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Famous Like Me > Writer > B > Maurice Blanchot

Profile of Maurice Blanchot on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Maurice Blanchot  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 22nd September 1907
   
Place of Birth: Quain, Saône-et-Loire, France
   
Profession: Writer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

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 overestimate. 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.

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.

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 Pas au-delà, 1973 (The Step Not Beyond)
  • L'Ecriture du désastre, 1980 (The Writing of the Disaster)
  • (The Book to Come)
  • (The Instant of My Death: Demeure: Fiction and Testimony)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Maurice Blanchot