ABSTRACT
❧ This short discussion of Mallarmé’s work was written for a volume in a series entitled Tableau de la littérature française, a collection of introductory essays on canonic French writers. Literally, the title of the series means “Picture of French Literature,” and Derrida begins by questioning—in Mallarmé’s name—the conception of literature that this phrase implies. Mallarmé’s writing, both that which is classed as “literary” and that which is not, unsettles the traditional categories of literature and of literary criticism, including referent, book, theme, meaning, and form. But the model of the revolutionary writer single-handedly breaking with the past is inadequate; borrowing, as he so often does, from the texts he is reading, Derrida identifies the Mallarméan moment as one of crisis, simultaneously marking the end of literature as classically understood and the exposure of those aspects of literature which have always, potentially, threatened that classical understanding. Derrida emphasizes that this is not a matter of Mallarmé’s taking to an extreme the exploitation of semantic richness that has been a critically foregrounded feature of poetry since the culture of ancient Greece, but his decomposition of the linguistic elements upon which such commentary depends, notably the word.
