Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing

249 Pages·1996·2.216 MB·English

by  Carolyn Bailey Gill (ed.)

Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot is one of the key figures of post-war European
thought. In both his fiction and his critical writings, Blanchot
continually challenged traditional views of literature and philosophy.
His texts on Hegel, Heidegger, Kafka, Bataille and Levinas, to name
but a few, count among the most perceptive and penetrating essays on
contemporary philosophical and literary culture; and both Foucault and
Derrida are indebted to Blanchot’s groundbreaking work.
This collection brings together the leading commentators on Blanchot
from both sides of the Atlantic. It also addresses the controversial issue
of Blanchot’s political sympathies during the 1930s—an issue that
Blanchot himself takes up in a letter to one of the contributors, which is
published here for the first time.
Thanks to its combination of cutting-edge criticism and detailed
analysis, this volume presents an ideal introduction to Blanchot’s life,
thought, politics and fiction; it will make fascinating reading for
students of philosophy, literature and French studies.
Contributors
Simon Critchley, Paul Davies, Christopher Fynsk, Rodolphe Gasché,
Leslie Hill, Michael Holland, Roger Laporte, Ian Maclachlan, Jeffrey
Mehlman, Michael Newman, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Gillian
Rose, Ann Smock.
The editor
Carolyn Bailey Gill teaches critical theory at London University. She
is the editor of Bataille: Writing the Sacred (Routledge, 1995).
Warwick Studies in European Philosophy
Edited by Andrew Benjamin
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick
This series presents the best and most original work being done within
the European philosophical tradition. The books included in the series
seek not merely to reflect what is taking place within European
philosophy, rather they will contribute to the growth and development
of that plural tradition. Work written in the English language as well as
translations into English are to be included, engaging the tradition at all
levels—whether by introductions that show the contemporary
philosophical force of certain works, or in collections that explore an
important thinker or topic, as well as in significant contributions that
call for their own critical evaluation.
Maurice Blanchot
The demand of writing
Edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill
London and New York
First published l996
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Selection and editorial matter © 1996 Carolyn Bailey Gill
Individual chapters © the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Maurice Blanchot: the demand of writing/edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill
p. cm.—(Warwick studies in European philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Blanchot, Maurice—Philosophy. 2. Literature—Philosophy.
I. Gill Bailey, 1930–. II. Series.
PQ2603.L3343Z78 1996
843′.912-dc20
ISBN 0-203-98141-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-12595-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-12596-0 (pbk)
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Acknowledgements x
A note on the translations xi
Introduction 1
Leslie Hill
1 Roger Laporte, reader of Blanchot 21
Ian Maclachlan
2 Maurice Blanchot today 25
Roger Laporte
3 The felicities of paradox: Blanchot on the null-space 34
of literature
Rodolphe Gasché
4 Crossing the threshold: on ‘Literature and the right 70
to death’
Christopher Fynsk
5 The work and the absence of the work 91
Paul Davies
6 II y a—holding Levinas’s hand to Blanchot’s fire 108
Simon Critchley
7 Conversation 123
Ann Smock
8 On unworking: the image in writing according to 137
Blanchot
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier
9 The trace of trauma: blindness, testimony and the 152
gaze in Blanchot and Derrida
Michael Newman
vi
10 ‘A wound to thought’ 174
Michael Holland
11 Potter’s Field: death worked and unworked 191
Gillian Rose
12 A letter 210
Maurice Blanchot
13 Pour Saint-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942 213
Jeffrey Mehlman
Index 233
Contributors
Simon Critchley is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex.
He is the author of The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and
Levinas (Blackwell, 1992) and Very Little…Almost Nothing
(forthcoming from Routledge). He is the editor of, with Robert
Bernasconi, Re-Reading Levinas (Routledge, forthcoming), with
Peter Dews, Deconstructive Subjectivities (SUNY, 1995), and with
Robert Bernasconi and Adriaan Peperzak, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic
Philosophical Writings (Indiana, 1996).
Paul Davies teaches philosophy at the University of Sussex, having
previously taught at Loyola University of Chicago and De Paul
University of Chicago. He is the author of several articles on
Levinas, Blanchot and related topics and of Experience and Distance
(SUNY, forthcoming). He is currently working on material for a book
on philosophy and the idea of a literary project.
Christopher Fynsk is Professor of Comparative Literature and
Philosophy, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature,
at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author
of Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1994) and of
Language and Relation (Stanford, 1996).
Rodolphe Gasché is Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative
Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books
include The Tain of the Mirror (1986) and Inventions of Difference:
On Derrida (1994). He is currently finishing a book-length study on
the work of Paul de Man entitled Wild Cards.
Leslie Hill, Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Warwick,
is the author of Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words
(Cambridge University Press, 1990), Marguerite Duras: Apocalpytic
Desires (Routledge, 1993), and a forthcoming book entitled Maurice
Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary.
viii
Michael Holland teaches French literature at St Hugh’s College,
Oxford. He is one of the founders of Paragraph, a journal of modern
critical theory, and currently one of its editors. He is the editor of The
Blanchot Reader (Blackwell, 1995) and is now working on a full-
length study of the work of Maurice Blanchot.
Roger Laporte was born in Lyons in 1925 and for many years taught
philosophy in Montpellier. His major works were published as Une Vie
(POL, 1986); most of his critical writings are collected in Quinze
variations sur un theme biographique (Flammarion, 1975) and
Etudes (POL, 1990). He was awarded the Prix France-Culture in
1978, and was in charge of seminars at the College de Philosophie
from 1989 to 1991.
Ian Maclachlan is Lecturer in French at the University of Aberdeen.
He is the author of Roger Laporte: The Orphic Tezt (Berg,
forthcoming), and is currently working on a study of writing and time
in recent French fiction and philosophy.
Jeffrey Mehlman is Professor of French Literature at Boston
University and the author of A Structural Study of Autobiography,
Revolution and Repetition, Cataract: A Study of Diderot, and
Legacies: Of Anti-Semitism in France; and, most recently,
Geneologies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in
Modern France (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Michael Newman is Head of Theoretical Studies and Art History at
the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and has
held a Research Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of
Louvain (Belgium) to complete a study of memory and forgetting in
Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and Blanchot. He is the author of many
articles on art and philosophy.
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier is Professor in the Département
de littérature française of the University of Paris VIII. She has
published several books on the theory of writing, notably Le Texte
divisé (Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), Ecraniques (Presses
Universitaires de Lille, 1990) and L’ldée d’image
(Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995). Her research is situated
at the frontier between literature, aesthetics and the cinema,
examining the possible cross-overs between the notion of filmic
writing and the work of the text in literary modernity.
Gillian Rose, who died last year, was Professor of Social and
Political Thought in the Department of Sociology, University of
Warwick. She is the author of Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-
Structuralism and Law, Hegel contra Sociology, The Melancholy
ix
Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, The
Broken Middle, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays; and,
most recently, Love’s Work (Chatto & Windus, 1995) and Mourning
Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
Ann Smock teaches French Literature at the University of
California, Berkeley. She is the translator of L’Espace Littéraire and
L’Ecriture du désastre (both University of Nebraska Press) and the
author of numerous articles on Blanchot and other contemporary
French writers. She is currently preparing a book-length study of
texts by Blanchot, des Forêts, Melville and Beckett.