Un Coup De Des

This is what Oliviér mentioned at the end of the session. It's Mallarmé's un coup de des reprinted to the exact specifications of the c.1923(?) edition. in french, but a decent facisimlie.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/coup-d%C3%A9s-jamais-nabolira-hasard/dp/2070736490/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450277552&sr=8-1&keywords=un+coup+de+des

it's only 15 quid

Magic number!

Loving the idea of finding a secret numerical code ("l'unique nombre") hidden in Mallarmé's poem. Quentin Meillassoux speculates it all in this book.

The Book as Spiritual Instrument

Concrete Island

I can't remember if we have discussed Ballard within our sessions, but I thought his novel Concrete Island has some crossover with our discussions. Here is an article that raises some interesting points from the text which seem relevant, I'm thinking specifically of the reference to a crypt, the highway in parallel to the railway and the void space that the novel takes place in.
http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2015articles/pdf/ebljarticle52015.pdf

...

The last rains fed
Into the newly opened canal.

The dust blows in.
The disturbance is
Nonverbal communication:
Meaningless syllables that
Have a music of their own,
The music of sex, or any
Nameless event, something
That can only be taken as
Itself. This rules ideas
Of what else might be there,

Which regroup farther on,
Standing around looking at
The hole left by the great implosion.
It is they who carry news of it
To other places. Therefore
Are they not the event itself?

Especially since it persists
In dumbness which isn't even
A negative articulation – persists
And collapses into itself

...

excerpt from 'Litany'
John Ashbery
Published in 'As We Know' – 1981

Blanchot's abyssal space of language

‘Take the trouble to listen to a single word: in that word, nothingness is struggling and toiling away, it digs tirelessly, doing its best to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it’ 

from Maurice Blanchot: ‘Literature and the Right to Death’.

Heidegger on the abyss

‘The word for abyss – Abgrund – originally means the soil and ground toward which, because it is undermost, a thing tends downward. But in what follows we shall think of the Ab- as the complete absence of the ground... But because presence conceals itself at the same time, it is itself already absence. Thus the abyss holds and remarks everything... In his hymn ‘The Titans’ Holderlin says of the Abgrund that it is ‘all-perceiving’. He among mortals who must, sooner than other mortals and otherwise than they, reach into the abyss, comes to know the marks that the abyss remarks. For the poet, these are the traces of the fugitive gods.'

 From 'What Are Poets For?'

Mallarme thoughts

Star Books

A post by James Bridle considering the book and it's form, and a declaration of the death of work.


http://booktwo.org/notebook/starbooks-death-of-the-work/

my conrad reference

The Conrad text I alluded to yesterday in relation to Mallarmé's image of workers taking a break is his preface to his (unfortunately titled) 1897 novella'The Nigger of the Narcissus'. In this preface Conrad, like Mallarmé, draws a parallel between the artist and the manual labourer, calling the former 'a worker in prose'. But then, again like Mallarmé, he links art not to a work's successful completion, but rather to its interruption or suspension: ‘To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve.’

Photos of Conflict Diagrams

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