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For the past half century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the atomic era. ... Read more

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"These were once dreams; they are now signs of poetry"
"Our dreams are a second life."-Gerard de Nerval
"Dream---a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows---is essentially poetry."-Michel Leiris

Michel Leiris' "Nights as Day, Days as Night": In the introduction to Leiris' forty year collection of dreams, Maurice Blanchot asks, "Who dreams in dreams? Who is the "I" of dreams? Who is the person to whom this "I" is attributed, admitting that there is one? Between the person who is sleeping and the person who is the subject of dream events there is a fissure..." The dislocation which seems to be the source of who exactly we are in dreams may spring from the fact that in our dreams everything takes on an almost theatrical aspect, sometimes we are spectator & sometimes we are actor, other times we are a combination of the two. One of Leiris earliest poetic mentors was Max Jacob, & two of the dreams related in the book involve him. In fact the manner in which Leiris records some of his dreams are reminiscent of certain of Max Jacob's prose poems. The following one by Jacob, "Literary Standards" would not be out of place in Leiris' book: "A dealer in Havana sent me a cigar wrapped in gold which had been smoked a little. The poets sitting with me said he'd done it to mock me, but the old Chinese who was our host said it was the custom in Havana when one wished to show great honor. I brought out two magnificent poems a scholar friend had written down translations of for me because I admired them when I heard them read. The poets said they were well-known and worthless. The old Chinese said they couldn't have known the poems because they only existed in a single manuscript copy in Pehlvi, a language they didn't know. Then the poets started laughing loudly like children while the old Chinese gazed at us sadly." As Blanchot stated in the introduction, "These were once dreams; they are now signs of poetry."

The greatest of the recorded events to be found in Leiris' book are the pages dedicated to dream elements overflowing into his waking life, communicating vessels. In the page dated May 4, 1943 Leiris describes a middle-aged man lurking around who seems to be nightmarishly fake, "A real cop or a mere civilian? Or nobody in particular? I asked myself the question but could not resist considering this shady character to be some sort of specter or macabre merrymaker who, having donned a terrifyingly contemporary disguise, was waiting for some shadowy carnival to begin."

In a few of the recorded dreams he notes that he realized he was dreaming & tried to wake himself up, he tells us it is usually by falling. This is a common dream phenomenon, & it may appear to be simple. We are having a nightmare, realize it is a dream, & then struggle to wake up. The interesting thing though is that it is usually after the realization we are having a dream that things in our dream become even more concrete & real, it is not just about waking up, it is almost as though we are trying to cheat death. Leiris records something similar which Blanchot called a turning back upon himself, "A movement anologous to the one that often tends to elicit similar screams from me just as I am about to awake. But in this case the movement was considerably more frightening; instead of those interminable pangs one experiences when emerging with difficulty from a dream, I was in a sense being precipitated downward by my dream, plunged into a sleep from which I would never escape, and which would be my death."

A Life in Dreams.
This book, first published in 1961, is commonly considered to be a companion to Leiris' great autoethnographic work, _Manhood_.It is simply a collection of recorded dreams spanning a couple decades.Beyond the fact that Leiris' dreams are interesting, what adds value to the work is that is that it's historical and biographical context can be reconstructed through Leiris' other work.Highly recommended for those interested in Leiris, surrealism, or the social network surrounding Georges Bataille. ... Read more

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One of the first French intellectuals to take a systematic interest in questions of language and meaning, Maurice Blanchot (1907--2003) substantially influenced such thinkers as Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Levinas, and Derrida. Until recently, Blanchot's work remained largely unknown outside France, in part because of its complexity and in part because Blanchot shunned intellectual celebrity. Over the past decade, however, nearly all of Blanchot's books have been translated into English, and worldwide interest in his fiction, cultural criticism, and philosophy has increased dramatically.

Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman bring together essays by prominent scholars from a range of disciplines to focus on Blanchot's diverse concerns: literature, art, community, politics, ethics, spirituality, and the Holocaust. The volume takes its title from Blanchot's idea that literature is "a power of contestation: contestation of the established power, contestation of what is..., contestation of language and of the forms of literary language, finally contestation of itself as power." Tracing this concept as a central theme of Blanchot's writings, and exploring its scope and ambiguity, the contributors bring this seminal, but formidably difficult, intellect into sharper focus.

Contributors: Gerald L. Bruns, University of Notre Dame; Leslie Hill, University of Warwick; Michael Holland, St Hugh's College, Oxford; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, University of Strasbourg; Vivian Liska, University of Antwerp; Jill Robbins, Emory University, and the editors.

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Jacques Derrida writes (in Deconstruction and Criticism)of The Madness of the Day that it is "a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad.la folie du jour, the madness of today, of the day today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad..La folie du jour is a story of madness, of that madness that consists in seeing the light, vision or visibility, to see beyond what is visible, is not merely 'to have a vision' in the usual sense of the word, but to see-beyond-sight, to see-sight-beyond-sight..The story obscures the sun.with a blinding light." ... Read more

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In "Lautréamont and Sade", originally published in 1949, Maurice Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism. Today, Lautréamont and Sade, these unique figures in the histories of literature and thought, are as crucially relevant to theorists of language, reason, and cruelty as they were in post-war Paris.

"Sade’s Reason," in part a review of Pierre Klossowski’s "Sade, My Neighbor," was first published in "Les Temps modernes". Blanchot offers Sade’s reason, a corrosive rational unreasoning, apathetic before the cruelty of the passions, as a response to Sartre’s Hegelian politics of commitment.

"The Experience of Lautréamont," Blanchot’s longest sustained essay, pursues the dark logic of "Maldoror" through the circular gravitation of its themes, the grinding of its images, its repetitive and transformative use of language, and the obsessive metamorphosis of its motifs. Blanchot’s Lautréamont emerges through this search for experience in the relentless unfolding of language. This treatment of the experience of Lautréamont unmistakably alludes to Georges Bataille’s "inner experience."

Republishing the work in 1963, Blanchot prefaced it with an essay distinguishing his critical practice from that of Heidegger. ... Read more

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Fascinating
'Lautreamont and Sade' is a compilation of two essays, each focusing solely upon the titular authors, the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautreamont. While Blanchot's essay on Sade consistently reveals new insight into the work of this controversial deviant philosopher, his examination of Lautreamont (which is considerably longer for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with the two) is the true gem, being a much-needed and all-too-rare analysis of the two books that the enigmatic author wrote before his death at the age of 24: 'Maldoror' and 'Poems.' 'Maldoror' is the work to which the most time is devoted, as it is the more difficult of the two and, according to Blanchot, the first part of a two-part dialectic of good and evil of which the second was the oft-overlooked 'Poems.''Maldoror,' which consists of strange, often paradoxical metaphors and off-the-wall symbolism is given its long-overdue tribute here, as Blanchot attempts to give his interpretation of what is often referred to as the first true surrealist novel.He "decrypts" modestly, constantly reminding the reader (and perhaps himself) that 'Maldoror' is ultimately a work that, at the end of the day, speaks for itself in that no one save for the long-dead author himself could possibly explain the method behind the madness.Yet Blanchot still manages to make as much sense of the book as is humanly possible, and in reading the essay one can't help but get the feeling that one is reading the third and final chapter in Lautreamont's epic masterpiece.Highly recommended. ... Read more

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In this book, the first in English devoted exclusively to Maurice Blanchot, John Gregg examines the problematic interaction between the two forms of discourse, critical and fictional, that comprise this writer's hybrid oeuvre. The result is a lucid introduction to the thought of one of the most important figures on the French intellectual scene of the past half-century.Gregg organizes his discussion around the notion of transgression, which Blanchot himself took over from Georges Bataille--most palpably in his interpretation of the myth of Orpheus--as a paradigm capable of accounting for the relationships that exist in the textual economies formed by author, work, and reader. Chapters on the critical work address such issues as Blanchot's ambivalent attitude toward the speculative dialectic of Hegelianism, his thematization of literature's involvement with death, and the mythical and Biblical figures he uses to portray the acts of reading and writing. Gregg also performs extended close readings of two representative works of fiction, Le Trs-Haut and L'Attente l'oubli, in an effort to trace Blanchot's evolution as a creator of narratives and to ascertain how his fiction can be seen as constituting a mise en oeuvre of the concerns he treats in his criticism. The book concludes with an assessment of Blanchot's place in the recent history of French critical theory. ... Read more

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Pourquoi parler du differend? Pourquoi employer ce terme comme modalite d'approche des deux uvres de Maurice Blanchot et d'Emmanuel Levinas? Il ne s'agit pas ici de nier leur rapport d'amitie, mais il faut inverser l'argument : c'est grace a leur amitie qu'il devient possible d'articuler les termes dans lesquels s'exprime la condition du differend. Qu'en est-il de cette condition? L'argumentation se developpe a partir de la these suivante : pour pouvoir expliquer la persistance du differend, il n'est pas possible de faire evacuer la question de la subjectivite dans l'evenement du langage. D'ou l'enjeu d'une confrontation des rapports heterogenes de Blanchot et Levinas a cette impossibilite. Les deux auteurs nous permettent d'expliciter le differend a partir d'un contexte phenomenologique. Mais, leurs approches divergentes de l'evenement du langage menent vers un (non-)lieu decisif ou le pouvoir du langage est en cause et qui rompt aussi avec la seule description phenomenologique. C'est ainsi, en suivant ce double mouvement qui va au-dela du descriptif, que le lecteur est aux prises avec un ecart entre les deux amis qui persiste dans leurs ecrits. La, pourtant, se passe aussi l'essentiel : l'avenement - avant meme qu'il soit question de l'etre - d'une modification du rapport a soi. En retracant l'histoire de cet ecart qui se dissimule dans le rapport entre Blanchot et Levinas, cette etude veut a la fois sonder son origine, interroger son insistance et en degager les termes qui exposent le differend comme une condition qui nous concerne. ... Read more

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Complexity in Maurice Blanchot's Fiction integrates findings from the history of science and mathematics, information theory, symbolic logic, and philosophy, in an interdisciplinary analysis of the relation between order, disorder, and process in the literary text.Maurice Blanchot's fiction serves as an exemplary focus for a textual analysis based on symbol formation and the emergence of order in complex literary texts.His fictional works are analyzed in terms of increasing complexity. Culture relates to the literary text through metaphors expressing indeterminism, subjectivity, multivalence, opposition, recursion, loops, spirals, order and disorder, and emergence. An extensive bibliography on complexity theory and on Blanchot is included. ... Read more