ENTRE MARGES ET IMAGES. TRAJECTOIRES MALLARMÉENNES DANS LA CRITIQUE LITTÉRAIRE DE SARTRE ET DERRIDA

In this thesis we aim to study how the model of Mallarmé's work has structured and oriented the literary criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. If the two philosophers have devoted specific studies to the Symbolist poet – Sartre's Mallarmé. La lucidité et sa face d'ombre and Derrida's “La double séance” –, the importance of Mallarmé and his poetic and metaphysical revolution cannot be limited to these texts. Through a rereading of the critical works of Sartre and Derrida, preceded by a contextualisation of the aesthetic work within a broader theory of Being, it was noted how Mallarmé pervades the entire critical path of the philosophers. In fact, reading the texts dedicated to Jean Genet (Saint Genet and Glas), Ponge (L'Homme et les choses and Signéponge), as well as the works on Flaubert, Artaud and Baudelaire, shows that Mallarmé's model operates as a hidden intertext, influencing the two intellectuals' critical positions on the authors in question. Through his radical poetic experience, Mallarmé becomes for Sartre the model of the committed poet, un poète engagé; this paradoxical aesthetic posture will be inapplicable to writers who have failed to complete, as Mallarmé did, a path of historical disengagement and aesthetic silence. For Derrida, Mallarmé is the figure-symbol of the metaphysical crisis that runs through the 20th century: Derrida's analyses of the "cas Mallarmé" reveal how the poet heralded deconstruction, and consequently all the disseminated readings produced by the deconstructive method. The result of these bundles of cross-readings, which complement historicist criticism with deconstructionist criticism, will be to bring out the universally valid side of Mallarmé's poetics: Mallarmé's aesthetic revolution has so conditioned the history of literature and philosophy as to become an archetype for the most diverse theoretical approaches.