Research On Alain Badiou’s Criticism Over Mallarme’s Poems

Alain Badiou’s philosophical thought and literary criticism are supplementary to each other; with the philosophical thought a prerequisite for literary criticism, while the literary criticism a part of philosophical thought supporting his philosophical system reversely. From the perspective of philosophical discourse system, Badiou has put forward a courageous and subversive literary thought of inaesthetics.The thought of inaesthetics attaches great importance to artistic status; it holds that art is independent from philosophy and opposes the traditional aesthetics control over the art. Badiou attempts to reconstruct a correlation between art and truth.He insists that art is a truth procedure of producing the truth, proposing to discover the intraphilosophical effects from within the artistic works that are recognized as artistic events.Mallarme plays a significant role in Badiou’s criticism. Badiou has provided new interpretations for a series of poets including Mallarme. Mallarme is his favorite poet as well as the one whose works have been elaborated in a most frequently manner. His criticism over Mallarme’s poems can be seen as an extension and verification of his philosophical and artistic thinking. From philosophical perspective, Badiou argues that every piece of Mallarme’s poetic works is not only a event which triggers the truth, but also the subject of artistic truth procedure; in concrete form, the poetic works are also the specific expressive forms of artistic truth procedure. The dynamic process of event, truth and subject constitutes the artistic truth procedure. From linguistic perspective, it can be found in Badiou’s elaboration on Mallarme’s poems that Mallarme’s poetic language demonstrates a "negative" feature. Firstly, it’s a type of non-class language; Badiou shows an obsession with universality of truth, so Mallarme’s poems which constitute the truth in his eye are inevitably oriented to all people. Secondly, it’s a type of "impersonalized" and non-instrumental language in which the subject and the object are deducted from the poems; in Mallarme’s poems with an "anonymous" subject, the poem is oriented to the so-called "idea world" instead of the objective world. Thirdly, it’s a type of distorted and mysterious language;Badiou maintains that in order to pierce the existence and truth, especially when the truth is a generative and brand-new one, the method of "catch awry" shall be adopted to touch the truth; hence, the language in Mallarme’s poems is inevitably out of the common. Fourthly, plenty of "void" metaphors are employed. From methodological perspective, the methods and logics in Mallarme’s poems are negative operations with subtractive nature, and the major method is "subtraction", which is mainly classified into "cancellation" and "foreclosure"...