On Poetry (Mallarmé, Blanchot and Derrida)

What is it about?

My essay began from Derrida’s propaedeutic “Letter to a Japanese Friend” and attempted to “give place” to three thinkers and/or writers across literature and philosophy, Mallarmé, Blanchot and Derrida himself, opening up critical interstices and establishing passages between them in order to show how the injunction for a new space is indissociable from the reinvention of what is called “ethics” in connection with “acts of literature”, which Derek Attridge regarded as invitations to “alterity”. Mallarmé’s poetic space — with its blank spaces on the double pages of “Un Coup de dés” — was crossed in a gesture meant to find out where Chance (Hasard) “takes place” and the casting dice turned into Derrida’s rolling the poem-as-hedgehog into a ball to be flung across the perilous autostrada from “Che cos’è la poesia?”.’ Finally, with the help of Blanchot, I opened up “the space of literature” once more in the “night’s heart”, a time marked by the absence of the work which recalled Mallarmé’s notion of the work becoming aware of itself, thus marking its very absence, a work that was doomed to impossibility. This was for me the space of death that Orpheus left behind, in Blanchot’s words, “a terrified space” and “the murmur of the interminable”, the space where le coup de dés becomes le coup de don, materialized in the Blanchotian “disaster”.

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