Maurice Blanchot : : A Critical Biography / / Christophe Bident.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Bident, Christophe,
• MitwirkendeR: McKeane, John,
• TeilnehmendeR: McKeane, John.
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2018]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (612 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; contents --; translator's note --; preface --; part I. 1907-1923 --; chapter 1. Blanchot of Quain --; chapter 2. Music and Family Memory --; chapter 3. The Fedora of Death --; part II. 1920s-1940 --; chapter 4. The Walking Stick with the Silver Pommel --; chapter 5. A Flash in the Darkness --; chapter 6. There Is --; chapter 7. Aligning One's Convictions --; chapter 8. "Mahatma Gandhi" --; chapter 9. Refusal, I: The Revolution of Spirit --; chapter 10. Journalist, Opponent of Hitler, National- Revolutionary --; chapter 11. The Escalation of Rhetoric --; chapter 12. Terrorism as a Method of Public Safety --; chapter 13. Patriotism's Breaking Point --; chapter 14. These Events Happened to Me in 1937 --; chapter 15. On the Transformation of Convictions --; chapter 16. From Revolution to Literature --; chapter 17. Murderous Omens of Times to Come --; chapter 18. Night Freely Recircled, Which Plays Us --; part III. 1940-1949 --; chapter 19. The Universe Is to Be Found in Night --; chapter 20. Using Vichy against Vichy --; chapter 21. Admiration and Agreement --; chapter 22. In the Name of the Other --; chapter 23. A True Writer Has Appeared --; chapter 24. Lift This Fog Which Is Already of the Dawn --; chapter 25. Writers Who Have Given Too Much to the Present --; chapter 26. From Anguish to Language --; chapter 27. The Prisoner of the Eyes That Capture Him --; chapter 28. The Disenchantment of the Community --; chapter 29. The Year of Criticism --; chapter 30. Respecting Scandal --; chapter 31. The Black Stain --; chapter 32. The Passion of Silence --; chapter 33. The Mediterranean Sojourn --; chapter 34. Something Infl exible --; chapter 35. The Turn of the Screw --; chapter 36. The Authority of Friendship --; chpater 37. Quarrels in the Literary World --; part IV. 1949-1959 --; chapter 38. Invisible Partner --; chapter 39. The Essential Solitude --; chapter 40. The Radiance of a Blind Power --; chapter 41. Are You Writing, Are You Writing Even Now? --; chapter 42. The Critical Detour --; chapter 43. The Author in Reverse --; chapter 44. Always Already (The Poetic and Political Interruption of Thought) --; chapter 45. Of an Amazing Lightness --; chapter 46. Grace, Strength, Gentleness --; chapter 47. In the Gaze of Fascination --; chapter 48. Refusal, II: In the Name of the Anonymous --; part V. 1960-1968 --; chapter 49. Note That I Say "Right" and Not "Duty" --; chapter 50. Invisible Partners --; chapter 51. Characters in Thought --; chapter 52. Act in Such a Way That I Can Speak to You --; chapter 53. The Thought of the Neuter --; chapter 54. A First Homage --; chapter 55. Between Two Forms of the Unavowable --; chapter 56. The Far Side of Fear --; part VI. 1969-1997 --; chapter 57. Life Outside --; chapter 58. Friendship in Disaster --; chapter 59. The Last Book --; chapter 60. Forming the Myth --; chapter 61. Making the Secret Uncomfortable --; chapter 62. With This Break in History Stuck in One's Throat --; chapter 63. Even a Few Steps Take Time --; Amor --; acknowledgments --; notes --; books by maurice blanchot, with translations into english --; index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780823281787; 9783110722734
• DOI: 10.1515/9780823281787?locatt=mode:legacy
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Christophe Bident.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century.As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May '68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the '30s.Now translated into English, Christophe Bident's magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot's itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer's close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident's book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy.The book is also a historical work, unpacking the 'transformation of convictions' of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident's extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot's work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot's life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot's life itself becomes an oeuvre-becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident's sophisticated reading of Blanchot's life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot's detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized.This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.