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The Absent Author: Maurice Blanchot and the Subjection of Politics

in The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France

This chapter analyzes the works of literary critic Maurice Blanchot. His youthful interwar writings helped shape a discourse of the nation, its substance and borders, haunted by the figure of an ... More

This chapter analyzes the works of literary critic Maurice Blanchot. His youthful interwar writings helped shape a discourse of the nation, its substance and borders, haunted by the figure of an “other,” and articulated an obsession with the way the subject can emerge undivided and in harmony with the social body—concerns that far-right writers like Thierry Maulnier, Jean–Pierre Maxence, and Jean de Fabrègues also addressed. Politics and literature were the sites where Blanchot worked through his possible answer to the crisis of subjectivity, self, and nation, and his relation to the difference which became associated with Jewishness. Like the Young New Right intellectuals he was close to, Blanchot attempted to find a resolution to a seemingly untenable political situation, that of interwar France perceived to be in the throes of a cultural and moral crisis.Less

The Task of the Doppelgänger: Jean Paul as Collocutor of Maurice Blanchot

Dimitris Vardoulakis

in The Doppelgänger: Literature's Philosophy

This chapter examines the three tasks of the Doppelgänger, looking at the issues of literature, criticism, and philosophy with the disappearance of the presence effected by ... More

This chapter examines the three tasks of the Doppelgänger, looking at the issues of literature, criticism, and philosophy with the disappearance of the presence effected by the Doppelgänger. It looks into the works of Maurice Blanchot and Jean Paul. In the Doppelgänger's reflection, both the subject and the law can only be present as absent—that is, not framed by the opposition between presence and absence. In this sense, the chapter argues that there is collusion between Jean Paul and Maurice Blanchot. This allows for the operative presence of the Doppelgänger, which unfolds on the fault lines of literature, criticism, and philosophy. The Doppelgänger arises at the points where each inquiry reaches a limit, transforming itself into something else. The collocution of Jean Paul and Blanchot holds that the canon is not merely a list of authors compiled by the critic but arises out of the absent presence of the doppelgänger.Less

Literary Unrest: Maurice Blanchot's Rewriting of Levinas

in The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought

This chapter considers Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas in dialogue to reveal a theory of the trope. It argues that Blanchot approaches Levinas's account of ethics and Judaism with a concern for ... More

This chapter considers Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas in dialogue to reveal a theory of the trope. It argues that Blanchot approaches Levinas's account of ethics and Judaism with a concern for the function of uprootedness not only in literature but also in politics. Although Blanchot consistently declared allegiance to Levinas and rarely criticized his philosophy, the chapter suggests that his conception of literature nevertheless leads to a subtle critique of Levinas. In particular, Blanchot disagrees with Levinas's frequent claim that Judaism will provide the way forward for a new universalizing humanism. As a result, Blanchot radicalizes the notion of deracination and, thus, the figural Jew. Consequently, the chapter claims that being Jewish comes to represent an exigency which calls into question allegiances of any sort.Less

By the Board: Derrida Approaching Blanchot

Kas Saghafi

in Apparitions—Of Derrida's Other

This chapter's approach to Jacques Derrida's text is animated by a number of interrelated questions: How do Derrida's essays in Parages, in particular “Pas” and ... More

This chapter's approach to Jacques Derrida's text is animated by a number of interrelated questions: How do Derrida's essays in Parages, in particular “Pas” and “Survivre”, allow one to make sense of the usage of the term “the other [l'autre]” in Maurice Blanchot's work? How are the other and alterity broached in Blanchot's récits? The chapter shows that the passages chosen by Derrida from Blanchot's récits are exemplary instances of the relation to the other. “Pas” and “Survivre”, in particular, highlight moments of the encounter with the other and show that the other is approached in terms of a pas sans pas. Derrida's reading of Blanchot is itself an exemplary case of welcoming and negotiating with the other—with an other, with the utterly other, and with alterity in general.Less

Pointed Instants: Blanchot’s Exigencies

Jeff Fort

in The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett

This chapter provides an overview of Part 2 of the book, devoted to Maurice Blanchot (chapters 5-7), arguing that the separation between writing and life so categorically asserted by Blanchot is ... More

This chapter provides an overview of Part 2 of the book, devoted to Maurice Blanchot (chapters 5-7), arguing that the separation between writing and life so categorically asserted by Blanchot is belied by the traces, residues and remnants of past time scattered throughout his narrative fictions. Focusing especially on the period beginning in the late 1940s, when Blanchot articulated something of an ontology of literary language, in both essays and narratives, this chapter places Blanchot’s work in relation to Heidegger’s thought, particularly with respect to the notion of “world.” Blanchot’s insistence on literature’s being “the other of every world” is questioned, in order to rethink the notion of an “exigency” that is fundamental to Blanchot’s texts during this period. An analysis of Blanchot’s essays on Proust brings into view a newly complicated understanding of the disastrous temporality at issue in Blanchot’s narratives or récits. Figures of punctual violence and melancholic loss pervade these texts, as shown particularly in “The Instant of My Death” and “(A Primal Scene?)” from The Writing of the Disaster, which restage the sublime as radically empty and voided of transcendence, while nonetheless suggesting the compensations of an interminable affirmation, and the violent initiaton of a vocation.Less

Seven: The Unerasable Difference (Levinas in Blanchot)

Gabriel Riera

in Intrigues: From Being to the Other

This chapter discusses the differences between Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot. It states that though their friendship has spanned several decades, Blanchot believes ... More

This chapter discusses the differences between Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot. It states that though their friendship has spanned several decades, Blanchot believes that his relationship with Levinas cannot be simply reduced to a series of facts of episodes. This chapter examines how Levinas and Blanchot's texts encounter each other and leave an indelible mark or an unerasable difference on the intrigue of the other. In addition to their difference in experience and philosophical horizon, Levinas and Blanchot also differ in fundamental ways.Less

French Thought between Liberalism and Fascism: Bataille and Blanchot in the 1930s

Adrian May

in From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987-2017

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political ... More

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political engagements of both these figures in the 1930s were coming under increasingly scrutiny as they were suspected of fascist sympathies and anti-Semitic views. This chapter returns to the pre-war period to firstly delineate the review’s trenchant defence of Bataille’s political record, and the influence of Bataille on Lignes’ dual political program of anti-fascism and a critique of economic and political liberalism is subsequently delineated. Secondly, the significance of the review’s historic defence and recent exposé of the right-wing past of Blanchot is discussed in depth. The reception of these two thinkers is thus historicised, especially in the 1980s context of the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ and the growing anxieties of intellectual complicity with fascism following the Heidegger affair.Less

In Lieu of a Last Word: Maurice Blanchot and the Future of Memory (Today)

Sarah Clift

in Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma

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. ... More

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

The Return of Genius: Mad Poets

Ann Jefferson

in Genius in France: An Idea and Its Uses

This chapter chronicles the return of genius as a viable object of thought, this time in the context of madness. It first turns to the conjunction between neurosis and full-blown psychosis where ... More

This chapter chronicles the return of genius as a viable object of thought, this time in the context of madness. It first turns to the conjunction between neurosis and full-blown psychosis where genius commands greatest attention in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is explored in the case of Friedrich Hölderlin, who becomes the object of theoretical attention in the early 1950s. The chapter shows how, in the early years of theory Pierre Jean Jouve (a poet-essayist, more than a theorist in the late twentieth-century style) and Maurice Blanchot have examined the case of Hölderlin, with supporting illustration from other examples.Less

The Communism of Thought: Reviews and Revolution in the 1960S with Blanchot and Mascolo

Adrian May

in From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987-2017

Several important Lignes dossiers in the 1990s retraced the political activities of Robert Antelme, Dionys Mascolo and Maurice Blanchot in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter restores the narrative of ... More

Several important Lignes dossiers in the 1990s retraced the political activities of Robert Antelme, Dionys Mascolo and Maurice Blanchot in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter restores the narrative of intellectual engagement traced by these significant collections and demonstrates the influence of these figures on the cultural politics and intellectual community of Lignes. Following their radicalisation during the French resistance, Antelme and Mascolo joined the French Communist Party after World War Two, participated in anti-colonial initiatives, recruited Maurice Blanchot to protest the return of Charles de Gaulle to power and the continuing Algerian War, and participated in the events of May 1968. Between Blanchot and Mascolo, two differing vectors of intellectual engagement, one more theoretical and literary and the other more stridently Marxist and materialist, are expounded. Lastly, the influence of Mascolo’s Le 14 Juillet, Blanchot’s Revue internationale and Philippe Sollers’ Tel Quel on Lignes is examined, and Michel Surya’s theorisation of the relationship between literature and politics is described with reference to Bernard Noël.Less

Blanchot’s Insubordination: On the Writing of the Manifesto of the 121

Étienne Balibar

in Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

This chapter analyzes the encounter between the radicality of the Manifesto of the 121 and the specific radicality of Blanchot's own thinking and writing. First, the chapter adheres to the letter of ... More

This chapter analyzes the encounter between the radicality of the Manifesto of the 121 and the specific radicality of Blanchot's own thinking and writing. First, the chapter adheres to the letter of the manifesto and discusses the implications of its key words and expressions. It then examines the intersection between the idea of a “declared right to insubordination” and other of Blanchot's formulations that refer to the idea of a refusal or negativity that under certain circumstances might be carried to extremes. Finally, this chapter outlines two concurrent hypotheses that can be formed with respect to the idea of a “foundation without foundation” of the law, which is evidenced precisely by the need for civil insubordination or disobedience.Less

The Imperative of Transparency: Maurice Blanchot's the one who was standing apart from me

Rodolphe Gasché

in The Stelliferous Fold: Toward a Virtual Law of Literature's Self-Formation

To engage with a philosophical question already at work in a narrative, or rather, a récit, such as Maurice Blanchot's the one who was standing apart from me, or to engage with one that may ... More

To engage with a philosophical question already at work in a narrative, or rather, a récit, such as Maurice Blanchot's the one who was standing apart from me, or to engage with one that may illuminate it, this chapter asks whether or not this requires a prior philosophical reading first to locate such a question, or to establish the narrative's philosophical credentials so that a specific philosophical question can shed light on it. However, if such a reading implies the search for a thematic content that is philosophically significant, or that takes place in view of principles underpinning Blanchot's writings and thought, then his fictional texts may have little to offer. Any philosophical approach must take the one who was standing apart from me just as it offers itself. And it must do so without trying to recuperate anything that Blanchot was himself clearly at pains to eradicate.Less

Dream and Writing in Blanchot

Herschel Farbman

in The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature

This chapter discusses dream and writing based on the works of Maurice Blanchot. In his works, he often speaks of an “experience”. Blanchot's reflections on the “experiences” of other writers ... More

This chapter discusses dream and writing based on the works of Maurice Blanchot. In his works, he often speaks of an “experience”. Blanchot's reflections on the “experiences” of other writers entangle themselves thoroughly in the reflexive webbing of the experience of the experience of writing. This entanglement begins in the impossibility of determining a subject when it comes to the experience of writing. Whenever Blanchot discusses dreaming along with the night, an important and recurrent concern in his work — he discusses it in terms of the experience of writing. The distinction between the “first night” and the “other night” models a logic that Blanchot follows in many of his key distinctions. In his view, sleep is essentially an extension of daytime concerns, whereas the restless movement of the dream is essentially nocturnal.Less

One: The Passion of Time: Au moment voulu (Nietzsche-Heidegger-Blanchot)

Gabriel Riera

in Intrigues: From Being to the Other

This chapter discusses the concept of intrigue in Maurice Blanchot's Au moment voulu. Blanchot defines intrigue as an inextricable relation between at least two human beings ... More

This chapter discusses the concept of intrigue in Maurice Blanchot's Au moment voulu. Blanchot defines intrigue as an inextricable relation between at least two human beings and he uses the term to refer to the “relation of the third type” and to the “exigency of speech” when faced with the strangeness of language. This chapter examines how the outside interrupts the order of meaning, the order of the world ceases to be the guarantor of intelligibility and the present is not the ruling temporal instance.Less

Seeing in the Dark Houses: History and Obscurity in and

Peter Lurie

in American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film

This chapter uses historicist criticism of William Faulkner to suggest a limit to even the best approaches to this deeply historical writer. Attending to what his novels cannot say—or—see about ... More

This chapter uses historicist criticism of William Faulkner to suggest a limit to even the best approaches to this deeply historical writer. Attending to what his novels cannot say—or—see about history and racial understanding, I draw on Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy of language to show the category error that scholars make when assuming that Faulkner’s texts yield the historical secret lodged in the imagined structures and complicated texts Absalom, Absalom! and Light and August, each of which bore the title “Dark House” in manuscript form. The chapter shows the more meaningful aporias and lacunae surrounding race and racial meaning in each novel and the U.S. south—problems attendant on language and the effort to name. It offers a model for historical knowledge drawn from Blanchot and from film theory of fascination, a spellbound, rapt sense of wonder before traumatic events, one that elements of Absalom evoke in readers and posits in Quentin Compson.Less

Blanchot and Affinity

Jonathan Evans

in The Many Voices of Lydia Davis: Translation, Rewriting, Intertextuality

This chapter focuses on Davis’s literary relationship with Maurice Blanchot. She began translating Blanchot early on in her career and some of her stories can be seen to respond to his work. The ... More

This chapter focuses on Davis’s literary relationship with Maurice Blanchot. She began translating Blanchot early on in her career and some of her stories can be seen to respond to his work. The chapter first focuses on Davis’s translation of Death Sentence and her approach to the translation, which it argues is the beginning of her own translation style and which shows a respect for the source author. The second half of the chapter analyses Davis’s story ‘Story’ and Blanchot’s ‘The Madness of the Day’. It is argued that Davis’s ‘Story’ offers a response to Blanchot’s récit, recreating the indeterminacy of the narrative while addressing the emotional concerns of the protagonist. Translation and story both serve as forms of response to Blanchot’s work.Less

The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the Philosophy of Levinas

Edith Wyschogrod

in Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Two objections arise repeatedly in connection with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of language. First, if ethics is beyond language, then ethics remains silent, and ... More

Two objections arise repeatedly in connection with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of language. First, if ethics is beyond language, then ethics remains silent, and rationally derived moral norms are meaningless. Language has become a liability, a fall, and ethics an inchoate relation to the other. A second standard reproach directed at Levinas is that he disparages the aesthetic by relegating art and poetry to a status inferior to that of philosophy and, a fortiori, to ethics. When these objections are taken together, the problems that arise in connection with Levinas's view of religious language can be resolved, at least partially, because important clues for the interpretation of ethico-religious expression can be found in the uses of literary language. This claim can be established by turning to Levinas's treatment of contemporary French writers, specifically Marcel Proust, Michel Leiris, and Maurice Blanchot.Less

“Why Do You Write?”—The Fault of Writing

Jeff Fort

in The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett

This chapter presents some key formulations in which Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett articulate the imperative that bears on their writing. It is shown that these formulas reelaborate the Kantian ... More

This chapter presents some key formulations in which Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett articulate the imperative that bears on their writing. It is shown that these formulas reelaborate the Kantian sublime, and with it the “moral law” to which the latter would give access – a reelaboration that can be understood as a form of translation. These translations have at their basis the well known exclamation attributed to Martin Luther: “I cannot do otherwise,” a phrase cited on more than one occasion by all three authors, but in contexts and with connotations that shift the meaning of the German expression (“Ich kann nicht anders”), into a register of helplessness: rather than the resolute “I cannot do otherwise,” the more pathetic “I can’t help it.” It is further shown that the radically fictive nature of these writers’ works reveals, in its very extremity and impersonality, an autobiographical dimension that can be read in certain figural aspects of their fiction. These figures – especially a death mask in Blanchot – are emblematic of temporal residues that haunt, and imperatively command, the writing in question. These paradoxes are related to a breach between writing and life presented as an ambiguous “fault,” understood as irreparable fissure and ethical shortcoming.Less