Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism

345 Pages·2018·2.939 MB·English

by  Christopher Langlois

Understanding Blanchot,
Understanding Modernism
Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism
The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding
Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully
through literary and cultural modernism and consequently to understand
literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the
series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to
lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical
work under examination.
Series Editors:
Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison
Volumes in the Series:
Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism
Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism
Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism
Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism
Understanding James, Understanding Modernism
Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism
Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism
Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming)
Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming)
Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming)
Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming)
Understanding Blanchot,
Understanding Modernism
Edited by
Christopher Langlois
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First published in the United States of America 2018
Copyright © Christopher Langlois and contributors, 2018
Cover design: Olivia D’Cruz
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Langlois, Christopher author.
Title: Understanding Blanchot, understanding modernism / Christopher Langlois [editor].
Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. |
Series: Understanding philosophy, understanding modernism |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017055534 (print) | LCCN 2017059721 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501331398 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501331381 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501331374
(hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Blanchot, Maurice. | Modernism (Literature) | Literature–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B2430.B574 (ebook) | LCC B2430.B574 U53 2018 (print) |
DDC 194–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055534
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3137-4
ePDF: 978-1-5013-3139-8
eBook: 978-1-5013-3138-1
Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Series Preface xii
List of Abbreviations xiv
Introduction: Against Praise of Maurice Blanchot Christopher Langlois 1
Part 1 Conceptualizing Blanchot 17
1 Critical First Steps: On Faux Pas Cosmin Toma 19
2 Thus Spoke Literature Hannes Opelz 37
3 Absolute Modernism and The Space of Literature James Martell 57
4 Writing the Future: Blanchot’s Le Livre à venir Leslie Hill 81
5 Literature Outside the Law: Blanchot’s The Infinite
Conversation Christopher Langlois 99
6 “Exacerbating the Self-Critical Tendency”: Ethics and
Critique in Le pas au-delà Aïcha Liviana Messina 121
Part 2 Blanchot and Aesthetics 139
7 Nescio Vos: The Pathos of Unknowing in
When the Time Comes Jean-Michel Rabaté 141
8 Writing as Überfluss: Blanchot’s Reading of
Kafka’s Diaries Michael Holland 163
9 “I Hear My Destiny in the Rustling of an Oak”:
Blanchot’s Char Kevin Hart 183
10 Neutral Conditions: Blanchot, Beckett, and
the Space of Writing Jonathan Boulter 203
11 The Look of Nothingness: Blanchot and the Image Jeff Fort 219
12 “ The Call of the Anterior”: Blanchot, Lacan, and the
Death Drive Allan Pero 247
13 “ Unmade According to His Image,” or, Night for Day:
Blanchot and the Blacknesses of Cinema Figure Kevin Bell 263
vi Contents
Part 3 Glossary 285
Disaster William S. Allen 287
Fragmentary Writing William S. Allen 291
Community Joseph Albernaz 295
Désoeuvrement Michael Krimper 299
The Neuter/The Neutral John McKeane 303
Passivity Patrick Lyons 307
Literature Audrey Wasser 311
Outside Audrey Wasser 315
Friendship Aïcha Liviana Messina 319
Index 323
Notes on Contributors
Joseph Albernaz is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, where
he is completing a dissertation on community and the everyday in Romanticism.
His other academic interests include ecological thought and criticism,
contemporary theory, German Idealism, political theology, revolutions, and
contemporary poetry in French and English. His publications include essays and
reviews on John Clare, photography, and French thought.
William S. Allen is an independent researcher at the University of Southampton,
UK. He is the author of Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after
Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (SUNY Press, 2007), Aesthetics of Negativity:
Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (Fordham University Press, 2016), and Without
End: Sade’s Critique of Reason (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Kevin Bell teaches at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Ashes
Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (University of
Minnesota Press, 2007). He is now completing Drift Velocities: The Figural Curve
of Radical Black Film and Literature, a study of non-anthropocentric itineraries
in black American writing and cinema since the mid-1960s.
Jonathan Boulter is Professor of English at Western University. He is the author
of Parables of the Posthuman (2015); Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma,
Memory, and History in the Contemporary Novel (2011); Beckett: A Guide for the
Perplexed (2008); Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (2001);
and coeditor of Cultural Subjects: A Cultural Studies Reader (2005). His work
has appeared in Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, SubStance, Genre,
Hispanic Review, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Journal of Beckett Studies,
and International Ford Madox Ford Studies.
Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis.
He is the author of The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka,
Blanchot and Beckett (Fordham, 2014). He has translated numerous books by
authors such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean Genet, Jean-Luc Nancy,
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jacques Roubaud.
viii Notes on Contributors
Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies in the Department
of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he also holds
professorships in the Department of English and the Department of French. He
is the author of The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (University
of Chicago Press, 2004), the editor of Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the
Narratives of Maurice Blanchot (Notre Dame University Press, 2010), and the
editor, with Geoffrey Hartman, of The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on
Maurice Blanchot (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). His most recent
scholarly publications are Kingdoms of God (Indiana University Press, 2014) and
Poetry and Revelation (Bloomsbury, 2017). His poetry is collected in Wild Track:
New and Selected Poems (Notre Dame University Press, 2015) and Barefoot
(Notre Dame University Press, 2018).
Leslie Hill is Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick
and the author of several books on the work of Blanchot and others, including
Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (1990), Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic
Desires (1993), Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (1997), Bataille, Klossowski,
Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (2001), The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques
Derrida (2007), Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of
Criticism (2010), and Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of
Epoch (2012). He has recently completed a forthcoming study of the controversy
between Jean-Luc Nancy and Blanchot on the question of “community,” and
is currently working on a book exploring the writings of Pierre Klossowski
entitled Circulus vitiosus deus: Klossowski, Nietzsche, and the Deconstruction of
Christianity.
Michael Holland is a Fellow of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. He has published
widely on Maurice Blanchot in both English and French. He published the first
comprehensive bibliography of Blanchot’s work. His Blanchot Reader (1995)
brought together texts covering all of Blanchot’s postwar writings. In 2012 he
launched the Cahiers Maurice Blanchot in collaboration with the late Monique
Antelme and Danielle Cohen-Levinas. In 2015 a collection of his articles in
French appeared with the title Avant dire. Essais sur Blanchot. He is working
on a book in English on Blanchot and narrative. He has translated Blanchot’s
Chroniques littéraires 1941–1944 in four volumes for Fordham University
Press. With Hannes Opelz, he is preparing a Dictionnaire Maurice Blanchot for
Classiques Garnier.
Notes on Contributors ix
Michael Krimper is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative
Literature at New York University, where he is finishing a dissertation on the
poetics and politics of inoperativity in modernism, with a particular focus on
the writings of Blanchot, Bataille, Beckett, and Melville. One of his recent articles
on Blanchot’s concept of désoeuvrement has appeared in SubStance.
Christopher Langlois is Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Literature at St.
Lawrence University, and author of Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature
(Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Some of his articles and essays have appeared
in Twentieth-Century Literature, College Literature, Mosaic, Modernism/
modernity, The Faulkner Journal, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and
European Journal of English Studies. He is also guest-editing a forthcoming special
issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature commemorating the
fortieth anniversary of Edward Said’s Orientalism.
Patrick Lyons is a graduate student in the Department of French at the University
of California, Berkeley.
James Martell is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at Lyon College. He
is the coeditor—together with Arka Chattopadhyay—of Samuel Beckett and the
Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (Roman Books, 2013). His current book-
length project focuses on modernism and matricide. He has published articles
on Derrida, Deleuze, Beckett, and the cinema of Béla Tarr. His latest article on
Derrida and tattooing has appeared in the December 2017 issue of The Oxford
Literary Review.
John McKeane is Lecturer in French studies at the University of Reading. He
is the author of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: (Un)timely Meditations (2015) as
well as of articles on the work of Blanchot, Barthes, Derrida, and others. He
coedited the collective volume Blanchot romantique (2011), and has translated
various volumes, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction
of Christianity, II (2013), and Christophe Bident’s biography of Blanchot
(forthcoming).
Aïcha Liviana Messina is Professor of Philosophy in the Institute of Humanities
at the Universidad Diego Portales. Her work is mainly focused on the relationship
between violence and language, on political issues such as law, sovereignty, peace,