Mallarmé’s language-in-itself poetics replaces worldly narration with a self-referential Book.

Evidence

A poetics of language-in-itself. It sanctions the moment when language, as if satisfied with its perfection, ceases to take for its object the recounting of its connection with particular surroundings, to concentrate solely upon its fervor to exceed its limits and reveal thoroughly the elements composing itsolely upon its engineering skill with these. This practice does not proceed without rambling, because rambling-as Mallarmé weIl knew-is an absolute challenge to narrative. Rather than discovering or telling about the world, it is a matter of producing an equivalent, which would be the Book, in which everything would be said, without anything’s being reported. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 181

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the poetics of language-in-itself as a key contrast term against which Glissant will develop his own Relation-based poetics.
• XREF: The language-in-itself / structure lineage echoes the detour toward totalizing form that Glissant elsewhere opposes to opacity and Relation — relevant to the reader’s tracing of essentialist vs relational identity models.