Maurice Blanchot

"The 'Passion for the Outside': Foucault, Blanchot, and Exteriority"

by Kas Saghafi

"'A Certain Spirit of a Certain Marx': Blanchot's Revolutionary Return in Specters of Marx"

by Kas Saghafi

IMPERSONAL EXISTENCE: a conceptual genealogy of the “there is” from heidegger to blanchot and levinas

by William Large

Scheda di lettura: Blanchot, La communauté inavouable

by Valentina Sperotto

GCSI, Biblioteca filosofica

Critically Man Dwells

by Elizabeth Perez

final paper from aesthetics

Idealism's Corpse or the Prosthetics of Suicide: Technologies of Retrieval in Fichte and Schelling

by f. scott scribner

Published in the journal "Idealistic Studies," Spring-Summer, 2011

This paper uses Maurice Blanchot's image of the corpse as a trope by which to offer a unique quasi-material reading of... more This paper uses Maurice Blanchot's image of the corpse as a trope by which to offer a unique quasi-material reading of the German Idealist notion of speculative suicide. And it's method of interpretative retrieval, like these idealists, works to think the relevance of idealism today by affirming the spirit against the letter. The paradox of suicide – that we aspire to be witness to our own death - presents itself as a double, as interpreted in works of Fichte and Schelling. This double, the very core of speculative aspiration, is essentially a temporal other whose prosthetic character suggests that the speculative power of spirit is simultanously technological, and that the limit-condition of suicide be found not in an ethereal speculative unity but rather in the intractable materiality of our own corporeal remains.

Théorie du cinéma chez Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier

by Beatrice BLOCH

Auto-phagia; The Destruction of the Literary Subject in the Diaries of Alejandra Pizarnik

by Sandra Alvarado Bordas

Published in 'Polyphony #1'
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Dutch Art Institute DAI. 2009

What is the relationship, in the work of Blanchot and Derrida, between the limit of literature and the limit of death?

by Beth Guilding

The Dream is Without End (Blanchot, Borges and Freud)

by Beth Guilding

Iconoclasm, Byzantine and Postmodern: Implications for Contemporary Theological Anthropology

by Christopher Denny

“Iconoclasm, Byzantine and Postmodern: Implications for Contemporary Theological Anthropology," Horizons 36/2 (Fall 2009): 187-214.

Medieval Byzantine debates regarding icons included fine distinctions between image, prototype, and symbol as these... more Medieval Byzantine debates regarding icons included fine distinctions between image, prototype, and symbol as these terms related to personhood. Iconodules and iconoclasts differed regarding the ability of art to represent the person. Must artistic representations of a person, to be justified, be consubstantial with the person represented and thus circumscribed, as iconoclasts believed? Or is it sufficient to refer to artistic representations as being symbolic of their human subjects? Embracing the victorious iconodule distinction between a person and artistic representations of the person raises questions regarding the manner in which an image can reveal a human being. Post-structuralist philosophers Maurice Blanchot and Kevin Hart have inverted this problematic. They begin the interpretation of icons and personhood not from the traditional understanding of the honor or worship paid to Christian icons. Instead, they examine the icon’s deconstruction of the viewer. What results is an iconodule defense of a post-Cartesian “anthropological iconoclasm.”

“Para lá da Razão e da Loucura: a escrita – Proximidade e distanciamento entre Maurice Blanchot e Michel Foucault”

by Hugo Monteiro

Kings of England: Quietude, Restlessness and Uproar: Notes on Silence in Eldersfield

by Simon Bowes

Presented at "Being Seen, Being Heard" (Symposium), Chelsea Theatre, London (27th November 2011). "Quietude..." examines speech and silence in recent performance "Elegy for Paul Dirac" (SPILL Festival, April 2011). "Elegy..." is the first chapter of "In Eldersfield", Kings of England's ten-chapter, decade-long cycle of works all for the twentieth century (2011-2021).

“How hard it is to sit in a silent theatre” (Barker, 1989: 117-119)

“The theatre must start to take its... more “How hard it is to sit in a silent theatre” (Barker, 1989: 117-119)

“The theatre must start to take its audience seriously. It must stop telling them stories they can understand” Barker, 1989: 17-19)

At the Pit in the Barbican, April 22nd 2011, Kings of England premiered Elegy for Paul Dirac the first chapter of “In Eldersfield”, as part of SPILL Festival • Between performance and historiography, In Eldersfield is a decade-long, ten-chapter cycle of works, all for the twentieth century • As the cycle progresses, we seek to invoke pasts to unsettle the present, allowing us, to better imagine the type of future to which we might want to belong • Autistic or Asbergic, probably, Dirac was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, singularly gifted, and singularly shy – always reluctant to speak • We glean something of his character through an anecdote: once in a laboratory at St. John’s College Cambridge, a colleague asked him: “Where are you going on your holidays?” Twenty minutes later (twenty minutes later), he replied • Elegy stages this ‘silence’ in real time, conceived as an invitation into a quiet contemplation, meditativeness • The performance is a dialogue on hope and expectation, by turns austere and ornate, full of withdrawals and reveals • Ultimately, it is an argument for care and attentiveness, but the argument is not without its complications: At the premiere, the silence gave way to restlessness and uproar, shrieks of anguish, walk outs and, finally, applause • Within a live art and performance culture increasingly defined by interactivity, and participation, the terms of the debate are shifting towards agency. The long-held assumption of passive spectatorship has been overturned in accordance with this new orthodoxy • Beyond the disciplines of live art and performance, philosophies of ethics advocate a radical passivity in the face of the other (see Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben) • Notes on Silence in “In Eldersfield” examines the lineages of radical passivity, and asks whether – and how –this philosophical literary approach might be instructive in rethinking the kinds of agency in live events and performative processes • Against the clamour to be heard, we want to ask: is such passivity either possible or desirable? Why-should-and-how-can Performance not only represent but invoke such passivity, and might such passivity accomplish an aesthetic, ethical, or political gesture?

Translation and Response Between Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis

by Jonathan Evans

Forthcoming in TranscUlturAl 4.2

When an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other... more When an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other responses may appear in their own writings that are more inflected with their authorial persona. Lydia Davis translated six books by Maurice Blanchot, including fiction and theoretical writings. Blanchot’s concept of the récit privileges non-conventional forms of narrative and it can be considered to have influenced Davis, a view shared in critical writing about Davis. However, responses to his fiction can also be found in Davis’s work. This article reads Lydia Davis’s story “Story” as a response to Maurice Blanchot’s récit La Folie du jour, translated by Davis as “The Madness of the Day”. Both texts develop a narrative that questions the possibility of arriving at a single story: Blanchot’s narrator cannot tell the story of how he came to have glass ground into his eyes, while Davis’s narrator must try to understand a contradictory story told to her by her lover. However, Davis responds to Blanchot by reversing the perspective in the story: where Blanchot’s narrator must and cannot create a story that explains his situation in a judicial/medical context, Davis’s narrator is struggling to understand her lover’s story which does not explain the situation that they find themselves in. Davis’s narrator is therefore motivated by an emotional need to find an acceptable story that is absent from Blanchot’s narrator. This difference in motivation is central to the difference between Davis’s and Blanchot’s approach, and complicates any reading of his influence on her because she responds to his text in her own.

Impossible Imperatives

by David Albert Rathbone

As presented at Monash colloquium on Maurice Blanchot at the Alliance Francais in St. Kilda

Literature and Refusal: Maurice Blanchot's Impossible Political Ontology

by Alexander Liepins

M.A. thesis supervised by Dr Peter Trnka (MUN, 2011)

Please contact me if you would like to view the abstract. Please contact me if you would like to view the abstract.

The Surreality of Community: Frédéric Brenner's Diaspora: Homelands In Exile

by John Ricco

Review of Blanchot's Political Writings

by Benjamin Noys

Review of Blanchot’s Political Writings (Fordham UP 2010), Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011): 196-204. [pre-proof version]

This review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953–1993 by Maurice Blanchot as a means to assess the... more This review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953–1993 by Maurice Blanchot as a means to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting the absence of his earlier right-wing political texts from the 1930s in this collection, it attempts to probe Blanchot’s idiosyncratic ‘ultra-left’ turn represented in his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I analyse how Blanchot develops a communism that focuses on the problem of abstraction: both the abstraction intrinsic to social reality, and the necessity to negate and contest that abstraction through a ‘communist writing’. The review reconstitutes this unusual form of Marxism, and analyses the possible resources it offers and its limits.

Judging in Politics and Art: Kant on Revolution and Artistic Production

by Alison Hugill

The Photography of the Disaster

by Alison Hugill