Robert Boncardo investigates how Stephane Mallarme, one of modernity’s most ingenious yet obscure poets, became an object of major political significance for French intellectuals. He asks how this most refined and seemingly aristocratic of poets became the writer of choice for leftist intellectuals and reflects on the ambivalent relation between literature and its political destiny in modernity.

With in-depth studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, along with shorter analyses of Jean-Claude Milner and Quentin Meillassoux, he situates Mallarme within the philosophical and political projects of some of France’s greatest thinkers.