Maurice Blanchot 1907 – 2003
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, literary theorist, and philosopher whose work occupies a singular place in twentieth-century French thought. After early right-wing political journalism that he later disavowed, he lived a famously reclusive life devoted to the writing of fiction, criticism, and philosophical essay. The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, and The Writing of the Disaster develop a sustained meditation on writing, death, and the relation to the Other. His friendships with Levinas, Bataille, and Foucault placed him at the heart of postwar French thought.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Post-Structuralism, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Maurice Blanchot:
“Writing is the wakefulness of the disaster.”
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Attributed to Maurice Blanchot:
“Literature begins where literature becomes a question.”
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Attributed to Maurice Blanchot:
“The work demands of the writer that he lose everything he might construe as his own.”
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Attributed to Maurice Blanchot:
“Death is the impossibility of every possibility.”
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Attributed to Maurice Blanchot:
“To respond to the other is to give what one does not have.”