Throughout his posthumous reception, in particular in the post-war period, the late nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé has been a privileged object of reflection for French intellectuals. Intriguingly, his writings have been drawn on not only to lend support to positions in philosophy or poetics: they have also been seen as politically significant. In stark contrast to the image that circulates of him as an aloof aristocrat unconcerned by history, Mallarmé has frequently been the writer of choice for twentieth-century French thinkers concerned with the politics of literature. From the work of Jean-Paul Sartre to that of Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner and Jacques Rancière, among many others, Mallarmé has been at the centre of political thought in French intellectual life. In fact, he has become ‘comrade Mallarmé’, the glorious ancestor of all those who would seek to argue for the progressive or revolutionary virtues of literature.

The aim of this book is to investigate this history of political appropriations of Mallarmé's writings. Our focus will be on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Tel Quel's theoretician-in-chief Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. The book also contains a short chapter on Jean-Claude Milner, and closes with a brief consideration of Quentin Meillassoux's recent intervention into Mallarmé studies. Throughout the book, our key concern will be to determine how Mallarmé has been constituted as an object of political reflection; what conceptual resources have enabled his writings to be construed as politically significant; and in what conjunctures – both intellectual and political – his work has been mobilised by French intellectuals.

Whether these intellectuals proclaimed Mallarmé to be a privileged agent in the revolutionary transformation of society; feted his writing's uncompromising complexity as the sign of an heroic attempt to resist, albeit in relative isolation and by the sole means of his literary art, a politically contemptible period; or condemned his difficult poetry and prose as symptomatic of a fatal withdrawal into obscurity, French thinkers have consistently linked Mallarmé's writings to politics. Crucially, however, these links have been far from univocal.