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Un Amour de Hahn: Of Literature and Life

Where has french theory gone? But what was “french theory”? A misnomer for the vicissitudes of a certain number of French readings of German-language texts once they arrived on North American shores? Or was it, at its most succinct, the fate of reading itself as mediated by all that attracted a half century of French thinkers to confront the limit case of Mallarmé? It was the latter proposition that attracted me in Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts: Mallarmé wending his way through postwar French thought like a radioactive tracer through the tissue of an organism. If “theory”—or philosophy—in France had in some sense gone “literary,” it was, it seemed to me, in and through a relation to the writing of Mallarmé. But our interim, PMLA's question suggests, is in some ways a posttheoretical one. What that probably means is that with the passing of certain major figures from the “theoretical scene,” we are living in a period in which the most revealing genre might well be literary biography: a dogged and occasionally humbling reality check against the headier excesses of speculation. It was with that thought in mind that I turned to Jean-Luc Steinmetz's recent biography of Mallarmé and ended up spinning this fable—of literature and life—around the single greatest surprise his work afforded me. In its effort to assemble an array of peripheral data into what Roger Caillois used to call a “cohérence aventureuse,” what follows, I would suggest, bears an essential relation to what is still, in some quarters, called theory.