Maurice Blanchot Research Articles

Kafka Shared Between Blanchot and Sartre

AbstractEver since their translation in the course of the 20thcentury, the works of Kafka have been widely appreciated by French intellectuals. Kafka’s greatest admirers include Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Paul Sartre, both of whom consider his work an exemplary illustration of their own poetical-philosophical views. This is remarkable, because Blanchot’s and Sartre’s respective views are generally conceived of as opposites. Apparently, then, these two authors who are so divergent in their philosophical views and literary criticism, as well as in their own literary works, find themselves on the same page in their appreciation of Kafka. I will argue that this shared appreciation not only reveals some unexpected points of agreement between them, but also facilitates an interesting intellectual encounter between Blanchot and Sartre in the late 1940 s. It is, we will see, only on the basis of an agreement with regards to Kafka’s work that their ways can part.

Um gesto menor, logo rebelde, na literatura brasileira

Bastou a chegada de um corpo jovem na cela repleta de homens já velhos e gastos pelas dores do mundo para que algo ocorresse naquela madrugada. Assim ocorre na peça-teatral Barrela (1958), do escritor brasileiro Plínio Marcos (1935-1999), cuja narrativa densa e repleta de diálogos intensos e clivados por afetos múltiplos nos permite pensar toda uma concepção de humanidade, subjetividade e institucionalidade no espaço prisional brasileira das décadas de 1960 e 1970. O texto analisa a imagem do corpo jovem violado, descrevendo as intersecções de classe, gênero, geração e sexualidade que cindiram uma subjetividade coletiva alicerçada na dor e na reprodução da violência física e psicológica, mas sem incorrer em processos de individualização da violência, mas justamente buscando pensar as tecnologias de subjetivação que a literatura de Plínio Marcos permite analisar para pensar os afetos, percepções e tensões que sua escrita apresenta. A partir do diálogo com Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze e Maurice Blanchot busca-se pensar as relações entre a História e a Literatura, problematizando os modos de dar a ler a realidade através da escrita e da crítica social operada em meio a tempos sombrios. Deste modo, o artigo visa contribuir por meio de um exercício de experimentação para pensar sobre história do Brasil e história do corpo jovem a partir de uma fonte literária que por meio de seus perfectos e afectos como obra de arte sempre pode abrir outros modos de pensar e sentir. Tal processo nos permite pensar a literatura como um gesto de criação ético-político sobre o mundo e a vida.

Blanchot y la lógica de la desapropiación

Frente a Hegel y la dialéctica, algunos autores como Maurice Blanchot contraponen la amistad como relación humana esencial y la experiencia estética como paradigma de la acción, relegando el trabajo, que es servil siempre, como modelo decaído de la misma. En este ensayo se ahonda en la cuestión privilegiando dos textos, aparecidos en 1969 y 1971, en donde Maurice Blanchot se plantea explícitamente la diferencia entre la dialéctica y la tragedia como formas antitéticas de plantear la realidad de lo humano.

DEATH, A SURREPTITIOUS FRIENDSHIP

This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close reading of their thought on death and dying. An intellectual and personal friendship, both conceived of death as an “impossible” space and “limit-experience” that not only constituted human subjectivity, but could also puncture it, leading to joy through deindividuation. This could only occur indirectly – for Bataille, via the sacrifice, eroticism, drunkenness or laughter – and for Blanchot, via literature. This line of thinking leads to varying formulations of sovereignty at odds with the prosaic world of use-value. Proceeding first through their friendship, this paper then explores this thinking death through the contexts of French Hegelianism, Kojève and Heidegger. While holding much similar, the paper argues that Bataille’s transgressive, embodied and deindividuating visions of death present a form of community that was overlooked by Blanchot subsequently, with consequences for theories of community and collective power today.

The song at the end of the future: on the (mouse) people

ABSTRACT ‘The people’ haunts democracy, and the sovereignty of the modern state presupposes its will: the social contract of equal and autonomous individuals. But if the power of the state derives from this spectre, the injunction to conceptualise it – or to lay it to rest – faces a double bind. On the one hand, to appeal to a unified body is to reduce difference to the order of the same, at worst yielding to a totalitarian ideal. On the other hand, to abandon the community is tantamount to an affirmation of the status quo, foreclosing the possibility of collective resistance to capitalism. In light of this predicament, this paper revisits the efforts by Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, amongst others, to conceptualise the community as inoperative. What are the political implications of predicating ‘the people’ on alterity? Is such a turn a dereliction of the commitment to emancipatory politics or in fact a means to revitalise it? It is suggested that Franz Kafka’s last story, ‘Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse People [Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse]’, answers compellingly to these questions.

Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

<i>Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media</i>. Edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. vii+289.

A importância da viagem: uma correspondência poética entre poetas e caraíbas

Este trabalho se dispôs a interpretar as longas peregrinações realizadas pelos tupis-guaranis de modo a estabelecer relação com uma noção de viagem que é muito cara à linguagem poética, aliás, própria do estatuto do poeta, ou seja, daquele que se lança no fazer poético; assim como a imagem ascética e errante do caraíba, enquanto designação também do poeta. Deste modo, pensar nesta correspondência entre o ritual indígena em busca de um território sagrado para refletir no próprio expediente poético, e em como ambos dialogam, ao entenderem, cada um à sua maneira, a importância da viagem, de sua trajetória e errância, mas também da figura do profeta-poeta, ou seja, daquele que se dispõe obstinada e religiosamente, no sentido da busca pelo sagrado, nesta perquirição. Para estabelecer tal correspondência, usaremos a trajetória poética de Max Martins, pois ele incorporou tais aspectos. Entre os teóricos que direcionaram este trabalho estão Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Benedito Nunes, Edmond Jabès, entre outros.

Irresolution and Completeness in Lydia Davis’ « How I Know What I Like »

If the urge to write comes from the realization that, according to Maurice Blanchot, nothing can be done with words, reading Lydia Davis’ short stories demonstrates Blanchot’s further claim that reading is situated beyond and before comprehension. Davis, who translated Blanchot (as well as Leiris, Flaubert and Proust), is mostly known for her short, short stories, sometimes known as flash fiction or micro fiction. Though her work is not confined to short, short pieces, in each collection, they make up roughly 50-75% of the stories. Though her stories are short on character, scanty of plot, and vague or silent in regards to place, they are replete with meaning. In order to grasp the meaning, the reader must delve into the workings of English grammar, a domain that Davis, as a translator has probed with minute consideration. Paul De Man wrote that meaning is always displaced with regards to the meaning it initially intended1. This displacement is of course, the source of misunderstanding and eventual conflict. Davis works with this idea of displaced meaning in her stories, and her attention to language invites the reader to examine her stories down to the very morpheme, and in some cases down to the punctuation mark. The analysis of « How I Know What I Like » from Davis’ 2015 collection Can’t and Won’t will demonstrate through her use of function words, modality and punctuation how the very fleetingness of this short, short-story leaves an indelible impression on the reader.

Kajian Metafisika “Relasi Kuasa” Dalam Pemikiran Michel Foucault

Foucault was the first philosopher after World War II who spoke of Nietzscheas a serious political philosopher. For him all kinds of truth claims are interpretations ofa world, which do not really exist as something ahistorical. Three important factors thatinfluence Foucault’s young thinking are, First, the history and philosophy of the Frenchschool of knowledge which was then influenced by the thoughts of Georges Canguilhemwho had many thoughts about the history and philosophy of biology. Second, the linguisticstells Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralist psychology developed by Jacques Lacan,and Georges Dumezil’s (a proto-structuralist in the comparison of religion) had a majorinfluence on Foucault. Third, namely Foucault was infatuated with French avant-gardeliterature, especially the works of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. In general,the definition of power according to Foucault is divided into two types, namely negativedefinition and positive definition. In the negative definition it is stated that power isnot through violence or the results of an agreement. In the positive definition of powerthat power is the whole structure of actions that suppress and encourage other actionsthrough persuasion, stimulation, seduction, coercion and prohibition. For Foucault poweris productive and cannot be separated from knowledge. Knowledge gives birth to power,power gives birth to knowledge. Knowledge is institutionalized and becomes the authority of power that determines this to be true and that which is wrong. The peculiarity ofthe concept of power from Foucault is that power is carried out more than possessed, notinherent in actors or interests, but united in various forms of practice. Foucault’s thoughtopened up the possibility to dismantle all domination and power relations, such as powerin knowledge between discourse creators, bureaucrats, academics, and “uncivilized”common people who had to be disciplined, regulated and “nurtured”. From the study offoucault’s works, it seems that the metaphysical truth of power relations lies in its historicalstatement, which is actually nothing but to perpetuate the power itself.

The apocalyptic tone of Scott Walker, Sunn O))) and Soused

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to listen to Scott Walker and Sunn O)))’s respective music, and their collaboration Soused, by way of Maurice Blanchot’s notion of disaster which is framed in relation to the ‘apocalyptic tone’. This notion of the apocalyptic tone is used throughout the paper as a way of referring to the unheard and unspeakable dimensions of their music. Structurally and methodologically, this paper is inspired by the work of Daniela Cascella who uses sonic references to both amplify the unheard and unspeakable dimensions of written texts, voices and places and to establish connections between previously disconnected points. In a similar way, this paper contains three imagined frequencies that, in turn, place Walker, Sunn O))) and Soused in proximity with disaster. The first imagined frequency draws Blanchot and Walker together through the ideas of apocalyptic tone and ‘edge work’, the latter being Walker’s term for trying to speak the unspeakable with his lyrics. The second frequency pulls Sunn O))) and Blanchot together by reconsidering Sunn O)))’s aesthetic and drone music through the temporality of disaster. The final imagined frequency consolidates the ideas from the first two in an analysis of Soused, where collaboration is framed in terms of Blanchot’s notion of the secret.

On the conditions of living/dying together in the Middle East

The idea of a “community of death” theorized by Maurice Blanchot with reference to George Bataille, and the discussion he pursued assuming Acéphale and May 68 as its concrete forms provides an important conceptual framework for the idea of emancipation‐oriented social movement. The thinkers discussed in here deliberated society or community as rather than being a platform of immanence that sacrificed the its singularity and the absolute otherness to an organic social ideal, connoting its singularity as the medium of revealing and sharing in a way that corresponds to a surplus within the community. Even if the most prominent aspect of the Arab Spring and Gezi Movement, storming through the Middle East, was the subsequent strengthening of the forces leading to blood and tears in these ancient lands, it is possible to answer questions about these phenomena such as “Are there any small sparks, glows or flares in the dust that can give lifeblood to the co‐existence of the inhabitants of these lands? What are the conditions?” by way of conceptual ammunition. Despite the subsequent antidemocratic pushbacks, this wave of social movements has now irreversibly placed new forms of individuality and subjectivity based on social and political freedom on the agenda of the masses in the Middle East. For the Arab Spring and the Gezi movement, the plurality of the public that emerged during the demonstrations, which could not be reduced to any identity or class, points to both the chances and the saddening misfortune of the social movements here, as Blanchot said.

Placed. Displaced

ABSTRACT Given that the working title of the collection of essays gathered in this issue of the journal was ‘children displaced across borders,’ the paper considers the implications of this strange and arresting word, ‘displaced,’ which can be read in conflicting ways, depending on the weight, stress, and strain that one applies to the rift that traverses it: displaced, dis-placed, and di-splaced. Drawing upon structuralist and poststructuralist influences, such as Alain Badiou, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, the paper stresses the place of displacement and the displacement of place, and deconstructs the ‘taking place’ of each, as well as of emplacement, misplacement, and mal-placement. The comeuppance of this contortion in the fabric of space–time is an unfathomable commotion or ‘loco-commotion’ in the structure of placement, where ‘displaced children,’ like any split subject, come to be ‘splaced’ out and ‘splayed’ out.

Of No Moment

Abstract Whatever may be said to come to pass could not have happened once, if its iterability is what will have permitted each word thereof to pass for such a one. The very terms for speaking of an occurrence would thus seem to be the impasse that renders each a fiction of no moment, in all senses of that phrase. But this often-cited feature of language could neither be affirmed nor denied once and for all, since either alternative would pretend to address as an established fact that which troubles every establishment. Rather, it is what each time solicits yet another attempt to retrace the turns and detours of those writings that are emphatically marked by the errancy, anachronism, and forgetfulness that recurrence and iterability entail. It is in such an attempt that this article offers commentaries upon several passages from the oeuvres of Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot, and Robert Musil that articulate what could be called the moment of no moment, and that thereby expose the untimely intersections that may come to pass through writing.

We Shall Therefore Never Write about What Took Place or did not Take Place in May

Without denying the importance of the emancipatory, radically democratic impulses of what is called ‘68, the present contribution aims at another – I would claim even more fundamental – dimension of the political as discussed around 1968. Under the sign of ‘67 (used as a cypher for this alternative configuration), more than the content of statements was questioned, and more than their form, namely the very mechanisms in which something can be asserted. Rather than just saying something new, ‘67 was developing languages in which something new could first be said at all – or at least examining why, in the existing languages, it was not possible to simply say anything new. This essay begins with an overview of the various forms of attempts at “sounding out the basic structure of language” undertaken in 1967, and detectable in texts as different as Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie and Peter Handke’s Kaspar. In a second step, it turns to the specific genre of the tract or pamphlet, as practiced in Berlin in 1967, and theoretically debated during the Parisian May by theorists such as Maurice Blanchot and Michel de Certeau. In sum, the essay takes these fundamental interrogations of linguistic structures and textual practices as a crucial momentum in the development of an alternative concept of the political.

The Ethical Appeal of the Indifferent

Ever since its emergence, the modern concept of revolution rests on an ambiguity. While it insists on the present’s intellectual sovereignty over the past, it cannot get rid of its pre-modern predecessor, re-evolution, which insisted on the present’s genetic dependence on the past. From the very beginning of its historical trajectory, this concept inconspicuously interferes with the pre-modern concept of re-evolution as a cyclical return to origins. The cyclical logic never smoothly absorbs the linear one without simultaneously being displaced by its uncanny residue. In turn, the same uncanny leftover operates in the opposite direction, accompanying the putative liquidation of the cyclical logic by the linear one. This disjunctive conjunction of the present and the past characterizes the relationship between the events of May ‘68 and the theoretical work that followed it, known under the label of l’après-Mai or post-May. Rather than being homely and familiar, the post-May thinkers’ present was interrupted by the interventions of the remnants from the colonial past and the Holocaust. This is the point of departure for my interpretation of the ethical appeal of the indifferent in the works of Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot.

On a Language that Does Not Cease Speaking: Blanchot and Lacan on the Experience of Language in Literature and Psychosis

ABSTRACT This essay shows how certain limit-points of Lacan's psychoanalytic discourse in his 1955–56 seminar on The Psychoses tangentially brush up against Maurice Blanchot's writing on the neuter, as presented in The Space of Literature from 1955. The effort is to strike up a conversation between Lacan's “clinical discourse” and Blanchot's “critical writing” on the topics of language, writing, authority, and madness. In this regard, the essay approaches an infinite point of approximation between the procedure of psychosis and the procedure of literary writing by questioning whether, at some point in these different ways of proceeding, they may share a certain experience of language. Namely, this is an experience of a language that, as stated by both Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, “speaks all by itself” and does so incessantly and with a certain furious neutrality.

Tradução] O des-astre da tradução: Blanchot relido a partir de Kafka

O presente trabalho experimenta realizar a tradução de excertos selecionados de ensaios sobre os escritos ficcionais e diarísticos do escritor Franz Kafka, escritos ao longo de mais de vinte anos por Maurice Blanchot. Busca-se, com esse expediente experimental, expor a afinidade entre a visão aporética dos dois autores do processo de criação literária, sobretudo no que diz respeito à sua relação com a escrita e à importância do morrer como elemento de ressignificação infinita.

Escrever o que precede à ruína – desastre e suicídio em Blanchot

Partindo da leitura de A escrita do desastre, de Maurice Blanchot, o presente artigo propõe discutir a questão, marginal em sua obra, do suicídio como elemento constitutivo da escrita e da noção de desastre. Uma não dialética se impõe nesse contexto, uma vez que Blanchot trabalha com a ideia de que a morte e o morrer tornam a literatura possível, não excluindo o suicídio que, como tento demonstrar no artigo, trabalha também na heteronomia da passividade. A escrita, portanto, passa a ser compreendida como um pensamento arruinado, uma aproximação não ontológica da responsabilidade, mas assombrada, desde sua origem, por sua hantologie.

O dia mais jovem

Com base em A partir de fragmentos de L'Écriture du désastre e de outros escritos de Maurice Blanchot, este artigo trata da relação entre a história (ou a outra história), as suas rupturas e o desastre. Para abordar essa relação, Blanchot recorre, em seus escritos, a autores como Wittgenstein, Hölderlin, Kafka, Melville (principalmente Bartleby, o Escrivão) e Levinas. Com base nesses autores, Blanchot elabora seu pensamento acerca da aporia messiânica, e busca compreender a sua relação com o totalitarismo. É particularmente importante a influência que Emmanuel Levinas, grande pensador de origem judaica, versado nos escritos do Talmude, exerce sobre Blanchot; este, por sua vez, se vê na delicada situação de pensar o messianismo desde sua posição de intelectual exterior ao meio judaico. Ademais, aborda-se a comparação, feita por Blanchot, entre o legado do pensamento judaico, frequentemente renegado pela moderna sociedade ocidental, e a cultura clássica grega, tradicionalmente exaltada como o berço da civilização, digno de sentimentos nostálgicos. Discutem-se também as ideias de tempo e de fim dos tempos, bem como o adiamento desse fim, e, finalmente, a proximidade do desastre.

L’écriture cyborg: un bricolage (im)possible? Le (dés)astre: une genèse pour l’écriture? Un dialogue discursif entre Maurice Blanchot et Réjean Ducharme

Les réflexions développées dans cet article se constituent à partir d’études centrées sur l’analyse de mécanismes qui engendrent des inversions herméneutiques dans la déconstruction de certaines structures figées, de certitudes et de discours qui ne correspondent plus à ce qu’ils énoncent ou représentent. L’écriture fragmentaire de l’écrivain québécois Réjean Ducharme, la déconstruction derridienne et la conception du (dés)astre du philosophe français Maurice Blanchot nous invitent à établir un possible dialogue discursif entre les œuvres La fille de Christophe Colomb et L’écriture du désastre.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A ESCRITA CIBORGUE: UMA BRICOLAGEM (IM)POSSÍVEL? O DESASTRE: UMA GÊNESE PARA A ESCRITA? UM DIÁLOGO DISCURSIVO ENTRE MAURICE BLANCHOT E RÉJEAN DUCHARMEAs reflexões desenvolvidas neste artigo se constituem de a partir de estudos centrados na análise de mecanismos que engendram inversões hermenêuticas na desconstrução de certas estruturas fixas, certezas e discursos que não correspondem mais ao que enunciam ou representam. A escrita fragmentária do escritor quebequense Réjean Ducharme, a desconstrução e a concepção do desastre do filósofo francês Maurice Blanchot nos convidam a estabelecer um possível diálogo discursivo entre as obras La fille de Christophe Colomb e L’écriture du désastre.---Original em francês.