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Die Dichtung und die Religion

Zu Mallarmés Toast funèbre

Gesang, Bernward | Bollack, Jean

Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Bd. 51 (2006), Iss. 1: S. 106–117

Zusätzliche Informationen

Bibliografische Daten

Gesang, Bernward

Bollack, Jean

Abstract

In his poem ›Toast funébre‹, Mallarmé gives a form to the commemoration of the dead poet Théophile Gautier by confronting the religious practice with the art of the word in a programmatic and strictly antithetic manner. To renounce the former implies to achieve the latter. Religion consists of empty forms; a play with phantoms shows, in the realm of cosmic wings, the absurdity of the beyond. Language opens a sphere for innerwordly transcendency which is accomplished in artistic modernity on the basis of cathartic atheism.