Mallarmé's Theo-Political Poetics

A recent wave of critical and speculative treatments of Mallarmé, especially by philosophical scholars from Jean-Claude Milner to Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Quentin Meillassoux, among others, has focused on finding or devising the keys to a viable politics for postmodern times in Stéphane Mallarmé's prophetically world-shattering poetry. The present reflection takes up the dialogue with the philosophers on the political underpinnings and implications of Mallarmé's revolutionary understanding of the revelatory capacities of poetic language exalted to its highest pitch and potential by the poetics of the symbol. The overall aim remains the elucidation of how poetry, even in the most radical modernist vein, can be turned into a unique type of (negative) theological revelation that is, by its intrinsic nature, politically revolutionary.