ABSTRACT
This chapter wants to look at this politics of the avant-garde in more detail, concentrating especially on Bataille, and also on Artaud and Blanchot. It looks at how Derrida develops this into a discussion of the politics of difference, where he enters into dialogue with a number of political philosophers, such as Habermas. In Mallarmé the emphasis on a reconfiguration of the poetic and the emphasis on 'arts for art's sake' is accompanied by a clearly radical democratic agenda where Mallarmé sees his work as having very real material effects politically in the world. Moreover, his very attempt to move beyond the genre of a more traditionally defined literature is obviously a political move. The political, especially understood in a materialist sense, can be seen to constitute a 'nonphilosophical' site, or one which stands both inside and outside traditional philosophy, but which gives an angle with which to question philosophy, and interrogate its limits.
