Böcker av Maurice Blanchot

This book is a translation of Maurice Blanchot's work that is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challenges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the beginning: writing, death, transgression, the neuter, but here the figures around whom his discussion turns are Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarme and Kafka.The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others.

This new reader from Station Hill (Blanchot's longtime publisher in the United States) is six books in one, and the first and only collection of Maurice Blanchot's celebrated fiction and critical/philosophical writing. Regarded both on the European continent and in America as one of the truly great authors of French Post-Modernism, Blanchot's reputation and readership in English has already established him as a modern classic. THE BLANCHOT READER brings together a substantial collection of critical and philosophical writings (The Gaze of Orpheus) and the only edition in print in English of his major works of fiction (Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, Vicious Circles, The Madness of the Day, When the Time Comes and The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me). General readers and students alike will seek out these essential works by the writer Susan Sontag referred to as "an unimpeachably major voice in modern French literature." Maurice Blanchot is now recognized as a major twentieth century philosopher whose influence extends to the works of Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Lacan and others. Blanchot's philosophical works explore issues concerning the problematic acts of speech and writing, death and questions of political right-concerns that also shape his fiction. Blanchot's fiction draws the reader in by upsetting expectations, we are confronted by characters who are in situations they don't completely understand. The settings are mysterious, almost surreal. As we read further into the story, hoping for greater clarity - why is this character here? Where did he come from?, etc. - meaning and resolution are constantly deferred. The lack of closure in Blanchot's fiction gives it at an odd kind of suspense and his spare but poetic language contributes to creating a very distinct atmosphere. Within and outside of these philosophical struggles there is the German occupation of France, and Auschwitz. The presence of an arbitrary or absurdist power and the spectre of death hover. Blanchot never concludes his exploration of the these issues, they remain indeterminate, but writing continues, despite its seeming impossibility. "Maurice Blanchot's work is an invitation to the reader to join him on those severe and icy slopes of consciousness, to experience what it means to be both fully dead - utterly separated from the world, "a shadow on the sun" - and fully alive. It is an amazing, exhilarating, appalling experience. Station Hill Press should be congratulated for its courage in bringing forth this important but obviously not very commercial enterprise. Blanchot's work is, as he says, "a force for transformation and creation, made to create enigmas rather than to elucidate them." For the first time, we are able to see it with some clarity." - Seminary Co-op Bookstore

Features Thomas who upon seeing a women gesture to him from a window of a large boarding house, enters the building and slowly becomes embroiled in its inscrutable workings. Although Thomas is constantly reassured that he can leave the building, he seems to be separated forever from the world he has left behind.

This is the third volume of Maurice Blanchot's 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.

29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy document the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the atomic era.

Explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This work reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention.

In this book, Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism.

Maurice Blanchot here sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Kafka, Pascal, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Camus, who are central to the history of Western thought and who have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect contemporary literary and philosophical debate.

Reflects upon efforts to abide in disaster's infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, this title takes up the most serious tasks of writing: to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation.