Broken Words: Maurice Blanchot and the Impossibility of Writing

Comparative and Continental Philosophy 1 (2):181-192 (2009)
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Abstract

This essay explains what Blanchot understands as writing and the space of literature. For Blanchot, writing is the place where the impossible interruption of the destiny of things is put into play, an interruption that world-formation needs but negates and conceals. Writing belongs to an excess outside of language, an otherness of language. The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words. Writing is contrasted with dialectical language and the totalizing aim of the Hegelian system. The essay explains the connection between the disaster of writing (after the holocaust), the neuter and fragmentary style of writing and the passivity of writing

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Walter Brogan
Villanova University

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References found in this work

Introduction to the reading of Hegel: lectures on the phenomenology of spirit.Alexandre Kojève - 1969 - Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Edited by Raymond Queneau.
The space of literature.Maurice Blanchot - 1982 - Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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