Abstract

This dissertation examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals--Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski--and their laudatory writings about each other. It argues that such a mode of writing allows for a unique convergence of content and form. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, these laudatory essays enable forms of communication and states of being that are often viewed as inferior to come to the forefront: these include chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work. ;The dissertation is structured as a circular series of exchanges between five different pairings of thinkers. The first pairing is Bataille-Blanchot, then Blanchot-Foucault, Foucault-Deleuze, Deleuze-Klossowski, and Klossowski-Bataille. Each pairing examines the exchanges between the two thinkers in question with respect to a given theme and in conjunction with a third party who comes to bear on the exchange. Thus, the Bataille-Blanchot exchange takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-Rene des Forets; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange is concerned with the absence of work and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The conclusion, which presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality, underscores the many contradictions inherent in the practice of hospitality and draws out these contradictions rather than resolving them