Numbers and Sirens: Interpreting Mallarmé Author: Gandan Meillassoux [France] Translator: Yu Jun Publisher: Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House

Mallarmé's "A Throw of the Dice Cannot Change Chance" is the only poem that has survived the twentieth century, like a seed buried in the ground that finally sprouted in the next century, like a defensive battle that we won strangely in an era of disillusionment.

—Quentin Meillassoux, author of the book

★Book Introduction

Mallarmé's late poem "A Throw of the Dice Does Not Change Chance" is his most obscure poem. The arrangement of the words in this poem is very strange, with the space of the double page broken by lines, and the font size varies, sometimes in a stepped shape, and sometimes there is only one word or a few words on a page. At the same time, its content is also very obscure, and its meaning is still not fully explained today. In the history of modern poetry, "A Throw of the Dice Does Not Change Chance" is the most thorough breakthrough in modern poetry, and constitutes one of the most radical literary ruptures of modernity.

This book is an interpretation of "A Throw of the Dice" by French philosopher Gandin Meillassoux. Meillassoux hypothesizes that Mallarmé hid a secret in this poem, a "unique number", which makes it possible to rediscover this poem. This book is a literary study, a treasure hunt and an investigation. In the book, Meillassoux uses his profound insight to try to decipher the code in the poem simply and clearly around Mallarmé's concept of "unique number", questioning concepts such as "chance", "contingency", "infinity" and "eternity". Through his bold interpretation of Mallarmé's works, Meillassoux puts forward his own unique insights on modernity, poetics, secularism and religion, opening a new chapter in his radical philosophy of contingency.

Media reviews

This book is sure to be a hit, offering a decisive and exclusive reading of Mallarmé's thought, a man who leaps a century from Beckett to Sartre to show us the creative power of the absurd.

——Philosophy Magazine

The work is perhaps the most unprecedented gesture: a work of art. It is difficult to classify as poetry, rhetoric, or philosophy. It is a rigorous analysis of a poem, metaphysics, a mystery investigation, and a detective story. In Meillassoux's clear and concise language, the investigation is presented as a police investigation of crimes and their motives, making the reader eagerly await the next part, just like reading a novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

——Spirale

★Reader Reviews

Meillassoux's philosophy opened up a new path for contemporary thought and transcended the Kantian antinomy between skepticism and dogmatism.

—Alain Badiou, French philosopher

Numbers and Sirens readily accepts the "decoding" challenge posed by the book's subtitle. Readers can not only discover the code that runs throughout the poem, but also think about the double risk that Mallarmé took: his poem will either not be deciphered and will always be misunderstood; or, on the contrary, it will be deciphered, but it will appear to be nothing more than a word game.

—Clément Layet, German Center for Art History (Paris)

Contrary to the common 20th-century reading of Mallarmé's A Toss of the Dice as an ironic demonstration of the failure of literature since the death of God, Meillassoux shows how A Toss of the Dice fulfills the 19th-century Romantic desire for the ultimate, a desire that is based on the inherent uncertainty of human nature.

—Grant Wiedenfeld, Professor, Sam Houston State University

Quentin Meillassoux (1967-), a French philosopher and one of the advocates of speculative realism, is currently a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). His major works include After Finiteness, Numbers and Sirens, Metaphysics and the Fiction of the World Outside Science, and Time Without Becoming. Meillassoux believes that philosophy is not a study of what is and what exists, but a study of what will become possible and what may exist.