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 Rancière, Alain Badiou, J.-C. Milner, Quentin Meillassoux, and many others. Confronted by this sequence of commentaries by poets and philosophers, a contemporary reader could be forgiven for experiencing a methodological and intellectual impasse. How could one add to this sequence of readings except as a supernumerary number that could always be another? Yet how could one also not feel that the sequence itself demands another numbering or enumeration of the operations of the poem? This paper sketches out a sequence of hypotheses regarding the foundations of Mallarmé’s poem in a new relation that he forges between syllables and syntax.