The Nothing of Mallarmé with the Anxiety of Heidegger

Abstract

In this short essay, Jean‐Luc Marion pays fitting homage to Pierre Cahné by reading Stephen Mallarmé's “With her pure nails offering their onyx high, …/Ses pur ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx, …” sonnet of 1887 with Martin Heidegger's phenomenological concept of anxiety. On the speculative hypothesis that Mallarmé and Heidegger encounter the same phenomenon, as void and anxiety respectively, Marion stages an indirect meeting between the poet and the philosopher. This essay asks simply “what does the poet see that the philosopher does not?” and, inversely, “what does the philosopher understand that the poet does not?” In doing so, Marion approaches a synthesis of the two perspectives: reading Mallarmé and Heidegger side by side allows one to see, like the poet, and to understand, like the philosopher, the same phenomenon. Through a close engagement with the finely balanced internal structure of the sonnet, alongside Heidegger's phenomenological descriptions, Marion shows how the inner reflection of the sonnet stages, poetically, the Nothing that Heidegger's fundamental mood of anxiety discloses, pulling each in directions neither alone would follow.