Le Nombre et la sirène: Un déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé/The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé's Coup de dés

Against prevailing twentieth century readings of the work as an ironic testament to literature's failure since the death of God, Meillassoux shows how Un coup de dés (1897/1914) realizes the nineteenth-century Roman- tic aspiration to an Ultimate founded on the immanent human conditions of uncertainty and chance. Meillassoux's companion article to this book, collected in Autour d'Alain Badiou (Paris: Germina, 2011), argues that the poem's visual rhymes realize a quintessentially uncertain modern ceremony where the theatrical Z.mot reverted to a totalizing order.\n The equivalence of chance, the infinite and absolute are almost taken for granted in the monograph.