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And whiteness-of the page, of typographic space, of the sea’s angry foam-was a central concern of Mallarmé, a frequent contributor to the seminal vanguard 1890s publication titled (perhaps) coincidentally La Revue Blanche or “White Review.” If, to a whitened sensibility, the shipwreck may present the ultimate metaphor (or, in the case of Ader, the ultimate enactment of a metaphor), for Black writers and artists it could be said to have quite different nuances. The artist Bas Jan Ader, having paid tribute to Un Coup de Des in several works, took his devotion to Mallarmé even further by actually sailing, for his final performance piece, a small boat out into the stormy Atlantic, never to return.Īll these cultural figures were, we might note in passing, white.
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Mallarmé’s grandest, most ambitious work was the almost unparsible Un Coup de Des, whose words, tumbling and cascading across the “gulf” of the page’s gutter, narrate the “eternal circumstances” of a shipwreck in the middle of which a pair of dice are (or more precisely, are not-yet) cast.įor late-modern philosophy, this scene has come to stand both as ur-setting (Jacques Derrida’s notion of “spacing” or “différance” is overwhelmingly indebted to the vast blank expanses of Mallarmé’s strangely laid-out poem, stretching laterally and horizontally and every which way in between the far-flung words) and as ur-drama-indeed, Alain Badiou’s central concept of “event” is rooted quite explicitly in that text’s shipwreck, in the failure-to-fully-happen of its central act, the throwing of the dice all of which adds up to frame the state of being “on-the-edge-of-the-void” as the ultimate ontological condition. From Joyce to Duchamp, Cage to Kristeva to Acker, the legacy of the symbolist poet and general thinker of aesthetics is writ large, in shared obsessions with chance and contingency, with constellation and catastrophe, abysses, gaps and pauses, silences, spaces-between. “All we do in the 20th century,” Roland Barthes once claimed, “is repeat Mallarmé-but as long as it’s Mallarmé we’re repeating, we’re doing the right thing.” We, here, is shorthand for a long-tailed literary (or more widely cultural) avant-garde and Barthes is, of course, right.