Maurice Blanchot

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).

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Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet St?phane Mallarm? 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.

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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.

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His best-known fictional work is Thomas the Obscure, an unsettlingly abstract novel about the experience of reading.

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Blanchot died on February 20, 2003 in Yvelines.

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September 27: September 27 is the 270th day of the year (271st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 95 days remaining....

1907: 1907 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar)....

February 20: February 20 is the 51st day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. There are 314 days remaining, 315 in leap years....

Maurice Blanchot related Images and Photos (experimental)

Maurice	Maurice	Maurice Sand	Maurice Barres
Maurice Chevalier	Maurice Jones-Drew	Maurice Jones-Drew- Fathead	Maurice Utrillo May 15 1954
Maurice Ravel French Musician	St. Maurice (Left Panel of a Triptych)	Maurice Schutz: Quatre Vingt Treize 1920	Maurice Schutz: La Passion De Jeanne D Arc 1928