Abstract

My dissertation aims to elucidate the fundamental paradox at the core of Maurice Blanchot's work: on the one hand, writing is for him an overpowering desire for a lost, mythical origin, on the other, writing becomes a site of resistance to the idea of origin. ;My second chapter takes up the fundamental questions of Blanchot's theoretical writings: "What is literature in its essence?" Blanchot defines the act of writing as an experience of facing the Impossible: an Absolute that the writer wants to possess, but which he must renounce in order for writing to be possible. Myth, for Blanchot, is thus the lost origin that makes literature possible: its pure space and time are what the writer aspires to recapture through writing. ;In the third chapter I demonstrate that Blanchot's view of literature parallels that of language, insofar as they are both the representation of an absence: in the same way that language represents the negation of the thing, literature represents the negation of the real. In the fourth and the fifth chapters I analyze several of Blanchot's short stories and the relationship between art/literature and the political in his writings. In his early theoretical texts, Blanchot compares the writer's desire for a utopian world with the nostalgia for a mythical, ideal community. The desire for myth and for the sacred is thus for Blanchot the common structure of political and of fictional utopias. ;My conclusion is that, despite Blanchot's fight against myth and origin, his last story, The Instant of My Death, is full of literary "quotations" which prove that literature and myth are probably inseparable, whether we think of myth as an immemorial past or as the "quotation" of an archetype