Against the backdrop of a delirious shipwreck, ocean and sky merging in one nocturnal tide, “solitaire éperdue” a plume floats across the pages of Stephane Mallarmé’s Un Coup De Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897). Hovering between submersion and salvation, the defiant feather is “stiff and derisory” in its whiteness, a bitter joke in the face of the dark abyss to which it is prey. At first, the fate of this chromatic insolence seems already spelled out, but the rhythm of the poem thwarts our desire for a grand finale. More than its foreseeable capitulation to the currents, it is the hazardous oscillation between flight and apnoea that grants the white feather a central role in the script. What Mallarmé is after is the vacillating tempo of the “AS IF.” The master of the ship, a “bitter shipwrecked prince,” accompanies the plume in the execution of this epically faltering beat. Tightly clenched in his hand are dice to gamble on the destiny of his vessel. Yet, he hesitates to fling them into the tempest. His arm already stretched into the storm, he does not let them go. In the end the dice are never cast; only a madman would rely on a number to outwit chance. The prince remains mute and apologetic. It is precisely in such muteness that meaning is to be found. Un Coup De Dés is not only an ode to the untameable rule of chance, but also a meditation on the nature of thought. There is a kind of negation at stake in the poem which exceeds the province of randomness –mining the grand anthropocentric scheme of the enlightment– to articulate something more impalpable, which manifests itself in the guise of speechlessness or immobility. “La pensée” is what is affirmed in this negation. This is not rational thought, impeached by fear and defeated by chance, nor is it irrational, as the moment of peril calls for strong nerves. Mallarmé is pointing to something different: the ideal of naked thinking. It could be visualized as white spacing between words, like the regions of virgin paper that surround the scattered verses of Un Coup de Dés. At pains to validate his eclectic use of the page, in the preface to the poem Mallarmé described these negative blanks as “bare thought.” In print, the hesitations that delay the unreeling of the plot mimic the same negation. All along, la pensèe is the underlying protagonist. Its character develops below the threshold of the verse, underwater one could say. While the ship is doomed to disappearance, its legend soon to be swallowed by the ordinary, what survives at the end of the poem is a constellation up in the sky witnessing the deluge and “surveying / doubting / rolling / shining and meditating.” As if the earthly calamity was only the pretext for an image of sidereal concentration. Aimless because helpless, thought needed chance to strip itself. Hence, the concluding line, “Tout pensée émet un Coup de Dés.”