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

The fourth volume of Blanchot's war-time chronicles reflects a commitment to silence and a detachment from circumstance, as Germany's occupation of France reaches its end. Convinced that disaster is now insuperable, Blanchot neutralizes the nihilism of that position through making it the basis of a new language of human relation.

Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the "new novel, " the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, "the ontological narrative"-a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.

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.

and , trans. "When we come to write the history of criticism for the 1940 to 1980 period, it will be found that Blanchot, together with Sartre, made French "discourse" possible, both in its relentlessness and its acuity....This selection...is exemplary for its clearly translated and well-chosen excerpts from Blanchot's many influential books. Reading him now, and in this form, I feel once more the excitement of discovering Blanchot in the 1950s..."-Geoffrey Hartman

This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: "A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II," is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. "Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism," writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: "Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit."

A dystopian novel of post-World War II Europe.

Describes the enigmatic condition of a man and woman alone in a sparsely furnished hotel room who try to remember what has happened to bring them there as they await whatever will happen next. This book tells of their reserved confusion and quiet desperation that impress upon them (and us) the realization that imagination can create reality.

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.

Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of essays on literature and language by Maurice Blanchot, the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the 20th century.

Provides a unique perspective on cultural life during the German Occupation, & offers crucial insights into the mind and art of one of the most original writers in the second half of the twentieth century

Provides a unique perspective on cultural life during the German Occupation, & offers crucial insights into the mind and art of one of the most original writers in the second half of the twentieth century

Maurice Blanchot is a towering yet enigmatic figure in twentieth-century French thought. Both his fiction and his criticism played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written, especially in its intense concern with the question of writing as such. This volume collects his political writings from 1953 to 1993.

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.

This is a a collection of essays by Maurice Blanchot, a key figure in the exploration of the relationship between literature and philosophy. Recurring themes in the essays include:the relation of literature and language to death and the historical, personal, and social function of literature.

Featuring essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, this collection clearly demonstrates why Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.

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.