Jacques Rancière's 1996 book Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren is written against the entire interpretative tradition we have explored in this book, at the same time as it reinscribes its major motifs within the coordinates of Rancière's novel account of artistic modernity, the ‘aesthetic regime of art’. Against Sartre, Rancière thoroughly reorganises the relation between modern French literature and democracy – a relation Sartre had powerfully argued was one of profound conflict. In contrast to Sartre's nihilist Mallarmé, Rancière's will be ‘a good democrat’ (PS 59) whose poetic language did not pit an artistic elite nostalgic for the nobility against the blind herd of the democratic masses, but rather sought to ‘consecrate the community’ in a secular world. Against Kristeva, Rancière will not set out to enrol Mallarmé in a situated struggle within the intersecting publishing, political and university fields in France at a moment of social upheaval, but will instead seek to understand him strictly on his own terms. Furthermore, he will refuse Kristeva's claim that Mallarmé's ‘religion’ was a mere fetish, arguing on the contrary that it is the key that unlocks his writings. Against Badiou, Rancière will reject the philosopher's penchant for extracting philosophically significant concepts from the poet's writings – concepts only the philosopher is capable of fully comprehending. He will also reject Badiou's reading of Mallarmé as an exemplary member of ‘the Age of the Poets’, whose principle achievement was an antirepresentative poetics. By stark contrast, Rancière's Mallarmé will have rigorously mimetic pretensions. Finally, against Milner, Rancière will refuse point blank the idea that Mallarmé was a counter-revolutionary, or even that he was in any way concerned by the problematic of the poetry-revolution couplet: ‘Certainly’, Rancière states, ‘Mallarmé never shared any revolutionary aspirations’ – but this is precisely ‘why he did not need to produce an assessment of them and declare them over’.

In this fifth and final chapter, we offer a comprehensive exegesis of Rancière's engagement with Mallarmé, an engagement centred on his extraordinarily dense monograph The Politics of the Siren but which also includes important chapters in Mute Speech (1998), The Politics of Literature (2007) and Aisthesis (2011).