Maurice Blanchot

The Refusal of Philosophy
Erscheinungsjahr 2005
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8199-2
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 376 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 613 g

A series of close readings addresses the philosophical and political questions that have surrounded Blanchot and his writings for decades

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

As 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 situations—death, madness, imprisonment, exile, revolution, catastrophe—anticipated 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bruns, Gerald L.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Französische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
List of Abbreviations
Part I: Poetics of the Outside
1. This Way Out: An Introduction to Poetry and Anarchy
What Is Poetics?
Mallarmé: "a perspective of parentheses"
The An-arche of the Work of Art
Disengagement
The "Spiritual Fascist"
2. Poetry after Hegel: A Politics of the Impossible
What Is Poetry?
The Aristotelian Argument
The Mirror of Sade
From Violence to Anarchy
Existence without Being
3. Il y a, il meurt: The Theory of Writing
The Essential Solitude
Fascination of the Exotic
Kafka
The Impossibility of Dying
Orpheus and His Companions
Part II: Infinite Conversations
4. Blanchot/Celan: Unterwegssein (On Poetry and Freedom)
Poetry and History
Error
A Poetics of Nonidentity
Elsewhere
Celan—Blanchot
5. Blanchot/Levinas: Interruption (On the Conflict of Alterities)
Listening
The Other Discourse
Plural Speech
December 25,1995: A Note on Friendship
6. Blanchot/Bataille: The Last Romantics (On Poetry as Experience)
The Detour of Poetry
Impossible Experience
Anthropology of the Last Man
Negative Phenomenology
The Voice of Experience
7. Blanchot/Celan: Désoeuvrement (The Theory of the Fragment)
Mad Language
Maurice Blanchot: nous n'eussions aimé répondre
No One's Voice, Again
Part III: The Temporality of Anarchism
8. Infinite Discretion: The Theory of the Event
Words without Language
Anonymity
The Infinitive
No More Texts
Man Disappears
9. Blanchot's "holocaust"
Concluding the Disaster
The Metaphysics of Being Jewish
Work/Death: Affliction
The Writing of the Disaster
10. The Anarchist's Last Word
Refusal/Survival
The Community of Lovers
Confessions of the Everyday
Bad Conscience
Notes
Index of Names
Index of Topics

Über Autor(innen)

Bruns, Gerald L.
Gerald L. Bruns is William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern and Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings.

Gerald L. Bruns is William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern and Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings.