Abstract

After an existential crisis, in which he experienced the subjective nature of the verse as an abyss of nothingness, the young Mallarme affirmed the latter and based his poetry on it. But how should one understand this nothingness? For Paul Claes it was obvious that nothingness should be understood in a Hegelian sense. In this article, however, I attempt to interpret nothingness not in the Hegelian sense as negativity, but in the sense in which Meister Eckhart experienced nothingness as the ground of the soul; that is, as a receptivity or resonate space in the heart of the word. This interpretation is particularly supported by the poet’s late text entitled “Je dis: une fleur!‘