As our last chapter demonstrated, Jacques Rancière's interpretation of Mallarmé's ‘politics of the siren’ seems to bring the history of political readings of the poet to a close. This is true in two senses. First, in his systematic re-inscription of the major motifs of these readings, from the infinite deferral of the Book to the poet's aristocratic isolation, Rancière offers a totalising interpretation of Mallarmé – indeed of the entire history of modern literature in which he played a part – and thus seems to close off, at least in principle, all further interpretative possibilities. Second, by showing why Mallarmé's egalitarian politics necessarily had to remain a horizon, an unreachable utopia that could, at best, inspire hope for emancipation and, at worst, justify a provisional aristocratism, Rancière undercuts any pretensions literature might have to successfully take part in a concrete progressive politics. Rather than affirming the contemporary relevance of such a literary politics, Rancière is best read as restoring the conditions of intelligibility for the fact that modern literature had such exorbitant political ambitions in the first place – ambitions that, as the case of Mallarmé exemplarily reveals, it could never, in fact, fulfil. Against Hamel, who claims that Rancière ‘maintains, in circumstances hardly propitious for a revolution, the solidarity of literature with the demand of an emancipation founded on a principle of egalitarianism’ (CM 181), we would suggest that he both does this and does the opposite: that is, Rancière certainly shows the form of ‘solidarity’ that a literature like Mallarmé's has with an egalitarian politics; yet he also demonstrates why this ‘solidarity’ is inextricable from a specifically literary elitism, which disables the poet's political capacities. And while Rancière claims, in the opening of his masterwork Mute Speech, that his inquiries aim to resist the widespread notion that ‘the complicity of French revolutionaries and German dreamers overturn[ed] everything reasonable and usher[ed] in two centuries of theoretical and political madness’ (MS 36), his project is not an unequivocal apology for the kind of poetico-political programme to be found in Mallarmé's writings.

In light of this, it is imperative that we make some brief remarks on the recent work of the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux.