en

Kevin Hart

2008

OpenAlex

'Blanchot's Mallarme': the interlacing of these two proper names could be taken to identify either one relationship among many or something essential to modern literature. It would be easy to multiply similar doublings, each with a plausible claim to interest readers of Blanchot. Other than Mallarme, the first literary names that come to mind to pair with Blanchot are Holderlin, Kafka and Bataille, although Sade, Lautreamont, Rilke, Char and Jabe's quickly follow them. Once the list has started to be assembled, the accent seems to shift almost by itself from literature to philosophy, and so we can twin Blanchot with Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Levinas, or we can go back further into history and name Heraclitus or Socrates, Kant or Kierke - gaard, or, looking among Blanchot's younger contemporaries, league Blanchot with Foucault, Deleuze or Derrida. Reading Blanchot's essays on these diverse authors would confirm what we would have already sensed by reading only two or three pieces, that Blanchot has every - thing of the hedgehog about him and almost nothing of the fox.1 If a case is to be made for the relative importance of Mallarme for Blanchot, it will be based on the continuity and variety of references to his work, and the intensity with which Blanchot identifies an opening of literary space with Mallarme's poetry and poetics, a space to which he has responded faithfully over several decades, in narrative fiction, literary criticism, and fragmentary writing.

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Philosophy | Literature | Nothing | Poetry | Narrative | Hegelianism | SOCRATES | Reading (process) | Variety (cybernetics) | Art | Epistemology | Linguistics | Artificial intelligence | Computer science