Synopses & Reviews
Writing in fragments is often held to be one of the most distinctive signature effects of Romantic, modern, and postmodern literature. But what is the fragment, and what may be said to be its literary, philosophical, and political significance? Few writers have explored these questions with such probing radicality and rigorous tenacity as the French writer and thinker Maurice Blanchot.
For the first time in any language, this book explores in detail Blanchot's own writing in fragments in order to understand the stakes of the fragmentary within philosophical and literary modernity. It attends in detail to each of Blanchot's fragmentary works (Awaiting Forgetting, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster) and reconstructs Blanchot's radical critical engagement with the philosophical and literary tradition, in particular with Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, Mallarmé, Char, and others, and assesses Blanchot's account of politics, Jewish thought, and the Shoah, with a view to understanding the stakes of fragmentary writing in Blanchot and within philosophical and literary modernity in general.
Synopsis
The first book to provide a detailed account of fragmentary writing in the work of the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003).
Table of Contents
Chapter One: A Turning1. A spectre2. Writing the future3. From fragment to fragmentary4. The limits of nihilism5. Radical suspension
Chapter Two: The Demand of the Fragmentary1. A gift2. A double voice3. Presence without present
Chapter Three: An Interruption1. From threshold to threshold2. A step further3. The law of return4. Voice without voice5. A politics of the fragmentary6. Burying the dead
Chapter Four: Writing — Disaster1. What is called disaster?2. Another epoch3. What happened4. The youngest day
Chapter Five: A Change of Epoch Bibliography Index