Abstract

From its beginnings in the 1940s, literary theory in France has often cast itself as a search for the essence of literature. It has also held Stephane Mallarme to be the essential poet who first unveiled and most fully explored the essence of literature. Yet in the course of the century, the disinterested theoretical search for literature's essence shaded into a perspective by which the "pure" or "essential" literature of a figure like Mallarme is itself tantamount to philosophical research into the foundations of our everyday categories and concepts. I call this line of thought "speculative literary theory." Taking the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida as representative, I argue that the theories that conceive literature as a quasi-philosophical, transcendent endeavor are based on flawed philosophical premises. Furthermore, their view of Mallarme as an honorary transcendental philosopher rests on a fundamental misinterpretation of his work. The study comprises three chapters. ;In the first, I show how, beginning from plausible premises about the inseparability of form and content in the literary work and its resistance to paraphrase, Blanchot is gradually led to the implausible conclusion that authentic literature necessarily plumbs the Nothingness that, he feels, subtends all of the concepts and categories of experience. ;Blanchot originated speculative literary theory in France, through the adaptation of the ideas of Martin Heidegger. In the second chapter, I explore the most developed such speculative literary theory, that of Jacques Derrida. I show that Derrida's project of the "deconstruction" of metaphysics and his concomitant view of literature as an important ally in this project, rests on a superstitious conception of the essences it would do away with, as well as a flawed view of syntactical constraint. ;In the last chapter, I revisit the poetics of Stephane Mallarme as put forward primarily in the Divagations. I show that Mallarme's main concern was the relationship between literature and its public in the 1890s, and not the transcendental research of the eternal foundations of all conceptuality. I argue that Mallarme's poetics of "chance," far from being an ally of speculative literary theory, poses a challenge to it