Sarah Clift
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823254200
- eISBN:
- 9780823261161
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823254200.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Chapter 5 develops the insights generated in Chapter 4 about the inextricability of the necessary and the contingent, and seeks to give it a concrete specificity in the writings of Maurice Blanchot. ...
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Chapter 5 develops the insights generated in Chapter 4 about the inextricability of the necessary and the contingent, and seeks to give it a concrete specificity in the writings of Maurice Blanchot. So the final chapter turns to Blanchot’s reading of Hegel in ”Literature and the Right to Death” and to questions of memory and mourning that arise in a neglected text by Blanchot in which he considers his own writing in terms of history. The language of après-coup (the title of Blanchot’s reflections and Lacan’s term for Freudian Nachträglichkeit) permeates Blanchot’s attempt to grasp two pre-war récits, and results in a failure to reconcile the past with what would turn out to be the future. This failure promotes the sense of a radical discontinuity between the past and the future, one that has largely escaped the few commentaries on this work, and it also provides the opportunity to reflect in concrete ways on how temporal discontinuity might inform an ethics of memory. For, while it is incontestable that Blanchot rejects all notions of the edifying power of memory, the chapter also suggests that he offers the possibility of a non-redemptive account of memory open to-indeed grounded in-that aspect of the future which it cannot possibly capture.Less
Chapter 5 develops the insights generated in Chapter 4 about the inextricability of the necessary and the contingent, and seeks to give it a concrete specificity in the writings of Maurice Blanchot. So the final chapter turns to Blanchot’s reading of Hegel in ”Literature and the Right to Death” and to questions of memory and mourning that arise in a neglected text by Blanchot in which he considers his own writing in terms of history. The language of après-coup (the title of Blanchot’s reflections and Lacan’s term for Freudian Nachträglichkeit) permeates Blanchot’s attempt to grasp two pre-war récits, and results in a failure to reconcile the past with what would turn out to be the future. This failure promotes the sense of a radical discontinuity between the past and the future, one that has largely escaped the few commentaries on this work, and it also provides the opportunity to reflect in concrete ways on how temporal discontinuity might inform an ethics of memory. For, while it is incontestable that Blanchot rejects all notions of the edifying power of memory, the chapter also suggests that he offers the possibility of a non-redemptive account of memory open to-indeed grounded in-that aspect of the future which it cannot possibly capture.
