Jean-Claude Milner’s Mallarmé: Nothing Has Taken Place

This fourth chapter introduces Jean-Claude Milner’s reading of Mallarmé, and offers a critical exegesis of his 1999 book Mallarmé au tombeau. The chapter argues that Milner presents Mallarmé as a committed nihilist who refused to recognise the existence of the 19th century’s revolutionary events, from 1848 to the Commune. Milner transforms Mallarmé into a figure strictly opposed to the Mallarmé of Badiou, or indeed of any reader hoping to include the poet in their pantheon of progressive or revolutionary writers.