More from the transcription/translation work:
Placing to hide in darkness [Positioning in darkness?]: annihilation
Every choice implies that everything that is chosen be highlighted and that what is rejected be left outside, because choice is preference and sacrifice: choosing one demands sacrificing the other. We can therefore describe artistic choice either as a procedure which shows forth the essential element or as a process which destroys, according as we insist on one or the other of its aspects: “the one who wants to be a creator in the good and the bad,” Nietzsche says, “must first be a destroyer and a breaker of values.”
Destruction can have a great force of seduction and of fascination. Certain artists push it to the extreme while desiring to attain an even greater creative purity. Many modern artists feel this character of artistic choice very keenly. Let us cite this very evocative passage by George Poulet with regard to Mallarmé:
An act of creation which is wrapped in negation and silence both before it and behind it like a poem which is written on a white piece of paper which is at the same time initial and final. For that poem is left only to be dissolved in order to authenticate the silence. Such is Igitur, the perfect example of a philosophical suicide.In order to create his dream, the poet acted as God does. He began by making the void.
A philosophical suicide is the only possible operation. And since it is only a philosophical” suicide it can always be repeated. It is the act of negation by which in any moment and only for that moment one can found his existence and his thought…
You need to be able to feel all of the parallels which Mallarmé himself had to make between the Cartesian act of consciousness by which existence is based upon thought, and the act of consciousness, properly Mallarméan, in which thought creates existence. On both sides everything begins with fiction, that is by a hyperbolic doubting at the end of which we finish by abolishing reality and thus make in ourselves and around ourselves [I can’t translate that]. There’s a doubt which becomes a negation, but a negation which we desire and will. “I want to think that everything is false.” And by this act of negation and elimination, everything else is reduced to this sole will, and it is in this act of will that Cartesian being is discovered to be at the same time to be thinking and by consequence, existing. Its existence, therefore is detached from the act of will by which he wants to annihilate everything, and he wants so to speak to make its positive presence surge forth upon a total act of negation. You only have to push that a little bit further, as does Mallarmé, in order to get to say something like this: “by an act of the will which gives life, I arrive at an act of the will which creates.”
--M.-D. Philippe, Philosopy of Art, "Artistic Choice"
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