Abstract

This paper examines the differences between Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek’s articulations of‘impossibility’ in their readings of the French experimental symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé. Thediscussion will focus on how Badiou and Žižek diverge in their respective understandings ofimpossibility as a hallmark of the Lacanian Real in Mallarmé’s oeuvre. This difference is framed inlight of the way that Badiou and Žižek consonantly turn to the modernist poet Mallarmé to understandthe conditions under which the subject can attempt to access this imperative/idea. Herein it will beshown that two relations become apparent: ‘subtraction’ and ‘purification’; ‘subtraction’ as the removalof the imaginary contents from the subject’s self-relation in an attempt to access the future antérieurand ‘purification’ as the attempt to purify the pure idea by locating the opaque core of the aestheticobject as the point of failure in the relation with the object