Blanchot, Maurice
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Wikipedia-Article "Maurice Blanchot"
Maurice Blanchot (September 27, 1907-February 20, 2003) was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. His influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida is difficult to overstate. It would be wrong to speak of Blanchot's work in terms of a coherent, all-encompassing 'theory', since it is a work founded on paradox and impossibility. If there is a thread running through all his writing, it is the constant engagement with the 'question of literature', a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the profoundly strange experience of writing. For Blanchot, 'literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question' (Literature and the Right to Death).
Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in formulating his conception of literary language as anti-realist and distinct from everyday experience. Literary language, as double negation, demands that we experience the absence masked by the word as absence; it exposes us to the exteriority of language, an experience akin to the impossibility of death. Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question of the philosopher's death, showing how literature and death are both experienced as anonymous passivity.
Blanchot's work was also strongly influenced by his friends Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas. Blanchot's later work in particular is influenced by Levinasian ethics and the question of responsibility to the Other. On the other hand, Blanchots own literary works, like the famous "Thomas the Obscure", heavily influenced Levinas' and Bataille's ideas about the possibility that our vision of reality is blurred because of the use of words (thus making everything you perceive automatically as abstract as words are). This search for the 'real' reality is illustrated by the works of Paul Celan and Stéphane Mallarmé.
His best-known fictional work is Thomas the Obscure, an unsettlingly abstract novel about the experience of reading.
Blanchot died on February 20, 2003 in Yvelines.
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Blanchot and ethics
After a short flirt with the far-right liberalist group Jeune Droite in his early twenties, Blanchot quickly withdrew from public life and decided to live in seclusion of society. Due to a traumatic experience with the Russians in the Second World War (Blanchot was hiding Levinas' jewish wife and daughter in his house, and was almost excecuted by the Russians, assuming he was a nazi ) violence became a main theme in Blanchot's philosophical work. Blanchot states that there is a possibility to create an ethics based upon the existence of violence in a democratic society. Since ethics did not prevent violence (for example, the existence of the ethical rule "You shall not kill" did not prevent people getting murdered during the existence of the rule) ethical rules cannot undo the very existence of violence. Secondly, violence can never be ethical(an idea based upon anarchistic socities: the belief that admitting to violence (en thus making an ethical rule of it) could make violence undone)). Blanchot believes there is a third way to construct an ethical system: by carefully balancing between the former two ethics, neither completely believing the 'holy rules' of ethics nor the power of violence, always being critcial about one's own beliefs, you can create a perpetual critical conscience, always evaluating one's ethical beliefs and thus constituting the best possible ethical system.
Principal works
- Thomas l'Obscur, 1941 (Thomas the Obscure: fiction)
- L'Arrêt de mort, 1948 (Death Sentence: fiction)
- La Part du feu, 1949 (The Work of Fire)
- L'Espace littéraire, 1955 (The Space of Literature)
- L'Entretien infini, 1969 (The Infinite Conversation)
- Le Livre à venir, 1970 (The Book to Come)
- Le Pas au-delà, 1973 (The Step Not Beyond)
- L'Ecriture du désastre, 1980 (The Writing of the Disaster)
- L'Instant de ma mort, 1994(?) (The Instant of My Death)
Further reading
- Michael Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader (Blackwell, 1995)
- George Quasha (ed.), The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Station Hill, 1998)
- Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside (Zone, 1989)
- Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, 2000)
- Leslie Hill, Blanchot (Routledge, 1997)