The way of silence: Mallarmé and Blanchot

Abstract

The change of paradigm that modern poetry represented implies a series of characteristics among which Silence and its elocutory possibilities rise as struggle and fertility. From a reading of Mallarmé’s works, and particularly of some of his essays and the poem “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hazard”, this piece seeks to represent the path along which the discovery of what Mallarmé called Nothing, Destruction and Silence has been able to forge for modern criticism, and especially for critic and author Maurice Blanchot, a new way of understanding this new poetry and, at the same time, of understanding its own possibilities of analysis and comprehension.