The Space of Literature “The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot’s thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reding as well as the nanture of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the applicat9ion of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, rilke, and Hölderlin. blanchot’s discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.”
The Step Not Beyond This translation of Maurice Blanchot’s work is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challanges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the beginning; writing, death, transgression, the neuter. But here his discussion turns around the figures of Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarmé and Kafka.
Blanchot’s metaphor for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsiblity of the self towards others.
The Writing of the Disaster “Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the century–world wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust–grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning?
The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon efforts to abide in disaster’s infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of writing: to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation.
Maurice Blanchot has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that Blanchot’s writing is a ‘language of pure transcendence, without correlative.’ Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman remarked that Blanchot’s influence on contemporary writers ‘cannot be overestimated’.”
The Most High: Many of the greatest philosophers have expressed themselves best in fiction–More’s Utopia, Voltaire’s Candide, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Sartre’s Nausea, and Plato’s Republic are but a few examples. The genre requires narrative skills and command of philosophical issues that few writers possess. Maurice Blanchot, however, has paid close attention to both modern fiction and the philosophical dilemmas of the twentieth century. The Most High (Le Très-Haut, first published in 1948) deals with some of the most striking and solemn themes that have set imagination afire.
Blanchot describes a world where the Absolute has finally overcome all other rivals to its authority. The State is unified, universal, and homogeneous, promising perfect satisfaction. Why then does it find revolt everywhere? Could it be the omnipresent police? The plagues? The proliferating prisons and black markets? Written in part as a description of post-World War II Europe, Blanchot’s dystopia charts with terrible clarity the endless death of god in an era of constantly metamorphosing but strangely definitive ideologies.
Maurice Blanchot is the author of numerous works, including The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster, both available from the University of Nebraska Press. Allan Stoekl is the editor and translator of Georges Bataille’s Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 and the author of Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, & the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (Nebraska 1992).