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Henri de Régnier recalls Mallarmé saying, in April 1894: "Il n'y a qu'un homme qui ait le droit d'être anarchiste: moi, le Poète, puisque, seul, je fabrique un produit dont la Société ne veut pas, en échange duquel elle ne me donne pas de quoi vivre."1
It is fruitless to speculate about the degree of irony or seriousness with which Mallarmé made this statement, but we know that his conversation was memorable for its brilliance and precision, for the care with which he chose his words, and for the phlegmatic audacity of his propos. What is striking about this comment is not just its topicality but its attentiveness to the analogical process by which Mallarmé connects the writer's "product" both to its (non-existent) market and to its maker's (missing) remuneration. It is also a more precise and less dramatically metaphysical statement than one he made three years previously-also concerned with the production of poetry and its relationship to the economics of audience-in Jules Huret's Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire, carried out for the Echo de Paris in 1891-92: "Pour moi, le cas d'un poète, en cette société qui ne lui permet pas de vivre, c'est le cas d'un homme qui s'isole pour sculpter son propre tombeau."2
It is possible to make out, in the comment that Régnier reports, the expression of a sort of ghost economics, in relation to which the negative poetics of Mallarmé's own work stand in illuminating consonance. Those poems of empty rooms, abolished bibelots, "vols qui n'ont pas fui," and in general all those tessellated, often self-negating, negatives that make a Mallarmé poem into a declaration-but also an enactment-of what we might call "redemptive negativity," seem apt commodities for the sort of phantom transaction Mallarmé has in mind: the irrelevant producing the unwanted for the uninterested. Mallarmé appears to be expressing a sense of poetic superfluity and marginality, and to be doing so with a mischievously neat merging of capitalist and anarchist idioms.
The relations between the poet and the state is a subject he returns to, along with the larger and related question of art and its public, throughout his life and in a range of texts: from the knotty, allusive prose of Divagations, the individual texts of which often appeared...