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, andThe 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, Mallarm?, 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.
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).
Leslie Hillis Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of
Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words(1990),
Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires(1993),
Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary(1997),
Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit(2001),
The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida(2007) and
Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism(2010). He is also the co-editor of
After Blanchot: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism(2005).
Chapter One: A Turning1. A spectre2. Writing the future3. From fragment to fragmentary4. The llsß
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