The Anguish of Thought by Évelyne Grossman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Anguish of Thought by Évelyne Grossman Callie Ingram (bio) the anguish of thought Évelyne Grossman Matthew Cripsey and Louise Burchill, trans. University of Minnesota Press https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-anguish-of-thought 180 pages; Print, $24.95 "At the heart of modern writing," Évelyne Grossman writes, "anguish designates that which occurs in closest proximity to thought." Expertly weaving together strands from the work of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Samuel Beckett, and Maurice Blanchot, among others, Grossman produces, in her newly translated The Anguish of Thought, a compelling and suggestive argument about our sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic experiences of being inspired by and through writing. "All experience it differently," she argues, "and yet there is a profound commonality to all these experiences in that they all rattle the assured bases of what we believe to be our own thought, our own identity." Originally published as L'Angoisse de penser (2008), this book joins the continuous philosophical and poetic debates about how to theorize literature as well as historical investigations into the experience of anguish. Grossman, as a well-established scholar of Antonin Artaud, emphasizes the performative aspects of reading and writing while drawing upon the work of major twentieth-century philosophers and writers of the French scene in order to argue for an understanding of anguish that forefronts how it pushes one to be "out of oneself," its creative force. The author's easy familiarity with the theories in play allows her a great latitude to find patterns across texts and examine similarities between these oft-discussed thinkers, and she does so [End Page 45] generously: generous both in advancing her ambitious hypotheses and in the relative accessibility of her argument. To be clear, background knowledge on the cited critical theorists and writers is recommended if not mandatory for readers. However, for anyone who has struggled alongside the difficult texts of the above writers, it is a genuine pleasure to read Grossman process and reframe that difficulty, synthesize their major ideas, and present her own with clarity. In the introductory chapter, Grossman deftly links these chosen figures through their shared tropes and concerns: the affective experiences of fatigue, nausea, ecstasy, and excessive negativity; the desire for access to an inhumanity or dishumanity beyond human finitude; a certain vision of existence on the level of atoms, emphasizing entanglement over strict, coherent identities; and finally a definition of inspiration that depends crucially on the aspiration (with some beautiful wordplay around the "breath") of the other. From Grossman's web of thinkers, writing emerges as a "profound experience of depersonalization," a dizziness that provokes anguish but which also animates us. Despite the book's focus on writing, the "literary" here follows tradition to signify thought broadly—it is less a matter of craft, though the latter half of the book does contain some detailed close readings of Beckett and Blanchot, and more a matter of conceptual form. The "other" that inspires us is not a political category (Grossman stresses this, perhaps disappointingly) nor any iterable form or identifiable entity—rather, it is that which rattles us out of ourselves, puts to question one's sense of oneself. The Anguish of Thought is above all a book about the practice of thinking, understood as both a destabilizing and generative experience. The study ranges from investigating Derrida and Levinas's "mad" commitments to the voice of the other in chapters two and three; to positing Beckett's "ephectic subject" in light of structural concepts of metalanguage, archive, and "dead form" in chapters four through six; to analyzing Blanchot's articulation of the project of writing as the "heroism of an impersonal death" in the final two chapters. (Alongside these central figures, the writings of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Catherine Malabou, and, of course, Artaud, also have a vocal [End Page 46] presence throughout the book.) Spun together, these explorations show the shared obsession of these thinkers with "the recurring question of how, through writing, can the unthinkable be touched upon" as well as the different ways that they have all tried to answer it. There are moments in The Anguish of Thought...