Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative: Ethics of the Image (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry)

Blanchot and his writings on three major poets, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, and Char, provide a decisive new point of departure for English language criticism of his philosophical writings on narrative in this study by leading Blanchot scholar, Kevin Hart. Connecting his work to later leading figures of 20th-century French philosophy, including Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, and Jacques Derrida, Hart highlights the importance of Jewish philosophy and political thought to his overall conception of literature. Chapters on community and negation reveal Blanchot’s emphasis on the relationship between narrative and politics over the more commonly connected narrative and aesthetics. By fully discussing Blanchot’s elusive concept of “the Outside” for the first time, this book progresses scholarly understandings of his entire oeuvre further. This central concept engages Franz Rosenzweig’s work on Abrahamic faiths, enabling a reckoning on the role of suffering and literature in the wake of the Shoah, with significant implications for Jewish studies more generally. Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title Page 6 Copyright Page 7 Dedication 8 Contents 10 Acknowledgments 11 Abbreviations 13 Note on Citations 17 Introduction: Blanchot Encore 18 Part I: On Poetry 36 Chapter 1: Blanchot’s Mallarmé 38 Chapter 2: Blanchot’s Hölderlin 55 Chapter 3: Blanchot’s Char 77 Part II: On Friendship 92 Chapter 4: Blanchot’s Weil 94 Chapter 5: The Aggrieved Community 105 Chapter 6: The Friendship of the No 117 Part III: On Narrative 138 Chapter 7: The Neutral Reduction: Thomas L’Obscur 140 Chapter 8: “Lès-Poésie?”: Levinas reads La Folie du jour 161 Chapter 9: Ethics of the Image 174 Part IV: On Being Jewish 192 Chapter 10: The Third Relation 194 Chapter 11: From The Star to The Disaster 215 Chapter 12: “The Absolute Event of History”: The Shoah and the Outside 230 Afterword 250 Bibliography 252 Index 268