Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative: Ethics of the Image

by Kevin Hart

Overview

Blanchot and his writings on three major poets, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, and Char, provide a decisive new point of departure for English language criticism of his philosophical writings on narrative in this study by leading Blanchot scholar, Kevin Hart.

Connecting his work to later leading figures of 20th-century French philosophy, including Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, and Jacques Derrida, Hart highlights the importance of Jewish philosophy and political thought to his overall conception of literature. Chapters on community and negation reveal Blanchot's emphasis on the relationship between narrative and politics over the more commonly connected narrative and aesthetics. By fully discussing Blanchot's elusive concept of “the Outside” for the first time, this book progresses scholarly understandings of his entire oeuvre further. This central concept engages Franz Rosenzweig's work on Abrahamic faiths, enabling a reckoning on the role of suffering and literature in the wake of the Shoah, with significant implications for Jewish studies more generally.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350349070
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/18/2023
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	535 KB

About the Author

Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Theology, University of Virginia, USA.
Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Professor in the School of Divinity at Duke University, USA. He also holds a professorship in the Department of English. He has written a number of scholarly books, edited collections, and written several volumes of poetry.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Blanchot Encore

PART I. On Poetry
1. Blanchot's Mallarmé
2. Blanchot's Hölderlin
3. Blanchot's Char

PART II. On Friendship
4. Blanchot's Weil
5. The Aggrieved Community
6. Friendship of the No

PART III. On Narrative
7. The Neutral Reduction: Thomas l'Obscur
8. Lès-Poésie: Levinas Reads La Folie du jour
9. Ethics of the Image

PART IV. On Being Jewish
10. The Third Relation
11. From the Star to the Disaster
12. “The Absolute Event of History”: The Shoah

Afterword

Notes
Index
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

One gets from this book a strong sense of Blanchot's thought and his placement among a unique cast of thinkers. Fitting for readers already familiar with the French writer, Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative
will be of interest to readers curious to learn more about any of Blanchot's various literary, philosophical, political, and theological influences and interlocutors.” —Critical Inquiry

“In this authoritative and wide-ranging new book, the result of nearly two decades of detailed engagement with the literary, philosophical, and political writings of Maurice Blanchot, Kevin Hart renews with impressive lucidity and toughness of mind contemporary understanding of one of the twentieth-century's most original and distinctive voices.” —Leslie Hill, Emeritus Professor in French Studies, University of Warwick, UK

From the Publisher