Continental Philosophy

Blanchot romantique

Maison française d’Oxford
20-21 April 2009

Keynote speakers: Christophe Bident, Leslie Hill, Michael Holland

THEME:

Marking the first major event on Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) to take place in the UK in the past fifteen years, this conference will bring together some of the most eminent scholars in the field, as well as a number of postgraduates both from the UK and abroad, to address the ways in which Blanchot’s work engages with the Romantic legacy and to explore how this engagement continues to inform contemporary debates on literature, philosophy, and politics. The aim of ‘Blanchot romantique’ is at least twofold: (1) to broaden our understanding of the singular place that Romanticism holds in Blanchot’s writings, and (2) to give a major assessment of his contribution to thinking aesthetics in the wake of Romanticism.

At decisive moments in his work, Blanchot engages with a variety of key Romantic notions, including subjectivity and experience, inspiration and imagination, irony and the sublime, the fragment and the total work, violence and revolution. Romanticism thus provides us with a crucial set of concepts to approach the literary, philosophical and political challenge that Blanchot’s writing represents.

From a literary perspective, Blanchot offers decisive readings of a number of figures associated with Romanticism and post-Romanticism, both in the French and German traditions (among others, Goethe, Jean-Paul, Hölderlin, Rilke, Sade, Lautréamont, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé). These readings inform not only his criticism but also his own practice as a writer.

From a philosophical and/or theoretical perspective, his thought engages with a number of key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche), as well as with the leading figures behind the Athenaeum (Novalis, the Schlegels), whose legacies are associated, directly or indirectly, with Romantic thought. The twentieth century continued to reflect upon the question of Romanticism, in particular at the intersection between literature, philosophy, and theory. In this light, the conference will examine Blanchot comparatively with other key critical interlocutors of the twentieth century such as Martin Heidegger, Albert Béguin, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Finally, from a political viewpoint, Blanchot’s work opens new perspectives on Romantic and post-Romantic questions of revolution, violence, history, commitment, and community. His interpretation of the French Revolution and of the May ’68 events are crucial in this regard.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME:

ROMANTIC LEGACIES (I): THEORY

Christophe Bident, Université de Paris-Diderot – Paris VII
‘Le neutre est-il une notion romantique?’

Yves Gilonne, University of Nottingham
‘L’auto-réflexivité du Sublime’

Maebh Long, University of Durham
‘A Step Askew: Ironic Parabasis in Blanchot’

Gisèle Berkman, Collège International de Philosophie, Paris
‘Blanchot et le Romantisme allemand: poétique, théorie, pratique’

ROMANTIC LEGACIES (II): PRAXIS

Michael Holland, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford
‘Blanchot and Jean-Paul’

Jérémie Majorel, Université de Paris-Diderot – Paris VII
‘Blanchot, narrateur de Mallarmé’

ROMANTIC CONVERSATIONS IN THE 20th CENTURY

Jake Wadham, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford
‘Blanchot, Benjamin, and the Absence of the Work’

Hector Kollias, King’s College London
‘Unworking Irony’s Work: Blanchot and de Man as readers of the Athenaeum’

Ian Maclachlan, Merton College, Oxford
‘Blanchot, Derrida, and the Romantic Imagination’

ROMANTIC FRAGMENTATIONS

Leslie Hill, University of Warwick
‘Blanchot and Translation’

Patrick ffrench, King’s College London
‘The Fragment, the Disaster, and Melancholy’

POLITICAL ROMANTICISM

Ian James, Downing College, Cambridge
‘Naming the Nothing: Nancy and Blanchot on Community’

Martin Crowley, Queens’ College, Cambridge
‘Even now, now, very now’

Parham Shahrjerdi, Université de Paris-Diderot – Paris VII
‘Terreur et révolution’

REGISTRATION:

To help us estimate attendance, please register with the organisers if you wish to attend this conference (there is no registration fee):

John McKeane: john.mckeane@st-annes.ox.ac.uk

Hannes Opelz: hdo20@cam.ac.uk

WITH THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF:

The Department of French, University of Cambridge
The sub-Faculty of French, University of Oxford
The Maison française d’Oxford
The Society for French Studies

Link

Richard Crary has been reading Blanchot’s The Space of Literature and is sharing his thoughts.

Link to his blog: The Existence Machine

 ESSAYS

New Horizons in Mathematics as a Philosophical Condition: An Interview with Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou with Tzuchien Tho

Restating Sovereignty: On America’s Regaining the Old Sense of the Political
Friedrich Balke
(Up) Against the (In) Between: Interstitial Spatiality in Genet and Derrida
Clare Blackburne

Friendship, Assymetry, Sacrifice: Bataille and Blanchot
Patrick ffrench

Sartre Integrating Ethics and Politics: The Case of Terrorism
Marguerite La Caze

Philosophy's Subjects
Nina Power

An ubu edition:

The Last Man (1957)
Maurice Blanchot

73 Pages

We can dream about the last writer, with whom would disappear, without anyone noticing it, the little mystery of writing. A dense, dream-like exploration of the extreme limits of this mystery, written some ten years prior to the Death of the Author, (though unpublished in English until thirty years later) Maurice Blanchot's The Last Man (Le Dernier Homme, 1957) could be considered a narrative follow-up to The Space of Literature (L'Espace littéraire, 1955) or a fictional companion to the critical essays composing The Book to Come (Le Livre à venir, 1959). One can imagine an infinite conversation between these works: drifting wearily across abyssal alterities—the echo, in advance, of what has not been said and will never be said. But this sumptuous récit alone demands the reader's full attention—marvelously, Blanchot writes what cannot be written without losing it as un-writable by writing it (Hans-Yost Frey, YFS, 1998). Narrating at the threshold of this impossible writing, The Last Man weaves a blurring of several prosopopetic characters towards a radical revision of the subject and the text. The prose itself never crystallizes into an unambiguous statement—Blanchot's trangressive philosophy peculiar in the tantalizingly pleasurable suspension of the never-fulfilled promise of understanding. Reading happens in this continual absence of comprehension: instead, dense knots of delightfully paradoxical propositions and stupefying catachreses drive the reader on in the unconditional acceptance of the text that pierces, like a look that is too direct, the indeterminate prose, and makes all relations, and especially our relationship to time, absolutely precarious. 

Link

Via Wood's Lot 

Editorial Community: Comme-un?

Kuisma Korhonen Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida    

Ignaas Devisch The Sense of Being(-)with Jean-Luc Nancy    

Marie-Eve Morin Putting Community under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities    

Dorota Glowacka Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-ontology in Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy    

Timothy J. Deines Bartleby the Scrivener, Immanence and the Resistance of Community    

Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson Cutting Democracy’s Knot     

Paulina Tambakaki Global Community, Global Citizenship?    

Daniel H. Ortega ‘En Cada Barrio’: Timocracy, Panopticism and the Landscape of a Normalized Community    

John Paul Ricco The Surreality of Community: Frédéric Brenner’s Diaspora: Homelands in Exile    

Jake Kennedy Gins, Arakawa and the Undying Community

Petra Kuppers Community Arts Practices: Improvising Being-Together

Natalie Cherot Transnational Adoptees: Global Biopolitical Orphans or an Activist Community?

From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Gerald Bruns' review of After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy (Monash Romance), ed. Leslie Hill et. al.

From the book's publisher:

What does it mean to come after Blanchot? First, it is to recognize that it is no longer possible to believe in an essentialist determination of literary discourse or of aesthetic experience. Second, there is the question of history. What is Blanchot's legacy to us, his readers? Any name, however irreplaceably singular, is always already preceded, limited, challenged even, by the abiding anonymity of the person, animal, or thing it claims to name. Blanchot "after Blanchot," then, can best be understood in the sense of that which is "according to Blanchot"—and that is nothing other than the infinite process of reading and rereading Blanchot: without end. Here, a third meaning to the phrase "after Blanchot" comes into view. For if we come after Blanchot, it is surely because Blanchot is still before us, still in front, still in the future, still to come. All of the contributors to this volume respond to this problematic. 

A brief passage from the review:

Blanchot cannot be identified except as l'écrivain, which is to say the modernist writer whose texts cannot be captured by any genre description or disciplinary framework. He was after all never a writer of narratives in any Aristotelian sense, nor even of novels composed according to recognizable conventions or unitary forms. Even the word "fiction" as applied to certain of his writings came to be enclosed within quotation marks at a very early stage. He was never a philosopher or thinker in the manner of his older or younger contemporaries (whom he nevertheless influenced) — Sartre, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. It is quite possible that he never formulated an idea of his own, since much of what he wrote was a reworking of his reading, although it often happened that an idea (e. g., Levinas's Autrui, Bataille's l'expérience) would become something new or strange when he appropriated it. So he is called a "critic" for lack of a better term. If Blanchot came to belong anywhere it is to the tradition (although "tradition" is hardly the word) of fragmentary writing that began with the Jena Romantics and which includes such figures as Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Paul Celan.

 

After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy is a volume of essays that attempt in one way or another to address Blanchot's intractable singularity.