Maurice Blanchot Research Articles

PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH IN MAURICE BLANCHOT

Maurice Blanchot is a 20th century French philosopher who was one of the few philosophers who started to write on death. Death has a special role in Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy, he understands death from two points of view: existential death and death as a metaphor, which is mainly investigated among side the process of creation and literature. The aim of this work is to present philosophy of Death in Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy. The presentation aims to present that death is understood from two points of view in his thinking. First, death is understood as the existential drive for living and creation; secondly death is also understood as a metaphor in the process of creativity, in this sense, death plays a crucial role in Blanchot’s thinking. The article also aims to explain such Blanchotian concepts as death’s space, death’s transmutation and two kinds of death. Death’s space is understood as a creative space of creation in which the representations and information is converted in the process of creation. Death’s transmutation is the process of transmuting certain material (whether its painting or words) into the new form. While two kinds of death refer to two types of death: the first is the death that persons can comprehend, while the second is the death that is experienced unexpectedly. Lastly, the work also aims to talk about the relationship between death and literature as death becomes an existential and creative force that sparks novelty.

Gifts for No One or Anyone: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida on Personne

In Parages, Jacques Derrida writes that the ‘Donner – le temps’ seminar ‘led up to’ a study of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour. That study is the improvised fourteenth session of Donner le temps II. Derrida turns to La folie du jour to treat in more explicit terms the structure of the ‘ récit’ which was particularly relevant to his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s récit ‘La fausse monnaie’ earlier in the seminar, but which is almost entirely absent from the sessions included in Donner le temps II. This paper proposes one possible reason for Derrida’s insistence on Blanchot in the seminar and for thinking the gift: La folie du jour’s narrator, which is not someone determinate, but personne (which, in French, can mean either an indeterminate ‘no one’ or a substitutable ‘anyone’ depending on the context). I argue that the aporetic structure of the gift is best expressed when the gift’s subject and object are indeterminable and substitutable, which is the case when the gift is given to or received from an impersonal personne (to or from no one or anyone).

The Question of Blanchot in Beckett’s Three Dialogues and The Unnamable

Abstract While the possible influence of the French writer Maurice Blanchot on Samuel Beckett’s writing has long been one of the more vexing questions in Beckett scholarship, textual echoes, thematic correspondences and circumstantial clues now make it likelier than not that Beckett encountered Blanchot’s writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The personal documents of Georges Duthuit—Beckett’s close friend in this period, during the writing of both Three Dialogues (1949) and the ‘Trilogy’ of novels (1951–1953)—shed further light on this connection. They suggest that Three Dialogues is a continuation of Beckett’s decades-long thought on habit, as first articulated in Proust (1930), and that Duthuit (re)introduced Beckett to Blanchot’s work at the time of writing Three Dialogues. This article explores connections between Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur (1941) and ‘De l’angoisse au langage’ (1943), and published and manuscript versions of Beckett’s Three Dialogues and L’Innommable, as well as between the problematics posed by the latter two texts. Finally, it suggests that L’Innommable is not a reflection but a radicalization of Blanchot’s thought, such that Blanchot missed the full extent of its radicality in his own review of the novel.

The space not beyond: T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and their musical adaptations as elemental melodrama of an upper-atmospheric limit

ABSTRACT This essay examines T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and its subsequent musical adaptation, Cats (1981) by Andrew Lloyd Webber, through the lens of elemental melodrama. It begins with Eliot’s envisioned but omitted conclusion, where a poet ascends with Jellicle cats, and explores its revival in the musical’s song ‘Journey to the Heaviside Layer’. This ascent melodramatises the climactic journey to a heaven, an imaginary space beyond Earth’s tangible experiences. The essay contrasts the musical’s alignment of the Heaviside Layer with a ‘heaven’ oriented toward the desires and aspirations of anthropomorphised cats with Joseph Kittinger’s 1960 high-altitude balloon ascent and Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on Yuri Gagarin’s space mission. Both Kittinger’s and Blanchot’s writings reveal the Heaviside Layer as both a real and metaphorical space of death and existential void, contrasting with the musical’s portrayal of it purely in terms of celestial ascent. Drawing on Peter Brooks’s theory of melodrama as a post-sacred mode, the essay highlights how tableau, gesture, heightened emotion and, especially, song in Cats convey a collective yearning for transcendence. Ultimately, it argues that the Heaviside Layer in Cats serves as a zone of elemental melodramatic transcendence. It is in this context that earthly limitations, particularly those relating to embodied differences of race and sex, exist in tension with feline (and, by implication, human) aspirations for an unreachable ‘beyond’.

Big crunch singularity: Quantization of alterity and transcendence in the light of quantum entanglement or non-locality in Maurice Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure, and When the Time Comes

Big crunch singularity: Quantization of alterity and transcendence in the light of quantum entanglement or non-locality in Maurice Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure, and When the Time Comes

ANGUISH, TRAUMA AND RESPONSIBILITY: ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE ON ONTOLOGICAL NARRATIVE FORMATION

This article discusses the issue of anguish from a philosophical perspective combining it with the issues of trauma, responsibility and ethics. It is argued that anguish is a painful emotion that has ontological roots and can be etched into a positive form of either arts or writing, which helps to express this particular emotion, according to Maurice Blanchot’s philosophical viewpoint. Further, the article focuses on the ethical narrative formation regarding the victim and the nature of trauma. The paper refers to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject to explain that the abuser’s narrative is usually abjected by the society by excluding the abuser from the ethical narrative, while the victim is seen as deficient due to the trauma experience. The article suggests that the trauma narrative can be reformed and changed in such a way as to include both the victim and the abuser into it. The text argues that demystification and dialogical relationship between the victim and abuser, as well as the reduction of the role of narcissism in the abuser’s narrative, can help create an ethical narrative that allows to humanize both the victim and the abuser. The article further argues that the abuser has to take the responsibility for the wrongdoings, which usually falls too often on the victim. There is a further argument about a shift in narrative formation in the society which creates certain values, meanings and socially accepted emotions. The article also emphasizes that empathy and love are important for considering trauma narratives in order to learn to accept new accounts of trauma.

Critique du récit pur: gleam of time in Maurice Blanchot’s narratives

ABSTRACT Maurice Blanchot’s itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned right-wing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a ‘pure novel’, inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this pure form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that ‘pure’ literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot’s fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author’s factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.

Literature and Philosophy in Maurice Blanchot

O presente trabalho busca reconstituir os momentos nos quais a primeira obra literária de Blanchot se abre para o pensamento filosófico. Em Thomás, L´Obscur, os temas de um vitalismo a contrapelo, que segue de perto os problemas colocados pela morte imanente à vida, se transpõem numa caracterização importante do que compreende como espaço literário. Tentamos mostrar como sua criação se estende para além do campo literário, dando a ver uma ontologia da linguagem e uma experiência intensiva do real. Apesar de serem incorporados criticamente alguns conceitos bergsonianos (ao invés de vida, duração e memória, o que se passa em Blanchot é morte, instante e esquecimento), não se trata propriamente de ir numa contramão. Tal inversão é ambígua, pois não se falseia propriamente o tipo de realidade para a qual o bergsonismo apontava, mas sim para aprofundá-la.

Maurice Blanchot’s troubling geography: Neutralizing key spatial and temporal concepts in the wake of deconstruction

In dialogue with recent studies that have sought to foreground the negative and the abyssal in human geography and that have struggled in vain to prevent their foreclosure, we introduce the work of the French theorist Maurice Blanchot, whose challenging and thought-provoking writings remain largely unknown within our discipline despite their significance for deconstructing geography’s conceptual architecture. After explicating Blanchot’s neutralization of the problem of negativity and positivity, the paper brings Blanchot’s neutral writings to bear on three areas of contemporary geographical concern: the trouble with subjectivity and identity; the unhinging of space and time; and the disaster of writing.

:Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative: Ethics of the Image

:<i>Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative: Ethics of the Image</i>

The chaff and the wheat: Emily Dickinson and Maurice Blanchot

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how Emily Dickinson consigned her work to loss and powerlessness instead of profit and power in the light of Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of ‘the unworking’, a concept he developed in dialogue with French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Bataille. The aspects of Dickinson’s writing practice that I relate to ‘the unworking’ are its materiality, strategies of address used in poems, spider poems, and the way she writes about dying. These aspects are marked by powerlessness, unemployed negativity and loss. Thinking about these elements in dialogue with Blanchot also provides a better comprehension of the relationship he established between ‘the unworking’ and literature.

Drawing Reflections

As part of a larger effort to explore the multiform relations between philosophy and literature—a research field that attracts growing attention— we focus on the philosophical aspects of literature. Our project tackles the subject of literature’s potential to generate knowledge. In our paper we intend to dwell on self-referential literature. This intriguing dimension of literary expression is associated with works in which self-reflective moves can be traced, that is, texts in which literary writing refers to and reflects on literature itself. The self-reflection of self-referential literature assumes many shapes, affecting in various ways the constitution of both content and form. Thus, our aim becomes twofold. First, we look into variants of literary self-reflection, while pondering the philosophical implications of each of those. Here, we are going to draw on examples from the writings of Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Maurice Blanchot and Clarice Lispector. Second, we propose to consider the necessary conditions and the prospects for obtaining some kind of knowledge by means of self-referential literature. In so doing, we examine alternative conceptions and kinds of knowledge which could be taken into account.

Letter as Subject for Anthropological Research

The article discusses the value and possible results of the anthropological research focusing on ordinary letters. An ordinary letter is considered in the article to be written primarily for maintaining a relationship with the addressee, rather than for solving specific problems in a certain field (even if that includes research, culture, art, business, or legal issues). The anthropological research of ordinary letters is valuable in that it reveals the less visible patterns of communication and cooperation. This analysis primarily displays the temporality of communication and togetherness, showing correspondence as a rhythmic bidirectional continuous process of different intensity; secondly, it highlights the composition of the momentary “I”, which depends on the relationship with the addressee and draws together episodes from different spaces and times; and finally, it discloses the constant negotiations with the proposed or imposed roles – these negotiations are most clearly visible in the ordinary letters and, at the same time, they clearly vary depending on the relationship maintained by the particular thread of correspondence.&#x0D; The article also uses theoretical insights by scholars researching the epistolary materials (Liz Stanley, Helen Dampier, Aistė Kučinskienė) and those by anthropologists and philosophers (William James, Maurice Blanchot, Judith Butler, Jens Brockmeier, Harold Garfinkel, Hanna Meretoja), including the classical theories of time, yet again reminding us of the heterogeneity of the time experience and human actions. The correspondence of the Lithuanian poet Janina Degutytė was chosen as a suitable example, since it most clearly reveals various aspects of the ordinary letters discussed in the article.

The Urban Essential Solitude of the Hunger Character: A Blanchotian Reading of PAUL Auster’s Moon Palace

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze Paul Auster’s Moon Palace through the lens of philosopher and critic Maurice Blanchot, whose literary theory provides a theoretical frame to study this novel as a fictionalization of the construction of the literary space. Paul Auster’s influence of Maurice Blanchot’s poetics starts with Auster’s experience as a translator of some of Blanchot’s texts, a job that contributes to the influence French literature has in Auster’s work. I argue that Paul Auster’s Moon Palace fictionalizes Maurice Blanchot’s literary theory by introducing a central character, Marco Fogg, who implicitly performs the role of character-author and progressively transforms himself and his own world into a fictional one. In order to accomplish this task, Auster leads his central character to different stages of inspiration and creation comparable to the ones defined by Blanchot in his theorization of the literary space. Whereas most of the critics point at isolation and hunger as a rebellious behavior provoked by the existential crisis of the character, I analyze them as creative stages in the protagonist’s fictional transformation. By introducing this creative process in his fiction, Auster creates a particular Austerian metafiction in which characters become the protagonists, creators and readers of their own urban fictional space.

“Barely Audible Voices”: Impersonal Justice And The Crisis Of Human Rights Discourse In Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

The article starts from the premise that much of the critical work dedicated to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 centres upon the idea of depersonalisation, generally understood as a subtraction of what is most properly personal in the human individual. The thesis put forward is that Bolaño’s style and technique of characterisation, particularly in the passages dedicated to the victims of human rights abuses, is best appreciated by recurring to the idea of “impersonality”, conceived as a third pole between personality and depersonalisation. The first section of the article is dedicated to connecting the idea of literary incorporation to that of human rights, thus showing how historically situated conceptions of “person” often influence readers’ expectations of what would constitute a dignified and just rendition of victims of real abuses in fiction. In the second section, it is suggested that Bolaño’s project intentionally diverges from the aims of literary incorporation and is more finely attuned to the philosophy of the impersonal which is to be found in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Simone Weil. The article concludes by interpreting Bolaño’s literary gesture in relation to existing critiques of human rights discourse.

The Work of Interpretation: Critique and the Review Form, 1946–1967

Abstract: This article examines a series of pivotal moments in the history of the postwar French journal Critique , tracing the development, refinement, and reassertion of the journal's singular style of critical practice. We present the journal's founding documents and consider editor Georges Bataille's identification of Maurice Blanchot as the guiding model for the journal. Then we examine two defining texts in the review's development: Alexandre Kojève's "Hegel, Marx and Christianity" (1946) and Alain Badiou's "The (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism" (1967). Kojève's celebrated article crystallised the ideals of the journal's programme; Badiou's article meanwhile tested those ideals, precipitating a minor editorial crisis.

Discussion on Social Media Aesthetic War: Maurice Blanchot and the Establishment of Ethics

This short discussion paper proposes a non-traditional view to ethics and war, and aims to highlight new perspectives on how we view and understand war. Images, images, images are everywhere in the virtual sphere of the internet, YouTube, ads, and social media. This process of expressing oneself via the virtual image accelerates the fight for the aesthetic virtual beauty when people are trying to create an image of glorified, ideal, and perfect life. This is a mode of fight which aims to narcissistically show off their grandiosity and desire for recognition, admiration, and fascination, fighting for the viewers and followers. Such mode of hedonistic desire seems to shun ethics away from the screen. However, Maurice Blanchot, a 20th century French philosopher, who was prone to denounce the issues of his contemporary time in a rather obscure and distant way, may give us the opportunity to understand this war of aesthetics in social media and ethics.

Corpses in Training: Blanchot and The International Necronautical Society’s Experimental Expeditions Beyond Life

The commentary discusses Blanchodian theorization on death and its experimental application in the International Necronautical Society (1999–2010). Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas regarded life as suspended living overshadowed by one’s death that was unknowable. Challenging such utter unknowability, the INS took cues from twentieth-century avant-garde discourses (revolving around the mélange of life and art) where death imbued perceptions of temporal stasis, finality, and journeying into the unknown. Their experimentalism conceptualized death as a “space” to be explored through artistic means. The INS sought to unravel the unassailable binaries between life and the absoluteness of death through art.

Carving out the absence within

This article explores the technique of rilievo (Italian for “relief”) employed in Renaissance painting to form a three-dimensional object, usually a figure, which stands out from the background. Transferred to philosophical and literary writing, rilievo is used to shape the two-dimensional medium of the text and carve out a concept that stands in a negative relation with the empirical world. Writing, like the work of art, includes what it appropriates from the empirical world, presents it in a new form, and affirms the existence of what is not visible in the material alone. Relying on Theodor W. Adorno’s dialectical understanding of the artwork’s self-negation and Maurice Blanchot’s writing of desubjectivation, I argue that, unlike the additive process of shaping a figure or a concept, negative rilievo is the process of recovering constitutive absence.

Rumor, an Anarchimedium

Beyond the only text Jean-Luc Nancy explicitly dedicated to it (‘Rumoration’ in La Ville au loin), rumor lurks in the background — under the surface — of any discourse on community, or on being-with. Following closely Nancy’s thought process in ‘Rumoration’ (Nancy presents himself as walking, wandering in the city), this article interweaves fragments of a genealogy of rumor, from the ancient Greek logopoios to today’s ‘fake news’. But rumor is precisely what evades genealogy, so although it can be thought of as an archimedium (pure mediality, as Maurice Blanchot suggests), its floating texture, made up of references to references, turns it into a kind of anarchistructure.