Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book of the YearDescriptionAs a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice Blanchot has earned tributes from authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Emmanuel Levinas. But their praise has told us little about what Blanchot's work actually says and why it has been so influential. In the first comprehensive study of this important French writer to appear in English, Gerald Bruns ties Blanchot's writings to each other and to the works of his contemporaries, including the poet Paul Celan.Blanchot belongs to the generation of French intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s, survived the Occupation, and flourished during the quarter century or so after World War II. He was one of the first French intellectuals to take a systematic interest in questions of language and meaning. His focus in the mid-1930s on extreme situationsdeath, madness, imprisonment, exile, revolution, catastropheanticipated the later interest of the existentialists. Like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, Blanchot was a self-conscious writer of fragments, and he has given us one the most developed investigations that we have on the fragment as a kind of writing.In a series of close readings, Bruns addresses the philosophical and political questions that have surrounded Blanchot and his writings for decades. He describes what is creative in Blanchot's readings of Heidegger's controversial works and examines Blanchot's conception of poetry as an inquiry into the limits of philosophy, rationality, and power. Reviews''A broad, erudite knowledge of the many literary and intellectual lines of force which criss-cross Blanchot's substantial oeuvre.''--Times Literary Supplement''Bruns' study is the first in-depth study in English devoted to Blanchot's thought and, for want of a better word, theory. It is overdue and most welcome.''--Dalhousie French Studies''Bruns's landmark study illuminates not only Blanchot's complex oeuvre but the entire intellectual horizon of French thought during the last half of the 20th century.''--Choice''As the first full English language study of Blanchot, this book is a fine introduction to the major work of this oft overlooked French master.''--Review of Contemporary Fiction''Through careful analyses of this shadowy author's writings on literature, the community, interpersonal relations, and the 'disaster,' Bruns allows us to decipher for the first time the logic of Blanchot's anarchism. Beyond the obvious importance of stressing Blanchot's anarchism as a way of clearing up much of the confusions concerning the intellectual origins of current theories of the 'postmodern,' Bruns provides the reader with a most useful explication of the real starting point for Blanchot's theory: the essay 'Literature and the Right to Death.' His scholarship is absolutely sound.''--Allan Stoekl, Pennsylvania State University
PrefaceList of AbbreviationsPart I: Poetics of the Outside1. This Way Out: An Introduction to Poetry and AnarchyWhat Is Poetics?Mallarmé: ""a perspective of parentheses""The An-arche of the Work of ArtDisengagementThe ""Spiritual Fascist""2. Poetry after Hegel: A Politics of the ImpossibleWhat Is Poetry?The Aristotelian ArgumentThe Mirror of SadeFrom Violence to AnarchyExistence without Being3. Il y a, il meurt: The Theory of WritingThe Essential SolitudeFascination of the ExoticKafkaThe Impossibility of DyingOrpheus and His CompanionsPart II: Infinite Conversations4. Blanchot/Celan: Unterwegssein (On Poetry and Freedom)Poetry and HistoryErrorA Poetics of NonidentityElsewhereCelan'Blanchot5. Blanchot/Levinas: Interruption (On the Conflict of Alterities)ListeningThe Other DiscoursePlural SpeechDecember 25,1995: A Note on Friendship6. Blanchot/Bataille: The Last Romantics (On Poetry as Experience)The Detour of PoetryImpossible ExperienceAnthropology of the Last ManNegative PhenomenologyThe Voice of Experience7. Blanchot/Celan: Désoeuvrement (The Theory of the Fragment)Mad LanguageMaurice Blanchot: nous n'eussions aimé répondreNo One's Voice, AgainPart III: The Temporality of Anarchism8. Infinite Discretion: The Theory of the EventWords without LanguageAnonymityThe InfinitiveNo More TextsMan Disappears9. Blanchot's ""holocaust""Concluding the DisasterThe Metaphysics of Being JewishWork/Death: AfflictionThe Writing of the Disaster10. The Anarchist's Last WordRefusal/SurvivalThe Community of LoversConfessions of the EverydayBad ConscienceNotesIndex of NamesIndex of Topics
""As the first full English language study of Blanchot, this book is a fine introduction to the major work of this oft overlooked French master.""
