Secondary Literature: Abstracts

Bruns (1997): Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy: “This books is an attempt to give a fairly comprehensive account of Maurice Blanchot’s thought and work from his earliest writings to La Commauté inavouable (1983) and “Les intellectuels en question” (1984). The argument of the book is that from the beginning Blanchot is something very like a philosophical anarchist, and that making sense of what this means will show the internal coherence among his politics, his poetics, and his career as a writer of increasingly fragmentary texts. Very roughly, Blanchot’s anarchism is a theory and practice of writing that seeks to experience the limits of discourse, subjectivity, rationality, power, community, and the human. The book studies a good many of Blanchot’s writings in detail, and in addition tries to understand Blanchot’s engagement with Emmanuel Levinas and Georges Bataille as well as his influence on Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others. Moreover, two chapters study the affinities between Blanchot and the poet Paul Celan.”
Hill (1997): Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary: “In writing this book, my aim was two-fold. First, it was to provide readers who were new to Blanchot’s texts with a wide-ranging and reliable introduction. Second, I wanted to have some part in changing the context in which Blanchot has so far been read in the English-speaking world. To date, particularly in the U.S., reception of Blanchot has too often, in my view, been skewed by an ill-informed and polemical campaign being waged primarily against Derridean deconstruction and its so-called complicity with European anti-semitism. This is what has given rise to the widespread (and erroneous) belief that Blanchot was a proto-fascist before he was an influential literary critic or novelist. My purpose in Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary is to challenge this view. The book aims not only to provide what I believe to be the first historically coherent account of Blanchot’s political and intellectual itinerary from the early 1930s to the present, but also to offer a sustained and detailed analysis of the complex dialogue taking place in Blanchot’s writing between philosophy (notably that of Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas) and literature, in the form of Blanchot’s own novels and shorter fiction. To that extent, this is a book that endeavours to deal equally with Blanchot’s philosophical writings, his fiction, and his known political activities both before and after the outbreak of war in 1939.”
Madder (1996): Abstract: Maurice Blanchot is generally regarded as an atheist. In this article I examine his work on Simone Weil, who can be linked to negative theology to the extent that God’s absence characterises her discourse. Weil considers desire to be the condition for the possibility of salvation. Blanchot subtilises the point, so that the condition for the possibility of salvation is also its condition for impossibility, dependent on what he calls “the neuter”. The consequent experience, whilst almost identical to that of the mystic, differs to the extent that it is based on the impossibility of any unique being. Language’s failure to represent God is seen to be an affirmation of itself, a celebration of the absence of absence.
Plate (1997): Author’s Abstract: “This article suggests that French novelist/theorist Maurice Blanchot writes at the ‘limits of language’. That is, he interrogates the liminal spaces that fall out between binary oppositions such as being/non-being, human/animal, creation/destruction, light/dark, and life/death. The limits revealed in Blanchot’s writing challenge each of these borders, but the border most challenged is that between writer and reader, and between writing and reading. Blanchot writes in such a way that as the reader reads, the readers feels her/his self to be read. This challenge to reading is entirely ancient and entirely contemporary and, in its former and current state, it is the challenge of what will here be called ‘religious reading’. Beginning with a suggestion made long ago by Cicero, it will be noted that ‘reading’ and ‘religion’ have etymological similarities. These similarities are then furthered through Blanchot’s writing. Two tests of Blanchot’s will be examined, one theoretical (the essay “Two Versions of the Imaginary”) and one fictional (the recit Thomas the Obscure). What will be suggested through these two texts is that Blanchot’s language is a religious language, that the experience of the limit between binary oppositions is a religious experience.