Aaron Hillyer: The Disappearance of Literature

A new publication from Bloomsbury

Aaron Hillyer, The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the Writers of the No

From Bloomsbury:

Aaron Hillyer considers the fate and implications of Maurice Blanchot's enigmatic formulation of literature's future: "Literature is heading to its essence, which is its disappearance." The Disappearance of Literature's primary theoretical objective is to highlight a previously neglected difference between Blanchot's and Agamben's philosophies. These philosophical and literary arguments proceed by examining a series of related concepts: study, sexuality, language, mysticism, and friendship. Despite the fact that Blanchot and Agamben often serve today as primary points of reference for literary theory, no significant critical work has yet examined their works in a sustained dialogue. Hillyer initiates this new trajectory of research through readings of Blanchot's The Unavowable Community and Agamben's The Open, which are followed by encounters with books by contemporary writers Vila-Matas, Aira, and Carson. The juxtaposition of these two different forms of writing (philosophy as literature and literature as philosophy) shows that the new kind of writing analyzed here holds both "literature" and "philosophy" at a certain distance from each other as well as from themselves. The primary means of this distantiation is the gesture of deactivation performed by the act of "study." The narrators and authors examined here often "study" both literature and philosophy in order to remove them from their perilous metaphysical foundations. In this way, Hillyer argues, the "study-novel" emerges as a basic paradigm of the disappearance of literature, a new category of literary creation marked by Agamben's dispute with Blanchot. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• 10 Years Since Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot

Charlotte Mandell on Translating Blanchot

A 2005 interview by Ready Steady Book

Photograph: E. E. Pridgeon

Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book talks to Charlotte Mandell about translating the French writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot:

I first came across your name as a translator of the work of Maurice Blanchot. What first got you interested in Blanchot?

Fate. My friend Pierre Joris, who translated Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, was asked by Helen Tartar (then editor-in-chief at Stanford University Press) to translate La part du feu. He didn’t have the time, so he recommended me. I sent in a sample chapter – I was only 24 then and the only book-length work I’d translated was a book of poems, Le feu l’ombre, by the French poet Jean-Paul Auxeméry. Helen liked the straightforwardness of my translation, the fact that it didn’t use any acadamese – I tried to translate Blanchot as simply and as honestly as I could.

Do you find the close reading required to translate a work has helped you to understand Blanchot more clearly than you would otherwise have done?

Definitely, yes. I feel I’ve never really “read” a work until I’ve translated it. I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I? (In the case of Blanchot it’s a little different – I’d already read many of his books in French when I was a student in Paris.)

Do you think "the common reader" can get much out of Blanchot or should he be left to academics?

Reading Blanchot is a little like watching someone think. You have to have patience, since his essays move by nuance and suggestion, and come to focus slowly. English readers – Americans especially – are used to being fed information; in the case of an essay, they’re used to the conventional statement-exposition-conclusion format. The nice thing about Blanchot (and the thing a lot of people find exasperating about him) is that he doesn’t follow that formula, or any formula for that matter. Often no conclusion is reached. The subject is examined, and questioned, and looked at from different angles, but never really resolved. I like that a lot – it’s sort of like reading poetry. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot
• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy

A new title from Bloomsbury

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, ed. Ivan Callus, James Corby, Gloria Lauri-Lucente

From Bloomsbury Publishing:

'What, in theory, is style? How has style been rethought in literary theory?'

Drawing together leading academics working within and across the disciplines of English, philosophy, literary theory, and comparative literature, Style in Theory: Between Philosophy and Literature sets out to rethink the important but all-too-often-overlooked issue of style, exploring in particular how the theoretical humanities open conceptual spaces that afford and encourage reflection on the nature of style, the ways in which style is experienced and how style allows disciplinary boundaries to be both drawn and transgressed.

Offering incisive reflections on style from a diverse and contemporary range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the essays contained in this volume critically revisit and challenge accepted accounts of style, and provide fresh and compelling readings of the relevance in any rethinking of style of specific works by the likes of Shakespeare, Petrarch, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, Cixous and Meillassoux. [Read More]

Contributors: Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Laurent Milesi (Cardiff University), Saul Anton (The New School & Pratt), Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta), Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen), Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University), James Corby (University of Malta), Chris Muller (Cardiff University), Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire University), Fiona Hughes (University of Essex), Janice Sant (Cardiff University), Marie-Dominique Garnier (Université de Paris-8 Vincennes-à-St-Denis), Mario Aquilina (Durham University), Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Why read Derrida?
• A Tour of Slavoj Žižek's Apartment
• Documentary: Examined Life (2008)
• Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes

Outside Literature: Lars Iyer on Exodus

Tim Smyth talks to Iyer about his latest novel

Lars Iyer, Exodus

From The Quarterly Conversation:

Since the appearance of his novel, Spurious, in 2011, Lars Iyer has made a challenging and vigorous contribution to our sense of the importance of literature and thought in our vexed cultural moment. The intellectual anguish and inventive bickering of his two UK philosophy professors sees him steer a middle course between Mercier and Camier and Withnail and I. His combination of almost-total bleakness and bracing humour enables him to dip perilously close to despair, only to escape at the last minute.

With the sequel to Spurious, Dogma, Iyer confirmed his importance as part of an “enclave outside literature,” whose work extends the territory outside the contemporary canon to new and challenging distances. This novel extended W.’s and Lars’s itinerary across America, with little more than Plymouth Gin and the word omoi for company. As the humour deepens, so too does the despair, recalling both the Thomas Bernhard of Frost and Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show.

The final instalment of Iyer’s trilogy, Exodus, is the funniest, most hopeful, most despairing, and most gin-soaked episode of the three. Despite the impossibility of true endings, it is a final instalment—and a satisfying one at that. I talked to Lars, via email, over the course of nearly two months, during which we talked about hot tubs, the Bible, endings, and the collapsing borders of literature. [Read the Interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot

An online video from the European Graduate School

From the European Graduate School (link via Lee Rourke): ‘Christopher Fynsk, contemporary philosopher, discusses Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, the double relation or imperative, language, speech, writing, literature, politics, ’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• 10 Years Since Blanchot

Photographs of Maurice Blanchot

Louis Kaplan discusses images of the French critic, writer and theorist

Blanchot (upper right), Lévinas (middle), and friends, ca. 1925, on their way to dine at the home of Charles Blondel, professor of psychology at the University of Strasbourg where Blanchot and Lévinas were enrolled.

Louis Kaplan Cabinet: ‘The first image of Blanchot is to be placed among the countless snapshots of everyday life that are taken and passed around among friends and that serve as mementos of the space-time they have shared. The image features Blanchot as a man in his twenties in dandyish attire seated on a car and surrounded by companions. The dark-haired man is none other than Blanchot’s lifelong friend, the philosopher of alterity, Emmanuel Lévinas. As far as the facts go, the group is on their way to Charles Blondel’s home for a dinner party in Strasbourg. It is as if Blanchot in his exposure to the camera and in his being posed in exteriority has yielded to the etiquette required by the ethical philosopher who believed so strongly in faciality—in the indebtedness of the face as it turns itself toward the Other.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• 10 Years Since Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book

An extract from Thomas the Obscure

Follower of Rembrandt, 'A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room' (about 1628-30)

From Maurice Blanchot's first novel, Thomas the Obscure (translated by Robert Lamberton):

Thomas stayed in his room to read. He was sitting with his hands joined over his brow, his thumbs pressing against his hairline, so deep in concentration that he did not make a move when anyone opened the door. Those who came in thought he was pretending to read, seeing that the book was always open to the same page. He was reading. He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention. In relation to every symbol, he was in the position of the male praying mantis about to be devoured by the female. They looked at each other. The words, coming forth from the book which was taking on the power of life and death, exercised a gentle and peaceful attraction over the glance which played over them. Each of them, like a half-closed eye, admitted the excessively keen glance which in other circumstances it would not have tolerated. And so Thomas slipped toward these corridors, approaching them defenselessly until the moment he was perceived by the very quick of the word. Even this was not fearful, but rather an almost pleasant moment he would have wished to prolong. The reader contemplated this little spark of life joyfully, not doubting that he had awakened it. It was with pleasure that he saw himself in this eye looking at him. The pleasure in fact became very great. It became so great, so pitiless that he bore it with a sort of terror, and in the intolerable moment when he had stood forward without receiving from his interlocutor any sign of complicity, he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute. Rather than withdraw from a text whose defenses were so strong, he pitted all his strength in the will to seize it, obstinately refusing to withdraw his glance and still thinking himself a profound reader, even when the words were already taking hold of him and beginning to read him.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• 10 Years Since Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing

An extract from The Space of Literature

Alberto Giacometti, Place (Platz), 1948-49

From Maurice Blanchot's essay, 'Approaching Literature's Space' in The Space of Literature (translated by Ann Smock):

When we look at the sculptures of Giacometti, there is a vantage point where they are no longer subject to the fluctuations of appearance or to the movement of perspective. One sees them absolutely: no longer reduced, but withdrawn from reduction, irreducible, and, in space, masters of space through their power to substitute for space the unmalleable, lifeless profundity of the imaginary. This point, whence we see them irreducible, puts us at the vanishing point ourselves; it is the point at which here coincides with nowhere. To write is to find this point. No one writes who has not enabled language to maintain or provoke contact with this point.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 10 Years Since Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

10 Years Since Blanchot

French critic, writer and philosopher passed away on 20 February 2003

Maurice Blanchot, the French writer, critic and philosopher, passed away exactly ten years ago today. From a 2003 obituary published in The Guardian:

The French writer Maurice Blanchot, who has died aged 95, was not so much a private person, it was almost as if he was perpetually absent. He lived in isolated places, such as the village of Eze-Village, in the south, or Mesnil Saint Denis, in the Yvelines, where he died. He never appeared on radio or television, never spoke in public and did not allow himself to be photographed. One biographer, Christophe Bident, entitled his book Maurice Blanchot: Invisible Partner.

Yet Blanchot was considered one of the outstanding intellectuals of postwar France. He wrote 11 novels and a series of essays, many of which also appeared in book form. None were bestsellers, but what counted was their quality. People were not always converted to his ideas, but they were invariably fascinated by him. [Read More]

A Selection of Articles from A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Blanchot and Beckett's Letters
• Blanchot on Karl Marx and Communism
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Heiner Goebbels: I Went To The House But Did Not Enter
• Maurice Blanchot and the Limit of Disaster
• Maurice Blanchot on Kafka
• Maurice Blanchot at Station Hill
• Blanchot at 100

The Unread and the Unreadable

From Andrew Gallix's 'In Theory' column

Monument of James Joyce in Trieste. (Source.)

Andrew Gallix (The Guardian) (thanks to Lucy Menon for the link):

There was a time when a learned fellow (literally, a Renaissance man) could read all the major extant works published in the western world. Information overload soon put paid to that. Since there is "no end" to "making many books" – as the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes prophesied, anticipating our digital age – the realm of the unread has spread like a spilt bottle of correction fluid. The librarian in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities only scans titles and tables of contents: his library symbolises the impossibility of reading everything today. The proliferation of lists of novels that you must, allegedly, have perused in your lifetime, reflects this problem while compounding it. On a recent visit to a high street bookshop, I ogled a well-stacked display table devoted to "great" novels "you always meant to read". We measure out our lives with unread books, as well as coffee spoons. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce

Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs

A page from Blanchot's corrected proof of L'Entretien Infini (The Infinite Conversation)

A page from Maurice Blanchot's corrected proofs of L'Entretien Infini, showing changes made by Blanchot. MS Fr 497. Purchased with the Class of 1952 Manuscript Fund, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the Patrick Grant Second Memorial Fund, 2009.

A 2010 news story from the Harvard Gazette:

As a novelist, literary theorist, journalist and philosopher, Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) had a profound impact on the thinking of dozens of philosophers, novelists, and writers. Until recently, however, it remained unclear how Blanchot’s thinking had evolved over his lifetime. A famously reclusive figure in the literary world, it was believed Blanchot had destroyed most of his personal papers before his death.

With the Houghton Library’s recent acquisition of corrected page proofs of Blanchot’s major 1969 work L’Entretien Infini (“The Infinite Conversation”), however, scholars should soon be able to shed new light on Blanchot’s changing political and literary attitudes.

The pages were salvaged from a rubbish bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper, and contain numerous handwritten annotations by Blanchot, along with typewritten sheets inserted into the proofs – some of which consist of small slips taped over pages, while others are multiple pages in length.

The proofs, along with several other Blanchot manuscripts, came up for sale in March 2009. Hoping the material might find an institutional home where it could be preserved and made accessible to scholars, Smith Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature Christy McDonald approached Leslie Morris, Houghton Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts with the idea of purchasing the items. [Read More]

See also: A conversation about the proofs of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini at Houghton Library [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Corrected Proof: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• J. G. Ballard Manuscripts at British Library
• Manuscript page of Don DeLillo's Libra
• Watt: Samuel Beckett's Wartime Manuscripts
• Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot

'I dreamt of being Blanchot'

Michel Foucault. Photo: Randolph Badler.

An excerpt from James Miller's biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault:

Music and the analysis of folklore were not the only areas of formalist ferment that interested Foucault in these years. Between 1953 and 1956, he also followed closely the book reviews published each month in the Nouvelle Revue Français by Maurice Blanchot—a critic preoccupied, like both Barraqué and Foucault, with the relationship between the formal unities of an artwork and the anguish of the artist haunted by death.

In the 1950s, Maurice Blanchot was one of France's most famous invisible men. A working critic whose stature in his own country warrants comparison with Edmund Wilson's in America, Blanchot eschewed any direct contact with his public. Like J. D. Salinger, he generated a mystique and sustained a kind of cult following by making a fetish of anonymity. He permitted no photographs of himself to circulate. He never lectured or read his work in public. He granted no interviews, though he did make a habit of "interviewing" himself.

Foucault found Blanchot's mystique irresistible. "At that time, I dreamt of being Blanchot," he confided to one friend years later. A close student of Blanchot's critical theories, he also studied his rhetoric, using the device of "interviewing" himself in his book Raymond Roussel and also at the end of The Archeology of Knowledge. In a touching homage to the faceless author, he even turned down an invitation to meet Blanchot over dinner, remarking to Daniel Defert that he knew the writing—and had no need to know the writer.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self
• Dianna Taylor, Michel Foucault: Key Concepts
• Michel Foucault on Beckett's Waiting for Godot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Maurice Blanchot and the Limit of Disaster

Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance

Philosophical essay available on Spurious

In a 2005 article originally published in Parallax, Lars Iyer summarises his book on Maurice Blanchot, Blanchot's Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical:

'For Blanchot, like the early Levinas, the world of things is a dead world, but it is one that is not inert. It is a dead world, but one possessed of a strange kind of life – a dying that is active, a force of becoming that is the experience of the being of things. How can being be brought together with becoming? The difference between beings and being, as Levinas and Blanchot will present it, is given in the relation between the thing and its image. As readers will know, for Levinas and Blanchot it as though, for them, the image was the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round. Broadly speaking, the image is what gives itself in the relation to the thing when it is turned from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it, resisting the very impulse of our existence to create meaning, to, as it were, ‘exist’ things by bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. It gives itself as what ‘in’ the thing exists over and above our interests. But even as it does so, its resistance captures my attention and struggles with it, escaping me even as it seems to offer itself to me. Yet I am not indifferent to it, and this is the point. The image of the thing no longer exists at any distance from me at all; fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples

Lars Iyer picks his favourite literary 'frenemies'

Ian McKellen and Roger Rees as Estragon and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Photo by Sasha Gusov

Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, Dogma and two books on Maurice Blanchot, names his favourite literary 'frenemies'. He choice picks a number of classic antagonistic couples from the works of Samuel Beckett, Cervantes, Thomas Bernhard, D. H. Lawrence, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Mann, Patricia Highsmith, and Saul Bellow, to name just a few. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Writers: J. G. Ballard
• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Andrew Gallix on the Death of Literature

Is literature a work of disappearance?

As part of The Guardian website's 'In Theory' series, Andrew Gallix discusses the role of contemporary literature, and the work of Tom McCarthy, Lee Rourke and Lars Iyer: 'By this token, the novels of Tom McCarthy, Lee Rourke and Iyer himself are not so much evidence of a nouveau roman revival as instances of a new type of hauntological fiction which explores the lost futures of Modernism.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• René Girard and Mimetic Desire
• Robbe-Grillet: 'Towards a New Novel'
• What is Hauntology?

Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh

First publication from the Contra Mundum Press

Gilgamesh, translated by Stuart Kendall

Contra Mundum Press is announcing that their first publication, Gilgamesh, should be entering online databases by the end of this month. The text was translated by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). 'Announcing the inaugural publication of Contra Mundum Press, a new translation by Stuart Kendall of the ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, Gilgamesh. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature.'

Critical Responses

As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical—as it has for several decades now—each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall’s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.

Jerome Rothenberg

This new translation of the Gilgamesh tale ventures outside the straitjackets that have often constrained the text, understanding its complicated transmission-history in the Sumerian and East Semitic languages of the ancient Near East and the way it evades modern ideas of ‘epic’ and ‘fiction’ often foisted upon it. In sharp, imagistic prose, Kendall shows how Gilgamesh’s story is not just an instructive yarn but a concerted act of ontological investigation. A needed provisioning of a much-discussed but little understood work

Nicholas Birns, Eugene Lang College, the New School

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Blanchot and Beckett's Letters

On the second volume of Samuel Beckett's Letters, 1941-1956

Stephen Mitchelmore draws connections between Beckett's writing and its wider French intellectual context: 'Soon Beckett’s stipulation that only letters with a bearing on his work can be published will be repeated as often as Kafka’s request to Max Brod. The difference is that we may regret Beckett’s executors were not so disloyal. What ever the riches the letters contain, we will always wonder about those bearing on the life. However, the latest volume stresses the unavoidable and indeed necessary nature of such wonder.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956

Online blog compiles a list of the texts Beckett found interesting

Beckett on Camus' (pictured) novel, The Stranger: 'Try and read it, I think it is important'

This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press in North America, has compiled a list of Samuel Beckett's reading material from the latest edition of the Letters (1941-1956):

Andromaque by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: “It is lively stuff.”

The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”

Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux

Mosquitoes by William Faulkner: “with a preface by Queneau that would make an ostrich puke”

Repeat Performance by William O’Farrell: “Excellent, once past the beginning.”

The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is important.”

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

The 628-E8 by Octave Mirbeau: “Damned good piece of work.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• The Irish Times publishes Beckett Letters
• Second volume of Beckett Letters published

Blanchot on Karl Marx and Communism

An extract from 'Marx's Three Voices'

Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844

From Maurice Blanchot's essay, 'Les Trois Paroles de Marx' in L'Amitié (translated from the French by Leslie Hill):

The example of Marx helps us to understand that the language of writing, which is a language of ceaseless contestation, must constantly be developed and interrupted in multiple ways. The language of communism is always at one and the same time tacit and violent, political and wise, direct, indirect, total and fragmentary, lengthy and nearly instantaneous. Marx does not live comfortably with this plurality of languages constantly colliding and being forced apart within him. Even if these languages seem to converge towards the end, they remain untranslatable into one another, and their heterogeneity, and the distance and interval that decentre them, make them non-contemporaneous with each other, such that, giving rise to an effect of irreducible distortion, they oblige those who have to withstand the challenge of reading (or executing) them to submit to a process of ceaseless readjustment.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Karl Marx and World Literature
• Mary gabriel, Love and Capital
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Maurice Blanchot on Kafka

Simon Critchley: Style in Theory

Malta, November 2009

James Corby (University of Malta) interviews Simon Critchley (New School) by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009 (link via Continental Philosophy). Topics under discussion included the writing of Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Wallace Stevens, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom McCarthy, Michel de Montaigne, and American president Barack Obama. Attendees included Jean-Michel Rabaté, Laurent Milesi and Catherine Belsey. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying