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Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren New York: Continuum, 2011, xvi + 94 pp.
Mallarmé is a difficult poet, and this book, like many others on the nineteenth- century French poet, readily attests to the fact. But he is not, claims Rancière, a hermetic poet, willfully and self-indulgently complex, singing a siren's song to the virtues of poetic Enigma. Nor is he a poet floating far above the everyday world, writing poetry too "pure" to offer any relevant engagement with social or political matters. The argument of Rancière's book is that, on the contrary, there is a politics to be discerned in Mallarmé-a politics of the siren.
If Rancière begins, therefore, on the acknowledgement that Mallarmé is a diffi- cult poet, it is in order to declare that what is difficult about this poet is appreciating the political task Mallarmé sets himself. That task is to inspect the possibilities of imagining new forms of social community. "Imagining" is not quite the right word, however, and Rancière would probably reject the criticism that literary visions of a new polity can only be experiments in idealism-literary fantasies, not exercises in real-world political activism. Nonetheless (and this is a point forcefully made in another of Rancière's books, The Politics of Literature), literature carries out its activism on its own terms, and the politics of a literary work is not just a matter of what it says about a certain political issue. It is also a matter of how that work in- trudes into a given context, lodges itself there as a stylistic achievement, a generic experiment, a formal innovation, or indeed, a treatment of subject matters previ- ously unaddressed. A poem, be it ever so pure, is not to be relegated to the aesthetic sphere, and an effective political literature only sought in romans à thèse. There can be a political potency to a poetic exercice de style; if a poem pays lyrical homage to swans, fans, foaming oceans and the trinkets of an aesthete's drawing room, it does not mean that such a poem cannot have a political impact.
It may be instructive to resume Rancière's formulation of the politics of litera- ture, particularly insofar as it bears upon his reading of the politics of...