Overview

In this concise and illuminating study, Jacques Rancière, one of the world's most popular and influential living philosophers, examines the life and work of the celebrated nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Stéphane Mallarmé. Ranciere presents Mallarmé as neither an aesthete in need of rare essences and unheard-of words, nor the silent and nocturnal thinker of some poem too pure to be written. Mallarmé is the contemporary of a republic that is seeking out forms of civic worship to replace the pomp of religions and kings. If his writing is difficult, it is because it complies with a demanding and delicate poetics that is itself responding to an exceptional awareness of the complexity of an historical moment as well as the role that poetry ought to play in it.

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9780826438409

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'[The author] seeks-through several intricate, close readings-to reinterpret the poet as one whose complexity lent light and lightness to a civilization deprived of spiritual and monarchic anchors.'-Choice Magazine

Author Information

Jacques Rancière taught at the University of Paris VIII, France, from 1969 to 2000, occupying the Chair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1990 until his retirement. Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), and two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics (Verso, 2006) and Conditions (Continuum, 2008).

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