Thus, modernity triumphed and we did not know it. The passionate energy expended, throughout the nineteenth century, upon extracting messianism from its Christian matrix, reinventing a civic religion delivered from dogma, an emancipatory politics beyond the old Salvation; this unprecedent effort, on the part of poets (Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Nerval), historians (Michelet, Quinet), philosophers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Comte), novelists (Hugo again, Zola) and he who we have never known how to classify, Karl Marx, once more to vectorize the subject with a meaning, with a direction freed from ancient eschatology; all that our masters have instructed us to regard as outmoded par excellence – those dead Grand Narratives, at best obsolete when fermented by solitary researchers, at worst criminal when clothed in the statist finery of Progress or Revolution; all this would nevertheless have succedeed in making one breakthrough up to our times, one only, and at a precise point – a unique Poem that would traverse the twentieth century like a hidden gem, finally to reveal itself, in the following century, as the strangely successful defense of an epoch we had buried under our disenchantments.
Mallarmé would have taught us that modernity had indeed produced a prophet, but an effaced one; a messiah, but a hypothetical one; a Christ, but a constellatory one. He would have architected a fabulous crystal of inconsistency containing, at its heart, visible across its transparency, the gesture of the siren, impossible and vivid, who had engendered it, and engenders it always. In this way the poet would have diffused the ‘consecration’ of his own Fiction among all the readers who agree to nourish themselves on the mental host of his fragmented Pages. And all according to an exacting atheism, for which the divine is nothing more than the Self, articulated with Chance itself.
The Coup de dés as christic crystallization of Chance.
As Christal of Nothingness.
As that which makes no longer being, but the perhaps, the first task – the task to come – of thinkers and poets.