Jacques Rancière, Steven Corcoran (translator) · 1996 · PDF · Calibre ID 8698
Resurfaced in A Crowd Still to Come (2026-10-13).
Role in the triad
The refusal: the discrete siren and the crowd still to come
Why this book
Gives the siren a politics: Mallarmé waits for ‘a crowd still to come’ and refuses the Saint-Simonian industrial hymn — the exact negative of Baku; reads ‘Salut’ and ‘A la nue accablante tu’ as sea fables on the question Blanchot asks of Ulysses.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “sirens do not exist, except in the writings of poets.” (p. 6)
- “the poet is unable to make himself heard to a crowd still to come” (p. 5)
- “it is the act, the suspension itself of fiction. It is the transformation of the narrative into a vanishing hypothesis.” (p. 7)
- “Industry made religious; religion made industrial – in order to establish the new hymn and theatre and replace the representative political machine.” (p. 28)
- “the conditions do not yet exist for the union of poet and crowd in ‘the hymn of spiritual hearts’.” (p. 33)
- “So it is pointless to try to cut short the ‘tunnel of the times’ and alight, today already, at some ‘central station’” (p. 34)
- “The orchestra conductor’s movement retains the mystery in its place and warns the crowd about adoring itself in the new temple.” (p. 38)
Themes
arabesque · crowd to come · hymn of spiritual hearts · hypothesis · Mallarmé · orchestra vs chorus · religion of artifice · restricted action · Saint-Simonians · siren