Syllable as Syntax: Stéphane Mallarmé's un Coup de dés

Abstract

Un Coup de dés is one of the masterworks of modern literature, and a kind of summa of Stéphane Mallarmé's lifework. It could not have been better served by writers and thinkers: on the one hand, it immediately transformed the field for working poets as different as Paul Valéry and Christopher Brennan, as for so many more thereafter; on the other, a strong lineage of European philosophy registered the poem as an event for thought, encompassing Maurice Blanchot, J.-P. Sartre, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, J.-C. Milner, Quentin Meillassoux, and many others. Confronted by this sequence of commentaries by poets and philosophers, a contemporary reade..