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Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing

A Change of Epoch

Leslie Hil 2012


E-Book: 457 pages

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Price: Free

Download: Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (Hil 2012).


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Writing in fragments is often held to be one of the most distinctive signature effects of Romantic, modern, and postmodern literature. But what is the fragment, and what may be said to be its literary, philosophical, and political significance? Few writers have explored these questions with such probing radicality and rigorous tenacity as the French writer and thinker Maurice Blanchot.

For the first time in any language, this book explores in detail Blanchot’s own writing in fragments in order to understand the stakes of the fragmentary within philosophical and literary modernity. It attends in detail to each of Blanchot’s fragmentary works (Awaiting Forgetting, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster) and reconstructs Blanchot’s radical critical engagement with the philosophical and literary tradition, in particular with Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, Mallarmé, Char, and others, and assesses Blanchot’s account of politics, Jewish thought, and the Shoah, with a view to understanding the stakes of fragmentary writing in Blanchot and within philosophical and literary modernity in general.


Review

“In his recent book, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, Hill argues convincingly that the fragmentary indicates an ethico-political exigency in Blanchot’s writing that is all too often overlooked by his critics and neglected by historians of modern literature. Hill frames his readings of Blanchot around the view that the fragment does not simply designate a missing piece of the whole, which must be recovered or restored. On the contrary, it ruins the logic of completion that is elsewhere held to unify the work of literature.” ―Michael Krimper, Make Mag


 

About the Author

Leslie Hill is Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick.