Abstract: Stéphane Mallarmé was more than just a fin-de-siècle poet. As the great modern theorist of the ‘virtual’ and of negative space; as the combiner (or collapser) of distinctive forms (from writing and printing to visual art and performance) into new, hybrid planes of iteration; as the tentative blueprint-drafter of the ‘book-to-come’, the vanguard tome in which all that exists is destined to become encrypted; as (in Alain Badiou’s words) ‘the thinker of the event-drama’ in its political as well as aesthetic dimensions — as all these and more, he drew up a road-map for the arts to navigate the twentieth century with. Could this still be used to plot a path through the twenty-first? And what might his notions of interdisciplinarity and relationality have to impart to that division of the arts that we call the sciences?
Speaker
Tom McCarthyNovelist and Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute