Kafka’s Letter

Author(s): William Large / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

Perhaps of all the writers Kafka is the most important to Blanchot. In some way, he defines what literature means to Blanchot. In every period of his work, and in most of his publications of essays and reviews, there is a substantial piece on Kafka (so much so that in French, De Kaf-ka à Kafka, there is a complete edition of them). This article is a personal account of the au-thor’s own encounter with Kafka. It focuses on the subjective experience of literature as how reading deeply affects one’s own sense of self (‘A book,’ Kafka writes, ‘must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.’) What is most important about Blanchot’s description of literature, de-spite the fact that we might attempt to turn it back into another theory, is that the book is an en-counter between the author and the work, which continually escapes them, and the reader, who through reading, is transformed and changed forever. It is this alteration that is the ‘truth’ of literature, rather than any description or interpretation of the text, which views this subjective response as a failure. Without this failure, however, literature would not be possible and reading would be reduced to information.

To Articulate the Void by a Void

Author(s): William S. Allen / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

This essay will discuss Blanchot’s L’Attente l’oubli by examining the relation between the space of its sentences and that of the room they describe. This relation arises as a new understanding of literary space that indicates how far he has moved from his earlier thought of the récit as a search for an imaginary centre. For in this approach Blanchot has found a thought of space that is eccentric and aporetic, which reveals the nature and possibility of relation as an exposure to the outside.

Distance mobile de la voix narrative

Author(s): Tatiana Nikishina / Language(s): French Issue: 01/2015

The narrative voice operates in Maurice Blanchot’s récits by means of the narrative distance which is a fine mechanism of discourse mobilisation. The quasi spatial nature of distance contaminates also Blanchot’s reflexion about literature; come through the narrative, perceptional or logical trials, the distance turns out to be ethical. The article is aimed at taking Blanchot’s spaces according to the mobile distance of the narrative voice; discursive, syntaxical and visual displacements of the narrative voice are particulary analysed in Blanchot’s récit Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas.

Poétique de l’espace littéraire chez Maurice Blanchot:

Author(s): Khalid Lyamlahy / Language(s): French Issue: 01/2015

Maurice Blanchot completely reshaped the very concept of literature. By connecting literary space to philosophical thinking, his works have contributed in refashioning the understanding of literature as a double act of creation and reading. This article aims to question the contribution of the second version of his first novel, Thomas l’Obscur, to a remodelling of space within writing. Looking at geographical representations as well as fictional, narrative and textual models, the aim of this article is to identify the various strategies created and implemented by Blanchot as part of the process of constructing and deconstructing the space. Blanchot’s novel is considered as the embodiment of a “spatial concern” through which literary creation emerges as an innovative means of refiguring space. The novel is read and studied from a “spatial” perspective which puts forward space as a key element in the text.

Introduction: Blanchot’s Spaces

Author(s): Arleen Ionescu,William Large,Laura Marin / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

Sacred Time/Ecological Time in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Author(s): Carl Lavery / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

My argument takes as its premise the idea that western theatre, what we might call, in shorthand, Aristotelian theatre, invests in a theological notion of time, which I associate, on the one hand, with a causal, linear narrative (beginning, middle, end), and, on the other, with a viewing experience which produces an absorptive temporality, rooted in a kind of weightlessness, a mode of temporal transcendence, an exiting from the earth. By taking us out of time, by abstracting us from our bodies, the dramatic logic of western theatre, invests in a time of redemption, in which the temporality of artificial/staged events is perceived as being somehow more real than time itself. Against synchronous identification and the time of drama, the article argues that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, purposively produces an experience of ‘presentness’, in which the subject – the spectator – is compelled to undergo an alternative temporality – the time of waiting. This is immanent time, the time of a different theatrical event, the time in which, to cite Beckett’s Endgame, ‘something takes its course’. ‘Presentness,’ as I define it here, has nothing in common with what the art critic Michael Fried sees as a moment of grace, and neither does it refer to an act of metaphysical self-coincidence. Rather, it is best seen as an ambivalent, impossible mode of temporality which I term ‘sacred time’. Crucially, this is not the time of cycles and myths; more disconcertingly, as in the sense of the English adverb presently, this is a time that is never quite here, a time of deferral, suspension and dis-appointment. The time, then, that I am interested in designating as sacred or as presentness has much in common with Maurice Blanchot’s notion of time as disaster or catastrophe; it is time that never arrives primarily, and scandalously, because it is always already here, weighing on us, insisting on its absent but irreducible gravity. It is a time that roots us to the earth.

Style Exercises outside Blanchot’s Space(s):

Author(s): Arleen Ionescu / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

D’un espace neutre

Author(s): Cosmin Toma / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

This article argues that the notion of ‘space’ in Maurice Blanchot’s writings is best understood in conjunction with Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. In light of recent trends, I begin by assessing the relevance of geocriticism before dismissing it in favour of a less positivistic critical approach that takes its cues from Blanchot’s very own The Space of Literature as well as from his late works, where the ‘neuter’ occupies an increasingly pivotal position. More specifically, I bridge the gap between these two seemingly distinct concerns by drawing on a) Derrida’s analysis of the crypt, a quintessentially Blanchot-esque type of architecture, and b) his deconstructionist take on the Platonic chora, which emphasizes the neutrality of space. In closing, I briefly probe the connection between Blanchot’s ‘dis/aster,’ writing, and outer-space.

Hors de soi

Author(s): Olivier Campa / Language(s): French Issue: 01/2015

From narratives to their contemporary critical essays, the Blanchotian experience of space appears at first as that of an unlocalizable outside, where any subject capable of experiencing it gets lost. Nevertheless, such an impossibility is spatially endured and thematized through writing, according to a meaning of spatiality that has to be apprehended, no longer as an extent, but as that nocturnal depth which would be the intensive origin of it, far below the a priori scope of possible experience. Therefore we can account for an experience of space as pure intensity, before any subjective appropriation of places and, all the more, any territorial rationalization. Thus, the wandering one finds oneself destined to by such a « space of literature » – an essentially disoriented and literally crazed space – depends on a double movement: on the one hand, the collapse, in a pure outside, of the subject of possible experience, on the other hand, because of that dis-subjectivation itself, the access, out of oneself, to a real experience of space as an intensive power – no longer lived but living, relating life itself to the forces which transform it incessantly and open it to the impossible.

Éric Hoppenot et Dominique Rabaté (dir.), Cahier de l’Herne : « Maurice Blanchot»

Author(s): Thibaut Chaix-Bryan / Language(s): French Issue: 01/2015

review of: Éric Hoppenot et Dominique Rabaté (dir.), Cahier de l’Herne : « Maurice Blanchot », Paris : Éditions de l’Herne, 2014, ISBN 978-285-197-1777, 400 pages

Eccentric Modernities: Shklovsky, Benjamin, Blanchot

Author(s): Anca Băicoianu / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

Despite striking similarities and documented intellectual affinities, the common grounds of Shklovsky’s, Benjamin’s, and Blanchot’s critical reflection on modernity have never made the object of theoretical attention. At the same time, recent relational readings of Shklovsky and Benjamin, and Benjamin and Blanchot, respectively, are indicative of the growing impact of such a treatment on the current developments in literary and cultural studies (Boym 2005, Tihanov 2005, Liska 2014, Allen 2015). Against this background, the aim of my paper is to provide a comparative discussion of the understanding of space in Shklovsky, Benjamin, and Blanchot by tackling the common theme of displacement understood as ‘dual trope of the moving body and of the movement of thought’ (Baqué 2006). The purpose of such a discussion is to show how displacement, a fluid concept describing both physical motion and the intricate paths of reflection, can be used to explore the lateral ways, invisible gaps and in-between spaces in the fabric of the intellectual project of late modernity.

Fugal Musemathematics Track Two: Leopold Bloom’s Polyphonic Fart and J.M. Coetzee’s Contrapuntally Gendered Practice of Meegevoel

Author(s): Brian Macaskill / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

contrapuntal set of relationships some points of contact, crossing, disjunction, and synchrony among various border-voicings: literary, linguistic, musical, mathematical, autobiographical, and ethical. Its controlling technique is the inescapably abstract and general notion of fugal pursuit more particularly lodged in the etymological derivation of ‘fugue’ from fugere and fugare – to flee and to pursue or expel (to drive into exile). Although retaining its independence from ‘Fugal Musemathematics Track One’ (Points One and Two, the first two essay parts), this portion of the essay follows its numerically earlier antecedents, with which it shares an interest in the unexpectedness of the familiar. Track Two revisits and follows, in as fugal a writing-space as I am able to create, the orthographically-engineered and sometimes intestinal music of the ‘Sirens’ episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose musical practice J.M. Coetzee contrapuntally pursues in his later fiction: here especially in The Lives of Animals and in Summertime. The essay pursues fugal writing and reading as a matter of placement, synchronization, and dehiscence: of bodies, of music, and of thought or seed spilling from within the dovetailed segments of text opening to one another. A particular concern on this occasion is the way synchronicity might be pursued through gendering, understanding this latter term to indicate, first, but not exclusively, a (familiar) process of sorting and placing into sexual categories, though not only and not always into groups of two: overlaps and exclusions demand more nuance. Gendered sorting, that is, and for instance, sorts not only into male and female; the neuter belongs by not belonging here too – hence the appearance of the castrati in these pages. So also are variously third or other categories summoned within these sorted page-sequences: biological, cultural, artificial, say; or temporal, spatial, fugal; human, animal, alien; ethics, politics, aesthetics. In order to pursue its prey, this essay – like its earlier two parts – has itself entered into exile, that word, space, and place Maurice Blanchot associates with literature, Kafka, and ‘the poetic condition’ (237), fleeing from the eminent domain of orthodoxly-governed argument even to the point of risking the exceptionable: whereby, for example, and for the sake and space and shape of its presentation, it eschews Chicago Style citation and makes (or takes) some sympathetic gestures (or liberties) in its spacing, while still conforming in most respects to the stylistic protocols of Word and Text

‘The Absolute Event of History’: The Shoah and the Outside

Author(s): Kevin Hart / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

The article analyses two sorts of disaster considered in Maurice Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre (1980): the Shoah and the approach of the Outside. Blanchot’s account of suffering is examined, as is the role that Blanchot’s reading of Robert Antelme’s L’Espece humaine (1947) plays in L’Écriture du désastre. Differences between concentration camps and extermination camps are detailed, and it is questioned whether fragmentary writing is capable of responding to the horror of the Shoah in an adequate manner.

Espaces d’amitié. Blanchot, Bataille: faux amis?

Author(s): Michał Krzykawski / Language(s): French Issue: 01/2015

The purpose of this article is to analyse discursive processes and textual mechanisms which enabled Blanchot to create his space of friendship by recalling his dead friend Georges Bataille. It is, however, questionable if Bataille would have acknowledged this space within which Blanchot does not cease summoning his name. Blanchot and Bataille, I argue, are ultimately false friends whose legendary friendship has been entirely built by the latter through the authority of his powerful commentaries and somehow self-interested misinterpretations of his friend’s oeuvre. Blanchot’s space of friendship is above all a space of commentary which is largely not amical to the commented text, whereas his discreet rhetoric of self-effacing conceals the way he takes possession of Bataille’s work and, henceforth, uses it at his disposal.

La chambre: espace de vie, espace de résonance

Author(s): Laura Marin / Language(s): French Issue: 01/2015

Most of the events that compose the narrative thread of Blanchot’s short stories take place in interior spaces such as that of the room. The room, a space which is given, determined, delimited and close from the beginning is also a space of the uncanny, having the physiognomy that seems to permanently change itself under the intrusive force of an exterior (dehors) that is made up of noises and silences of all sorts, from the most undiscernible to the most unbearable. Almost all the time, the one who lives in the room listens to this sonorous universe of the shortstories that remains hard to be identified. The more his listening intensifies to identify the sonorous source, the more doubtful and prone to questioning the space of the room becomes. The article discusses the dynamics of this interior space which is a room, in order to investigate that moment in the economy of the short-stories in which this space converts into a resonance box. To approach the space via the sonorous movements that cross it and cause bouleversement allows further considerations on new possibilities of being concerning this space that opens, above all, in writing.

‘Everything and Nothing’: Shakespeare in Blanchot

Author(s): Mario Aquilina / Language(s): English Issue: 01/2015

This article discusses several moments in Maurice Blanchot’s work in which he delves into the space of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. For close contemporaries of Blanchot like Derrida and Levinas, Shakespeare is a decisive figure who inspires some of their major work. On the other hand, Shakespeare is not someone to whom Blanchot turns in decisive ways, except, perhaps, in a discussion of ‘Hamlet’ in The Space of Literature. The article discusses why Blanchot’s thinking may resist moving into the space of Shakespeare and proposes that, for Blanchot, Shakespeare’s name is inextricable from notions of human freedom and mastery that the modern work, which Blanchot is primarily interested in, dismisses. The (non-)relation with Shakespeare explored here reveals itself to be significant in what it discloses about Blanchot’s thought and the way he positions himself in relation to other writers.

Recenzje: Dzieło mistrza chwili

Author(s): Zuzanna Szatanik / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2003

CIAŁO PŁEĆ LITERATURA. Prace ofiarowane Profesorowi Germanowi Ritzowi w pięćdziesiątą rocznicę urodzin. Red. Magdalena Hornung, Marcin Jędrzejczak, Tadeusz Korsak. Wstyp Andrzej Borowski. Warszawa, Wiedza Powszechna 2001. s. XXIV, 727.

Recenzje: Zaskakująco poprawny profesjonalista

Author(s): Leszek Drong / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2003

Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, Harvard University Press 1999, s.146.

ETHOS IN TED TALKS: THE ROLE OF CREDIBILITY IN POPULARISED TEXTS

Author(s): Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

This paper investigates the importance of credibility in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks, which are popularising speeches aiming at Knowledge Dissemination. Drawing upon Gili’s (2013) theory on credibility, which grounds credibility on the three roots of knowledge, affectivity, and shared values, this work analyses how credibility is established in this new tool of popularisation that breaches the typical ‘scientist-mediator-audience’ triangularisation, bringing scientists directly into contact with their audiences. Through the analysis of the use of personal stories and anecdotes, familiar language, visuals, exemplifications, and reference to everyday life, this study shows how these techniques are used by TED speakers to establish on-the-spot trustworthiness by appealing to emotions and values, revealing that in this genre of popularisation, credibility is achieved more through trustworthiness and similarity, connected to Gili’s normative and affective roots of credibility, than through authority and reputation due to mere knowledge. The work further suggests that the success of these talks depends on how the speakers are listened to, remembered, and perceived as credible promoters of knowledge dissemination, but also on how they contribute to the audience’s approach to science, not as something distant and separate, but as a heritage belonging to both professionals and layperson.

“TWA QUEENS. WAN GREEN ISLAND”: NATIONALIST AND FEMINIST ISSUES IN LIZ LOCHHEAD’S MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS HAD HER HEAD CHOPPED OFF

Author(s): Milena Kostić / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

From the very first description of the two kingdoms on an island in Lochhead’s play, a striking difference between them is perceived: England is described in terms of the order established and prosperity granted by its intelligent monarch, Elizabeth, whereas the Scottish insecure and problematic position is epitomized through the personal characteristics of its ruler – a beautiful lady, a foreigner, most commonly perceived as the last Queen of an independent Scotland, making an effort to rule the divided country. Inclined towards Catholicism, politically inexperienced and unskilled, Mary fails to recognize the fact well known to her powerful Protestant cousin, Elizabeth – a proper queen has to rule the kingdom with her head, and not with her heart. Written for the performance of the Communicado Theatre Company in 1987, as a tribute to the fourth hundred anniversary of Mary, Queen of Scots’ death, Lochhead’s play establishes the connection between the burning political issues in XVI and XX century Scotland. By relying on the critical insights of Finlayson, Greenblatt, Gonzales, Butler and Lochhead herself, the paper examines the nationalist and feminist issues in the play, as well as their relevance for the understanding of the Scottish identity.