A la recherche du language: `L'Après-midi d'un faune'

Based upon a close reading of "L'Après-midi d'un faune," the article suggests that Mallarmé's crisis resulted from his dissatisfaction with divine or idealistic accounts of the origins of language and his subsequent interest in the relationship between desire and language. That relationship can be elucidated in a Lacanian, psychoanalytical perspective, which concentrates upon the theory of the subject. In the course of the poem, the faun reflects upon the nymphs as a metaphor of his desire. After discovering, both in them and within himself, a constitutive division, he goes on to experience the disjunction of the signifier of desire and the linguistic signified. After attempting in vain their reconciliation, he discovers at the heart of the signifying process the law of castration that maintains the division of the subject and remains the condition of his entry into language. (In French) (GJvanS)