La Production du sens: `Un spectacle interrompu'

On the surface Stéphane Mallarmé's prose poem "Un spectacle interrompu" narrates the anecdote of a misinterpretation that interrupts the circulation-of-meaning understood as the contents of any traditional text established on differentiated a prioris. Underlying the crisis of the theos, however, is the suspension of all meaning in a momentary eruption of non-sense. The narrative reader enters this crisis of the logos with a "new" interpretation that produces an "original" meaning. Through a process of self-reflection the text reveals the moment of suspension, recognizes that it cannot recuperate the meaningless hole in its midst, and spins a tale of meaning around it. This productive work rejects the "between" whose sudden uncovering the text recovers in order to resolve the crisis of indifferenciation. In order to be successful the traditional text must rely on its own logical violence rejecting that moment of non-sense that lies, paradoxically, at the origin of its meaning and acts as a catalyst for the appearance of its subject-reader. (In French) (MLA)