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The role of politics in literary creation and interpretation is discussed for the French intellectual tradition and the critical period in France from 1931 to 1948.Maurice Blanchot's early fiction is analyzed as a symbolic expression of its sociopolitical context.He portrays the plight of the Jewish people and of the French nation in his fiction published between 1936 and 1949.A recent storm of critical reaction raises questions about the rights and limits of the literary critic and about moral and personal aspects of the author, text, and reading process.Politics and Literature offers a model for critical interpretation that takes into account complexity, process, and the sociopolitical context of the literary text. ... Read more

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Disappointing
The text is helpful in the overview it gives of critical responses to Blanchot. However, it is too often guilty of simplistic assertions both about Blanchot and his texts as well as about those who have written about him. ... Read more

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In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation which question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a "neutral" voice that arises from the realm of the "outside." This book is crucial not only to an understanding of these two thinkers, but also to any overview of recent French thought.Michel Foucault (1927-1984) was the holder of a chair at the College de France. Among his works are Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality Maurice Blanchot, born in 1907, is a novelist and critic. His works include Death Sentence, Thomas the Obscure, and The Space of Literature. ... Read more

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A Compelling Examination of the Space of the Writer
Any fan of Foucault or Blanchot should greatlyappreciate these two short homages.Maurice Blanchot was originaly a literary critic who later wrote fictions, philosophical essays, and unusual hybrids of the two.Acontemporary and friend of Levinas, his work has had a huge impact on postWWII literature and continental philosophy.With astonishingly articulatelanguage (as translated by Massumi), Foucault offers both a insightfulcommentary on Blanchot and an idea of what means to exit in the space ofwriting fiction. It is difficult to categorize Foucaultswriting;perphaps he is best known as a writer who encouraged a modified(archealogical) method ofexamining history, and using this methodprolifically wrote social/cultural/philosophical commentary.Blanchotwrites on Foucaults writing with clarity and appreciation.If you areunfamiliar with these authors, this book makes for a good introduction;these writers may change the way you think, and you should read more. Ifyou know these authors then you should definitely sympathize with thehomage aspect: it's a great quick read (though you will probably need toread the layered language five times, and again late in life.) ... Read more

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WHEN THE TIME COMES ostensibly chronicles the troubled relations between the narrator-a very ill man-and the two women whose lives he invades. As in all of Blanchot's intensely subjective fiction, the true subject of the work is the narrator's consciousness and the process by which his tale emerges through its telling. Powerfully affected by the slightest of events, the narrator responds with a violence that, most disturbingly, appears inevitable. ... Read more

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"Blanchot describes a world where the Absolute has finally overcome all other rivals to its authority. The State is unified, universal, and homogenous, promising perfect satisfaction. Why then does it find revolt everywhere? Could it be the omnipresent police? The plagues? The proliferating prisons and black markets? Written in part as a description of post-World War II Europe, Blanchot's dystopia charts with terrible clarity the endless death of god in an era of constantly metamorphosing but strangely definitive ideologies."-Translation Review ... Read more

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These early parables of Maurice Blanchot provide a rewarding introduction to a modern master; they also illuminate with hallucinatory intensity certain consequences of the hopeless and irresistible human longing to communicate through language. The world is still haunted by the ghosts of unspoken and unspeakable words emanating from the deaths here recounted almost fifty years ago. ... Read more

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Examining the work of Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy while at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and specters that go under the name of literature. ... Read more