Mallarmé Quotes

“The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

“For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird's folded wing, or a fan never opened.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“We do not have to plump for the one or the other [extreme].
We experience the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the event and the non-event. Just as, according to Hannah Arendt, we are confronted in any action with the unforeseeable and the irreversible.
But, since the irreversible today is the movement towards virtual ascendancy over the world, towards total control and technological 'enframing', towards the tyranny of absolute prevention and technical security, we have left to us only the unpredictable, the luck of the event.
And just as Mallarmé said that a throw of the dice would never abolish chance - that is to say, there would never be an ultimate dice throw which, by its automatic perfection, would put an end to chance - so we may hope that virtual programming will never abolish events.
Never will the point of technical perfection and absolute prevention be reached where the fateful event can be said to have disappeared.
There will always be a chance for the troubling strangeness [das Unheimliche] of the event, as against the troubling monotony of the global order.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact