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Число и сирена
«Число и сирена» — вторая книга одного из самых заметных современных философов. Она существует сразу на нескольких территориях: философия, литературоведение и даже детективная драма, преподносящая в финале удивительную разгадку.
В «Числе и сирене» Мейясу обращается к знаменитой поэме «Бросок костей» Стефана Малларме и в поисках «числа не способного стать другим» предпринимает попытку расшифровки поэтического текста. Полученный им код становится ключом к пониманию поэзии и религии современности. Издание «Числа и сирены» включает в себя оригинальный текст поэмы Малларме, а также перевод поэта Кирилла Корчагина, сделанный в 2014 году для первого выпуска журнала «Носорог».
В «Числе и сирене» Мейясу обращается к знаменитой поэме «Бросок костей» Стефана Малларме и в поисках «числа не способного стать другим» предпринимает попытку расшифровки поэтического текста. Полученный им код становится ключом к пониманию поэзии и религии современности. Издание «Числа и сирены» включает в себя оригинальный текст поэмы Малларме, а также перевод поэта Кирилла Корчагина, сделанный в 2014 году для первого выпуска журнала «Носорог».
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First published September 21, 2011
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December 3, 2015
My dad gave me this book on my birthday. He thought it might be interesting for me since the publisher described this work as “a detective story à la Edgar Allan Poe,” and I love detective stories. It was indeed a very fun and exciting book. But when I finished reading it, I was also left with a lot of questions whirling in my head.
In this book, the author tries to decipher a famous poem that the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in 1897. The poem is called ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard,’ which means ‘A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’ in English. It is a very strange poem with words and sentences placed in different parts of the page, and not all lined up neatly like other poems usually do. Mallarmé’s work is very famous, but it was also a mystery for a long time because nobody really understood what he wanted to do by writing like that. Meillassoux says that he is the first person who has succeeded in decoding the secret of the poem, and that is what he explains in this book. From what I understood, I think Meillassoux’s detective work tried to solve two mysteries at once. One was the question of “what did Mallarmé try to do in his poem?” and the other was the question of “why was Meillassoux able to decipher the secret of what Mallarmé tried to do in his poem?” Meillassoux says that both of these questions have the same answer, which is the ‘absolutization of chance.’ ‘Chance’ is a word that describes the possibility of how things could have been and can be completely different from what it is now. ‘Absolutization’ means that that possibility of being different is true for everything, and that that is the only thing that is true for everything (my dad told me that this problem of ‘absolute chance’ was something that Meillassoux also wrote in his previous book called After Finitude). Meillassoux discovers that both mysteries have the same answer, but that is not the only thing he finds out. Because they have the same answer, he thinks that the two mysteries are actually the same question. That is why he says that the second mystery of how he was able to decipher Mallarmé’s secret by chance, was already written inside the first mystery of what Mallarmé did in his poem, since Mallarmé’s poem is all about chance.
But here is where I became puzzled: How can Meillassoux claim that both Mallarmé’s secret and his discovery of the secret be about absolute chance? Wouldn’t the idea of ‘absolute chance’ destroy Mallarmé’s secret when you think of it in relation to Meillassoux’s detective work, and vice versa? I will try to explain why I think so. Meillassoux finds the number “707” working like a secret key in Mallarmé’s poem. He counts all the words in the poem and there are 707 of them. He also says that the way letters are placed and the order of the poem are also decided by using the number 707. That is why the number “707” is very meaningful. But because Meillassoux wants to say that chance is also important in Mallarmé’s poem, he adds two other things here. One is that if he counted slightly differently the number would have been other numbers close to 707, like 705 or 706. The other thing is that in the case that the count ends up in a number other than 707, his entire theory about the secret number would have been completely meaningless. Meillassoux says that this is how Mallarmé put chance, which is the possibility that things could have been completely different, into the core of his poem. But I think that if everything could have been different, the secret number could have been any other one, and be as meaningful as 707. The same thing can be said about Meillassoux’s discovery of Mallarmé’s secret. Because if everything could have been completely different, the possibility would have not only been that Meillassoux might have never discovered Mallarmé’s secret. A stronger ‘chance’ would be the possibility that Meillassoux might have discovered any another work, and found a secret that was as meaningful as Mallarmé’s.
Now this is a bit funny, because for me, Mallarmé’s title of the poem precisely explains this stronger ‘chance,’ especially when it is shortened as ‘Un Coup de Dés’ or ‘A Throw of Dice,’ like Meillassoux does many times in his book. The title can then be read as: “A Throw of the Dice” (written by Mallarmé, and decoded by Meillassoux) will Never Abolish Chance. I agree with Mallarmé, if this was indeed what he wanted to say, because I believe that the “wager system” Meillassoux says the poet put into his poem, by which he means the system of betting on the possibility that the secret of an artwork might be decoded long after the author dies, is not at all unique to “A Throw of the Dice.” I think instead that such system is true for all (or most) works of art. So if things can be totally different, not only the secret code of Mallarmé’s work might not have been “707,” but Meillassoux’s book might not have been on Mallarmé’s secret to begin with. Not thinking about this possibility is to rely on “absolutization by chance,” rather than admitting the consequences of “absolute chance.” That is also why I think the answers to the two mysteries do not fit well with each other. If Mallarmé’s chance is absolute, Meillassoux’s discovery is not, and if the chance in Meillassoux’s discovery is absolute, then Mallarmé’s secret is not.
But Meillassoux doesn’t write about these things, about why he places an odd limitation to just how much he absolutizes ‘chance.’ He does say that the strange logic of what he calls ‘retro-action’ might explain things: that the result of his discovery itself explains the arbitrariness of Mallarmé’s work backwards front. But for me this sounds like a bad science fiction or something, and it feels like cheating. I think there is a more simple reason for why Meillassoux does not write about this. It is because he does not write at all about how he writes. The only reason Meillassoux never thinks seriously about other numbers being as meaningful as 707, is because he believes that 707 can be discovered in Mallarmé’s work by pure detective work. But what is a pure detective work? From what I understand, pure detective work is like a book report that you have to write without referring to any other book than the one that was assigned (kind of like what I am doing here). The problem with both is that they have to say two things that do not go well with each other (just like Meillassoux!). The first is saying or believing that whatever the detective or the student writing the book report finds, was always and already there waiting to be found. And this secret must be a secret that can be cracked by doing very simple things that anyone can do, like counting words, or paying attention to a particular paragraph or sentence. But at the same time, the other thing the detective or the student has to say or believe is that somebody had to write about it using words, so that people can actually realize the secret, or something about the book that had not been perceived before. I have read many detective novels but in most of them this second point is never written out so clearly. It is more often just hidden to make the first point seem more important.
In my opinion, the way of writing that concerns the second problem which lets the reader see what should have been seen by anyone but actually was not, has a lot to do with ‘rhetoric,’ which is something I learned in my English class the other day. Rhetoric is the way words are used to describe and convince the reader of what is written. If this is usually hidden in detective novels and very logical analysis like Meillassoux, I think it is because they make full use of it. Rhetoric is the secret engine that drives detective novels forward, and that is why they can’t talk about it. Another very interesting book that I read recently was called The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet. It was written by Shawn James Rosenheim, and it explained how Edgar Allan Poe, my favorite author who created the world’s first detective novels, had a hard time balancing between the logical aspect of language which allows a detective to ‘read’ physical clues on crime scenes as signs on one hand, and the rhetoric that he must use to convince the others about the ‘truth’ of the crime on the other. So detective novels have been deeply connected to and disturbed by rhetoric from the beginning.
Going back to Meillassoux, I think when the reader starts thinking about rhetoric of his writing, it becomes difficult to ignore the possibility that there can be other rhetorics connected to other secrets, which can be told in equally convincing way. The absolutization of chance makes other rhetorics as meaningful as the one Meillassoux chooses to absolutize (without knowing or acknowledging so). I think the strange distinction Meillassoux makes between the “real” Mallarmé and “fictive (ideal)” Mallarmé is also related to this problem of him not really considering the workings of rhetoric in his work. This is because from the perspective of rhetoric, any writing is always fictive. And as I learned in my literature class, it was the French poets of nineteenth century including Mallarmé, who did many interesting things with this possibility. For example, Charles Baudelaire was a poet who influenced Mallarmé to become a poet in the first place, and also the person who translated Poe into French. When I read his essay called “The Painter of Modern Life” written in 1863, it was very clear to me that what Baudelaire wanted to do, was to make the painter Constantin Guys and his works exist only inside, or through, his writings. What a strange thing to do! I thought this was a very interesting experiment, especially because I haven’t seen any of Guys’ paintings in real life. So the distinction between real and fictive is much more complicated here than in the simple distinction made by Meillassoux.
When I told this to my dad, he said that he thinks this problem extends to Meillassoux’s interest in “truth,” which can be read in his discussion in After Finitude and his relationship to his teacher Alain Badiou. I have not read After Finitude and I don’t know who Badiou is, but dad explained to me that rhetoric is never about truth (Friedrich Nietzsche said that truth is only a part of rhetoric). It is always about persuasion or how language performs itself. I think that even though Meillassoux talks about the performance of Mallarmé’s text, he never really thinks about the performance of his own writing. But for me, that also leaves Meillassoux in a weak place. When I try to see what Meillassoux is doing as a performance, I only see a French philosopher absolutizing another French poet as the greatest thing that happened in the nineteenth century culture. Which strikes me as a very French thing to do. But I think the most important thing about Mallarmé’s work, and what I learned from Meillassoux’s decoding of Mallarmé’s work, was that it didn’t really matter if Mallarmé was French or not. The “wager system” of Mallarmé, his act of throwing himself into the ocean of all the things that would come after him, cannot be contained inside one country or culture. It could even have been some alien that found and decoded his poem.
I guess what I am trying to say is that Meillassoux’s detective work is very thorough, but is also weak because it is thorough. The answer to the mystery that he finds can be put like this: 1) there is a definite answer that I discovered, and yet, 2) there is no definite answer. But from what I understood, the absolute result of absolute chance is not in an absolute correctness (of “707,” or Meillassoux’s discovery of Mallarmé’s secret), nor absolute incorrectness (of the complete meaningless of “706” or “705,” or the possibility of Meillassoux not discovering Mallarmé’s secret). The answer is not split between an absolutely meaningful answer and an absolutely meaningless one. Instead, the answer is that there are and can be several meaningful answers. Maybe “7” is much more meaningful then “707,” or maybe “700007,” and maybe Meillassoux or any other person can find likely meaningful secrets in any other artist’s work in other times and other countries. And if this is the answer, then it opens up a new question: how to choose one meaningful discovery over the other, and how to convey that choice in a convincing way to the readers. And like I said, this is a question of rhetoric, which is to say it is a question of “detective stories à la Edgar Allan Poe.” So I guess the publisher’s advertising wasn’t so misleading, after all
In this book, the author tries to decipher a famous poem that the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in 1897. The poem is called ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard,’ which means ‘A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance’ in English. It is a very strange poem with words and sentences placed in different parts of the page, and not all lined up neatly like other poems usually do. Mallarmé’s work is very famous, but it was also a mystery for a long time because nobody really understood what he wanted to do by writing like that. Meillassoux says that he is the first person who has succeeded in decoding the secret of the poem, and that is what he explains in this book. From what I understood, I think Meillassoux’s detective work tried to solve two mysteries at once. One was the question of “what did Mallarmé try to do in his poem?” and the other was the question of “why was Meillassoux able to decipher the secret of what Mallarmé tried to do in his poem?” Meillassoux says that both of these questions have the same answer, which is the ‘absolutization of chance.’ ‘Chance’ is a word that describes the possibility of how things could have been and can be completely different from what it is now. ‘Absolutization’ means that that possibility of being different is true for everything, and that that is the only thing that is true for everything (my dad told me that this problem of ‘absolute chance’ was something that Meillassoux also wrote in his previous book called After Finitude). Meillassoux discovers that both mysteries have the same answer, but that is not the only thing he finds out. Because they have the same answer, he thinks that the two mysteries are actually the same question. That is why he says that the second mystery of how he was able to decipher Mallarmé’s secret by chance, was already written inside the first mystery of what Mallarmé did in his poem, since Mallarmé’s poem is all about chance.
But here is where I became puzzled: How can Meillassoux claim that both Mallarmé’s secret and his discovery of the secret be about absolute chance? Wouldn’t the idea of ‘absolute chance’ destroy Mallarmé’s secret when you think of it in relation to Meillassoux’s detective work, and vice versa? I will try to explain why I think so. Meillassoux finds the number “707” working like a secret key in Mallarmé’s poem. He counts all the words in the poem and there are 707 of them. He also says that the way letters are placed and the order of the poem are also decided by using the number 707. That is why the number “707” is very meaningful. But because Meillassoux wants to say that chance is also important in Mallarmé’s poem, he adds two other things here. One is that if he counted slightly differently the number would have been other numbers close to 707, like 705 or 706. The other thing is that in the case that the count ends up in a number other than 707, his entire theory about the secret number would have been completely meaningless. Meillassoux says that this is how Mallarmé put chance, which is the possibility that things could have been completely different, into the core of his poem. But I think that if everything could have been different, the secret number could have been any other one, and be as meaningful as 707. The same thing can be said about Meillassoux’s discovery of Mallarmé’s secret. Because if everything could have been completely different, the possibility would have not only been that Meillassoux might have never discovered Mallarmé’s secret. A stronger ‘chance’ would be the possibility that Meillassoux might have discovered any another work, and found a secret that was as meaningful as Mallarmé’s.
Now this is a bit funny, because for me, Mallarmé’s title of the poem precisely explains this stronger ‘chance,’ especially when it is shortened as ‘Un Coup de Dés’ or ‘A Throw of Dice,’ like Meillassoux does many times in his book. The title can then be read as: “A Throw of the Dice” (written by Mallarmé, and decoded by Meillassoux) will Never Abolish Chance. I agree with Mallarmé, if this was indeed what he wanted to say, because I believe that the “wager system” Meillassoux says the poet put into his poem, by which he means the system of betting on the possibility that the secret of an artwork might be decoded long after the author dies, is not at all unique to “A Throw of the Dice.” I think instead that such system is true for all (or most) works of art. So if things can be totally different, not only the secret code of Mallarmé’s work might not have been “707,” but Meillassoux’s book might not have been on Mallarmé’s secret to begin with. Not thinking about this possibility is to rely on “absolutization by chance,” rather than admitting the consequences of “absolute chance.” That is also why I think the answers to the two mysteries do not fit well with each other. If Mallarmé’s chance is absolute, Meillassoux’s discovery is not, and if the chance in Meillassoux’s discovery is absolute, then Mallarmé’s secret is not.
But Meillassoux doesn’t write about these things, about why he places an odd limitation to just how much he absolutizes ‘chance.’ He does say that the strange logic of what he calls ‘retro-action’ might explain things: that the result of his discovery itself explains the arbitrariness of Mallarmé’s work backwards front. But for me this sounds like a bad science fiction or something, and it feels like cheating. I think there is a more simple reason for why Meillassoux does not write about this. It is because he does not write at all about how he writes. The only reason Meillassoux never thinks seriously about other numbers being as meaningful as 707, is because he believes that 707 can be discovered in Mallarmé’s work by pure detective work. But what is a pure detective work? From what I understand, pure detective work is like a book report that you have to write without referring to any other book than the one that was assigned (kind of like what I am doing here). The problem with both is that they have to say two things that do not go well with each other (just like Meillassoux!). The first is saying or believing that whatever the detective or the student writing the book report finds, was always and already there waiting to be found. And this secret must be a secret that can be cracked by doing very simple things that anyone can do, like counting words, or paying attention to a particular paragraph or sentence. But at the same time, the other thing the detective or the student has to say or believe is that somebody had to write about it using words, so that people can actually realize the secret, or something about the book that had not been perceived before. I have read many detective novels but in most of them this second point is never written out so clearly. It is more often just hidden to make the first point seem more important.
In my opinion, the way of writing that concerns the second problem which lets the reader see what should have been seen by anyone but actually was not, has a lot to do with ‘rhetoric,’ which is something I learned in my English class the other day. Rhetoric is the way words are used to describe and convince the reader of what is written. If this is usually hidden in detective novels and very logical analysis like Meillassoux, I think it is because they make full use of it. Rhetoric is the secret engine that drives detective novels forward, and that is why they can’t talk about it. Another very interesting book that I read recently was called The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet. It was written by Shawn James Rosenheim, and it explained how Edgar Allan Poe, my favorite author who created the world’s first detective novels, had a hard time balancing between the logical aspect of language which allows a detective to ‘read’ physical clues on crime scenes as signs on one hand, and the rhetoric that he must use to convince the others about the ‘truth’ of the crime on the other. So detective novels have been deeply connected to and disturbed by rhetoric from the beginning.
Going back to Meillassoux, I think when the reader starts thinking about rhetoric of his writing, it becomes difficult to ignore the possibility that there can be other rhetorics connected to other secrets, which can be told in equally convincing way. The absolutization of chance makes other rhetorics as meaningful as the one Meillassoux chooses to absolutize (without knowing or acknowledging so). I think the strange distinction Meillassoux makes between the “real” Mallarmé and “fictive (ideal)” Mallarmé is also related to this problem of him not really considering the workings of rhetoric in his work. This is because from the perspective of rhetoric, any writing is always fictive. And as I learned in my literature class, it was the French poets of nineteenth century including Mallarmé, who did many interesting things with this possibility. For example, Charles Baudelaire was a poet who influenced Mallarmé to become a poet in the first place, and also the person who translated Poe into French. When I read his essay called “The Painter of Modern Life” written in 1863, it was very clear to me that what Baudelaire wanted to do, was to make the painter Constantin Guys and his works exist only inside, or through, his writings. What a strange thing to do! I thought this was a very interesting experiment, especially because I haven’t seen any of Guys’ paintings in real life. So the distinction between real and fictive is much more complicated here than in the simple distinction made by Meillassoux.
When I told this to my dad, he said that he thinks this problem extends to Meillassoux’s interest in “truth,” which can be read in his discussion in After Finitude and his relationship to his teacher Alain Badiou. I have not read After Finitude and I don’t know who Badiou is, but dad explained to me that rhetoric is never about truth (Friedrich Nietzsche said that truth is only a part of rhetoric). It is always about persuasion or how language performs itself. I think that even though Meillassoux talks about the performance of Mallarmé’s text, he never really thinks about the performance of his own writing. But for me, that also leaves Meillassoux in a weak place. When I try to see what Meillassoux is doing as a performance, I only see a French philosopher absolutizing another French poet as the greatest thing that happened in the nineteenth century culture. Which strikes me as a very French thing to do. But I think the most important thing about Mallarmé’s work, and what I learned from Meillassoux’s decoding of Mallarmé’s work, was that it didn’t really matter if Mallarmé was French or not. The “wager system” of Mallarmé, his act of throwing himself into the ocean of all the things that would come after him, cannot be contained inside one country or culture. It could even have been some alien that found and decoded his poem.
I guess what I am trying to say is that Meillassoux’s detective work is very thorough, but is also weak because it is thorough. The answer to the mystery that he finds can be put like this: 1) there is a definite answer that I discovered, and yet, 2) there is no definite answer. But from what I understood, the absolute result of absolute chance is not in an absolute correctness (of “707,” or Meillassoux’s discovery of Mallarmé’s secret), nor absolute incorrectness (of the complete meaningless of “706” or “705,” or the possibility of Meillassoux not discovering Mallarmé’s secret). The answer is not split between an absolutely meaningful answer and an absolutely meaningless one. Instead, the answer is that there are and can be several meaningful answers. Maybe “7” is much more meaningful then “707,” or maybe “700007,” and maybe Meillassoux or any other person can find likely meaningful secrets in any other artist’s work in other times and other countries. And if this is the answer, then it opens up a new question: how to choose one meaningful discovery over the other, and how to convey that choice in a convincing way to the readers. And like I said, this is a question of rhetoric, which is to say it is a question of “detective stories à la Edgar Allan Poe.” So I guess the publisher’s advertising wasn’t so misleading, after all
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June 8, 2019The Number and the Siren is unlike other books. Remarkably French, it combines literary theory with a Dan Brown-esque search for a code secreted in Stephane Mallarmé’s poem Coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice), notoriously resistant to interpretation, to reveal an atheist eucharist in which the reader participates with the author in an experience of our fundamental nature: Chance. With a capital letter, no less. Or, at least, this is what its author, provocative philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, wishes to be revealed.
His first published book, After Finitude, struck out in an apparently very different direction. It attacks all other philosophies as having ignored the scientific revolution by remaining in thrall to metaphysics, and so to idealism and religion. Even those philosophies that purport to be in the service of science fall into this trap, he says, because they attempt to formulate reasons why science works. This assumes some ultimate reason, but we can’t access an ultimate reason through reasoning because we can’t get outside of what we think, or reason, to see what grounds it. Therefore we simply believe that there is a reason why things are as they are, without being able to know what that reason is.
Meillassoux extricates us from the problem he diagnoses in a bold and straightforward way: ‘in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response “for no reason” is a genuine answer.’ Yes, things happen for no reason at all. And therefore the things that happen could have been any other things at all. The one thing we know for sure is that anything could happen – the sun could disappear, you could become butterflies, I could want Manchester United to win the football league.
Preposterous I know, but Meillassoux is following a venerable philosophic tradition. David Hume, in 1748, argued that everything we know, we know from experience rather than thought (he was on the side of the Empiricists versus the Rationalists). Hume pointed out that before one billiard ball hits another, we have no way of knowing, on the face of it, what will happen next: ‘May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction?’ We believe that the second ball will zip away in proportion to the force we gave the first, precisely at the angle desired, smacking into the centre of the pocket (yes!) because of our previous experience of what happens when one thing hits another. Hume says that even though we’ve experienced a cause lead to an effect before, it is logically possible that the same cause could have a different effect. Meillassoux says that it is absolutely possible that the same cause could have a different effect.
It’s a refreshingly audacious philosophic move, entailing that even what we consider the laws of the universe could change at any moment. For me, it’s then a little disappointing that Meillassoux’s argument trails off into an endorsement of the laws of the universe we actually have, building his argument on mathematics rather than philosophy. Nevertheless, that his first book should so comprehensively (according to him anyway) dismiss metaphysics and religion in favour of mathematics, science and atheism, lends further piquancy to the eccentric direction his second book takes.
In The Number and the Siren Meillassoux describes how he stumbled by chance upon an apparent encrypted number in Mallarmé’s Coup de dés. Inspired by enigmatic notes that Mallarmé made throughout much of his life – and asked to be burned, a single volume remains – he envisages a religious scope to the poem and its hidden number. Mallarmé’s fragmentary notes are toward The Book, a projected work, unfinished, barely even started, its pages to be unbound and so interchangable, allowing a huge range of possible The Books. The Book was to be read on ceremonial occasions, at prescribed times and locations. This unlikely enterprise was intended to replace ceremonies of worship devoted to monarchies and religions with a secular ceremony worshipping the divine in the human.
Because The Book was never finished, Meillassoux believes its aim was transferred to Mallarmé’s late, great work Coup de dés. The coded number (not telling) will reveal the divine, the absolute, in us. The main character of the poem, The Master, stands for a moment above the shipwreck of traditional certainties, hesitating to throw the dice of a new dispensation: does he in the end throw them, and if he does, what number is produced? We don’t know. And Meillassoux says that similarly the author of the poem may have chosen to encode a number in the poem and that he may have found it – and yet he can’t be sure and this undecidability leaves open all options, makes the author contain them all and so become the divine Chance that is our fundamental nature. Mallarmé is a secular Christ and Meillassoux’s decipherment of his poem is the secular Mass.
All very high-flown you may be thinking. Well, yes. But brace yourself, there’s more. Having argued for an atheistic, materialist philosophy, Meillassoux elsewhere in his work considers justice. For atheists, there is no redemption for history’s victims, while for theists there remains the question of why God allows evil. He gets around the problems of these positions by advocating for hope. In a world of radical contingency, where Chance holds sway and anything could happen, he suggests ‘believing in God because he does not exist.' We are to look forward to the real possibility that God will burst into existence to resurrect and redeem the dead.
I was surprised to see this God of the future appear in Meillassoux, both in the form of the Christ-like Mallarmé-Messiah and as the not-yet-God, who is to be believed in anyway – but not surprised by the concept itself. God-to-come appears also in the millenarian idea of the Singularity: the point at which artificial intelligence reaches so far beyond our own that its technology takes us out of our human flesh and into immortal robot or virtual bodies. Ray Kurzweil, its major prophet, believes that God-like beings will exist in the future, capable of resurrecting the dead (with science, of course, so plausible…). Those who look forward to the transcendence of the human body through technology, have a transhumanist church which similarly anticipates that: ‘We will go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead from the past with advanced science, space-time engineering and “time magic.”’
In these ideas is perhaps the early stirring of a more fundamental change. There is a body of academic research supporting the theory that ancient and modern people experienced time in different ways. For ancient people time was cyclical, like the seasons, and if events looked different, their meanings were repeated. The same basic patterns of things occurred over and over. Modern people experience time as linear, as always progressing to a new state of things. The model for this is often supposed to be the messianic Judaeo-Christian religions. In these, an endpoint to worldly life is anticipated: the coming of the Messiah and the Day of Judgement. If you consider yourself to be unaffected by such beliefs, let me put it this way: the idea that human life is progressively getting better as time goes by, that we are advancing politically and economically towards a just world, is precisely what ancient peoples could not conceive.
Many recent movements have traded in belief in the advance toward human perfectibility, though untethered to divine inspiration. Early evolutionary science (the contemporary brand is more circumspect), Marxism, Fascism and liberal democracy all rest, or rested, on the shaky conceptual ground of unacknowledged millenarianism. With Meillassoux and the Singularitarians, messianic beliefs are similarly stripped of their origins in God, but their messianism is celebrated rather than hidden. We have not had a Fall, and are not returning to our creator. No, the world began for no reason, it is arbitrary and meaningless – but it will be redeemed by a future miracle.
What is it that this God reflects about our contemporary situation and beliefs? If we can be redeemed only by chance in the future, it follows that we must believe our present selves to be lost. The much criticised view that we are all tainted by Original Sin at least places us in a narrative: we Fell from grace and are in the messianic historical process of redemption. That is surely better than the idea that we are all ciphers, that meaning, that justice, have never existed for us and all we have is to hang on in the hope that it miraculously appears.
The implication is that we view ourselves according to our posterity. Once we would have founded our identities on our heritage. Who were our fathers (sadly, our mothers were not usually such a concern), what were we bequeathed? Now our identity is a question of who will look back on our memory. Who in the future will validate our present?
And for those who feel all this discussion seems far from everyday life, I ask you to consider why we take our selfies; why exciting and unusual events are haloed by hand-waved smartphones, seen and curated through a screen as an anticipated memory; why do we prostrate ourselves before TV judges, not trusting our talent until we have seen it played back to us?
Social media, as its logical conclusion, promises a Resurrection that is already being offered by the sick-makingly named Eternime, a website that collates your social media profiles so that ‘you [can] live on forever as a digital avatar … even total strangers from a distant future will remember you in a hundred years.’
Taken seriously, this messianism without a spiritual or moral framework, without any structure at all, is desperate: until the saviour arrives we have only anxiety. Nothing of the good or the beautiful, nor even the bad and the ugly, is yet real. The transhumanist God of the future might at first seem more optimistic, as it asks us to participate in constructing the deity. But this is a laissez-faire spirituality, which requires no ethical transcendence, no effort to be good to one another; only technical facility.
Another, bleaker version of this retrospective creator is the hypothesis that we and our world are a computer simulation of the ancestors of a post-Singularity civilisation. In this case we are our virtual past, the messiah has come, the promised land is attained, yet we will never know, will always wait, any meaning we might have out of our reach and oriented entirely toward our ‘descendants’.
Perhaps this is the messianism of the postmodern, of consumer culture, of things reduced to the abstract numbers of scientific measurement or monetary worth, and so become indifferently interchangeable: we are empty, indolent addicts waiting for the next hit, hoping desperately for meaning to finally be bestowed by our next possession.
You can read this review, and others, on my blog: http://viewsrebooks.info/the-poetry-o...
His first published book, After Finitude, struck out in an apparently very different direction. It attacks all other philosophies as having ignored the scientific revolution by remaining in thrall to metaphysics, and so to idealism and religion. Even those philosophies that purport to be in the service of science fall into this trap, he says, because they attempt to formulate reasons why science works. This assumes some ultimate reason, but we can’t access an ultimate reason through reasoning because we can’t get outside of what we think, or reason, to see what grounds it. Therefore we simply believe that there is a reason why things are as they are, without being able to know what that reason is.
Meillassoux extricates us from the problem he diagnoses in a bold and straightforward way: ‘in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response “for no reason” is a genuine answer.’ Yes, things happen for no reason at all. And therefore the things that happen could have been any other things at all. The one thing we know for sure is that anything could happen – the sun could disappear, you could become butterflies, I could want Manchester United to win the football league.
Preposterous I know, but Meillassoux is following a venerable philosophic tradition. David Hume, in 1748, argued that everything we know, we know from experience rather than thought (he was on the side of the Empiricists versus the Rationalists). Hume pointed out that before one billiard ball hits another, we have no way of knowing, on the face of it, what will happen next: ‘May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction?’ We believe that the second ball will zip away in proportion to the force we gave the first, precisely at the angle desired, smacking into the centre of the pocket (yes!) because of our previous experience of what happens when one thing hits another. Hume says that even though we’ve experienced a cause lead to an effect before, it is logically possible that the same cause could have a different effect. Meillassoux says that it is absolutely possible that the same cause could have a different effect.
It’s a refreshingly audacious philosophic move, entailing that even what we consider the laws of the universe could change at any moment. For me, it’s then a little disappointing that Meillassoux’s argument trails off into an endorsement of the laws of the universe we actually have, building his argument on mathematics rather than philosophy. Nevertheless, that his first book should so comprehensively (according to him anyway) dismiss metaphysics and religion in favour of mathematics, science and atheism, lends further piquancy to the eccentric direction his second book takes.
In The Number and the Siren Meillassoux describes how he stumbled by chance upon an apparent encrypted number in Mallarmé’s Coup de dés. Inspired by enigmatic notes that Mallarmé made throughout much of his life – and asked to be burned, a single volume remains – he envisages a religious scope to the poem and its hidden number. Mallarmé’s fragmentary notes are toward The Book, a projected work, unfinished, barely even started, its pages to be unbound and so interchangable, allowing a huge range of possible The Books. The Book was to be read on ceremonial occasions, at prescribed times and locations. This unlikely enterprise was intended to replace ceremonies of worship devoted to monarchies and religions with a secular ceremony worshipping the divine in the human.
Because The Book was never finished, Meillassoux believes its aim was transferred to Mallarmé’s late, great work Coup de dés. The coded number (not telling) will reveal the divine, the absolute, in us. The main character of the poem, The Master, stands for a moment above the shipwreck of traditional certainties, hesitating to throw the dice of a new dispensation: does he in the end throw them, and if he does, what number is produced? We don’t know. And Meillassoux says that similarly the author of the poem may have chosen to encode a number in the poem and that he may have found it – and yet he can’t be sure and this undecidability leaves open all options, makes the author contain them all and so become the divine Chance that is our fundamental nature. Mallarmé is a secular Christ and Meillassoux’s decipherment of his poem is the secular Mass.
All very high-flown you may be thinking. Well, yes. But brace yourself, there’s more. Having argued for an atheistic, materialist philosophy, Meillassoux elsewhere in his work considers justice. For atheists, there is no redemption for history’s victims, while for theists there remains the question of why God allows evil. He gets around the problems of these positions by advocating for hope. In a world of radical contingency, where Chance holds sway and anything could happen, he suggests ‘believing in God because he does not exist.' We are to look forward to the real possibility that God will burst into existence to resurrect and redeem the dead.
I was surprised to see this God of the future appear in Meillassoux, both in the form of the Christ-like Mallarmé-Messiah and as the not-yet-God, who is to be believed in anyway – but not surprised by the concept itself. God-to-come appears also in the millenarian idea of the Singularity: the point at which artificial intelligence reaches so far beyond our own that its technology takes us out of our human flesh and into immortal robot or virtual bodies. Ray Kurzweil, its major prophet, believes that God-like beings will exist in the future, capable of resurrecting the dead (with science, of course, so plausible…). Those who look forward to the transcendence of the human body through technology, have a transhumanist church which similarly anticipates that: ‘We will go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead from the past with advanced science, space-time engineering and “time magic.”’
In these ideas is perhaps the early stirring of a more fundamental change. There is a body of academic research supporting the theory that ancient and modern people experienced time in different ways. For ancient people time was cyclical, like the seasons, and if events looked different, their meanings were repeated. The same basic patterns of things occurred over and over. Modern people experience time as linear, as always progressing to a new state of things. The model for this is often supposed to be the messianic Judaeo-Christian religions. In these, an endpoint to worldly life is anticipated: the coming of the Messiah and the Day of Judgement. If you consider yourself to be unaffected by such beliefs, let me put it this way: the idea that human life is progressively getting better as time goes by, that we are advancing politically and economically towards a just world, is precisely what ancient peoples could not conceive.
Many recent movements have traded in belief in the advance toward human perfectibility, though untethered to divine inspiration. Early evolutionary science (the contemporary brand is more circumspect), Marxism, Fascism and liberal democracy all rest, or rested, on the shaky conceptual ground of unacknowledged millenarianism. With Meillassoux and the Singularitarians, messianic beliefs are similarly stripped of their origins in God, but their messianism is celebrated rather than hidden. We have not had a Fall, and are not returning to our creator. No, the world began for no reason, it is arbitrary and meaningless – but it will be redeemed by a future miracle.
What is it that this God reflects about our contemporary situation and beliefs? If we can be redeemed only by chance in the future, it follows that we must believe our present selves to be lost. The much criticised view that we are all tainted by Original Sin at least places us in a narrative: we Fell from grace and are in the messianic historical process of redemption. That is surely better than the idea that we are all ciphers, that meaning, that justice, have never existed for us and all we have is to hang on in the hope that it miraculously appears.
The implication is that we view ourselves according to our posterity. Once we would have founded our identities on our heritage. Who were our fathers (sadly, our mothers were not usually such a concern), what were we bequeathed? Now our identity is a question of who will look back on our memory. Who in the future will validate our present?
And for those who feel all this discussion seems far from everyday life, I ask you to consider why we take our selfies; why exciting and unusual events are haloed by hand-waved smartphones, seen and curated through a screen as an anticipated memory; why do we prostrate ourselves before TV judges, not trusting our talent until we have seen it played back to us?
Social media, as its logical conclusion, promises a Resurrection that is already being offered by the sick-makingly named Eternime, a website that collates your social media profiles so that ‘you [can] live on forever as a digital avatar … even total strangers from a distant future will remember you in a hundred years.’
Taken seriously, this messianism without a spiritual or moral framework, without any structure at all, is desperate: until the saviour arrives we have only anxiety. Nothing of the good or the beautiful, nor even the bad and the ugly, is yet real. The transhumanist God of the future might at first seem more optimistic, as it asks us to participate in constructing the deity. But this is a laissez-faire spirituality, which requires no ethical transcendence, no effort to be good to one another; only technical facility.
Another, bleaker version of this retrospective creator is the hypothesis that we and our world are a computer simulation of the ancestors of a post-Singularity civilisation. In this case we are our virtual past, the messiah has come, the promised land is attained, yet we will never know, will always wait, any meaning we might have out of our reach and oriented entirely toward our ‘descendants’.
Perhaps this is the messianism of the postmodern, of consumer culture, of things reduced to the abstract numbers of scientific measurement or monetary worth, and so become indifferently interchangeable: we are empty, indolent addicts waiting for the next hit, hoping desperately for meaning to finally be bestowed by our next possession.
You can read this review, and others, on my blog: http://viewsrebooks.info/the-poetry-o...
July 28, 2018
Like a literary mystery novel totally devoid of character, plot, and setting. Everything happens within the close reading (and counting) of a poem. The Number and the Siren is a pure invention, worthy of Mallarme, and a singular act of close reading. There are swathes of tedium in the anticipation and refutation of protests and rebuttals to the thesis, but it is 100% worth it.
Read
October 31, 2019«…писатель тайно вводит в одно из своих произведений – возможно, в свой шедевр – ключ, который, он это знает, может быть обнаружен только случайно. То есть Малларме рисковал тем, что его главный поэтический акт никогда не будет раскрыт. И мы понимаем, почему: в сердце Произведения необходимо было наличие жертвы, чтобы эта поэзия могла обрести глубину Страстей. В жертву приносится не индивидуальное тело – как в случае Страстей Христовых, – а смысл произведения. Не плотская жизнь, а духовная…»
Стефан Малларме – великий французский поэт, один из вождей символизма и, по определению Поля Верлена, один из «проклятых поэтов», своими визуальными текстами (в которых расположение слов на странице не менее важно, чем сами слова) предвосхитивший футуристов. «Все в мире существует для того, чтобы завершиться некоей книгой» – писал он, и именно такую книгу, абсолютный текст, пытался создать. «Что это? Трудно объяснить: да просто книга, во множестве томов, книга, которая стала бы настоящей книгой по заранее определенному плану, а не сборником случайных, пусть и прекрасных вдохновений... Скажу более: единственная книга, убежденный, что только она одна и существует, и всякий пишущий, сам того не зная, покушается её создать, даже Гении…» – запутанно объяснял он Полю Верлену. Малларме не смог завершить свой труд (и – может ли такой труд быть завершенным?). Фрагменты и наброски «Книги» в 1957 году (спустя почти шестьдесят лет после смерти поэта) опубликовал исследователь Жак Шерер. А наиболее удавшимся приближением к искомому абсолюту Шерер назвал поэму Малларме «Бросок костей никогда не отменит случай» (1897) – короткий, странный текст завораживающей красоты. А книга, о которой я тут пишу, называется «Число и сирена» (пер. Софии Лосевой и Карена Саркисова), написал ее Квентин Мейясу, и это – потрясающий опыт медленного чтения поэмы «Бросок костей…», попытка разгадать шифр, заложенный в этой поэме. Удачна ли эта попытка? И да, и нет – кто знает… И – не нужно искать саму поэму Малларме – она, естественно, присутствует в книге «Число и сирена». Война верлибристов и адептов, так сказать, традиционной поэзии; каббала; Малларме как предтеча Сартра; обезглавливание как разделение духа и природы; религия как публичное дело; паломничество в Байрейт как попытка возвести искусство в статус новой религии; поэт, становящийся одним из своих вымыслов (Вымыслов); законодательное изменение орфографии, меняющее смысл – все в книге «Число и сирена».
«Нельзя хотеть быть греком: не потому что греки – это потерянный исток, идеальное единство искусства, науки и политики, которое невозможно открыть заново, но, наоборот, потому что мы, люди эпохи модерна, знаем, что у нас не греческие корни. Наш настоящий потерянный исток, тот, который следует вернуть к жизни, хотя бы и в новой форме, – это не греческая Античность, а латинские Средние века…»
Понять, что это на самом деле – действительный опыт вдумчивого медленного чтения или условно курехинский «гон» (не исключающий, при этом, первого), я не в силах. Но игра ума блистательная, читать и перечитывать. Если существует жанр филологического, текстологического (и, в первой части, нумерологического) детектива, то это как раз оно и есть, причем высокого класса.
«Неверное, что верлибр содержит метрический стих, потому что нельзя путать случайную регулярность в��рлибра – появляющуюся по смысловым и ритмическим причинам – со строгим правилом, которое поэт не может свободно менять. Суть размера и рифмы в том, что они ограничивают и что им необходимо следовать всегда – а не выбирать в качестве средства художественной выразительности из палитры других средств…»
Стефан Малларме – великий французский поэт, один из вождей символизма и, по определению Поля Верлена, один из «проклятых поэтов», своими визуальными текстами (в которых расположение слов на странице не менее важно, чем сами слова) предвосхитивший футуристов. «Все в мире существует для того, чтобы завершиться некоей книгой» – писал он, и именно такую книгу, абсолютный текст, пытался создать. «Что это? Трудно объяснить: да просто книга, во множестве томов, книга, которая стала бы настоящей книгой по заранее определенному плану, а не сборником случайных, пусть и прекрасных вдохновений... Скажу более: единственная книга, убежденный, что только она одна и существует, и всякий пишущий, сам того не зная, покушается её создать, даже Гении…» – запутанно объяснял он Полю Верлену. Малларме не смог завершить свой труд (и – может ли такой труд быть завершенным?). Фрагменты и наброски «Книги» в 1957 году (спустя почти шестьдесят лет после смерти поэта) опубликовал исследователь Жак Шерер. А наиболее удавшимся приближением к искомому абсолюту Шерер назвал поэму Малларме «Бросок костей никогда не отменит случай» (1897) – короткий, странный текст завораживающей красоты. А книга, о которой я тут пишу, называется «Число и сирена» (пер. Софии Лосевой и Карена Саркисова), написал ее Квентин Мейясу, и это – потрясающий опыт медленного чтения поэмы «Бросок костей…», попытка разгадать шифр, заложенный в этой поэме. Удачна ли эта попытка? И да, и нет – кто знает… И – не нужно искать саму поэму Малларме – она, естественно, присутствует в книге «Число и сирена». Война верлибристов и адептов, так сказать, традиционной поэзии; каббала; Малларме как предтеча Сартра; обезглавливание как разделение духа и природы; религия как публичное дело; паломничество в Байрейт как попытка возвести искусство в статус новой религии; поэт, становящийся одним из своих вымыслов (Вымыслов); законодательное изменение орфографии, меняющее смысл – все в книге «Число и сирена».
«Нельзя хотеть быть греком: не потому что греки – это потерянный исток, идеальное единство искусства, науки и политики, которое невозможно открыть заново, но, наоборот, потому что мы, люди эпохи модерна, знаем, что у нас не греческие корни. Наш настоящий потерянный исток, тот, который следует вернуть к жизни, хотя бы и в новой форме, – это не греческая Античность, а латинские Средние века…»
Понять, что это на самом деле – действительный опыт вдумчивого медленного чтения или условно курехинский «гон» (не исключающий, при этом, первого), я не в силах. Но игра ума блистательная, читать и перечитывать. Если существует жанр филологического, текстологического (и, в первой части, нумерологического) детектива, то это как раз оно и есть, причем высокого класса.
«Неверное, что верлибр содержит метрический стих, потому что нельзя путать случайную регулярность в��рлибра – появляющуюся по смысловым и ритмическим причинам – со строгим правилом, которое поэт не может свободно менять. Суть размера и рифмы в том, что они ограничивают и что им необходимо следовать всегда – а не выбирать в качестве средства художественной выразительности из палитры других средств…»
February 19, 2022
This is just an EXCEPTIONAL piece of literary criticism. Meillassoux's reading of Mallarmé's coup de dés begins from the seemingly trivial decipherment of a code related to the number of letters in the poem, before evolving into a breathtaking argument on how the poem is not simply an effect of chance, but allows its author Mallarmé to BECOME chance itself. I think Meillassoux's thesis is a Deleuzian one, which champions becoming (the notion of 'perhaps') over being. What is more impressive than his conclusion however is how he gets there THROUGH his reading of Mallaramé's poem - a tightly-woven 'decipherment' that respects the author while also respecting the text, creating a beautiful convergence between author and reader. Furthermore, Meillassoux's reading advances with the thrill of a mystery novel peppered with the joy of linguistic and thematic resonances - a tone sufficiently clear and impressively sustained yet also so playful in its 'quavering'. This is essential reading for people interested in the possibilities of what literary criticism can be - both in terms of insight, and enjoyment!
Kudos as well to the translator Robin Mackay, who has expertly captured Meillassoux's linguistic games and revelations! I'm especially grateful for how he provided the original poems in French alongside his English translations for comparison.
All in all, this is just everything I love about literary criticism. It's a great introduction to Mallarmé's poetry too, which I really want to read more of now!
Kudos as well to the translator Robin Mackay, who has expertly captured Meillassoux's linguistic games and revelations! I'm especially grateful for how he provided the original poems in French alongside his English translations for comparison.
All in all, this is just everything I love about literary criticism. It's a great introduction to Mallarmé's poetry too, which I really want to read more of now!
February 22, 2021
Ce livre érudit se lit comme un roman policier. Il analyse et décortique le coup de dé de Mallarmé, texte révolutionnaire ayant influencé toute la poésie moderne.
Et si derrière le coup de dé, coup de folie poétique se cachait autre chose ? Et si Mallarmé avait caché un message caché, un code disant beaucoup de sa vision du monde ?
Brillant
Et si derrière le coup de dé, coup de folie poétique se cachait autre chose ? Et si Mallarmé avait caché un message caché, un code disant beaucoup de sa vision du monde ?
Brillant
May 30, 2019
A page-turner that investigates a Mallarmean aesthetics of (de)coding. The translator aptly calls it "a Da Vinci Code for the Being and Event generation."
April 25, 2021
Valuable and inscrutable at the same time.
October 4, 2025
I understood like %5 of this book. It's not to say it's a bad book, I just personally didn't enjoy it because I don't know what the fuck this French dude is talking about.
March 22, 2013
It's difficult to rate a book the sole thesis of which is confirmed whether or not one agrees with it, but I have to at least admire the author's inventiveness.
I came to The Number and the Siren completely unfamiliar with Mallarme's Un Coup de des, so I'm probably the best candidate for a book that's promoting a highly unorthodox interpretation of it. I really dug Meillassoux's debut, After Finitude, and couldn't help but read the only other book available by him in English. And while I wish it would have drawn more from the project laid out in AF, The Number and the Siren did flirt with some familiar themes.
For the casual reader, the detail will seem a bit extreme (and thoroughly pretentious), but if one can make it through to the end, rewards do await. While a scientist would read the book and immediately recognize the thesis as an unfalsifiable claim, I think Meillassoux is interested in more than proving his hypothesis; he's wondering aloud about the nature of such claims and how they have a sort of an irresistible "infinite" quality about them.
So... four stars? One star? Five stars? Oh, I don't know. Undecidability is a bitch sometimes.
I came to The Number and the Siren completely unfamiliar with Mallarme's Un Coup de des, so I'm probably the best candidate for a book that's promoting a highly unorthodox interpretation of it. I really dug Meillassoux's debut, After Finitude, and couldn't help but read the only other book available by him in English. And while I wish it would have drawn more from the project laid out in AF, The Number and the Siren did flirt with some familiar themes.
For the casual reader, the detail will seem a bit extreme (and thoroughly pretentious), but if one can make it through to the end, rewards do await. While a scientist would read the book and immediately recognize the thesis as an unfalsifiable claim, I think Meillassoux is interested in more than proving his hypothesis; he's wondering aloud about the nature of such claims and how they have a sort of an irresistible "infinite" quality about them.
So... four stars? One star? Five stars? Oh, I don't know. Undecidability is a bitch sometimes.
November 10, 2014
Superb forensic dissection of Stephan Mallarme's late 19th century metaphysical poem THE ROLL OF THE DICE DOES NOT ABOLISH TIME. Using it as a platform for defining the new Speculative Realism in the decodification of objects through an alien phenomenology. Not so much the death of phenomenology as its natural epistemology. This is quantum linguistics. The attributions to things as they are, not as we perceive them to be through the stained glassed filters of our own humanisms.
The kicker is the link up with object oriented programing in computer science.
The ways in which we think about objects in our world and our relationships to them is being delivered as a computational reality instantly. Thus our ideas are literally sculpting the world we inhabit at the rate that we think.
Amazing blueprint for what will happen next.
The kicker is the link up with object oriented programing in computer science.
The ways in which we think about objects in our world and our relationships to them is being delivered as a computational reality instantly. Thus our ideas are literally sculpting the world we inhabit at the rate that we think.
Amazing blueprint for what will happen next.
September 30, 2013
Compelling and silly at the same time. By focusing on numerological decoding of the text, it devolved into an inherently superficial reading, riddled with presuppositions of Mallarmé's intentions. That said, I didn't decide to stop reading it either, though cam close at the transition point between its two major sections. In part I think I was just enjoying reading and thinking about Mallarmé again, enough to keep me engaged in Meillassoux's project.
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