Cou coupé poetry

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading of Mallarmé’s poem Herodiade, specifically of the fragment “Cantique de Saint-Jean”, in which the figure of the beheading goes along with a possible idea of ‘salvation’ (salut), defined as a mundane ‘toast’ (salut) – or a “coucou”, in the more familiar and irreverent greeting of Apollinaire’s – that is, a way of thinking the ‘community’. Our aim is to highlight the limitations of the thesis of the historical emptying of the so-called ‘aestheticism’, showing how Mallarmé’s famous ‘cratilism’, of poetry as the reward of “languages’ fault” – this sort of religion of effect – co-exhists in a productive and conflictive way with the poem’s assigned task of reappropriation of the sacred, taken as a device for the understanding of the human thing, in cultural and anthropological terms – a sort of effect of profanation.