A World in Ruins Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943 [Hardcover]

In certain key respects, 1943 marked a turning point in the war. Increasingly, victory seemed assured. However, the backdrop to this gradually improving situation was one of widespread and unremitting destruction.

In the essays from that year, Blanchot writes from a position of almost total detachment from day-to-day events, now that all of his projects and involvements have come to naught. As he explores and promotes works of literature and ideas, he privileges those with the capacity to sustain a human perspective that does not merely contemplate ruin and disaster but sees them as the occasion for a radical revision of what human is capable of signifying.

Consigning all that the name France has hitherto meant to him to a past that is now in ruins, Blanchot begins to sketch out a counter-history that is international in nature, and whose human field is literature.

Maurice Blanchot (Author)
Maurice Blanchot(19072003)writer, critic, and journalistwas one of the most important voices in twentieth-century literature and thought. His books includeThomas the Obscure,The Instant of my Death,The Writing of the Disaster, andThe Unavowable Community.

Michael Holland (Translator)
Michael Hollandis a Fellow of St Hughs College, Oxford.

This is the third volume of Maurice Blanchots war-time Literary Chronicles. Written in 1943, they appeared during the darkest days of the war yet also at a time when real hope for victory was becoming possible. Against the grain of any simple optimism, Blanchot identifies in ruin and disaster a sign and a chance for a mode of human relation that will truly guarantee the future.Writing from one world in ruins to another, Blanchot comes to us today to pose the question of what, if anything, deserves to survive the collapse of an established order of meaning. Through the richness and precision of Michael Hollands presentation of these texts, and lÃm