Mallarmé’s Digital Demon

Abstract

How do Mallarmé’s writings speak to the present? To answer this question, this article establishes a dialogue between one of Mallarmé’s early prose poems, ‘Le Démon de l'analogie’, and texts by the contemporary media theorists Mark Hansen, Steven Shaviro and Eugene Thacker. The article argues that Mallarmé’s poem explores how it feels to be a body modulated by code. The poem puts twentieth-century phenomenology with its focus on human perception under pressure, and instead presents a very contemporary view of individuation (subject-formation) as a process that is both thoroughly bound up with the environment, and difficult to comprehend and unify. In a final section, the article considers ‘Le Démon de l'analogie’ in relation to the poet's dream about le Livre, and suggests that Mallarmé’s work as a whole brings together the utopian and the dystopian tendencies that have marked media studies from their inception, and that continue to characterize our relations to the technological object.