The proposal to summon Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Alain Badiou to a talk on Mallarmé's ideas on theatre coincided with a particular moment in the contemporary European debate, affected by the consequences of the collapse of the so-called socialist bloc and the enthronement of the hegemonic discourse of the end of history and ideologies. which supported the idea of the market society as the only possible world.

Thus, in this context, of deepening social inequalities and forms of perpetuation of power and symbolic domination, new questions arose among many leftist intellectuals about possible silent, underground paths of political emancipation, and also a special attention to the nineteenth century, the century of History. of the emergence of the proletariat and of popular rebellions.