Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.
Maurice Blanchot's writings have played a critical role in the development of 20th-century French thought, but the implicit tension in this role has rarely been addressed directly. Reading Blanchot involves understanding how literature can have an effect on philosophy, to the extent of putting philosophy itself in question by exposing a different and literary mode of thought. However, as this mode is to be found most substantially in the peculiar density of his fictional writings, rather than in his theoretical or critical works, the demand on readers to grasp its implications for thought is rendered more difficult. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature provides a detailed and far-reaching explication of how Blanchot's works changed in the postwar period during which he arrived at this complex and distinctive form of writing.
What does it mean to come after Blanchot? Three things, at least. First, it is to recognise that it is no longer possible to believe in an essentialist determination of literary discourse or of aesthetic experience. All this has disappeared; and there is no way back. Second, there is the question of history. What is Blanchot's legacy to us, his readers? Any name, however irreplaceably singular, is always already preceded, limited, challenged even, by the abiding anonymity of the person, animal, or thing it claims to name. Every name is necessarily impersonal, anonymous, other. Blanchot after Blanchot, then, can best be understood in the sense of that which is according to Blanchot - and that is nothing other than the infinite process of reading and rereading Blanchot: without end. Here, a third meaning to the phrase after Blanchot comes into view. For if we come after Blanchot, it is surely because Blanchot is still before us, still in front, still in the future, still to come.
This book is a translation of Maurice Blanchot's work that is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challenges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the beginning: writing, death, transgression, the neuter, but here the figures around whom his discussion turns are Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarme and Kafka. The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others.
The first book to provide a detailed account of fragmentary writing in the work of the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003).
In this landmark volume, Blanchot sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers whose contributions have marked turning points in the history of Western thought and have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect the contemporary literary and philosophical debate today. "Blanchot waits for us still to come, to be read and reread. . . I would say that never as much as today have I pictured him so far ahead of us." Jacques Derrida
Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May ’68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the ’30s. Now translated into English, Christophe Bident’s magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident’s book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy. The book is also a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident’s extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot’s work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot’s life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot’s life itself becomes an oeuvre—becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident’s sophisticated reading of Blanchot’s life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot’s detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized. This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.
Featuring essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française, this collection clearly demonstrates why Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.
