Product Description
Que es el civismo cuando, en ciertas circunstancias, se convierte en sumision vergonzosa? No hay casos en que la negativa a servir constituye un deber sagrado, en que la traicion significa el respeto valiente por lo verdadero? Y cuando, por la voluntad de esos que lo utilizan como instrumento de dominacion racista o ideologica, el ejercito se afirma en estado de revuelta abierta o latente contra las instituciones democraticas, la revuelta contra el ejercito no cobra un sentido nuevo? La trascendencia de la obra critica y literaria de Maurice Blanchot esta fuera de toda duda. Su pensamiento politico, sin embargo, es menos conocido: los textos y declaraciones reunidos aqui por primera vez fueron escritos para revistas efimeras o incluso confidenciales y aparecieron firmados por muchas personas (para dar cuenta de un movimiento colectivo) o por nadie (para que todos pudieran sentirse responsables). Si la caracteristica que recorre todos estos textos es el rechazo (tal como se titula el primero de ellos), no es menos cierto que los articulos revisten una de las formas mas elevadas de la afirmacion: el intento de pensar en comun, de reflexionar de modo comunitario la posibilidad de una nueva experiencia politica. ... Read more

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Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of Maurice Blanchot's essays on literature and language, consisting of fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays-like those collected in the other five books of criticism published over several decades-have established Blanchot as the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century. Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and modern, both literary and theoretical texts, they have attained the status of model readings for authors as diverse as da Vinci and Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust, Molière, Goethe, and Mallarmé.

However, the book is not a miscellaneous collection of exquisite essays. The first section of the volume, "From Anguish to Language," indicates the relative unity of its trajectory and its special moment in the development of Blanchot's thought. "Anguish" was a prominent notion for the existentialist philosophies of the period of his first work, and in this book Blanchot reflects on the necessary transition from the paradoxes of anguish to a focus on the paradoxes of language. He does so without ever betraying the affective tensions that attach themselves to linguistic utterances, but he also insists that the pathos of anxiety is, in the last resort, comical. Whoever writes "I am lonely" can judge himself to be quite comical, as he evokes his solitude by addressing a reader and using means that make it impossible to be alone.

This comedy of language is retraced in Blanchot's intensely luminous essays on poetry and narration, on silence and symbolism, the novel and morals, the stranger, the enigma, time, and the very possibility of literature in the works of Blake, Balzac, Rimbaud, and Gide, Bergson and Brice Parain, Rilke and Bataille, Sartre, Camus, Queneau, and so many others. ... Read more

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Reflections on the enigma and secret of "literature." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Rich and strange
Brilliant, eccentric, flying recklessly in the face of the critical and philosophical trends of its time, PROXIMITY is an analysis of individuation and difference that has no equal in the history of philosophy. Libertson, never heard of before or since, saw In Levinas, Blanchot and Bataille a nocturnal "involvement" which led him to his own bold conclusions about alterity as a condition of possibility of all separation or individuation. But he did not put this in terms of space, of form or structure like the thinkers of his time. Rather, he put it in the terms of force, of violence. The Other weighs on the Same from within the Same, crushing, suffocating, sucking the breath out of the separate being and at the same time giving it breath, giving it life. Libertson managed to derive this bizarre thematics from the writings of the three thinkers, quoting them copiously to support his arguments. Contradiction after contradiction, paradox after paradox, are compressed as though by a vise as Libertson endlessly repeats that the separate being can have no identity, but has an intense unicity. And the Other, imponderable, unseizable, approaches from within the Self itself. "I cannot approach it. It approaches me, and as it approaches, it creates me."

He praises Gilles Deleuze, and pauses for a withering footnote about Jacques Derrida's reading of Levinas. He characterizes Derrida as a Heidegerrian intellectualist unequipped for the challenges of Levinas. Few writers of the time would have dared such a broadside.

Apparently Levinas and Blanchot were in close touch with Libertson during the writing of the book, and both were presented with copies of the Phaenomenologica hardcover. According to a brief note in Critique May 1985, Blanchot wrote to Libertson, "ce que vous dites répond si merveilleusement à ce qu'il faut penser qu'il faut encore douter que vous soyez compris." Libertson is a footnote in one of Levinas's articles. Beyond this he remains completely unknown, if he is still alive.

Two years ago this writer was in the house where Blanchot lived for many years in Le Mesnil St. Denis, sixty miles from Paris. In the living room where Blanchot used to work is a bookshelf with a small shrine to Blanchot, lovingly kept by his adopted daughter. On the shelf is a cheap snapshot of Blanchot as an old man, a compendium of essays called LIRE BLANCHOT and -- a copy of PROXIMITY.

Prior Knowledge Essential for Comprehension of this book
For over ten years I had been reading this book--attempting to grasp the vocabulary which is sometimes in French, (with no page of definitions) and sometimes in English.One's task is to first keep track of ideas presented in the first chapter, then with your deep and profound pre-knowledge of Levinas, Blanchot, and Bataille, you can try to ferret out what is the strange, echoing discussion all three of them had amongst and between their works.The premise is that they DID read each other and responded in their own works to each other, but only Libertson gained some intuition of what these correlations might be. An excellent effort, hard to understand, must love exotic French theory and Martinus Nijhoff books.European all the way. ... Read more

Product Description
A scene of self-sacrifice can never be staged or secured. The work of Friedrich Hölderlin, arguably one of the most profound writers of the German Enlightenment, supports this idea in fascinating ways. Much of Hölderlin's critical reception, however, has the poet saying the exact opposite. Joseph Suglia counters the dominant critical reception of Hölderlin's Empedokles fragments, which would transform the tragic hero's experience of mortality into a project that would be accomplished in the name of the transcendent reconciliation of disparate spheres. This book also focuses on a densely detailed consideration of the work of the great French critic and literary artist, Maurice Blanchot, whose own treatment of self-sacrifice exists in closer proximity to Hölderlin's than the former appears to recognize. For Blanchot, it is argued, self-sacrifice is "a sacrifice that is an engagement with, in, and for language, a sacrifice that is both madness and mystery." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Theses and the Mind Set
Ever probe into your inner thoughts and find a theory behind your thoughts?This will make 'self sacrifice' seem a must for us to practice even if it means abandoning materialistic gains. ... Read more

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Iyer argues for the transformative potential for philosophy and political practice of the thought of Maurice Blanchot. The book traces Blanchot's complex negotiations of the thought of Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and Levinas, which allowed him to develop his distinctive account of the work of art and his account of the opening to the Other. Iyer also examines the significance of Blanchot's interventions in French political life, in particular, his participation in the events of May 1968.
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