COLLAPSE VIII

The Coup d e Des, or the M ateri al i st

D ivi n ization of the Hypothesis1

MAT E RIALI S M B EYO N D AT H E I S M

Readers of After Finitude2 will n o doubt ask why I

became interested in Mallarme's Coup de des, what
link my study The Number and the Siren 3 could possibly
have to the speculative positions that I developed
there concerning the necessary contingency of every
being. I would simply say the following: The Coup de
des is, as far as I know, the greatest poem ever to be
dedicated entirely to eternal Chance; and to the role
of the human ( and specifically of the poet, in Mal­
larme ) confronted with this dark absolute, the only
1. This text is an edited version of a talk given at Miguel Abreu Gallery,
New York, 6 May 2012.
2. Q Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity ef Contingency
( London and New York: Continuum, 2008) .
3. Q Meillassoux, 7he Number and the Siren: A Decipherment ef Mallarme's
Coup de des, tr. R. Mackay ( Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and
Sequence Press, 2012) .

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 COLLAPSE VIII

one recognised by the moderns. What I find striking

in this poet is that, in the face of a Chance held to
be insuperable, he does not renounce his hope for
the divine-a divine that takes on an extraordinarily
original form which I shall try to unveil in what follows.
Now, Mallarme's gesture is entirely materialist. Thus,
as a materialist, it interests me: because (and this is a
fundamental point to grasp in order to understand my
own trajectory) materialism is not an atheism. For mate­
rialism does not consist in denying gods, but in materializing
them. It is Epicurus, of course, who founds this gesture:
for him, the gods exist, but they are not the gods of
the mob-the gods of religion and superstition who
are feared or praised. The Epicurean gods are atomic
beings, immortal in fact, since they are born by chance
in the intercosmic spaces where the gains in atoms are
always equivalent to the losses, and thus conserve bod­
ies indefinitely. This is why the gods care nothing for
our existence, and do not concern us either: they are
not bothered by terrestrial affairs, since they remain
immortal only on condition that they stay where they
are. This is also why they are not essentially different
from us: we are identical to the gods, except that we
are mortal-a relatively unimportant difference. The
materialist philosopher is thus one who knows how to
be like a god among men. For to be divine is nothing
more than to be filled with life as a god might be, to
be for a moment equally happy as man and as god:

814
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

which comes down to the joy of satisfying the limited

requirements of our nature. The joy of satisfying one's
thirst with a little water makes us equal to the divine
at the moment it is quenched.
Going beyond the particularities of Epicurean­
ism, we might say that, most profoundly, materialism
consists in that thought, now largely forgotten, that
unveils to us a divine norm for a life entirely avowed to
a hazardous absolute. 'Norm' is to be understood here
in the sense of the latin norma: the carpenter's square.
The divine norm of materialism allows the subject 'to
be straight', to find his verticality without religion
or metaphysics. It does not separate him from gods,
but on the contrary gives him access to the true god,
one that is material and born of chance. Whence the
potent irreligious significance of materialism. Atheism
is always impotent against religions: contenting itself
with denying religious gods, it remains haunted by
their absence, and ceaselessly reimparts that which
it refuses-as the term itself indicates: a-theism, that
which can only be defined as the negative of the reli­
gious god and in relation to him.
Atheism thus always leads back to what it refuses,
in the mode of absence and haunting, and unfolds
infinitely in its own impotence. Whereas materialism
saturates the space of thought with the absolute-the
pure meaninglessness of Chance-and with what I
call the Ultimate-pure hazardous gods, the most

815
 COLLAPSE VIII

successful creations of a perfectly absurd becoming.

Constructing its life and its thought between these two
extremes, between the meaninglessness of the absolute
and the divine success of contingency, the materialist
wages his struggle and prosecutes his critique against
religions and metaphysics alike. Against scepticism,
he affirms that the absolute is thinkable-for to refuse
thought's ability to grasp the absolute is to reserve
the absolute for a belief purified of all reason (in
this respect, scepticism has always been the loyal ally
of faith) . Against atheism, it affirms that the gods
are real, material, and that they orient our existence
without alienating it. Against metaphysics, subject to
various forms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, it
denounces the pseudo-necessities of ideology, which
justify the powers that be, or powers yet to come, and
unveils the real contingency beneath false essences
and supposed idealities.
Materialism-if we relate it to the Epicurean gesture,
without reducing it to the particular form he gave
it in his philosophy-materialism alone, I believe,
can hope to deliver us from religious gods. But the
paradox is that materialism also delivers us from its
own gods, from the material gods that it theorises as
ultimate yet perishable points of chance. For what
is singular about materialism-a position far more
irreligious than the negation of gods-is that it tells us
that, certainly, gods exist, but that they are secondary.

816
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

They are models, perhaps, but not masters. They are

'patterns' that allow us to outline more easily the
apparel of our existence-but the 'pattern' matters less
than the suit whose cutting-out it allows. Certainly,
the gods remain important for Epicurus, but far less
important than your way of running your life here and
now, by modelling yourself on their reality. Certainly,
for Epicurus, the gods exist-but so what? This is a
secondary matter for the sage, who occupies himself
with men rather than with gods. The gods don't care
about us, and we care more about men than about
gods. And this is indeed the contrary of idolatry: not
to make of god, on the grounds that he exists, the
most important thing. To allow gods to exist, but
to 'secondarise' them: not to obey them, but to avail
ourselves of the knowledge we have of them, so as to
cease to preoccupy ourselves with them any more than
that, and above all to live fully as a human amongst
humans. Such is the slogan of every true materialist:
god exists, or could really exist, that's a fact-but not
the most important one.
It is this materialist gesture that I try, in my own
way, to revive today, in my philosophical investiga­
tions. I believe that the materialist, on one hand, must
radicalise the meaninglessness and the contingency
of the absolute; and on the other hand, must think
the configuration of the divine that the most radical
contingency allows to exist-stripped of any necessity,

817
 COLLAPSE VIII

but subsisting at least as a forever real virtuality of this

absurd becoming. I certainly do not believe that gods
exist as a remarkable product of chance atomic encoun­
ters-but I believe that materialism well and truly
consists in thinking the most remarkable emergence of
which contingency is capable; that materialism consists
in drawing up the most extreme map of the possible,
and in living according to the intense effect that this
possible exerts upon existence, once it is understood
as real possibility and not as mere reverie.

T H E M ET E R A N D T H E C O D E

Now, I insist that this revival of the divine gesture

of authentic materialism is precisely what Mallarme
already achieved, in his own unique way, in the Coup
de des: he produced a poem that I call authentically,
and not banally, atheistic, because, through the sole
power of Chance, it brings about a configuration
that is divine, but nonetheless wholly human. It is
a materialist god who rules over these pages, and by
the same token a secondary god-one who seeks only
to produce an effect on our lives (your life being, all
the same, more important than that of Mallarme's
god ) . In the conclusion of The Number and the Siren,
I say that the Coup de des is an 'exact atheism' . But I
define this exact atheism of Mallarme's ironically­
precisely as the contrary of an atheism; as that which

818
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

makes of the divine the articulation of the Self and

of Chance-and thus as something that departs from
atheism, to become a true and vigorous materialism.
What I describe therefore is a Mallarmean renewal of
the Epicurean gesture.
As I state quite plainly, I am convinced that Mal­
larme's poem is coded. But what is totally original
in Mallarme is that he tried to use this question of
encryption to resolve the problems of his epoch, which
concerned, in particular, the question of metrics-that is
to say, the question of the writing of poems according
to regular forms, rather than in free verse.
Until the Coup de des (written in 1897, in its two
different versions) , Mallarme only writes poems in
regular forms; that is to say, he adopts a metric linked
to fixed forms such as the sonnet, to fixed numbers of
syllables, and to rhyme. He continues to do so even
though he is confronted, from 1887 onward, with
the new form (or refusal of form) that is free verse,
and which abandons all traditional meter. But then
suddenly, in 1897, everything explodes, and we have
a poem even more audacious in form than free verse,
namely the Coup de des. The enigma is that there is
no mediation between the strict metric of all previ­
ous Mallarmean poems, and this stupefying poem of
quite unabashed transgression, which no-one really
understands (not even the free verse poets) when it is
published for the first time in 1897. In order to better

819
 COLLAPSE VIII

grasp the meaning of this abrupt break, I want to

show that the Coup de des is in fact not a form ( even
an exacerbated form ) of free verse-that it is not an
intensified refusal of metricity-but that it proceeds
from another logic entirely; and that the only way to
understand this logic is by way of the discovery of a
procedure of encryption.
I do not agree with critics such as Ronat and Rou­
baud that it is a matter of a defence of the old metric
( in particular, the alexandrine ) ; rather it concerns a
new meter, and a new count. The Coup de des is a eulogy
to counting in poetry, and an apologia for the thesis
that what essentially distinguishes poetry from prose
is that the poet is the one who counts, who 'calculates' ,
albeit in a rhythmic and not solely an arithmetical
sense; he for whom every number counts. This granted,
the Coup de des fundamentally speaks to the role of
number in poetry, and defends meter in a completely
unprecedented manner.

T H E MAS T E R AND T H E PO E T - P R I N C E

Th e Coup de des's shipwrecked Master who throws

the dice in the stormy waves is surely poetic Meter,
in the process of being drowned by the tumultu­
ous waves that are none other than the segments
of text exploding onto the Page of the Coup de des.
These fragments have all the characteristics of free

820
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

verse, exacerbating its refusal of classical form. It is

free verse that submerges Meter. In this way, the ter­
rible tension between the two forms is dramatically
brought to life, and Mallarme will try to resolve it from
a poetical, not just a critical, point of view: through
the writing of a poem rather than through a theoreti­
cal intervention.
The Master of the Coup de des holds the two dice
in his hand. This theme, as we know, was already
present in lgi,tur, the unfinished tale of 1869 . The crisis
that provoked this poem goes back to the discovery
of the Nothingness which Mallarme writes of in his
1866 correspondence: the discovery that there exists
no God capable of guaranteeing the absolute value
of the poetic symbol, as was still hoped by the first
romantics, perhaps even by Baudelaire himself. He
therefore writes this fable, which was never to be
published, in which he imagines a young poet-prince,
Igitur, inspired by Hamlet, who descends into the
tomb of his ancestors, asking himself whether he
must perpetuate their destiny. His whole hesitation is
condensed in the question of whether or not to throw
the two dice he holds in his hand, to try to obtain a
double six. These ancestors represent the line of poets
whose heir Mallarme wishes to be; and it is a question
of knowing whether it is still worth the effort of produc­
ing the twelve of the perfect alexandrine, even when
one knows that this alexandrine will no longer be the

821
 COLLAPSE VIII

result of a divine inspiration, but that of meaningless

chance. Language no longer being a bond between
man and God, but one chance among others, what
point is there in throwing the dice? What point is there
in continuing to seek the sublime verse, if the divine
vocation of the poem, its claim to replace the old
religion, is no longer subtended by any transcendence?
The romantics refused to perpetuate the old Catholi­
cism: but they claimed that they did so in the name of
a more profound understanding of the beyond, not
because it is illusory. The drama of Mallarme himself,
transposed into the hesitation of Igitur, is that he no
longer believes in the existence of a super-terrestrial
reality, but still cannot manage to renounce the idea
of a religious and higher vocation of poetry.
The poet thus hesitates between two possible end­
ings that he could give the tale, without managing
to decide on one of them-whence the unfinished
character of his fable: either Igitur throws the dice and
provokes the derisive anger of his ancestors ( they make
a furious wind whistle in the ears of the hero ) , because
the poet resumes the gesture of his forebears, but does
so for opposite motives ( chance having become the
moderns' sole god ) ; or-the other ending proposed
in the manuscript-Igitur keeps the dice in his hand
without throwing them, and proceeds to lie down
upon the tomb of his ancestors. We already find, in
these two endings, the opposition between a kind of

822
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

' Sartrian' solution-one boldly assumes the absurdity

of the world by throwing the dice-and a solution that
puts us in mind of the process of writing according
to Blanchot: one writes the exhaustion of writing, a
writing that unfolds indefinitely, in a trial of its own
impossibility.
Igjtur must of course be read in relation to Ham­
let-it involves a decision at once fatal and impossible,
which must separate an absolute before and after, and
which, because of its own radicality, seems inaccessible
to any resolution. Now, these themes are manifestly
taken up once more in the Coup de des, nearly thirty
years later. The Mallarme of 1897 comes back to this
thematic from 1869 because he understands that in the
Coup de des he will be able to transfer the theme of the
death of a verse guaranteed by the divine, to the crisis
of free verse. The Master must throw the dice to know
whether he will produce once more a universal metrical
verse, or whether everything will be lost to the chance
of non-metrical verse, the representative of subjective
temperaments of different poets, lacking all necessity.
The same crisis of nothingness is at play across the
distance of decades; in 1897 it directly compromises the
future existence of the poetry practiced by Mallarme.
' NOTHING / of the memorable crisis / WILL HAVE
TAKEN PLACE / BUT THE PLACE / EXCEPT / PERHAPS / A
CONSTELLATION ' , writes Mallarme. The 'memorable
crisis' is the crisis of free verse, from which nothing will

823
 COLLAPSE VIII

escape unless meter, classical among all, can escape it

victorious. The danger would be that one of the two
forms of verse should drown the other. On the contrary,
the two forms have to coexist in some original fash­
ion. And yet when we read the Coup de des we cannot
see, a priori, anything but an exacerbated explosion
of free verse. Could there be some way for a metric
to be inserted into a poem that apparently breaks so
completely with all the old rules?

THE B O O K AN D THE MAS S

In fact, we find another example of this will to maintain

a metric 'on the terrain of free verse' in Mallarme's
Notes for the Book. Mallarme was obsessed his whole
life with the writing of an absolute Book, the Great
Work which, in a public letter to Verlaine, he called
'Orphic Explanation of the Earth' . This obsession also
must be understood in the framework of the religion
of art. Mallarme very seriously tried to write a text
that could replace the Bible. We might think he was
being ironic here, given the hubristic nature of such a
project: but this is, I believe, to misunderstand him-so
far was this project from being out of reach, that in
fact he wholly succeeded in it, in any case according
to his own criteria for success. But only in the Coup
de des, as we shall see; I maintain that the Coup de des

824
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

alone realised the whole project of the Book, but via

a wholly new route.
In the Notes, Mallarme describes a ceremony of
reading that is quite obviously designed to replace
the Mass. This is a most strange ceremony: we see a
room, with 'assistants' seated before a scene, and on
the scene two pieces of furniture, two racks containing
loose-leaf pages which an 'operator', as anonymous as
a priest, takes up and joins one to another, according
to a combinatory so complex that the reading of the
whole Book would take place over a period of five years.
Now, the reader of these Notes cannot but be struck
by the numerological obsession that runs through
them. For the manuscript is essentially composed of
numbers, of calculations on numbers, of measure­
ments as to the material and financial aspects of the
Book, of various quantities involved in the ceremonial
context of its reading. These Numbers, on one hand,
have an obvious link to the alexandrine: there must,
for example, be twenty-four assistants in the reading
room, and the size and the price of the book are also
linked to multiples or divisors of twelve. It thus seems
clear what Mallarme is seeking to do with these strange
calculations: The poet perceives that the alexandrine is
being driven from the poetical text by free verse; free
verse seems to demonstrate that the IQ is contingent
for poetry. So the IQ takes refuge in the material sur­
roundings of the text and in the context of its reading

825
 COLLAPSE VIII

( size, price, number of volumes, assistants, and so on ) ,

and no longer concerns its content. We understand
that the poet seeks a way to reinsert the metric-the
count-into poetry, by finding new functions for meter
Nevertheless, it is hard to see how this procedure
of enumeration is meant to have saved the alexandrine,
and restored its necessity. But what is interesting, for
our purposes, is to ask whether the Coup de des did
not continue this 'counting mania', but make it more
effective: through the writing of a poem that, however
apparently non-metrical, would contain within itself,
in its very composition, numbers that are not imme­
diately visible, but that would constitute the result
of the Master's throw. Thus the Master would have
admitted that the waves of free verse were destined
to visibly engulf poetry-including the Coup de Des;
however, in this poem there would have existed a
metrical principle-not immediately accessible, but
underlying its composition. If this is what Mallarme
did, then the Coup de des could no longer be considered
as a radicalisation of free verse, but must be understood
as a metamorphosis of metrical verse. The Coup de des
would not have pushed one step further the rupture
with classical constraints, but would have tried to
reinvent them. Mallarme would then have written what
I would willingly call a poem in essential verse: a verse
neither free nor metrical in the old manner, but capable
of uniting radicalised free verse and a reinvigorated

826
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

metrical verse. This would be a poem we could call

'hyper-metric' : in the guise of being 'hyper-free' , it
would be yet more rule-governed than classical verse,
but according to a rule encrypted within the poem itself.
Now, the only cipher that appears, written out, in
the Coup de des, is Seven. The final throw of dice that
compensates for the failed throw of the Master gives
rise to a ' Septentrion', a stellar seven that seems to
mark a possible success of the voyage despite the sur­
rounding disaster. What could the Seven symbolize
for Mallarme? Already, in the last Page-the page
where the Septentrion emerges-we find a clue to this
stellar 7 under whose aegis the meaning of the metrical
count governing the whole of the Coup de des is placed.
We read-running from the penultimate to the final
Page-the second great announcement of the Poem:
' NOTHING / WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE / BUT THE PLACE /
EXCEPT I PERHAPS I A CONSTELLATION ' . This Constella­
tion is said to be 'cold with forgetfulness and desuetude'
-'not so much' , however, it is added-'that it fails to
number / on some vacant and higher surface [that is:
in the stellar sky, but also on the vacant surface of the
page] the successive impact / starrily / of a total count
in the making [that is to say, of a total count that is
in the process of being produced at this very moment
as we read the poem] keeping watch / doubting / roll­
ing /shining and meditating / before finally halting /

827
 COLLAPSE VIII

at some last point by which it is consecrated / Every

Thought Emits a Throw of Dice'.
I believe that what is described here is that there is a
metrical count that is in the process of being summed,
of being totalised, as the reader arrives at the end of
the poem, and that will be completed by a 'consecra­
tion' . In metrical poetry, the count is obviously always
completed at the end of the verse: it is when I read
the end of an alexandrine that the summation of the
twelve syllables is produced effectively in the verse. Let
us suppose, then, that the whole of the Coup de des was
written as one single verse, that is to say (since a verse
for Mallarme is always two verses rhymed together)
as two adjoined verses, each symbolically of 12 pages.
What Mallarme is describing here is what happens at
the end of a poem, in which something is in the process
of being summed-and the total count is completed
precisely with the word 'consecrated [sacre] ' which, at
the same time, would designate the final crowning of
the Septentrion. 'Consecrated' would then be the last
word that completes the count (still enigmatic) of that
unique Number that cannot be another. The stellar
throw of dice is thus a mental throw of dice, and the
sky is not the night sky, but the white of the page. The
reader believes that the poem is describing to him a
stellar night outside of the book, but in fact Mallarme
describes what he himself is doing: he 'enumerates' his
'total count in the making', which is like a glorification
of a Meter to come.

828
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

T H E S I M P L E S T OF M ET E R S

If we start out from the hypothesis that 7 is the secret

and constellatory Meter of the poem, we still need to
find out what it counts. To conclusively track down
this enigma, we will take a look at the final 'moral' of
the Poem: ' Every Thought emits a Throw of Dice'. We
can propose the following interpretation: when you
think, you must pass by way of language, and thus
you must use a certain number of linguistic units. For
example, the declaration ' I love you' ( in English ) has
three words, eight letters, five vowels, etc.-it produces
a series of implicit numerical counts. But these counts
are a matter of pure chance, of a simple dice throw,
in regard to the meaning of the phrase . There is no
link between ' I love you' and the numbers 3, 8 and
5-no link, that is, apart from a purely chance one.
However, what is proper to the poem is precisely to
contest this purely chance link between thought and
count, by associating the meaning of the verse to the
enumeration of the syllables necessary to formulate
it. To conquer chance 'word by word', as Mallarme
writes in one of his critical texts-to try to associate
meaningfully sense and count, such is the supreme task
of poetry-even if the struggle seems lost in advance.
But in that case, doesn't this conclusion 'Every thought
emits a throw of dice' contain the metrical key that
will permit us to know what the final 7 counts?

829
 COLLAPSE VIII

In other words, won't the secret of this 'moral' of the

poem be to indicate to us the linguistic unit we must
enumerate in order to obtain the unique meter? Let's
now ask whether there exists a linguistic element that,
counted in this phrase, would give 7 as a result. There is
indeed one such, and it is the simplest that could be:
the conclusion efthe Coup de des-'Toute Pensee emet
un Coup de Des' -contains 7 words.
Our hypothesis follows naturally from this: What if
Mallarme had counted the words of his poem? What
if his meter was 'lexical' rather than syllabic? In this
case we should have to present the matter as follows:
the conclusion, 7 words long, would represent in some
way the 'musical' key of the poem; it would indicate
that the Coup de des is written 'in i, as a sonata might
be written 'in C', the 7 being isolated for itself in the
final phrase, clearly separated from the rest of the text.
On the other hand, the unique Number, properly
speaking, would be the result of the 'total count in the
making' : it would have the word 'consecrated [ sacre ]'
as its last element, and, being greater than 7 (since
from the first word to the word 'consecrated' there
are, at a glance, many hundreds of words) , it must
contain 7 in a sufficiently remarkable fashion that we
would hesitate to put it down to chance alone when
we discover it.
If' consecrated' was, for example, the 777th word of
the poem, we would indeed have a Number linked in a

830
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

remarkable way to 7. Another cipher, however, has an

immediate significance for the Coup de des: namely o,
since it is the obvious symbol both for nothingness
and the void, and for the vortex, the whirlpool that
is described as circular and in which the ship and
the Master are lost. So we can imagine three other
Numbers capable of representing our Meter, formed
exclusively from 7 and o: namely, 700, 707 and 770.
If we end up with one of these four counts, we will
be able to say that we have not necessarily taken a
wrong turn. Any other result, on the other hand, will
discredit our hypothesis entirely. But even if we arrive
at one of the four numbers, this will not be enough. A
simple chance could have given rise to this sum. To be
sure that a Meter is genuinely encrypted in the poem,
Mallarme would have had to have given us the means,
within the poem, to validate this possibility. In other
words, the poem would have to speak implicitly of
one of these four numbers, as in a 'charade' or a riddle.
As I show in The Number and the Siren, we can
read the central page of the poem- the page of the
' coMME SI ' , or ' As IF ' -as the site of this charade. The
' sI ' , assimilating the Master, decapitated by the waves,
to the Saint John (Sancte Johannes) of Mallarme's Noces
d'Herodiade ( ' coMME sI ' = ' LIKE s . 1 . ' ), also refers to
the seventh note of the simple so!fege scale in French:
'doremifasolaSido' (in 'a simple insinuation', as the Coup
de des tells us, in a line studded with 'si' -'insinuation

831
 COLLAPSE VIII

simple silence precipite'). 707 thus describes the central

passage of the poem-two 'Comme si' (7) swirling
around a central vortex ( =O )-and, by making the
count of words in full, we can also verify that the.final
word 'sacre' is the 707th word qfthe poem.
But what can we conclude from this? We are satis­
fied with having proved that there does indeed exist
in the Coup de des an encrypted meter, counting words
rather than syllables; but at the same time we remain
frustrated, because we don't understand how this is
supposed to resolve the problem of modern poetry,
nor how the strange Meter is a unique Number that
cannot be another.

TREAS U R E O F T H E B LAC K D RAG O N

To resolve this question, we must start again from

the fact that, in the decade between 1885 and 1895,
Mallarme sought to respond to two challenges: that
of free verse, which demotes meter to being noth­
ing more than the chance of gratuitous or political
invention; and that of Wagner, who usurped from
the French poets the project of founding a religion
of art. According to Mallarme, Wagner sought to
transpose to the German people what the Greeks did
with tragedy: to make them see themselves through
mythology, through a reflection of themselves on
the stage. Now, for our poet, the Greek stage cannot

832
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

constitute a new religion after Christianity-because

the stage is precisely a representation, a fiction. And the
moderns cannot go back to a religion of representation.
For, in the meantime, we have tasted something else:
the Latin Middle Ages. And what did they deploy, of
which the Greeks knew nothing? The Mass.
Mallarme is no longer a believer, certainly; but he
always remains interested in the device of the Mass
( indeed, Deleuze criticises him for this ) . The mass is
not reducible to a scenic device, because the priest is
not an actor: he does not replay the Passion upon a
stage, but assures the real presence of God through
his coded gestures-ceremonial ( the Eucharist ) and
sometimes very simple ( his withdrawal, facing the
audience ) . The mass brings us something on the order
of presence, not representation: God is there, and not
only his fiction. This Passion descends into the very
host, and it even allows for a physical assimilation.
There is a real fact here. Mallarme was persuaded that,
if modern poetry was incapable of grasping for itself
this capacity of the Mass to really diffuse the divine,
to pass from representation to presence-what he calls
the 'treasure of the black dragon' -Christianity would
never be dethroned. It is this treasure that we must
steal in order to put an end to the old religion. He
theorises this in the 1895 text 'Catholicism' , where he
broaches the question of the real assured presence of
the Eucharist. Now, 1895 is also the year when he stops

833
 COLLAPSE VIII

work on the Notesfor the Book. This is surely no chance

occurrence: for the ' Mass' of the Book proposes only
readings and scenic representations-no real 'diffusion'
of the divine. When Mallarme understands that he
has thus taken a wrong turn-that he has fallen into
the same impasse as Wagner-he abruptly changes
direction, and directs his energies toward the writing
of the Coup de des, whose premises appear the same
year in one of his critical texts ( 'The Book as Spiritual
Instrument' ) . But how will the Coup de des resolve this
vertiginous aporia: how will it realise a poem capable
of bringing about a real presence of the divine, and not
a mere representation of the absolute? How, moreover,
to envisage such a diffusion of the divine, when poetry
is deployed under the reign of N othingnesss, and no
longer under that of the old religious transcendence?

MAS T E R O F C HAN C E

I f we admit that there i s an encrypted meter i n the Coup

de des, it must be understood that nothing in this poem,
nor indeed in any of Mallarme's oeuvre, allows us to
deduce the existence of this meter: you can spend your
whole life reading Mallarme's writings, and you will
find no clue to put you on the right path. If I discov­
ered it, I did so simply because I had a stroke of luck,
one day, when I had the preposterous idea of count­
ing the words of a sonnet in which this principle had

834
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

already been put to work in 189 4 ('A la nue accablante

tue' ) . But it is not by chance that this discovery was made
by chance. For Mallarme had manifestly confided to
chance alone-to an accidental enterprise-the care of
discovering his meter. There is nothing in his whole
oeuvre that allows us to rationally deduce that he
had undertaken such a wager-precisely because he
wanted it to be Chance, and not the erudition or the
intelligence of a reader, that discovered his procedure.
Mallarme thus threw the dice into the aleatory sea of
historical reception, a code whose discovery nothing
could guarantee.
In Mallarme's poem, the dice throw is not merely
represented: it is really effectuated. The poem is per­
formative, because Mallarme does exactly what he
describes the Master as doing. He asks himself, hesi­
tating, whether to throw his stellar Number into the
ocean of posterity. Will he play out his destiny as a
poet by confiding to his own divinity-Chance, rather
than Providence-the care of revealing one day the
metrical and stellar calculation by which he hopes to
open a new passage for poetry?
Once we understand that Mallarme is the Master,
that he is the real thrower of a Number really hidden
in the cloud of our misunderstandings as we read
the poem, we understand that we are faced with a
true Passion. Christ sacrifices his flesh, but Mallarme
sacrifices meaning ( the meaning of his oeuvre ) . It is a

835
 COLLAPSE VIII

sacrifice yet more spiritual than the christic sacrifice;

in a certain way it removes the corporeal immediacy
of the latter, in order to express it in a higher form.
We can then understand Mallarme's attachment to
a Meter whose essence lies not so much in giving
its rhythm to verse as-let us recall-in assuring its
cultural dimension. The encrypted Meter allows the
silent reader of the Coup de des to evoke once again
the presence of a real Poet having assumed the really
possible sacrifice of his oeuvre. It is a mental Eucharist
that makes of the silent reading of the poem a solitary
but universal ceremony-perhaps the only type of
ceremony that a modern can perform without making
himself ridiculous.
But we still don't understand what is necessary
about the Number-what is 'divine' about it, in short.
The only divinity accessible to the poet of Nothing­
ness, as we know, is Chance. Now, only Chance is
eternal-this is what, literally, the title of the Coup
de des tells us: 'A Throw of Dice will never abolish
Chance ' . In other words, everything is subject to
chance, every throw falls into the contingency of the
aleatory-except for Chance itself, which no throw of
the dice can ever engender or destroy. Thus, The Eternal
is Chance-Chance is our only Infinite. Now, in order
for the Number to be not only the fact of a contingent
throw, that of a simply human and particular poet-in
order for it to acquire a necessary dimension-it must

836
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

fase with Chance rather than simply being the result of

Chance: 'If it was the Number / it would be / Chance' :
that is, i f the Number comes, then i t will be, not the
derisory result of Chance, but nothing less than identical
with Chance-since only Chance 'cannot be another' .
But how can a Meter fuse with Chance, and participate
in its divinity?

H E S I TAT I O N AN D I N F I N I T I ZAT I O N

To understand this final enigma, we must return to

Igitur, the unfinished tale of 1869 . During this period,
and under the influence of his friend Villiers de l'Isle
Adam, M allarme became interested in H egel. He
probably knew Hegel through Edmond Scherer, who
in the 1860s wrote a controversial review of the phi­
losopher's work. Now, in this article, Mallarme could
have discovered Hegel's speculative-rather than arith­
metical-conception of the infinite. Hegel considered
that the divine infinite is infinite in the precise sense
that it has nothing outside of it; which explains why
the true God is for Hegel a Christian God, that is to
say a God who is incarnated in a singular man. For
if God was only God, enjoying a transcendence like
that of the Jewish or Koranic God, he would precisely
not be every thing, since he would not be human. The
purely divine God does not have the finite in him, and
consequently he is limited by the finite-limited by the

837
 COLLAPSE VIII

contingency, finitude, or imperfection that is external

to his nature. In order for God to be authentically
infinite, he has to pass into man, become man, become
Jesus, thereby incorporating the finite into his own
process. But God also must not remain in the state
of humanity; in this case he would be but finite, and
would lose his divine part. He must therefore return
into his infinity enriched by finitude: Jesus must be
crucified, must die, and reascend to the Father. As one
commentator on Hegel says: in order for the infinite to
pass, the finite must pass away. God must die as a man
and rejoin himself in his proper infinity, permitting the
passage of the human Christ to the eternal Christ of
the trinity. The infinite therefore contains eternally the
moment of its finitude, as abolished in the crucifixion.
Now, it seems clear that, in Igj,tur, Mallarme attrib­
utes to chance itself the properties ef the divine Hegelian
irifinite. In this tale, it is chance that nothing escapes,
that nothing is external to-no longer God, who is now
cast down into nothingness: which is why "Chance"
('Hazard' -now written with a 'z' to recall the Arab
etymology: 'a game of dice') is explicitly qualified as
infinite. Now, chance is always manifested in two basic
ways: it can manifest itself firstly in an obvious way,
in all the failings of existence, all the inconsequential
throws, mediocre verses. And in this sense it is 'affirmed'
by reality in its everyday mediocrity. But it can also
be 'denied' by reality, when suddenly there emerge

838
 COLLAPSE VIII

apparently meaningful phenomena. For example, a

throw of the dice that miraculously wins a game where
a life is at stake; or more to our purpose here, a verse
so apparently perfect that it seems to result from divine
necessity. But of course, even in such a case, it is in fact
still chance that produces this effect: its negation is
only its reaffirmation in the form of the extraordinary
'coincidence' of the creator-genius himself, engendered
fortuitously. Chance is thus just as present in that
which affirms it as in that which denies it; and in this
sense it is infinite-there is nothing outside it, since it
contains both its negation and its affirmation.
Now, a question was to haunt Mallarme on the
basis of this 'dialectical' infinitization of Chance: how
to equal, with a human act, this infinity? Chance is the
figure of the divine within us: to become equal to it
would thus be to bring ourselves closer to the divine,
eternally meaningless part of ourselves. But through
what act, since every act is finite, contingent-that is
to say, produced by Chance, but not identical with it?
The act that most closely approximates to the infinite
so understood, according to Mallarme, is hesitation.
In hesitation you are virtually what you are and what
you are not. You are at once he who is on the point
of committing an action, and he who nevertheless
ceaselessly holds back from it. You are 'between' the
two, and you conserve these opposites potentially
within you. In one of the endings of Igjtur, the hero

840
 COLLAPSE VIII

seems to hesitate, retaining the dice in his hand rather

than throwing them. But he ends up renouncing the
throw, and lays down forever upon the ashes of his
ancestors. The master of hesitation is obviously Hamlet,
the model for IgiJur, and fundamentally, for Mallarme,
the only play, to write and rewrite-he is very radical
on this point-because its intrigue is precisely that of
the infinite. But here again, in Shakespeare's play, the
hero ends up choosing-he kills his father's murderer,
and himself dies of being thus finitized.
Let's come back to the Coup de des. If Mallarme
had known the equivalent of a Passion, he would have
produced not only a human sacrifice, but a divine one:
not only a finite, but an infinite one. Christ is not only
a crucified man, he is a crucified man-god. To overcome
Christianity, one must produce not only a Passion ( the
sacrifice of the meaning of the poem to Chance ) , but a
Passion that infinitizes the sacrificer, that is to say one
that infinitizes Mallarme himself. Now, ' THE MASTER /
hesitates' - the Master's sole action is his hesitation in
throwing the dice. And this hesitation, unlike that of
Hamlet or Igitur, is never overcome by a determinate
resolution. Very simply, we know nothing of the Master,
apart from his hesitation, become eternal. Has the
throw taken place or not? Is there a Number or not?
This is what seems to have been consigned forever to
a hypothetical status. And this is why Mallarme does
not write, in conclusion, ' NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN

842
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

PLACE BUT THE PLACE / EXCEPT A CONSTELLATION ' ,

but instead: ' NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT
THE PLACE / EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION ' . The
constellation has perhaps taken place, but perhaps not.
On this basis, we can understand whence comes
the necessity of the 'unique Number' : it cannot be
another, because it is irifinite-that is to say, because it
already contains within itselfits other, its proper non-being,
qua undecidable hypothesis. It is; but just as much, it is
not: it is the eternally hypothetical result of a throw
that is infinite because forever hesitant, and thereby
capable of equalling the necessity of Chance itself.
Mallarme would himself be infinitized, by making
himself the thrower of the Dice who produces and
does not produce the unique Meter: making himself,
for all eternity, the thrower and non-thrower of the
two Dice of the unique Meter.
However, this seems to contradict our own conjec­
ture: for, according to what we have said, Mallarme
did throw the dice, and produced his Number, 707-a
Number too precise not to be contingent, and thus
hopelessly finite. But everything would change, were
this number charged with an internal hesitation that
infinitized it: a hesitation that, at once, made it equal
and not equal to 707. How could this happen? Very
simply, if we were almost certain that the poem was
coded, but at the same time not entirely sure of it-if
the count efwords was not entirely certain to be equal to 707.

843
 COLLAPSE VIII

If there was a 'slippage' in the code, if in the count of

words there was a possible hesitation, this would mean
that, for all eternity, Mallarme would have sacrificed
the certainty of his gesture, even once his poem was
decoded. In doing this, he would have produced a
real fact-his gesture of encryption-that would be
at the same time a hypothetical fact. Mallarme, the
signatory of the poem, would become, forever-that
is to say for the posterity of his readers-infinite: he
would have thrown and not thrown the dice, he would
have drowned himself in chance, infinitized himself in
it, like a Hamlet at once real and fictional. A mixture of
a real individual and a hypothetical fiction. This would
give us a religion of art whose one and only character
would be Mallarme-but not the real, biographical
Mallarme; instead, Mallarme the signatory of the Poem,
and who, as signatory, makes himself equal to Chance.
It is by identifying just such a 'slippage', a 'qua­
vering' in the count, a 'hesitation' that is condensed
into one, central, word of the poem-the ' PEUT-ETRE
[perhaps]' whose count (one or two words?) is uncer­
tain-that I argue, in 'IheNumber and the Siren, that the
Coup de des succeeds in making the number 'divine' ,
and fulfils the conditions o f Mallarme's Book: a s the
site of the ceremony, of the 'real' or diffusive presence
of the divine, and of the advent of a mental song (the
poem must be read silently, seen and not read out in
public, in order for all its graphical and spatial effects

844
 Meillassoux-The Coup de Des

to be deployed ) . But it also possesses this last remark­

able property with which Mallarme wished to endow
the Book: fundamentally it would not have been writ­
ten 'by' anyone; its author is ultimately anonymous.
For the Coup de des escapes its readers, who will never
know what the biographical M allarme did or did
not premeditate-to code, not to code, to hide from
himself his own intentions-and Mallarme will never
have known ( if he did code the poem) whether or not
it was ever decrypted by some lucky chance. No one
can grasp both sides of the truth-neither author nor
reader-and the Poem thus functions according to a
logic that belongs to it alone.

A N EW MAT E RIAL I S T G E S T U R E

In conclusion, you may be worried by this reading-if

not Christian then at least christological-of Mallarme.
But to my eyes, this reading, I repeat, is above all
materialist. From Epicurus to Mallarme, the gesture is
in truth, I believe, fundamentally the same: the divine
exists, but it is not what is essential. For Mallarme
succeeded, in a certain way, in assuring the triumph
of modernity: that 'religion of art', that immanent
replacement for the old religion that our teachers
assured us had failed, or had even engendered political
crimes, Mallarme did bring it to fruition successfully.
There is, thanks to the Coup de des, a divinization of the

845
 COLLAPSE VIII

poem, and the birth of a new cult. But this triumph,

this cult, this religion, are not at all what we expected­
or that which we mocked or condemned. This new cult
is simply the silent reading of a book, the remembering
of a hypothesis, a play upon the count of words. It is
more and better than Christianity, without being any
more than that. It is the reinvention of the divine as
being nothing grandiose, nothing transcendent; as
not being that which matters most in our lives; and
at the same time as that which participates in them
with an elegant and very beautiful discretion. It is the
most effective way in which to repeat such a materi­
alist gesture . To reinvent otherwise than Epicurus
and M allarme these secondary gods-here, in my
opinion, is a task for a philosophy rendered over to its
immanentist power.

846