“Un acte où le hazard est en jeu”

Achievement and Negation of Chance in Mallarmé

Abstract

For Mallarmé, chance can be defined as an ontological and anthropological fact, but the poet’s originality lies in the fact that he also defines chance as a quasi-transcendental modal category that conditions and allows every symbolic production. This implies that to abolish chance (the oft-stated project of Mallarméan poetics) is the same of performing chance itself: this proposition surprisingly situates Mallarméan poetics in relation to the chance it plans to abolish and allows us to understand the paradoxical meaning of the negation envisaged. Such an attempted negation forms a system with a set of strategies that aim to signal the contingent status of the poem. It is thus part of a pedagogy aimed to fight the illusionary wanderings of the language, while at the same time laying the foundations of a poetics of the performativity which initiates a deep change in the conceptions of what poetry is or can accomplish.