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Remarkably Valuable Text for 20th Century French Philosophy
Ann Smock's qualities as a translator shine through in Blanchot's earlier theoretical work, wherein one encounters a variety of themes that preoccupy him for the remainder of is literary life. Except for "Literature and the Right to Death", this is--in my opinion--the best starting point for anyone who is newly discovering Blanchot, but it remains significant and important for even the most well-read Blanchot scholars!

Journey to the Farthest Within
Many who aspire to being "more creative," are familiar with Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.This competent and assuring book - my wife is involved in such a program now - helps people develop practices that lessen the weight and noise of practical doings so that freer, more spontaneous and generative energies can seep through and inspire creativity. Blanchot's book starts from the utterly, completely opposite pole, from that "distant interior," where any practical busy-ness is not even in sight. An "elsewhere;" (p. 71)"Art is the world overturned," he says; (p. 217) and this "...art is `true' only in the work always still to come." (p. 235).
This book, like Cameron's intends a way, to be sure; but Blanchot is concerned to show the artist a way back.

The Space of Literature takes up the experiential itinerary of the artist from out of the depths of this "anterior region." The book describes "the leap," called inspiration (p. 177), that is required if the artist is to move out from that pure storm, poor in moorings, rich in torrent, wind and foam, that entrances the artist's desire and bring forth the work.Then, chapter-by-chapter, section-by-section, he articulates how the artists, through works, weave fragile tendrils that span from out of the vortex back to "our" world. This movement reaches its expository climax in the poignant retelling of the Orpheus myth ("The Gaze of Orpheus").Here Orpheus's rescue of his wife Eurydice from death and bring her back to earth fails because great artist turns his gaze back in order to behold the beloved he brings forth from that teeming underworld. Such a gaze, back toward the impetus of the artist's work, is always forbidden.But failing is the risk the artist must venture: "The work of art is linked to a risk; it is the affirmation of an extreme experience." (p. 236).

Blanchot's account not only delineates the space (a non-space, really) of literature, he also takes the willing reader right up to the raging fringes in which art becomes necessary for some people: it aims right at the collision of art-generating experiencing (I call "the arteous") and language as it permeates and fails to encompass that experience; it resounds exactly with what a person in this vortex feels and realizes at that point of confliction (Blanchot knows this from his own literary writing);); he stops and takes up his pen right at the place of the darkest night, where nothing happens and pure chance sparks minute emergences -- emergences that artists, with all their living, affirm. Kafka, Mallarme and Rilke provide the focal points.Hölderlin, right at the end, enflames the whole book that preceded.Indeed Hölderlin looms over the book as the figure of the extreme experience that Blanchot cares about most and ardently seeks to convey to us.

Here we sample Blanchot at his most luminous exposition:"The poet exists only poetically as the possibility of the poem, and in this sense, he only exists after it, although he stands uniquely before it.Inspiration is not the gift of the poem to someone existing already, but the gift of existence to someone who does not yet exist." (p. 227) He has thought this notion from the beginning of his authorship, and here he expresses it with poise and elegance (elsewhere, in The Work of Fire, in "The `Sacred' Speech of Hölderlin," the fire burns).

For me, a mentor to the aspiring spirit, I know that when such a spirit has been freed from habituation and standards of material satisfaction, accomplishment, value and power, after the jubilation of release, the question, "How do I live now" arises as a new and daunting terror.There is little solace or reassurance to offer the sojourner who lives in the way of the artist.

However, this book, maybe more than any other I have read, points to an itinerary that spirit can undertake, and can affirm. It takes the itinerary of the artist all the way through passages of death and tragedy, all the way out from the underworld and all that has been left behind there, to point to the artist's measure, composure, poise while residing right in the heart of the conflict, right in the void left in the wake of the death of God and all the gods. For Blanchot this is the way the artist comes to us, mourning what is lost in that very act of gathering and guiding the work onward toward a place among us.

And yet, this book may not speak to artists.Not because it is academic or estranging, but, ironically, because it is too demystifying.For Blanchot places word markers all around the burgeoning torrents of art-making experience; and he does so with unfailing accuracy. To the artist who may hesitate to take this work on, I suggest this: Blanchot fervently desists from dissecting or characterizing the ineluctably empty core that defies and refuses articulation even as it pours itself into the life demanded by the arteous.It is still yours alone.No "analysis" relieves you of the incomprehensible enigma that incites your work.

The Space of Literature does speak powerfully to certain philosophically inclined readers, to educated poets as well as to literati or critics who are willing to take a step out of the din of "interpretation" that buries art in histories and psychological mumbo-jumbo order to "save" the artist. And, I should mention, one negative note for me is Blanchot's focus on death - a notion I think we no longer have to harbor as some kind of totem of meaning the artwork must bear.

Finally, Blanchot offers a narrative opening onto the "way the artist is."He lights up the sense that there is a way, and that the greats have lived it, into it, through it, and were permeated through and through by it. And maybe for unnamed others who dare Blanchot's necessary obscurities and who choose to dwell and tarry with them for a while, it will open a new horizon where artists take their places as founding breakout creatives. Their works stand apart from our daily goings on, but are there nonetheless, within reach of our most pressing urge to be fully human.

He draws the curtains around this space with these words, elided here: "In the work of art, being is risked... to emerge deep down in appearance... the excess in affirmation... the true will be able to take place."

Go there, with Blanchot.The journey can be made.

The best Blanchot study
A great classic on the subtle workings of the minds of poets and writers and on poetry and writing in general. Like the title aptly puts it, it is a study of the interior space of Literature through studies of great poets like Mallarme, Rilke, Novalis and Holderlin and author-philosophers like Nietzsche and Kafka. Extremely perceptive approach with all the extreme analyses that characterize French thought. Mostly philosophical and intended for Poetry and Philosophy buffs. Excellent translation.

The Space of Absence
Better to read this than to read ten manuals on the subject of writing.

Blanchot evokes the non-presence of death in writing, writing's necessary complicity with death.This death, however, is not the Hegeliandeath that would negate and finalize the subject (cf Arendt), fixing it ina form on which judgement could finally be passed.No, true to his essayon the absence of any right to death (which appears in _The Work of Fire_and _The Station Hill Blanchot Reader_), this death never occurs.Thisdeath is never present, happens at no particular time, and happens to noone (see also _The Writing of the Disaster_).It cannot be said to happenor occur at all.It is never present, and being so, shares with writingthe latter's most unearthly, strange quality - the absense of the writerand of that about which has been written.

In addition to being the mostprofound book on writing about which I can write with any knowledge, thisis also Blanchot's most coherent and accessible set of essays.Theypossess something of a centrality of purpose and, together, make upsomething of a book, rather than the collections which make up theremainder of his critical and quasi-critical work.This may be a failingin the eyes of most Blanchotophiles, but it provides a bridge from thenormal style of scholarly exposition to his more challenginginvestigations, and can be recommended as a first approach for the readerwho is unfamiliar with his work.Nevertheless, some prior acquaintancewith Rilke, Mallarme, Hoelderlin, and Kafka will be of immeasurableaid.

Most importantly, this one stands as its own example of writing thatutterly lacks completion, that is haunted throughout with a palpablesensation of absence, a sensation that is at once as appealing as it isastonishing and unsettling. ... Read more

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Cryptic and Complex
The Writing of the Disaster is an immensely difficult text- a text which deals with issues as totalizing as writing, the holocaust, and the text itself. Blanchot's style is naturally Nietzschean, drawing on the example of the aphorism, a fragmentary and disjointed fragment of thoughts, remarks, and of course contradictions. True, the use of explicit contradictions is a bit tiresome, and often difficult to comprehend, but Blanchot is playing with the impossibility of the writing of the disaster. The play of disaster and ruin is both destabilizing and ordering. Blanchot writes:
"Energy, as destruction of things or as removal from among things, destroys and removes itself. Let us acknowledge this. However, this loss, as the disappearance of things-the disappearance, indeed, of the order of things-seeks in its turn to get into line, either by reinvesting itself as another thing, or by letting itself be spoken. Thereby, thanks to this discourse that makes a theme of it, it becomes considerable, it fits back into order and 'consecrates' itself. Only order gains from its loss" (90).

The Writing of the Disaster is a thinking of and in pain. It is a deeply perplexing meditation on the impossibility of the text and the disaster of absence.

Even books, set quite apart, far from the fray--beloved books, essential books--are agonizing now.
I can't say that I'm usually a huge fan of philosophical texts; I figured I was taking a gamble by picking this one up. A philosophical theory book written in fragments that deals with the holocaust? Not usually my thing.

The first few pages I was just mystified; they seemed full of wilfully contradictory phrases about the other, about truth, about literature and death, concepts I understood in my own language but which this book was not making clear how I should interpret.

After I got into the swing of its vocabulary, however, I was swept away in its philosophical power. Some say theorizing is just a way to avoid confronting how little we control in the universe. Maybe that's true, even though this theory seemed concerned mainly with showing us how little control we have, and how fragmented our existence is.

The organization--fair for a book about traumatized writing in fragments--is hard to follow at times, but most of the fragments, if arbitrary, are dazzling, even dazzlingly beautiful in their demistifying quality. Some on writing, some on existence, some on death, some on the need for a God; the ones I understood I almost universally loved. I found myself in the midst of endless pleasure as I read this book, as difficult as it was.

A few choice quotes:

On Etymology: It is not the arbitrariness that is surprising here, but on the contrary, the mimetic effort, the semblance of analogy, the appeal to a doubtful body of knowledge that makes us the dupes of a kind of transhistorical necessity.

On Writing: But this "task" cannot be limited, as he would have it, to the job of exhausting life--causing life, through the constant renewal of desire, to be lived completely.

From Schelling: "To the extent that the human mind is related to the soul as to something nonexistent--something, that is, without understanding--its profoundest essence . . . is madness. The understanding is regulated madness. Men who have no madness in them are men whose understanding is void and sterile.

Learn to Think in Pain
In my opinion, this book is a purified example of what theory should be, how theory should be written. Granted that I've not read the original in French; but even through this darkened glass, there's enough light that breaks through. Enough to blind one.
In reading Blanchot, I think, you must never be "one". There is no Unity in the Disaster of Writing. "Just" Ethics. Blanchot's writing, to me, echoes that of Nietzsche (and also the later Wittgenstein): both are written in - so called - aphorisms, short phrases, unconnected by language's rules or direct meanings. No longer a detailed/derailed "Treatise" that's going to "make it all understood"; I view the Levinassian heritage - prominent in Blanchot's thought (he was good friends with Emmanuel Levinas) - as an "Ethics of Deconstruction" (to quote Critchley's wonderful book of Levinas and Derrida), as a fragmentation rather than unification. This fragmentation, this disintegration, this death - - allow the only Ethical standpoint available to a mortal facing the world: an infinite responsibility toward the Other.
That's why Blanchot - and also Derrida, in my opinion - is an Ethical Philosopher: his Writing of the disaster is always aware of the catastrophe the Other brings upon any "Unity" - whether Political (Totalitarianism) or psychological (what Lacan called "Ego Psychology") - and our Ethical obligation toward the Other as an infinite responsibility, one that does not have an "end", one that doesn't end.
In Blanchot, Form adheres to content, and therefore that's what makes his writing - again, in my eyes - Ethical. Writing ABOUT Ethics is one thing (and a pretty dead-end thing at that); But Writing Ethics, The Writing of the Disaster - is what Blanchot's book is all about.
One of the closing/opening remarks of His is "learn to Think in Pain". this is how I understand Ethics, if at all.

Worn Down Past the Nubb
To rate this book is to do its author a disservice.I might as well have given the text one star, for it makes no 'sense'.It is a multiple work, in the spirit of Nietzsche's aphoristic style, that attempts to lend a few scents to the reader.These scents might lead one to a space of silence in which the artist or writer relates with the source of his or her law, the inactive voice of reason.Can silence be rated?Our mistake is thinking that it can be rated and adhered to, giving rise to the disaster.The disaster is always already past; it is embedded in the way we read, the way we write, and the way we relate to texts.The disaster is something like the silencing of silence, and Blanchot's project attempts to rimind us to forget what we've read, as a historical community, and remember that which gives us pleasure in creating attempts to communicate with others. ... Read more

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Blanchot's famous fictive recit, tr Lydia Davis ... Read more

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Opening the Dark
Since I am not an accomplished fiction reader, I came to Blanchot's "Death Sentence" with trepidation. Blanchot is one of those French `postmodernists" that drives American pundits crazy. I am personally devoted to studying everything I can about him.For me, he is a deep explorer of the creative spirit as lived by the artist today. Still, the fears lingered: Would I understand this author, whose reputation for obscurity is renowned?Would reading this book be a dry exercise in slogging through strange wordings and plot convolutions?
And then the surprise. Each and every sentence sparks with luminously, incandescently clear impact. And yet, each and every one of these sentences disassembles the narrative right before my eyes.Each sentence instigates a tear:"...this sadness communicated a feeling to me that was absolutely distressing, that was dispossessed and in some way bereft of itself; the memory of it became inexpressible despair, despair which hides in tears but does not cry, which has no face and changes the face it borrows into a mask." (p. 49) Oh my.
The narrative is simple: first the death, spontaneous resuscitation and then completely instigated final death of the narrator's loved one; then, in the second part of this slim book, the narrator proposes marriage while he and his female companion are taking refuge from aerial bombardment, during the early days of WWII. The pressing crowd subsequently separates the couple as everyone rushes out of the subway bomb shelter.They reunite - if that is the term for what happens here -- in a space of estranging darkness:
"Everything about that room, plunged in the most profound darkness, was familiar to me; I had penetrated it, I carried it in me, I gave it life and which no force in the world could ever overcome.That room does not breathe, there is neither shadow nor memory in it, neither dream nor depth; I listen to it and no one speaks; I look at it and no one lives in it.And yet, the most intense life is there, a life which I touch and which touches me....May the person who does not understand that come and die.Because that life transforms the life which shrinks away from it into a falsehood." (p. 67)
I found this work in the space of death to be strangely liberating.I was mourning a death in my own immediate circle when I read it.In my death scene, I too instigated a final deathblow, the death sentence (euthanasia for my brave and aged dog, fighting to the end). In reading this work during this time, the very unsettling of the narration streamed forth as a linguistic "nature" pouring out, as it does, beyond any trivialities of meaning I can bring to a comprehension of a beloved's death. The flights of language out of any sentiment or meaning, the interruptions and dislocations articulated here opened room for a free constitution of what living now meant in the face of what was a definitive, inescapable death event. The breaking apart, the "absent meaning," (The Writing of the Disaster; p. 24) let the dark in. The dark of a world beyond my reach, not my own sentimental illuminations, surrounded me and freed up the mystery, set it loose.The only way to live is to let the touching happen - whatever and however that occurs.As Steven Wright said, "Shins are for seeing in the dark."
Kafka shines a guiding light for Blanchot. Where Kafka narrated the occasions of dislocation and ever-receding destination, Blanchot articulates the forming of a literature right in the heart and tumult of the artists' experiences - death sentences all.
The echoes of Kafka resound throughout Death Sentence. As Blanchot says of Kafka's writing, "We do not know if we are grasping the outside or the inside, whether we are in the presence of the building or the hole into which the building has disappeared." (Work of Fire, p. 23) When contemplating the seminally guiding literature of Kafka, Blanchot says: "So is art the place of anxiety and complacency, of dissatisfaction and security.It has a name:self-destruction, infinite disintegration.And another name:happiness, eternity."
Indeed.

Best Novel of the 20th Century
I've been a fan of Maurice Blanchot for years, and this novel is probably his masterpiece. I've read it now three times, and I'm looking forward to my fourth reading. It's that kind of book. You can't read it too often. It's relatively short, but extremely intense. When I finished reading the last page yesterday,even though I was in a public place, I had to shout out loud---so stunning was the ending.

This is a love story about a young man and woman. The woman dies early in the story, but their love is so strong she's not really dead. She keeps reappearing to her lover in other personae. Almost unceasing ecstasy.

Staring Death in the Eye
A short, harrowing work interested neither in description, character development, nor cleverness but rather in staring death in the eye. If you like Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, or even Raymond Carver you doubtless may detest this abstract gift of a conflicted consciousness of a taciturn man in love with a sickly, dying young woman during troubled times. Perhaps the supreme study of the impossibility of fidelity, let alone true love, in a world where death hangs in the air as the possibility of total absence or, more frighteningly, as the cipher of a total presence condemned to repeat its secret to deaf ears.

Blanchot the artist...
L'arret de mort (Death Sentence)is a beautifully crafted piece of literary art...and one which starkly draws the boundary line between what is perceived as 'The Art of the Novel' in France and its dumbed-down American counterpart. Blanchot (along with Bataille, Robbe-Grillet and countless others; certainly not all from France) is a writer who dares to ask what fiction is, dares to redefine the form, re-examine his new definitions...he dares to make his novels about ideas, not mere bedtime stories (or worse, Hollywood film-treatments). From the first sentence to the last this novel draws the reader into considerations of our mortality, of the haunting trajectory of our experience, and most daring of all, it questions the very nature of literary endeavor. Magnificent.

death sentence is worse than a death sentence
Foucault praised Blanchot on his writing of this book, expressed his admiration for Blanchot's style. But... it is Blanchot's style that makes the book absolutely unbearable. Focault thinks that Blanchot's absence of aplot is the plot itself. I think that there is a certain amount of faith inthis believe; faith in the assumption that the non-plot is conscious, thatit is deliberate. I don't, I can't, believe that this is true and if it is,I don't think it's that ingeneous. Books without plots are just long poemsand even long poems (take Dante's Inferno) have some type of plot. Blanchotnon-plot style of writing isn't particularily interesting, which might bedifferent if Blachot could find a better subject to write about. The bookrambles on, with the main charter being fickle, but since there is no plot,there is no way to determine exactly what he is being fickle on. The book,which is short, only one hundred pages, drags on and for such a short novelthat's a "bad" thing. ... Read more

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Without Maurice Blanchot, literary theory as we know it today would have been unthinkable.Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze : all are key theorists crucially influenced by Blanchot's work. This accessible guide:

* works 'idea by idea' through Blanchot's writings, anchoring them in historical and intellectual contexts
* examines Blanchot's understanding of literature, death, ethics and politics and the relationship between these themes
* unravels even Blanchot's most complex ideas for the beginner
* sketches the lasting impact of Blanchot's work on the field of critical theory.

For those trying to come to grips with contemporary literary theory and modern French thought, the best advice is to start at the beginning: begin with Blanchot, and begin with this guide. ... Read more

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Foundations of modern theory...
Ullrich Haase and William Large's text on Maurice Blanchot is part of a recent series put out by the Routledge Press, designed under the general editorial direction of Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London), to explore the most recent and exciting ideas in intellectual development during the past century or so. To this end, figures such as Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer and other influential thinkers in critical thought are highlighted in the series, planned to include more than 21 volumes in all.

Haase and Large's text, following the pattern of the others, includes background information on Blanchot and his significance, the key ideas and sources, and Blanchot's continuing impact on other thinkers. As the series preface indicates, no critical thinker arises in a vacuum, so the context, influences and broader cultural environment are all important as a part of the study, something with which Blanchot might agree, yet with some interesting reservations.

Why is Blanchot included in this series? Blanchot is a foundational thinker for the modern literary criticism and language philosophy - every philosopher and intellectual of the past few generations has had to contend with his ideas or ideas generated in response or reaction to his, and his impact has gone far beyond narrow intellectual confines to influence psychology, politics, literature, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, history and anthropology. Haase and Large indicate that Blanchot's concentration on literature is unrivaled in modern intellectual development, and had direct influence on Derrida, Foucault, and de Man, through whom almost all modern thinkers have had to deal with ideas originating in some way with Blanchot.

The authors separate Blanchot's writing into four main types: political journalism, literary reviews, writing novels, and a fourth, combination form that includes philosophy and literature.It is this fourth type that typifies Blanchot's primary point of the blurring of distinctions between philosophy and the text; it is significant that Blanchot cared less for the relative evaluation of novels and such (is this novel better than that one) and worked with thinkers such as Heidegger, Hegel and Levinas to look for what he describes as 'the possibility of literature'.

Unlike other volumes in this series, the Key Ideas are not neatly contained as ideas.Haase and Large explore Blanchot's overall definitions of literature and his anti-theory of literature (he argues for a 'stubborn independence' of the text from author).They look at Blanchot's ideas of the connection between language and literature, the connection of philosophy (and particularly concentrating on the idea of death in both literature and philosophy), and the philosophical issue of ethics in literature (Levinas is a strong influence here).Later ideas show the progression to ethics and politics, working through journalism, a particular form of literary expression (when done properly) that Blanchot used at different times in his career.

One of the useful features of the text is the side-bar boxes inserted at various points. For example, during the discussion on Blanchot's development of Nationalism, there are brief discussions, set apart from the primary strand of the text, on the significance of the events of May 1968 for the French academy in particular and the intellectual world generally; another box gives a short biography of Charles de Gaulle in the context of Blanchot's nationalist development. Each section on a key idea spans approximately twenty pages, with a brief summary concluding each, which gives a recap of the ideas (and provides a handy reference).

The concluding chapter, After Blanchot, highlights some key areas of development in relation to other thinkers, as well as points of possible exploration for the reader. Haase and Large explain that few in the English-speaking world encounter Blanchot directly (in some ways confirming one of Blanchot's key points of the separation of text from author); we in the English-reading world are more familiar with the names of Derrida and Foucault, as well as other intellectuals such as Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze.The precursor to Derrida's 'key idea' of deconstruction is present in Blanchot (Haase and Large claim that there are few ideas of Derrida that are not already present in Blanchot).

As do the other volumes in this series, Haase and Large conclude with an annotated bibliography of works by Blanchot (primarily those available in authoritative English translation), and works on Blanchot by major scholars.

While this series focuses intentionally upon critical literary theory and cultural studies, in fact this is only the starting point. For
Blanchot (as for others in this series) the expanse is far too broad to be drawn into such narrow guidelines, and the important and impact of the ideas extends out into the whole range of intellectual development. As intellectual endeavours of every sort depend upon language, understanding, and interpretation, the thorough comprehension of how and why we know what we know is crucial.

... Read more

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Good Companions
I have read this book all the way through the final page, but I am far from done with it.I will never be done with it.For, as Blanchot says, "The book:a ruse by which writing goest toward the absence of the book." (p. 424)
I cannot help but start from Jean-Luc Nancy's protests against accusations of Blanchot being mystical and nihilistic (Multiple Arts; The Muses II (Stanford, CA; 2006); p. 85).I protest, but not because Blanchot is not a mystic, but because the word is thrown out by these erstwhile critics as an epithet.For me a mystic is one of the four figures that are essential for demarcating a human endeavor worthy of the name.Blanchot is a mystic in that his work breaks out of the everyday, the set, commonplace and utilitarian to the "ungraspable ambiguity" that opens onto "being's inertia," its foregone onwarding, toward which the human reaches its extremity and its strangely demarcated way.He is a mystic because he does the work, and places into circulation the precept and precursor on which a course of vibrancy and generativity can take shape.
It is not surprising that such a stance and such work escapes the comprehension of many, or that it frightens those who get the words and syntax but cannot place themselves in motion synchronous with Blanchot (or Nancy -- the two are synchronous and syncopate, without repeating together).
This book publishes late writings in Blanchot's career.They are crisp and without exposition in casting out into word-forms what always exceeds these words, always originates what words set into play.I call this a "destinational comprehension: a "region" of psychic/somatic formation that arises in order to generate a locus of human gathering, a gathering most at home when in estrangement, new lands of newly strange and potent, and as yet unnamed forces.(If Blanchot is anti-Semetic -- another charge vehemently protested by Nancy -- he is one in the way of Moses, shattering the tablets of what beckons to become law in order to form a new people who then seek out a new law, one of generative ventures into the art work:"the unique, ineffable and untranslatable." (p. 231), "the voice, but not speech..., the reverberation of a space opening onto the outside." (p. 258). He opposes any and all rigid formulation as having any value for generative human life.He writes as a Jew, always venerating the Exodus, reaching out even into the desert, toward that destination that cannot be reached, Hearing (O Israel) that word that is never comprehended.See Pt II, Chr V;and Pt III, Ch XVIII.
Calling Blanchot a "critic" or "social commentator" is like calling Frank Lloyd Wright a home builder.Blanchot is marking out new dimensions of human capability, right in the heart, as Nancy might say, of the most strident and difficult, the most obscure and ambiguous of human endeavors.His company -- Bataille, Sade, Nietzsche (right in the middle of the work), Mallarme (throughout the work), Rimbaud, Kafka and Mann among others -- bespeaks of the courage of this journey (for all involved).Hegel forms the backdrop and foil, and Heidegger's shadow looms silently over the the work.
The paradox of the work is that while extolling speech, it inscribes what is only now becomingwritable -- though his efforts, and the efforts of his companions, Nancy, Foucault, even Deleuze. But written, these words stand not just for affect, but to set in motion a new encounter that offers a return and a new gathering, and not just once, but as a way, a as a demarcating of a re-envisioned human endeavor (the exigency set before us after the 20th century'scatastrophes of wars, holocaust and self-satisfied ignorance, bigotry and power grabs).
The book amazes me.It may be the one that I rescue from the fire.It shows the benefit of keeping good company, and since a book cannot refuse the company that enters its sway, I will keep company with it.

The most coherent of Blanchot's critical works
By the above I don't mean to imply that Blanchot's works are not coherent or that they don't merit reading.I think Blanchot is one of the most important writers of this century.His work is far more significant than Foucault or Derrida, not to denigrate them or deny the vitality of thier work.Readers of Derrida's more recent works (Politics of Friendship, the Gift of Death, Cinders, even Postcards) will find Blanchot quite worthwhile.

In The Infinite Conversation are an extensive collection of essays and dialogues composed by Blanchot over several years and most of them originally published seperately.In this book Blanchot explores in a rigorous and almost orderly fashion "what it would mean for something like literature" to exist.Starting with the idea of literature he explores, through consideration of literature--Hoderlin, Homer, Kafka, Levinas and others--the vacant center of such concepts as identity, agency and subjectivity.Almost ex nihilo, Blanchot constructs an ethics that asks extraordinary responsibility from us without drawing on God, natural law, humanism, or any kind of center.

After reading Blanchot, the weight of words weighs heavily.Anyone with even a slight interest in continental philosophy ought to read this book.

comment?
I don't know how to answer the question, "was sseor@aol.com's response helpful?"

Perhaps it is not so helpful to readers as it is to sseor@aol.com's psychiatrist.

An infinite re-source
Among Blanchot's publications in American (English), this is one the reader can turn to repeatedly. The index is wonderful, and the Introduction by the translator is very helpful when trying to situate ourselves withinthe con-text of Blanchot'swork.

I never start at the beginning of thebook and read it in order. Instead I'll open it randomly and scan the wordsuntil I am drawn in, somehow.

Or I'll turn to the marvel of an Index atthe back of this book and scan this until I find a topic, or textualarrangement that grabs at me.

Or if you find yourself wanting to pursue acuriosity with a certain writer, poet, or intellectual/thinker it isfascinating to turn to the Index and see what Blanchot's take on it mightbe.

Make this book your own! Follow its coursings and angulations perhapsas a way of holding your own mind-ful inquiries (conversations) against thepage as a mirror and watch where the light dances, refacts, or is obscured.And the cracks, silvered coating ('reflecting glaze'?), and mirrorizeddisplay will work and 'un-work' the space which surrounds or unbinds you.And of this "space" what of it is parlayed by the 'space ofliterature'( to borrow what Blanchot refers to in another book of his ).Isn't this an uncanny notion (or how is it we forget?): that we make ourway in the world by thinking, and speaking? And so what or how are we to'read' into that? What is the topology of this, as such? Dowe enter themaps as 'surs'? (Thinking of Michael Palmer's poetry here, perhaps).

What is it that draws us on? What 'calculus' observes or holds us within a'recognizable context'? Or what one are we observing and holding to,without criticism or re-course?(Palmer again:"An indefinite calculuswatches/ writes and re-writes")

What is determined within this"sphere" of recognized forms, gestures, figures, and theirarticulation,where-in we recognize our movements:

the re-formedun-maskings, shown coverings, and 'un-workings', which pass on to theun-recognizable, the un-accountable, the unavowable? Only to make their wayback again, but is this re-transmitted, re-circuited? Or are, we though"acting", somehow short-circuited in our thinking and speaking?Do we have a prayer? Thanks be to Maurice Blanchot...but somehow... andyet...?

Now, finally, to end this review, one way to adjust to the"infinite" in the title of his book, looking at some lines by Isaac-the-Blind,who writes:

For every sphere fills itselffrom a sphereabove it. //

& they are given in orderto meditate from thesphere that appears //

in your heart,to meditate //

up to theinfinite. //

For there is no path to prayerother than that whereby//

man is sucked up by finite words& rises in thinking to theinfinite// ... Read more

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Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the "new novel, " the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, "the ontological narrative"--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton. ... Read more

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Reading the Foam
"A stone rolled, and it slipped through an infinity of metamorphoses the unity of which was that of the world in its splendor.In the midst of these tremblings, solitude burst forth...Thomas went forward.The great misfortune which was to come still seemed a gentle and tranquil event."
This passage comes near the end of Thomas the Obscure (p. 114); but it just as well could have been placed in the beginning.It is not that nothing happens in the course of this brief and intense fiction - it is as long as it can be, and no shorter. Anne dies.That is event enough.
The book gathers around that event, and eavesdrops on two beings that are differently enveloped in it: Anne dying and Thomas affected.What we hear are the murmurings of their beings, waves of singular beings crashing onto the shore, of this death; the slightly different tones and rhythms of the waves' slapping is what we hear.The text is all foam.We begin with Thomas in the water, losing himself there.Awaiting the death, witness to the dying, and the intimate companion of this dying woman. Foam: the in between formations of the water's detritus that mark what the accumulated cycling of wave upon purely flowing wave deposits around the shoals of these individuals.
Anne, in dying, (not quite her own dying) wonders at Thomas' perpetual absence.The "obscurity" of Thomas is her rendering of him.She bursts onto the scene at a dinner occasion, blazing with beauty and concentrates Thomas' attention.The vividness of the encounter creates the book, but does not provide Anne with companionship in her most solitary moments.Anne has died by the time the passage cited above comes up in the text, but maybe she has already died, whatever that means for Thomas, by the time the book begins, with Thomas in the ocean, amid the foam, maybe drowning, communing in dying but absent from Anne's bedside.
I find Blanchot's fiction arresting. It is the fiction that needs to be written and only can do so as art (in one form or another, and Blanchot writes it), and is what art has to be.This is the fiction of beings' speaking enroute to the human event. Impossible, because being does not speak - and therein lies the essential fiction. Blanchot knows of this, and details his acquaintance in unsurpassed non-fiction (but still fiction-making) essays, thought pieces, thought experiments all.Thomas poeticizes in prose the most dear and precious moment:when we need a voice from beyond, need some assurance of deliverance or salvation; and what is delivered is only the voice of that being, its waves one by one, one word, one sentence following on and on, crashing onto the shores of the most human act of dying.This is the only fiction there is:the evocation and writing of this voice. (Deleuze certainly heard it.)
Blanchot had long ago completed Thomas when he wrote this fictional conversation (how many voices, we do not know): ""Attraction by which, keeping us in the mystery of the illusion, we think we recognize them, name them, keep them at a distance under the brilliance of the name, and thus, embellishing it, facilitate their approach." - "Always too close for them to be near to us." `' "And yet separated by the movement of their coming." - "They're not coming."" (The Step Not Beyond; p. 111)
The names here:Thomas and Anne.We think we can know them when they do not even "know" each other. Thomas, walking, is tranquil "before" the event, the waves break, and we read the foam.

An Unsettling Book
The tendency of prose to settle while being read will not be found in this book.Stability of the mind will be a memory worth forgetting as you embark into a personalized world of disturbing imagery (disturbing in a good sense)and ambiguity at its absolute height.A must read for anyone interested in non'linear literature. ... Read more

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Groping for What GoesThere
This book was exhausting.It demanded more than reading, and threw off more than sparks of realization.So one has to give way to its continual assault on sense making and find one's own way.As Blanchot's Thomas does in these melted pages, these riveting whirlpools of sentences andheaps of steaming, liquified words.How is it that such diffusion of image and even allegory can be so compelling?It is because every one of those sentences is uttered at the very extremities of the voices's words and one needs to go with them just to get to the next step.Frightful, and exhausting.
Jeff Fort's introduction is brief and pointed in giving the reader a foothold, And it is a good one, but insufficient, as Fort surely knows.
This is an allegory of writing the same way the Odyssey is a novel about a voyage.This is an epic assimilating myth and rousing a sense of a new realm of being.Thomas journeys through a sensibility that has a structure, dimensions, inhabitants, all of whom dissolve before him and dissolve him, bringing him to the darkness, finally, that absorbs all that would not live, leaving just that pure moment -- not of a novel, but of an act of living at the edge, while all that has been constructed, declared, sworn to, cleaned and inscribed utterly disappears.And one is left with raw, pure, coming to a singular life.
Blanchot was not yet at the point of writing the neutral, but he felt its work.His great teachers, Mallarme and Kafka resounded;his great friends, Levinas and Bataille gave words and thus shocks of transmission.The neuter was coming, the book was coming.And that book would be named, "Disappearance," a pure wandering as Fort helps us appreciate, in the fore-naming of "Aminadab."
What would come is that sparking and flecking (Blanchot later quotes from Beckett) where the darkness comes, as through a window into an inscription, as though cut with a diamond and foretold of the young girl and held in amorous embrace of the pure light Lucie, and accompanied by the companion who always hears the sounds of breaking into being, Dom.These are the characters of that great concrescence of the refusal to be obliterated, by law or anything else, and step into first what is singular, and then what can be written of it, for all to mark as they wander along their own paths.
Exhausting.And this is the only way. Blanchot is our host, our guide, the tenant to whom we turn our reading. ... Read more

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Questions of Testimony
How are we to testify to our own death?Our act of testimony seems to foreclose the possibility that we are actually dead.Yet even in our desire to speak, we find the words nearly impossible to speak.

Blanchot's short story, "The Instant of My Death," explores the idea of facing one's death, of feeling death overcome you, only to somehow escape.How can you speak after such an event, after the disaster of this encounter?

Derrida seeks to answer or at least probe these questions that Blanchot raises and leaves unanswered.Using Blanchot's other theoretical work, "The Writing of the Disaster," Derrida probes the idea of the impossible encounter with one's own death, and ideas of testimony.

A classic Derrida piece.

A Derrida Must-Read!!!
The first part of the book is a short story by Blanchot and the seond part is Derrida's analysis. Derrida's critique is amazing stuff. He performs a close-reading, line by line. Derrida is one of the greatest thinkers, if not the most thought provoking theorist/critic, of our time. ... Read more

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Maurice Blanchot is a towering yet enigmatic figure in twentieth-century French thought. A lifelong friend of Levinas, he had a major influence on Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, and many others. Both his fiction and his criticism played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written, especially in its intense concern with the question of writing as such. Never an academic, he published most of his critical work in periodicals and led a highly private life. Yet his writing included an often underestimated public and political dimension.This posthumously published volume collects his political writings from 1953 to 1993, from the French-Algerian War and the mass movements of May 1968 to postwar debates about the Shoah and beyond. A large number of the essays, letters, and fragments it contains were written anonymously and signed collectively, often in response to current events. The extensive editorial work done for the original French edition makes a major contribution to our understanding of Blanchot's work.The political stances Blanchot adopts are always complicated by the possibility that political thought remains forever to be discovered. He reminds us throughout his writings both how facile and how hard it is to refuse established forms of authority.The topics he addresses range from the right to insubordination in the French-Algerian War to the construction of the Berlin Wall and repression in Eastern Europe; from the mass movements of 1968 to personal responses to revelations about Heidegger, Levinas, and Robert Antelme, among others.When read together, these pieces form a testament to what political writing could be: not merely writing about the political or politicizing the written word, but unalterably transforming the singular authority of the writer and his signature. ... Read more

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The writings are scholarly, measured, and serious in tone
Skillfully translated from the original French by Zakir Paul, Maurice Blanchot's Political Writings, 1953-1993 is an anthology of philosopher Maurice Blanchot's political writings - many of which were written anonymously and signed collectively, in response to current events. Individual topics include the right to insubordination during the French-Algerian War, the creation of the Berlin Wall, repression in Eastern Europe, and personal insights concerning the ideas of Heidegger, Levinas, Robart Antelme, and more. The writings are scholarly, measured, and serious in tone, even though Blanchot himself was never an academic and published much of his life's work in periodicals. An insightful window into the politics of France in the decades after the Second World War, Political Writings 1953-1993 is a welcome addition to political science shelves and highly recommended for college library collections. "There is no good nationalism. Nationalism always tends to assimilate and unify everything, all values; that is why it ends up being exclusive and fundamentalist, which is to say, the only value."
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Writing about The Gaze of Orpheus, Geoffrey Hartman suggested that 'When we come to write the history of criticism for the 1940 to 1980 period, it will be found that Blanchot, together with Sartre, made French 'discourse' possible, both in its relentlessness and its acuity..This selection.is exemplary for its clearly translated and well-chosen excerpts from Blanchot's many influential books. Reading him now, and in this form, I feel once more the excitement of discovering Blanchot in the 1950s. ... Read more

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"The freedom of a decapitated head..."
No one can make literary theory seem as dark and cool and sexy as the French and no one--with the possible exception of his pal Georges Bataille--is darker, cooler, and sexier at it than the great mystery man of 20th century French letters, Maurice Blanchot.This short but weighty collection of some of his characteristic essays is filled with intriguing, elusive, and suggestive observations on the art of literature and the practice of writing.

What was the song the Sirens sang--and what do we learn from the different responses taken to their singing by Odysseus and Ahab? Why did Orpheus look back at Eurydice even though he'd been warned he'd lose her if he did--and why, as a poet, was it his greatest moment and greatest failure?

Such are the questions that Blanchot asks and answers--sort of--in these densely allusive and ever elliptical pieces. For me, the experience of reading Blanchot is something like I'd imagine it might be riding a rodeo bull. You get accustomed to the idea that each sentence is going to eventually throw you with its powerful twists and unexpected involutions; victory is a matter of hanging on for as long as you can. Often I found that if only a passage had ended just a few words sooner I would have understood Blanchot's point perfect, but before the period came he'd throw in one last phrase that left me in the dust and dazed.

The Reign of Terror, Flaubert, cadavers, Lazarus, Lautreamont, the insanity of writing, the absence of the book--this isn't a text you read so much as re-read, a book it takes another thousand books to understand. Blanchot is "talking" not only to the reader, but across time and into the timeless region between texts to address other authors and other books. If you aren't familiar with Hegel, for instance, you apparently miss much of the subdued references Blanchot is citing, amplifying, distorting, modifying, refuting. If you don't know Mallarme, you may find yourself as mystified by some passage as you'd be if you were listening in on only one side of a conversation--because you are.

Still, there is much to be gleaned from *The Gaze of Orpheus* even if you glean only thirty percent of it. Indeed, it's consoling to learn that no one *completely* understands Blanchot--including the translator and the editor who wrote the book's afterward, as they readily--and admirably--admit. In fact, while I usually only read translator notes, introductions, and afterwards out of a sense of duty and a sort of obsessive compulsion, I found that in this case the translator's short preface and the aforementioned editorial afterward to be interesting and illuminating in their own right--well worth your time.

*The Gaze of Orpheus* and Maurice Blanchot are the quintessential example of the kind of book and author that you'll love if you love this sort of thing--and hate if you don't. For some, this collection will be fascinating, thought-provoking, inspiring, and beautiful. For others, it will be frustrating, hopelessly obscure, virtually unreadable. I found it all of this--I very much recommend it.

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Examines poetic language in the work of Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot. ... Read more

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Into the Difficulty: An Inscrutable Guide
Ellipsis is a difficult book. I love difficult books, well written ones, the difficulty rising up from the trajectory of the ideas themselves;difficulty that sends me into the books discussed, to get into the very texture of difficulty;difficulty that demands something of me by the strength of the clarified complexity being set to work.I loved this book.
I also loved this book because the back cover listed its author as "an independent scholar."There is work that has to be done outside the confines of the validation structures of the university.I feel Allen as a companion in the cold.
The trajectory through Holderlin, Heidegger and Blanchot cannot be more difficult.These writers mark out traces of our relation to what occurs by virtue of the ellipsis of language in ways not imagined in our conventional and traditional metaphysics.They go right at the place where language generates what can come to us as experience.And as with the eye of a hurricane (or trauma or deja vu, as Allen cites), that generativity has no "there" in its center; an absence can be surrounded in cycling repetitions, but penetrating that center has nothing to show of what comes.Ellipsis: "... for the word resist all possession, even its own. While it gives itself freely, what gives it is inaccessible, and so it remains outside our grasp and incomprehensible."Are we ready for the world that comes in such a way?
This is not a book for beginners in cutting edge thought.Brushes with and crushes on Holderlin and Blanchot are prerequisites.Encounter and battle with Heidegger (and coming to terms with his past) is a must.And not the Heidegger of Being and Time, but the Heidegger of Contributions... and Mindfulness, and the later writings on language.
My own longing asks for more on Blanchot as the pages and discourse toward him are cryptic and blindingly fast (as compared to the slow, considered expositions on Holderlin and Heidegger).But maybe such speed and cryptography are the only marks we have with Blanchot as we work through our embrace of his work. At least Allen goes there.(Reading Leslie Hill's Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary,provides a good preparatory for Allen's speed read).
For those ready to do the work on this new language, beyond subject and object, in which truth nestles like the hedgehog, and which places the human endeavor at the precipice of what cannot be vouched safe, but only desired, this book is a worthy companion. ... Read more

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essays on community, tr Pierre Joris ... Read more

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to"A Customer"
Dear "A Customer"
Thank you for your re-view, in which you offered such a clear, transparent view into your experience of reading. I was just purchasing this book which has intrigued me for some years, when I came across what you wrote. I wanted to tell you that I liked it very much. Good luck with your future explorations!

If you can locate a copy, you'll entrust it to your friends.
I have been reading and re-reading this nearly "page-less"(about 80 pages including the translator's introduction ) volume of ___?(what is it? autobiography?poetry?) for about 4 years now . I can't get it out of my mind. I was hard-pressed to read any philosophy until I tried this remarkable author's work. Since then, I've gradually made my way into this new kind of "inquiry" mainly from the inspiration he has provided in this particular volume. Blanchot was born in 1907 so he would have been nearly 80 years old when this was first published in France in 1983. It is difficult reading and you may come away from the initial reading perplexed. Stay with it. It takes some years getting used to this new way of comporting your "self" in the world which the author seems to offer as a kind and patronly "Instructor".Though it is only a few pages, I can't read it all at once. Instead I'll pick it up every few months and read some of it. Usually this is when I am trying to find someone (like Blanchot) who might want to talk to me about why things seem so hopeless in this technologically driven society. Blanchot even quotes another writer here (Edgar Morin) who expresses the view he(Blanchot) shares "in the possibility of another society and another humanity". This also reveals (even as it conceals) some of Blanchot's major themes including the mystery of "friendship", an "impossible" relation enigmatically exposed to the light of day, that is if we get a glimpse of it at all. ( I recall in another essay, these words that Blancot says have been attributed to Aristotle:"Oh my friends, there is no friend"). This might give some sense of the kind of measure and question Blanchot "risks" in each sentence he writes. Here in THE UNAVOWABLE COMMMUNITY, we have the "evidence" most especially of a significant vulnerability toward friendship as it relates to Blanchot's testimonial of a crucial, yet "unavowable" bond with Georges Baitaille and Marguerite Duras (who by the way wrote the book that the movie "The Lover" was based on as well as the screen-play to the film "Hiroshima,Mon Amour").I only began my interest in Western Philosophy recently and Blanchot has been the main reason, though I have heard he is difficult and "impenetrable" at times. That surprises me! Considering that I have not read deeply in Philosophy until recently, though I did read quite a bit of "literature". Blanchot entrusts some questions to us in the hopes that we might "choose to carry" them with us; and maybe entrust it to others in our stead ( "live the questions as Rilke told a young poet in a letter once) . I can't get away from these deeply personal reminisences. By the same token,once the reader becomes accustomed (somewhat) to the "difficulty"(or newness) of this kind of writing (as well as a kind of "modesty" on Blanchot's account) the reader gradually moves toward some kind of gap that separates his/her experience from that of Blanchot. Somehow, Blanchot's gazes turns quite movingly and touchingly into the visual context of community and friendship. Unless ,of course, it is the other way around.Perhaps, our sense of the community (or whatever may or may not characterize the social relation) IS the very "visual" or "lighted" place risked or illumined in any speech offering or gesture. Its an "unavowable" relation. A relation which Giorgio Agamben characterizes as "irreducibly social and ethical". Otherwise, perhap there is a darkening region now nearer to the eyes, which by our relation and openness towards each other (or the other) changes the homestead of"light"and its shadings into hope, perception, or memory of light ( or is this"re-presention that I'm speaking of?).Somehow Blanchot's tone is toward "meaning " but without asseting itself as anything "meaningful" . To close let me mention two things. Blanchot led me to Giorgio Agamben's book "The Coming Community" because of its similar sounding title , and I quoted from another Agamben book "Stanzas" above. Also, I'm reminded of Blanchot's appropriation of Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent", to which he offers this toward the end of this book of his(Blancot's) we have been discussing here:"given that by enunciating it he has not been able to impose silence on himself....does indicate that in the final analysis one has to talk in order to remain silent. But with what kinds of words?" I first read that sentence 4 years ago, and I still wonder what kind of words we are and are not using still. Up until now, I've been rather silent about the issue. ... Read more

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Fiction/Literary Criticism, translated from the French by Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton, with a foreward by Christopher Fynsk and an afterword by George Quasha and Charles Stein, edited by George Quasha. Maurice Blanchot, in his "rcits" and essays alike, attends to "the haunting presence of a language that brings language itself into question as it searches the borders of what can be said in its time." (from the Foreword) Resolutely exploratory, refusing the modes of explanation and lyric complacency, and resolutely astute, letting no one, least of all the writer, off the hook of fiercely committed language in a difficult world, Blanchot's writing is, in Susan Sontag's phrase, "unimpeachably major." "Blanchot's power as a writer pierces, like a look that is too direct, the indeterminate prose, and makes all relations, and especially our relation to time, absolutely precarious." (-Geoffrey Hartman) This book is the only collection in English of Blanchot's mature fiction, and includes, as well as a reprint of seven of Blanchot's Station Hill books, a selection of literary/philosophical writings drawn from five of his most important works. ... Read more

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An excellent source of Blanchot's fiction and early thought
This reader does as well as a job as I can imagine at abbreviating Maurice Blanchot's corpus into one volume. The essays are mostly of his early thought on literature and the fiction is that of his most important short works. Preventing the need for lots of very little, not so cheap editions of Blanchot's fiction alone makes this reader a staple for anyone interested in Blanchot. The essays are helpful, but in no way stand in for the works from which they come. If you want to engage Blanchot's thought, The Space of Literature and The Infinite Conversation will take you far beyond what staying with this reader could do. Unfortunately, the essays only present early Blanchot, before he shifted his thought from literature to writing. But still, having Thomas the Obscure, The Moment of My Death, and Madness of the Day in one volume is enough for me. If you have had no experience with Blanchot, then these essays would be a good way to test the water. If it is to your liking, just be sure to move on quickly into his actual work and not consider these essays to be sufficient in themselves.

Oh, and as a side note, a lot of Blanchot's fiction isn't light reading. Thomas the Obscure is extremely heavy. As in, 5 or 10 pages only in one sitting, heavy. Heavier than Ulysses, heavy. His fiction basically doesn't provide the reader her common, comfortable places for footing. The reader instead falls into the writing, as it were. Immensely beautiful and engaging--don't let this be a deterrent--but it does demand effort from its reader. It goes without saying that if you're interested in Blanchot, you're willing at least in part to do some of this work, but here it also means that there's much more to be gained from the effort. ... Read more

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Maurice Blanchot's impact on French thinking and culture over the last 50 years has been enormous.Yet he still remains a writer whose work, though often cited, is little known to the English-speaking reader. In The Blanchot Reader Michael Holland answers that urgent need and does so in a way that provides a coherent perspective on what by any standard is an extraordinary personal and intellectual career.We see how Blanchot in the 1940s anticipated later post-Sartrean trends, as followed by among others Samuel Beckett and the practitioners of the nouveau roman. We discover how the linguistic turn of the 1950s took place for Blanchot in a political climate, while also occurring within literature and philosophy, and we trace the emergence of the entretien, a dialogue format used by Blanchot to interrogate the writing of his contemporaries, and beyond this to entertain a real dialogue with the `Other' and so to broach the question of ultimate responsibility.The volume concludes with a consideration of Blanchot's development of the `fragment', in his philosophical and his political writings, as well as in those devoted to literature.A final subsection focuses on his recentmidrash on Moses and Aaron, dedicated to Jacques Derrida. A chronology of Blanchot's career and a succinct primary and secondary bibliography are also included, together with a list of English translations of Blanchot's work. ... Read more

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As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice Blanchot has earned tributes from authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Emmanuel Levinas. But their praise has told us little about what Blanchot's work actually says and why it has been so influential. In the first comprehensive study of this important French writer to appear in English, Gerald Bruns ties Blanchot's writings to each other and to the works of his contemporaries, including the poet Paul Celan.

Blanchot belongs to the generation of French intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s, survived the Occupation, and flourished during the quarter century or so after World War II. He was one of the first French intellectuals to take a systematic interest in questions of language and meaning. His focus in the mid-1930s on extreme situations -- death, madness, imprisonment, exile, revolution, catastrophe -- anticipated the later interest of the existentialists. Like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, Blanchot was a self-conscious writer of fragments, and he has given us one the most developed investigations that we have on the fragment as a kind of writing.

In a series of close readings, Bruns addresses the philosophical and political questions that have surrounded Blanchot and his writings for decades. He describes what is creative in Blanchot's readings of Heidegger's controversial works and examines Blanchot's conception of poetry as an inquiry into the limits of philosophy, rationality, and power.

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fiction, tr Lydia Davis ... Read more

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Radical Passivity examines the notion of passivity in the work of Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, three thinkers of exceptional intellectual privacy whose writings have decidedly altered the literary and philosophical cultures of our era. Placing their use of passivity in the context of Heidegger and Kant, Wall argues that any philosophical understanding of Levinas's ethics, Blanchot's aesthetics, or Agamben's community must begin with an understanding of a "logic" of passivity that in fact originates (in the modern era at least) in Kant's analysis of the transcendental schema. ... Read more