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What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflexion, now the language of narrative fiction? And what relation does writing have to the limit that defines it, but, by exposing it to the limitlessness that lies beyond it, also threatens its possibility? These are some of the questions raised by three of the most provocative and influential French writers of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), and Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Examining all three together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy whilst at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and spectres that go under the name of literature. It considers in detail the philosophical and literary heritage shared by all three writers (Sade, Hegel, and Nietzsche), and analyses in turn both the philosophical writing and literary output of all three authors, paying particular attention to Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, Le Bleu du ciel, and Madame Edwarda; Klossowski's Les Lois de l'hospitalité, and Blanchot's Le Très-Haut and Le Dernier Homme.

This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the specificity of literature in distinction from one of its others—namely, philosophy—but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the text and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is, the book holds, the unreflected presupposition of both realist, or historicist, and reflective, or deconstructive, criticism. This book argues that the scenes of production within literary works, created by their authors yet independent of those authors' intentions, stage a work's own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation. In the book's construction of these scenes, in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence, certain images prevail: the fold, the star, the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts, the text not only puts into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of argumentation that, in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality, is on a par with it. The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautramont, Nerval, de l'Isle Adam, Huysman, Flaubert, Artaud, Blanchot, Defoe, and Melville.

This is a full-length book in English on the noted French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This book introduces the range of Lacoue-Labarthe's thinking, demonstrating the systematic nature of his philosophical project. Focusing in particular on the dynamic of the loss of the subject and its possible post-deconstructive recovery, it places Lacoue-Labarthe's achievements in the context of related philosophers, most importantly Nancy, Derrida, and Blanchot.

This book is about dreams. It looks at the works of several authors that make the dream a central concern. “I sleep, but my heart wakes,” says the Song of Songs. “The other night” names the sleepless night we spend in dreams. From Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams to Joyce's Finnegans Wake, many of the great writing projects of the first half of the twentieth century articulate experiences of waking in the very depths of sleep, where no “I” can declare itself present though the heart still beats. After World War II, in the cold light of the closure of the age of dream books, Beckett and Blanchot discover with new clarity, and new fatigue, that what wakes when the “I” sleeps doesn't sleep when the “I” wakes. Revisiting Freud's argument that the dream is a form of writing, this book looks at how life becomes literature in this wakefulness. Though we seem to be seeing things in our dreams, we are actually confronted with a kind of writing. This writing is not in our power, and yet it is ours. We are responsible for it in the same strange way that we are responsible for our lives.

The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive and responsible thinking about “the undeniable experience of the alterity of the other”, this book examines exemplary instances of the relation to the other, e.g. the relation of Moses to God, Derrida's friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, and Derrida's relation to a recently departed actress caught on video, to demonstrate how Derrida forces us to reconceive who or what the other may be. For Derrida, the singularity of the other, always written in the lower case, includes not only the formal or logical sense of alterity, the otherness of the human other, but also the otherness of the nonliving, the no longer living, or the not yet alive. The book explores welcoming and hospitality, salutation and greeting, “approaching”, and mourning as constitutive facets of the relation to these others. Addressing Derrida's readings of Husserl, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, and Nancy, among other thinkers, and ranging across a number of disciplines, including art, literature, philosophy, and religion, this book explores the apparitions of the other by attending to the mode of appearing or coming on the scene, the phenomenality and visibility of the other. Analyzing some of Derrida's essays on the visual arts, the book also demonstrates that video and photography display an intimate relation to “spectrality”, as well as a structural relation to the absolute singularity of the other.

This book examines the possibility of writing the other, explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible, and discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected criticism. It focuses on the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Martin Heidegger and examines how the question of the other engages the very limits of philosophy, rationality, and power. The book's horizon is ethics in the Levinasian sense: the question of the other, which, on the hither side of language understood as a system of signs and of representation, must be welcomed by language and preserved in its alterity. Martin Heidegger's elucidation of a more essential understanding of Being entails a deconstruction of onto-theology, of the sign and the grammatical and logical determinations of language, all decisive starting points for Levinas and Blanchot. At stake for both Levinas and Blanchot is how to mark a nondiscursive excess within discourse without erasing or reducing it. How should one read and write the other in the same without reducing the other to the same? Critics in recent years have discussed an “ethical moment or turn” characterized by the other's irruption into the order of discourse. The other becomes a true crossroads of disciplines, since it affects several aspects of discourse: the constitution of the subject, the status of knowledge, the nature of representation, and what that representation represses. Yet there has been a tendency to graft the other onto paradigms whose main purpose is to reassess questions of identity, fundamentally in terms of representation; the other thus loses some of its most crucial features.

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community (2014). Unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot’s text, Nancy’s essay addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot’s thinking. These themes and motifs include: their respective readings of Georges Bataille, notably his political writings as well as his appeal to the “community of lovers”; pre- and post-war responses in France to fascism and communism; the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; the relation between the disenchantment with democracy and “aristocratic anarchism”; readings of Marguerite Duras’s récit, The Malady of Death; references to the Eucharist and Christianity; and a rethinking of politics and the political. In short, the exchange between Blanchot and Nancy opens up a rethinking of community that raises at once questions of affirmation and critique, of avowal and disavowal.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind identifies a decreative ethics, whereby self-dispossession underwrites an ethical obligation to preserve the other from harm. The author shows how obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: between the other’s subject affirmation and one’s own dislocation, between what one has and what one has to give, between a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand of asking nothing. In the unfolding and reiteration of themes issuing from the other’s claim upon oneself develops a complex picture of the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality. Just how these tensions both subtend and undercut an other-centered ethics of preservation is the question this book tarries with. By proposing a way to read the distinct ethical charge of the other’s claim not to be harmed, Decreation and the Ethical Bind offers a novel treatment of the concept of decreation in the thought of Simone Weil, putting her work in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler. In examining themes of ethical obligation, vulnerability and the force of weak speech, the present study places Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech are bound up with questions of ethical appeal. It contributes a new and critical voice to the current conversation in theory and criticism that addresses a difficult form of ethics that isn’t grounded in subjective agency and narrative fruition, but in the risks taken to fulfill the claims it makes.

This book addresses the interplay between modes of writing, modes of understanding, and modes of being in the world. Drawing on literary, anthropological and autobiographical sources, the book explores writing as a technics akin to ritual, oral storytelling, magic and meditation that enables us to reach beyond the limits of everyday life and forge virtual relationships and imagined communities. Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of writing, the passion and paradox of literature lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible—a leap of faith that calls to mind the mystic's dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, and the ethnographer's attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. Every writer, whether of ethnography, poetry, or fiction, imagines that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.

Published posthumously in 2011, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, the implications of which are steeped in political and ethical stakes. Ranking alongside the works of better-known interlocutors for Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking such as Plato, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, or Heidegger, Blanchot’s writings represent a decisive crossroads of almost all of Lacoue-Labarthe’s central concerns. The latter converge here on the question of literature and, in particular, of literature as the question of myth–in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death, a myth with which Lacoue-Labarthe himself had to contend, namely through his experience of reading–and writing after–Maurice Blanchot. But the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely (auto)biographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis and to which all Western literature is subject. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot’s thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes. In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot’s writings, setting them among a variety of key texts by writers and thinkers as diverse as Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, or Derrida, this translation further familiarizes English-speaking audiences with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s groundbreaking work and, as such, with contemporary debates in French thought, criticism, and aesthetics.

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.