Jean Bollack

In his poem ›Toast funébre‹, Mallarmé gives a form to the commemoration of the dead poet Théophile Gautier by confronting the religious practice with the art of the word in a programmatic and strictly antithetic manner. To renounce the former implies to achieve the latter. Religion consists of empty forms; a play with phantoms shows, in the realm of cosmic wings, the absurdity of the beyond. Language opens a sphere for innerwordly transcendency which is accomplished in artistic modernity on the basis of cathartic atheism. mehr