while the
Western “One” is being torn up by the roots? This is where Glissant in his
turn is explicit as to what poetry must now do, interpreting Rimbaud’s
clarion call for a “langue qui sera de l’âme pour l’âme” (“a language from
the spirit to the spirit”) (Rimbaud 187). Poetry’s goal is to “[fixer] des
vertiges” (“pin down vertigos”) (Rimbaud 97) in a poetic language that
should be both its site and its formula, no longer the song of being but
of beingness, replacing space with duration. Just as Glissant mistrusted
the lightning images of Césaire (and the surrealists who preceded him),
so he mistrusted Rimbaud’s flashes of poetic insight, which, though they
have a place, must give way to duration, to a form whose temporality
and rhythm is better adapted to express a future communality: “Poetic
language must guarantee a vocation of unity that poetry opposes to the
dispersal of all things. That is to say, once we have realized that unity is
not uniformity, and the Total is not the Same. In a fragmented world,
swarming with truths, this language must be able to ask to be perennial”
(Poetic Intention 61). If Rimbaud was able to place poetry within its “rela-
tion to the impossible” (61), Glissant’s own poetics “opens out into all
possible relations” (61).

Mallarmé: The Constant “Clairvoyant”

Rimbaud’s work might have lain forever waiting for history to bring it
to fruition, but Rimbaud did not have the patience to bear the wait-
ing. Mallarmé’s writing, in contrast, marks time in everlasting expecta-
tion of the “Book”; he waited for an absolute that he could never attain.
Mallarmé is Rimbaud’s counterbalance; he is a poet of maturity, of the
inherent flaw in language, of the nothingness underlying everything, of
a philosophy and ethics of poetry locked in a constant fascination with
beauty. Many a seam of Mallarmé’s poetry will sparkle among Glissant’s
poems, which preserve its enigmatic difficulty—in other words, its opac-
ity. For the opacity in Mallarmé’s poems reflects above all a recognition
of absence, nothingness, and the insufficiency of language and of any
poetic attempt. The flaws or “failure” inherent in poetry are what is truly
at stake: since the one true, supreme language is lacking, all the poet can
do is to compensate in philosophical terms for the limitations of language.
This recognition of absence, of the original gaping chasm, Glissant con-
siders, is echoed in the historical trauma of the slave trade (the pit in
the belly of slave ships serving as a negative matrix, in Glissant’s view, to
the peoples of the Caribbean). Glissant’s negation, which appears under
 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée” 209

the name of “négateur,” of counterpoetics, of “déparleur” (“unraveller of

words”) is corroborated on every count by what he calls Mallarmé’s “nega-
tive energy” (65).
It is as an inaugurator of “poetic thought” that Mallarmé plays a semi-
nal role in Glissant’s poetics, which was still in its initial stages in 1969.
According to Glissant, Mallarmé’s failure constitutes paradoxically a form
of abundance: “He dug his heels in and his apparent calm was only there
to allow him to pursue his quest undisturbed. He does not have the flashes
of inspiration, nor the impatience of Rimbaud, but he fixes his attention
on the ‘absolute’, every moment caught in the tension of a consecration
of his dream of poetry and perhaps a painful pleasure in deferring the
moment when the lot which fell to him would be not success but defeat”
(64). Mallarmé’s oeuvre is deeply theatrical, an enactment of itself. The
pulse of perpetual waiting in his poems, cunningly orchestrated and sur-
rounded by nothingness, converges with Glissant’s concept of a poetry
that vibrates as it strains toward absolute relation. It makes little differ-
ence that Mallarmé’s nothingness is less historically determined: there is
something bridging these two abysses, which are both fundamental and
beyond repair. Mallarmé’s taste for philosophy and theater, his sense of
the dramatic, and to a greater extent his concept of the “musical,” the
“spoken,” the “obscure” and of “relation, rapport” that Pierre Campion
has brought to light so well in his study of the poet’s work, could not fail
to touch a chord in Glissant; for these very ideas are echoed and explored
in his poetics: musicality, orality, beauty, opacity, relation, as well as those
poetic structures ensuring that the “cry” will not be uttered in vain and
that it will find its echo chamber.
Glissant feels close to Mallarmé above all in the latter’s philosophy,
Mallarmé’s poetic practice being inseparable from reflection on language
itself, from a “poetics of thought.” As Campion says, “[b]oth Mallarmé’s
poetry and his poetics are philosophical in that they exercise a critique,
indeed a fundamental critique, of truth” (6). He adds, “It is a negative
philosophy on the basis that the theory and practice of literature are prob-
lematic for Mallarmé. These problems have to do with sense, that is to say
with the relations which the human spirit establishes at the heart of the
outside world and through which it connects with that world, the intrin-
sic nature of that spirit, the type of reasoning which men can employ in
their approach to the world and hence to each other” (7). This idea of
“relation” as a weaving of meaning, both aesthetic and ethical, is already
incipient as one possible foundation stone in Glissant’s poetics of relation.
But first and foremost, Mallarmé’s awareness that the absolute cannot be
said is a rigorous, healthy antidote to poetic tradition. We are no lon-
ger dealing with Rimbaud’s visions, which, in the end (perhaps wrongly)
210 Hugues Azérad

proved too romantic but with the “clairvoyance of a man confronted with
what he senses is unattainable, the heroic obstinacy of a poet preparing
for an event that will not take place” (65).
The stage on which this is set is that of poetry; site and formula are at
last linked in a play of meaning—the dramatist sits in the front row: “No
thoughts on poetry are possible, in regard to Mallarmé’s undertaking,
except with reference to a poem. Everything preceding is illusory. Without
a doubt Mallarmé’s tragedy and triumph is to have perpetuated the illu-
sion in the margins of his poems, to have enacted it (since he was aware of
the impossibility of the task), and to have assented to its deficiency” (65).
The dramatic side of “meaning,” its enactment, was to be seminal for
Glissant in composing his poetic and fictional work, and most especially
when he wrote for the stage (see Monsieur Toussaint).
Mallarmé became a vital ally for Glissant also in his reflections on
language. Cautious of French imposed by France, Glissant promoted
creolization as a means of achieving freedom and (self-) awareness. In
Mallarmé he uncovered a “universalizing” concept of language, which,
because it is not culturally determined, can be applied to each and every
culture, to the Tout-monde. Diving directly into the sources, into its
dramatic enactment, the poetic language Mallarmé creates, through its
musicality, rhythm, and syntax, becomes a tool that Glissant uses to forge
his own language. Glissant, following Mallarmé’s example, confronts this
impossibility of expressing what needs all the same to be said unfailingly
and fully. The underlying structure of Mallarmé’s poems, based not on
lightning flashes or images but above all on syntactical innovation that
gives birth to hidden “melodies,” is of great value to Glissant. In his way,
Glissant argues, Mallarmé’s rebellious stance toward the French language
was akin to that of a “Marron” (“runaway”) slave, whose language was
Creole: “Let us maintain, Mallarmé stretches his language to its limits
whilst holding it to its path. Writing of any kind will meditate (or reflect)
on its structure, its purpose. With Mallarmé, as it happens, meditation
on language effectively precedes the birth of the poem in an active and
executory manner. He does not only exert his poetics in the act of the
poem but already in the arduous and knowing silence that precedes and
prevails over it. There, there is no (not yet, not only) poetic thought, but
indeed a poetics of thought” (65).
In its asymptotic relation to poetry, thought creates precisely that
resonating, tense moment when language, enacted through the poem,
is capable of “structuring” the cry. The lengthy, prolonged meditation
on the poem is what becomes the poem, which is in effect its thought.
Poetic thought is the necessary preliminary stage that helps establish the
 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée” 211

poetry of thought—in other words, poetry as knowledge. According to

Glissant, poetry can never be justified or justifiable without the thought
that precedes, processes, and prolongs it. As Bonnefoy (Horizon 206) put
it in his reflections on Mallarmé, no other poet had staked out a wider
poetic space of reflection—an investigative space that plumbs the idea of
poetry to its utmost depths, particularly with regards to the “mensonges
glorieux” (“glorious lies”) of poetic language (Horizon 200). By denying
the essentializing power of words, by effacing the illusion of representa-
tion, Mallarmé liberates words from their illusory attributes and allows
for the “notion pure” of the thing to burst forth in poetic language (Hori-
zon 202). In effect, what Bonnefoy describes as Mallarmé’s intuition of a
nonconceptual plane uncovered by poetic language—the rare moments
when the disembodied poetics of thought truly becomes an embodied
poetic thought—is also what Glissant is striving to achieve in his poetics,
having resisted the sirens of self-sufficient poetic beauty.
One Mallarméan temptation Glissant does not resist but continues
to explore is that of negativity. Based on silence, on blanks between
the printed words and syntax, Mallarmé’s poetic structure is nonethe-
less expressive, albeit negatively. This negative energy runs parallel to
Glissant’s political writing, which has no supporting historical struc-
ture and first of all has to go by way of an antipoetics, via a language
that does not betray the annihilating energy that arises out of the slave
trade. Whatever the utopian leaps he makes in his writing, the shadow
of the silent “déparleur” (“unspeaker,” “unraveller” of words) remains,
hovering in the margins, showing him the futility of such an undertak-
ing (Poétique 224): it is a call to order, a reminder of an inexpressible
reality that is the only trace, all that survives, of an eradicated memory.
Everything that Glissant puts forward is measured against the incontro-
vertible reality that his poetics of relation attempts to establish, while
looking despair in the face.
Hence Glissant “reads” Mallarmé by a process of completion, “link-
ing” him back into his own poetics, weaving the separate threads together
in L’Intention poetique, and gathering the components that would lead
to his Poétique de la relation. Glissant extends Rimbaud’s and Mallarmé’s
poetics into the dimensions of the Tout-monde, reintroducing a histori-
cal perspective where history had failed them and led them to give up:
“After Rimbaud had reconnected the threads of energy (relinquishing
the pursuit where he felt that the times—historical necessity—had not
prepared the ground for site or formula), Mallarmé exposed its mecha-
nisms . . . Consequently, with him, a poet begins to criticize his own for-
mulation . . . and then to meditate on his own formula. But today and for
212 Hugues Azérad

us the pulse of the place is consubstantial with the formula. Any science
of relation is incomplete if it is not knotted within the earth from which
it branches out—and sets itself free” (66).
This relation to place, so essential to Glissant, represented by the
Caribbean, is what completes Mallarmé’s poetics. However, there is
another relation, equally essential, which Glissant uncovers. It is the rela-
tion between a poet and his or her own tradition, a relation that is also
an invitation, a call to another poetics that will complete it: every act
of creation has to be accompanied by a gift, and in this case that gift is
the poem. Not only does the poet engage him or herself in the act of a
poem, but all his or her poetics are a part of it, too, culminating in a
poetic thought that transcends the poetics of thought, breaking it open
and extending it by democratizing it. What such a commitment is worth
will be judged according to its ability to reach out to a “future.” It starts
with the critical eye that the poet casts over his work, his formulation, and
his purpose, which “from then on becomes the art of poetics, engaged in
the responsible act of poetic writing. A poetics of thought, shared perhaps
with several others, is either transfigured or not through this engagement,
depending on whether the poem has justified it as ‘poetic thought’, sub-
mitted to all. Its intention is illuminated in the second degree by its failure
or success, by achieving or failing to reach its goal” (66).
This sharing, this transmission, might take place only through succes-
sion and might not be intended in this way, but according to Glissant, it
is, consciously or not, negatively inscribed in the work itself. And hence
it is a right to which the successor lays claim, his way of making a choice,
all the while continuing the work undertaken by his poetic predecessor,
whether imprisoned in his tainted historical context or not. It is almost
a fear of influence in reverse that we sense in Glissant’s rebellious stance,
akin to that of the “marron” slave, deep within the undergrowth of West-
ern tradition. And yet it is the emphasis on the idea of “intention” that
matters the most and that can only be deduced from the books them-
selves, the imprints or gramma left by the author. It is up to the successor
to reveal the negative content of the chosen work; he has the right to take
it further as he broadens his poetics by bringing it into relation with his
own intention, which he will in turn have to transcend. Mallarmé’s inten-
tion, which Glissant never renounced, maintains its presence, as valid
now as ever “the work of absence is thus nonetheless the only presence,
and its individual volumes will always act as revelations through their
negative exposures. Mallarmé lived to the uttermost this tragic and mag-
nificent confusion, this unbearable state of being” (66).
 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée” 213

Poetics of Relation: “Mesure parfaite et

réinventée” (“Perfect, Reinvented Measure”)6
Zeroing in on the poetic experiments made by Rimbaud and Mallarmé
(not to mention those of Segalen, Reverdy, Claudel, and Char), Glissant
bids farewell to tradition and its poets. And yet he did revisit them time
and again, continuing to reinterpret them as his poetic thinking became
more complex, culminating in his Philosophie de la relation in which art
and philosophy become one. L’Intention poétique nevertheless remains the
fundamental text—the inaugural aesthetic and political gesture—that
frees that which deserves to be freed from the tradition of poetry. At the
start of the book, Glissant defines the vital criteria of his approach to lit-
erature: “A work involves us in three ways. Firstly through community, or
that which drives a group of men. Secondly, purpose, through attaching
itself to the will of a man; thirdly relation, through the ongoing workings
and drama of the human condition” (Intention 24).
Community, purpose, relation—these are the three intersecting areas
we find throughout Glissant’s works where the aesthetic and the political
are intermeshed. Indeed, Glissant, whose aesthetic drive is profoundly
political, dismisses literature and its adjoining categories in favor of rela-
tion, and this is the starting point for looking at literature in a completely
new way. It is in this sense that L’Intention poétique is also an explosive
political gesture (and consequently fell on critics’ deaf ears for the next
forty years): not only does it highlight the incompleteness and blinkers
embedded in France’s “enlightened tradition,” but it also sounds the death
knell for the literature of the “old” world, too besmirched with univer-
salism, colonialism, and individualism, with the completely Westernized
being. But this political/aesthetic gesture should not be understood as yet
another manifesto of the avant-garde: there is no need for an avant-garde
or for tradition in the poetics that Glissant imagines and anticipates here
in its constant dialectic of “mesure” (the centripetal drive of classicism)
and “démesure” (the centrifugal drive of baroque literature).
Because Glissant’s poetics is transformative (transformation as a concrete
act of displacing terms, dislodging linguistic and social habits, shaking the
foundations of our proprietary instincts), words such as politics and aesthet-
ics take on a new valency and require a new approach, a new mode of read-
ing. Glissant’s poetics is a philosophical and poetic act of retributive justice,
leaving the logic of violent revenge or rejection behind. It is perhaps not
surprising that another thinker—Jacques Rancière—was concomitantly
revisiting the categories by which literature, politics, and aesthetics had
been judged in post-1945 France. Both thinkers—who shared a fascination
for Mallarmé and sought to shake up the foundations of inequality—think
214 Hugues Azérad

of aesthetics in terms of emancipation and of redistribution of the sen-

sible: in effect, as an emancipating force that brings autonomy to the spec-
tator/reader by doing away with stratified hierarchies between objects,
subjects, and bodies. By removing the distinctions between art and non-
art, both thinkers posit “relation” as the predominant idea that is apt to
remove the damaging gap between those who think and those who are
relegated to a nonthinking (“subaltern”) position. They substitute for it a
democratic space, a “community of interruptions” and of intervals of being
together, being between (between identities and statuses) (Hallward 41).
Both Rancière and Glissant tease out the politics of literature by displacing
and redefining the categories with which politics and literature had been
defined, studied, and marketed (particularly the now-age-old distinction
between alleged avant-garde engagement and modernist autonomy of the
work of art). Both L’Intention poétique and Rancière’s works gesture toward
the emancipatory power of aesthetics and a renewal of a truly democratic
politics (the template of which can be found in Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and
Flaubert): “Literature has its own politics. And that politics was part of the
wider politics—or metapolitics—of aesthetics: a metapolitics of the sensory
community, aimed at achieving what had been missed by the ‘merely politi-
cal’ revolution—freedom and equality incorporated in living attitudes, in
a new harmony between the distribution of bodies and the distribution of
words, between the places, the occupations and the modes of being and
speaking” (Rancière, “Politics” 18).
Poetry only succeeds in its purpose by transcending itself and accept-
ing its entanglement with the world, where it is always in danger of dis-
integrating in the face of the impossible task expected of it: “Intention
perfects itself in Relation” (Poetic Intention 217). The poet must quit the
reassuring world of his creation and even of his vision and may admit
no other criterion of truth than that revealed to him by relation, which
Glissant calls the “rhythm” of the world: “[The poet] dismisses the flashes
of brilliance, the revelations, the meaningless highlights, those deceptive
moments of illumination which are snuffed out by the fleeting moment
of the image, turning instead to the multiple rhythms of duration. The
poet selects from the mass of the world that on which he must fasten and
which harmonizes with his song. Rhythm has the force of ritual, raising
consciousness to another level” (Intention 222). Recognizing its intrinsic
inadequacy, Glissant’s poetics acknowledges that the task cannot, or can
only barely, be accomplished. It requires constant, unremitting vigilance
to avoid repeating tradition with its burdensome inheritance of meaning
and language: “We are as yet caught in a tangled web, for the Old World
still casts its shadow over us” (223).
 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée” 215

Poetic endeavor can only be validated when it moves beyond itself and
into relation, and the rewriting of literary history that Glissant under-
takes is valid for the sole reason that he reminds literature of its duty
of remembrance, but of a particular kind of remembrance, one that is
pregnant with communality and has its eyes cast on the future. The “I” of
the writer disappears when faced with the “we,” which still lacks the sup-
porting structure of tradition, and from thence springs the importance of
writing a new, albeit unending, narrative: “In truth, there are no struc-
tures which constrain. Not a single cathedral. Not one great shared Book.
Our History is yet to come . . . There, within what you called History,
between the ditches where our unnamed heroes were buried, all I see are
the footprints we left behind” (223).
Glissant’s L’Intention politique assumes a political stance at the core of
literature, rather than a personal positioning within a literary tradition
(which would ultimately only serve to enshrine tradition). In this work he
gives literature back its political power (even though his is a new concept
of politics, going hand in hand with a new idea of literature that he never
had time to conceptualize in full). “To say the self,” for Glissant, must
necessarily mean to say the world, the world of relation, which he has
apprehended through the story of his own life. “[P]oetry does not engen-
der universality, on the contrary, it gives birth to upheavals which alter us”
(Cohée 108). This, however, is not to say that Glissant abandons the poets
of the nineteenth century; quite the reverse—Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lau-
tréamont, and also Baudelaire remain his constant companions in every
one of his succeeding texts on poetics. In all instances, Glissant rereads
and reconnects with these poets. The case of Lautréamont is particularly
revealing, insofar as he is a writer whose baroque poetry has no equiva-
lent in French literature (if we disregard Hérédia or Leconte de Lisle,
who were embroiled in their own Parnassian rhetoric). Lautréamont,
Glissant argues, must be understood within the context of American or
New World writing and at variance with Rimbaud’s fulgurant images:
“Lautréamont fascinates us because we sense that what is so modern in
his writing might simply be the height of ‘literariness.’ It is a triumph of
the baroque, not in indicating what is lacking, but by urging connections
to their very limits” (Discours 135). In fact Glissant takes the directive of
Lautréamont to its logical conclusion: “Poetry must be a collective work.
Not that of an individual” (Rimbaud 788).7
Rimbaud and Mallarmé are never quite absent from Glissant’s poetic
practice and his thoughts on poetry. Glissant still believes in the poem,
even if the poem assumes a freer, more oral dimension. Each time he
rereads these poets he finds a new interpretation and this in turn reflects
216 Hugues Azérad

the development of his own poetic thinking. “Plumbing the depths, con-
struing the language and exposing the text, these three procedures, each
in turn, are used as a critical perspective to explain the questions posed
by French literature since the Romantics. But there is another approach,
unnoticed, or rather hidden away, to which we give the name ‘a poetics of
Relation’” (Poétique 38).
The poets of modernity, the modernity that Barthes and his followers
typified as a poetics of self-reflexive language, inform Glissant’s “modern-
ist” poetics, which does not call into question its premises. Glissant does
not alter the course of poetic tradition and certainly does not cast a nos-
talgic glance toward a pre-Mallarméan poetic past. However, for him, this
poetics of self-reflexive language still remained too confined by a specific
language (in this case French) and its inherent ideological ramifications.
Instead, Glissant prefers to substitute for this rooted and exclusive notion
of “langue” (French) his own idea of language based on the dynamics of
creolization, which brings into contact all the world’s languages.8
Nonetheless, if Mallarmé retains his place as unquestionably the one
who elevated poetry to a philosophical vision of the world, Rimbaud is
the poet who reappears again and again in Glissant’s poetry and poet-
ics, even if it is through unexpected detours, and Glissant always feels
compelled to adjust or even correct his predecessor. There is good reason
Glissant weaves into the weft of his books certain Rimbaldian words, such
as “inouïs, maelström, en-allée, dérèglements (dé)halages.” Glissant’s faith
in poetry, in its utopian and transformative (if not regenerative) powers,
is inherited directly from Rimbaud, and it cannot be abjured. Having rel-
egated Rimbaud too early on in his L’Intention poétique, misjudging him
in terms of a missed encounter with history, Glissant eventually returns
to him, discovering in him the poet most able to perceive reality beneath
“appearance” (Discours 241): “Rimbaud’s ‘I is an other’ is historically lit-
eral. A kind of ‘awareness of awareness’ throws open the doors in spite of
ourselves, showing each of us to be a troubled actor within the poetics
of Relation” (Poétique 39). In Glissant’s Une nouvelle région du monde, in
which he develops his ideas on beauty and aesthetics as an extension of his
poetics of relation, there are echoes of Rimbaud in the phrase “nous salu-
ons la beauté” (Région 139–45). But Glissant has turned Rimbaud’s “Je
sais aujourd’hui saluer la beauté” (Rimbaud 102; the phrase closes Délires
II: “Alchimie du verbe” in Une saison en enfer) into a “nous.” Just as poetry
changes our ways of thinking and makes us aware of what we lack, so
“beauty points towards the place where things will change” (Région 107).
Glissant crosses Rimbaud’s path once again, in his last two books.
Insofar as it is a “Pensée du poème” (Philosophie 56; “Thinking Poetry”),
 “Mesure parfaite et réinventée” 217

Glissant’s philosophy of relation is inseparable from what he calls the

“Imaginary of languages,” his culminating idea, which became the title
of the last book published before his death, L’Imaginaire des langues. His
penultimate book, Philosophie de la relation, already broached the idea
that “the imaginary has the power to create paradise every day” (Philoso-
phie 56), thereby setting the imaginary or visionary against the imagina-
tion, which deals in continents and maps the world, intending to conquer
it. “Such a vision of the world will lead elsewhere. The visionary senses,
guesses, discovers, it never looks to its own advantage, it welcomes neither
possession nor knowledge. Its imaginary starting point is the archipel-
ago” (109). Imagination belongs to the individual, while the imaginary
or visionary belong to the collective, but both are interdependent and
fertilize one another. It is during his analyses of imagination versus the
imaginary that Glissant returns to Rimbaud, this time running contrary
to his own previous readings of the poet: “Le Bateau ivre is imagination,
but Une saison en enfer is imaginary. Both are the product of the same
pen. In Le Bateau ivre Rimbaud takes the material of reality and uses his
imagination to create something suggested by or opposed to the fantasies
hidden within Charleville. Une saison en enfer is fantasy itself, shifting,
opened up by the imaginary and raised to the level of an unquestion-
able reality” (109–10). Imagination predicts and perceives, and its repre-
sentations of the future render it either contented or disillusioned. The
imaginary, by contrast, forms the basis and substance of those landscapes
that are fundamental to Glissant. His approach anchors the dialectic of
imagination-imaginary in the reality of dominated countries, who are fed
on a daily diet of “material alienation” but whose vision “flies far ahead
of those still debating the end of colonialism” (110–11). Here also, Glis-
sant takes his cue from Rimbaud: “[T]he imagination and the imaginary
have no leverage over each other . . . They must complement each other
as they are. Nowadays, Le Bateau ivre and Une saison en enfer would have
led to one single poem, which might have been Les Illuminations” (112).
To link these two terms is to say that “the world as representation exists
within the imagination, but insofar as it is also the Tout-monde, that is a
non-totalitarian totality, preserving the multiplicity and the detail, thus
opening the doors to the imaginary” (111). The strength of this alliance
may not change “life,” but it might cunningly change what, within it, is
destructive—“les exterminateurs” (112; “the destroyers”).
It is therefore to Rimbaud, somewhere there between the startling
“passant” (“passerby”) and the “passeur” (“intercessor/mediator”), which
Glissant grants a place among those who have entered into relation, her-
alded by the poem “Génie,” which he selected for his anthology. Glissant
218 Hugues Azérad

applies to this poem, the most enigmatic of all, a guarded interpretation,

a constantly covert reading: “When [Rimbaud] says ‘we have to become
seers,’ he is saying that we must be able to see that moment of primor-
dial fusion” (Imaginaire 93–94). Whether it is a matter of beauty, poetry,
truth, or Relation, “Génie” is, to use Rimbaud’s words, the “mesure par-
faite et réinventée” (“perfect, reinvented measure)”—the boundless mea-
sure (“mesure-démesure”), the rhythm of the poem of Relation (which
beats in L’Intention poétique and trembles in Glissant’s poems)—found
and sung at last. “Génie” is the poem that points toward the “new region
of the world,” which Glissant has tried to describe throughout his work,
always in the name of a “we,” of a community still to come.

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Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South. Eds. Celia Britton
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Bonnefoy, Yves. Notre besoin de Rimbaud. Paris: Seuil, 2009.
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———. L’Intention poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1969.
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———. Monsieur Toussaint. Paris: Seuil, 1961.
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Notes
1. See Née (L’Ailleurs), who excludes any postcolonial approach from the start. On
the other hand, reference must be made to the philosophical readings of Mal-
larmé and Rimbaud provided by Rancière, Bonnefoy, Steinmetz, Thélot, and
Badiou.
2. Translations of Glissant and other French writers are ours or Michele Lester’s,
unless otherwise stated.
3. See, for instance, obvious echoes of Rimbaud in the second poem of Un champ
d’îles (1953), “Pour Mycéa”; “Pays” in Pays rêvé, pays réel (1985); “Tremiti” and
“Prométhée” in Fastes (1991); “L’eau du volcan” (“Le poète descend, sans guide
ni plan, sans rive ni sextant ni clameur demeurant” [“The poet descends, with
neither guide nor map, remaining without shore or sextant or clamor”]) in Les
Grand chaos (1994); “Vertige des temps froids,” “Gloire,” “Mourir non mourir”
in Le Sang rivé (1961); “Le premier jour,” “plaies” in Le Sel noir (1960); “Ce qui
commence,” “Plus sourd que mer,” “Malemort” (“voyelles, voyelles, non con-
crétées”) in Boises (1979). Echoes of Mallarmé can be found in “Falaise secrète”
in La Terre inquiète (1955); “Cathédrale de sel” in Fastes, “ô non donnés, ô
improbables, lacs” in Les Grands chaos; “Beauté” in Le Sang rivé; “Carthage,”
“Afrique,” “Plaies” in Le Sel noir.
4. For an excellent introduction to Glissant’s concepts, see Madou and Glissant,
La Terre.
5. This return of aesthetics qua politics, but politics by more subtle means, is
more prevalent in Glissant’s works, written during the theoretical upheavals
that shook the French intellectual landscape of the 1950s to the 1980s (see
Kristeva and Kaufman), and in Jacques Rancière’s continuous efforts to rethink
aesthetics (see Le Partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique). See also Prabhu and
Azérad.
6. Rimbaud, “Génie” (Rimbaud 136–37).
7. On the notion of Glissantian Baroque, see Daniel-Henri Pageaux.
220 Hugues Azérad

8. This multilinguism, which is not to be confused with the perfect command

of various languages, may also be present not only in Rimbaud’s poetry (the
implicit fascination for and use of foreign words found in his poems, which
dispel rather than call for exoticism) but also in Mallarmé’s use of English,
the constant foreignization he imposes on classical French syntax, and so on.
It is also symptomatic that Glissant decided to work within the parameters
of nineteenth-century poetry, while consistently altering the lexis of French
language, its rhythms, and its syntax. Like Bonnefoy, with whom he shares a
refusal to embrace abstract formalism and textualism (Roche, Hocquard, etc.)
and a desire to preserve poetry’s “sacred” relationship with free verse, Glissant
does not shatter the recognizable forms of poetry. Their poetry innovates inso-
far as it meshes the concrete with the abstract, merges the figurative and the
nonfigurative.
Contributors

Joseph Acquisto is associate professor of French at the University of

Vermont, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French lyric
poetry and the novel, with a focus on the relations among literature, phi-
losophy, and music. He is the author of French Symbolist Poetry and the
Idea of Music (2006) and Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French
Literature: Solitary Adventures (2012), as well as articles on Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, Proust, Cioran, and others.

Hugues Azérad is fellow in French at Magdalene College, Cambridge,

and the author of L’Univers constellé de Proust, Faulkner et Joyce (Lang,
2002). He coedited (with Peter Collier) Twentieth-Century French Poetry:
A Critical Anthology (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Chantiers du
poème (Lang, 2012); and a double issue of French Forum (2012) titled
Poetic Practice and the Practice of Poetics in France Since 1945, with Emma
Wagstaff, Michael G. Kelly, and Nina Parish. He has written articles and
chapters on Reverdy, Proust, Glissant, Faulkner, Nerval, and Joyce. He
is an editor for the modern poetry section of the Literary Encyclopedia
(http://www.litencyc.com).

Emile Fromet de Rosnay received his PhD from Queen’s University

in 2007. He has published a book on French poet Stéphane Mallarmé
(Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmésis: Mythopoétique de Stéphane Mallarmé)
and articles on modernism, digital humanities, and Mauritian novelist
Ananda Devi. His Mallarmé Hypertext Project can be found at http://
mallarme.uvic.ca.

Alison James is assistant professor of French at the University of Chicago.

She is the author of Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo
(Northwestern University Press, 2009), as well as articles on surreal-
ism, Jacques Roubaud, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau, and Fran-
çois Bon. Her research interests include experimental poetics, relations
between literature and philosophy, and representations of the everyday.
222 Contributors

Edward K. Kaplan is Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities at Brandeis

University. His books include Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel
in America, 1940–1972, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical,
and the Religious in The Parisian Prowler, and Michelet’s Poetic Vision: A
Romantic Philosophy of Nature, Man, and Woman.

Claire Chi-ah Lyu teaches French at the University of Virginia. She is

currently working on the semiology and phenomenology of blank space
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and literary
theory. Her works have appeared in French Forum, Nineteenth-Century
French Studies, Esprit Créateur, and MLN.

John McKeane is Laming Junior Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford.

His research looks at post-1960 French writing and thought, particularly
Maurice Blanchot’s fragmentary and dialogical writing, on which he
wrote his thesis. A more recent project looks at the younger pair of think-
ers, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. He is the coeditor of
Blanchot Romantique (Peter Lang, 2010) and translator of Nancy’s Ado-
ration (the Deconstruction of Christianity, II) (Fordham University Press,
2012).

Ève Morisi (PhD, Princeton University and the Sorbonne) is assistant

professor of French and Francophone literature at the University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry
and prose fiction with an emphasis on the intersection of poetics and eth-
ics in representations of violence, dominance, and suffering. In addition
to a variety of articles on these issues, she has published Albert Camus con-
tre la peine de mort (Gallimard, 2011) and is currently completing a book
on capital punishment in the works of Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus.

David Nowell Smith is lecturer in literature at the University of East

Anglia. He has written on various topics in literary theory and poetics
and is author of Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics
(Fordham University Press, 2013).

Bradley Stephens is lecturer in French at the University of Bristol. His

research focuses on the reception and adaptation of French Romantic
works during and since the nineteenth century, with a particular inter-
est in Victor Hugo. He is the author of Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre,
and the Liability of Liberty (Legenda, 2011) and the coeditor of Transmis-
sions: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema (Peter Lang, 2007).
 Contributors 223

He has also published numerous articles and book chapters in this field,
including a new introduction to Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-
Dame (Signet Classics, 2010).

Alain Toumayan is professor of French at the University of Notre Dame.

He concentrates on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French litera-
ture. He has published a monograph on the problem of evil in Barbey
d’Aurevilly, Huysmans, and Baudelaire, various articles on nineteenth-
and twentieth-century subjects, and a Festschrift on literary generations.
In 2003, he published Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Prob-
lem of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas.

Catherine Witt is associate professor of French at Reed College. Her

research interests lie in early nineteenth-century poetics, historiography,
and philological imagination with a focus on the works of Nodier, Cha-
teaubriand, and Baudelaire.
This page intentionally left blank
Index
Adorno, Theodor, 151–52
Agamben, Giorgio, 1, 2, 31, 133, 135,
142–43
Aristotle, 143
Badiou, Alain, 1, 2, 3, 186–200
Barthes, Roland, 117–18, 216
Bataille, Georges, 111n20
Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 9–24, 28–39,
59–69, 73–94
“Au lecteur,” 12–13, 126
“A une heure du matin,” 21–22
“A une madone,” 79, 87–88
“A une passante,” 30–37, 120–22
“La Beauté,” 14
“Une Charogne,” 76–77
“Le Confiteor de l’artiste,” 17, 34
“De l’essence du rire,” 76, 80–81
Exposition universelle 1855, 28–30
“L’Héautontimorouménos,” 78–79,
82, 85–86, 90–91, 192–99
“Hymne à la beauté,” 16
“Mademoiselle Bistouri,” 18–21
“Une Martyre,” 82–83, 90
“Le Masque,” 14–16
Mon Cœur mis à nu, 84, 93
Les Paradis artificiels, 61–64, 69
Salon de 1859, 33
“Le Tonneau de la haine,” 77–78
Benjamin, Walter, 31, 136, 137, 143
Bersani, Leo, 194
Blanchot, Maurice, 95–107, 116–17,
159, 161
Bloom, Harold, 44
Bonnefoy, Yves, 1, 2–3, 153, 154, 211
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 29,
37–38
Dante, 118–19, 121–22
Deguy, Michel, 1, 118–20
Delacroix, Eugène, 28–29, 81
De Maistre, Joseph, 83, 89
De Man, Paul, 118, 194
De Quincey, Thomas, 60–61, 64–69
Derrida, Jacques, 49, 103, 119–20
Descartes, René, 114–16
Dostoyevski, Fyodor, 59–60, 63
Doumet, Christian, 5
Ducasse, Isidore, 98–99, 201
Eldridge, Richard, 1, 45
Felski, Rita, 1, 2, 183
Gautier, Théophile, 133
Glissant, Édouard, 201–18
Go, Nicolas, 2
God, 11, 18
Hegel, G. W. F., 27, 102, 104, 105–7,
126, 135, 138, 168
Heidegger, Martin, 25–27, 151–53,
158–59, 162–63
Heine, Heinrich, 28
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 32, 97–98
Hugo, Victor, 6, 23n3, 45–55, 172,
175, 201
“La Force des choses” 50–55
226 Index
Jaccottet, Philippe, 122–23
Kierkegaard, Søren, 9–24
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 1, 32, 38–
39, 45, 109n4
Lautréamont, le Comte de. See Ducasse,
Isidore
Levinas, Emmanuel, 43–55, 69
Macherey, Pierre, 186–87, 190–91, 199
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 3, 5, 39, 100–107,
123–28, 131–45, 150–63, 168–
70, 172–77, 190, 208–12
“Un coup de dés,” 115–16
“Crise de vers,” 177
“Évantail (de Mme Mallarmé),”
160–61
“Sainte,” 155–58
“Salut,” 123–28
“Solennité,” 176
Maulpoix, Jean-Michel, 5–6
Meschnonnic, Henri, 149–52, 154,
159, 161
Michaux, Henri, 71n4
Montaigne, Michel de, 35–37
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4, 45, 142
Nerval, Gérard de, 39
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 137, 142
Novalis, 102, 104
Nussbaum, Martha, 1
Perloff, Marjorie, 44–45
Pichois, Claude, 29
Rancière, Jacques, 1, 2, 3, 132, 163–77,
201, 213–14
Rimbaud, Arthur, 6, 39, 141, 171, 177,
195, 201, 205–8, 211, 216–18
Roubaud, Jacques, 177–80
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 29, 34–36
Sanyal, Debarati, 85, 201n2
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 151, 171
Schelling, F. W. J., 25–27
Szondi, Peter, 135, 136
Valéry, Paul, 115
Weil, Simone, 13
Žižek, Slavoj, 131, 133