Quentin Meillassoux: The Number and The Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés (2011/2012) [French, English]

“A meticulous literary study, a detective story à la Edgar Allan Poe, a treasure-hunt worthy of an adventure novel – such is the register in which can be deciphered the hidden secrets of a poem like no other. Quentin Meillassoux, author of After Finitude, continues his philosophical interrogation of the concepts of chance, contingency, infinity and eternity through a concentrated study of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de dés, patiently deciphering its enigmatic meaning on the basis of a dazzlingly simple and lucid insight with regard to that ‘unique Number that cannot be another’.

Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard constitutes perhaps the most radical break in the history of modern poetry: the fractured lines spanning the double page, the typographical play borrowed from the poster form, the multiplication of interpolations disrupting reading. But the intrigue of this poem is still stranger, always resistant to full elucidation. We encounter a shipwreck, and a Master, himself almost submerged, who clasps in his hand the dice that, confronted by the furious waves, he hesitates to throw. The hero expects this throw, if it takes place, to be extraordinarily important: a Number said to be ‘unique’ and which ‘can be no other’.

The decisive point of the investigation proposed by Meillassoux comes with a discovery, unsettling and yet as simple as a child’s game. All the dimensions of the Number, understood progressively, articulate between them but one sole condition: that this Number should ultimately be delivered to us by a secret code, hidden in the Coup de dés like a key that finally unlocks every one of its poetic devices. Thus is also unveiled the meaning of that siren, emerging for a lightning-flash amongst the debris of the shipwreck: as the living heart of a drama that is still unfolding.

The English volume contains the entire text of the Coup de dés and three other poems, with new translations.”

Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé
Publisher Fayard, 2011
ISBN 2213666989, 9782213666983
256 pages

English edition
Translated by Robin Mackay
Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, and Sequence Press, New York, 2012
ISBN 9780983216926
306 pages

Review (Michael Reid, Mute)
Review (Adam Kotsko, The New Inquiry)
Review (Thomas H. Ford, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy)
Review (Edward K. Kaplan, Nineteenth-Century French Studies)
Review (Brian Kim Stefans, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Graham Harman’s blog post about the book, part 2

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Publisher (EN)

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PDF, PDF (English, updated on 2015-1-24)

Machiko Kusahara: Toward Digital Biodiversity: A View on Correlation of Digital Technology and Culture through Analysis of Media Art and Entertainment (2001)

This dissertation deals with the relationship between contemporary media art and digital technology. The main focus is on the analysis of the nature of interaction between art and technology. Through a series of case studies, various interactions are analyzed. This will be dealt with from a number of different perspectives, yet always within the context of media culture and society. The way media art and technology simultaneously both influence and are influenced by society and culture will be considered from the perspectives of art history, science, perception and media research. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop conceptual methods for a better understanding of the modalities of human-computer interaction.

Dissertation thesis
The University of Tokyo, January 2001
180 pages

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Charles Bazerman: Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (1988)

The immense force of scientific knowledge in our world has in recent years commanded the attention of a number of scholarly disciplines, ranging from the history of science to literary theory, from philosophy to the teaching of writing. Each foray into the language of science, however, has been motivated by the discipline and school of the researcher. Shaping Written Knowledge confronts scientific language more directly, by making its special character the real center of the inquiry. Original and extensive, this work will be of great interest to scholars concerned with the sociology and history of science, language theory, the history of literacy, the rhetoric of knowledge, technical writing, and the teaching of composition.

The emergence of the experimental article in science, Bazerman shows, is a response to the social and rhetorical situation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy activated by the need to communicate findings and the exigencies of conflict that arise from communication. The appearance of the argumentative forms of scientific writing are coincident with the rise of the scientific community and the development of experimental procedures. All three interactively structure each other. Bazerman shows that later developments of the experimental article, in both the physical and social sciences of the twentieth century, have been made within the contexts of various disciplines. An understanding of what forces have shaped the experimental report, what functions the features were designed to serve, and the impact of rhetoric on the rest of scientific activity help to evaluate all statements of knowledge and increase our ability to make intelligent writing choices.

Edited for digital presentation by Patricia Klei
Publisher University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 1988
ISBN 0299116905, 9780299116903
356 pages

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