Meillassoux on Mallarmé, second half

It’s time to start the office day, but on the bus ride and then over coffee, I finished Meillassoux’s book.

In this book, he never makes an explicit link between his interpretation of Mallarmé and his own philosophy, though there’s a trace of it there. Having worked hard to establish the hidden “707” code in the first part of the book, in the second part he subverts this code by showing that Mallarmé deliberately left some ambiguity as to whether the code was real or the result of chance. Rather than having chosen one possibility out of the many open to him, Mallarmé is a kind of super-Hamlet (and Hamlet is discussed in Meillassoux’s book), not just hesitating for awhile before deciding on the unique number, but infinitizing his hesitation into a virtuality of all possible outcomes. Thus the deliberate haziness surrounding the 707 code, which in one sense seems to be definitely there, but in another sense is dependent on purely contingent decisions such as whether to count non-hyphenated compound words as one or two.

In any case, I have the feeling that we can expect Mallarmé to play a key role in the multi-volume reworking of L’Inexistence divine, whose first volume now seems to be tangibly within publishing distance, though you’d have to ask the author if you want to know the exact date.