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 McCarthyMiller Scholar