Badiou and Žižek on Mallarmé: The Critique of Object-Art

Abstract

This paper examines the differences between Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek’s articulations of ‘impossibility’ in their readings of the French experimental symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé. The discussion will focus on how Badiou and Žižek diverge in their respective understandings of impossibility as a hallmark of the Lacanian Real in Mallarmé’s oeuvre. This difference is framed in light of the way that Badiou and Žižek consonantly turn to the modernist poet Mallarmé to understand the conditions under which the subject can attempt to access this imperative/idea. Herein it will be shown that two relations become apparent: ‘subtraction’ and ‘purification’; 'subtraction’ as the removal of the imaginary contents from the subject’s self-relation in an attempt to access the future antérieur and ‘purification’ as the attempt to purify the pure idea by locating the opaque core of the aesthetic object as the point of failure in the relation with the object.

Keywords: Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Stephane Mallarmé, Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis, philosophy, materialism, ontology, aesthetics, art