"The genuine infinity of being, though it is related to the multiple, is not bound to any bounds of reckoning, and does not carry any relation."
Alain Badiou makes this startling ontological observation about a non-relational being which is pure multiplicity and yet isolated in non-relation in his essay 'Mallarme's Method'.
The remark is all the more startling because it is not only Badiouean but also curiously Mallarmean. It's a point in his reading of the French poet which remains testimony to the way literature bends a philosophical system when that system makes inroads into its body.
Literature thinks in its own right and while it shares its fundamental operators in thought with those of philosophy, it's never entirely dependent on philosophical thinking. Literary thinking makes its presence felt precisely where it departs from a systemic as well as systematic philosophical thinking after coming perilously close to being identified with its systematicity.
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