Notes. Introduction. 1 That Merciful Surplus of Strength

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1 Notes Introduction 1. Ultimately, though, it must be thought in terms of the economy of meaning as it is implicated in the aneconomy of non-meaning or non-sense, as I will try to substantiate in what follows. I think it is necessary to give a broadly phenomenological account of Blanchot s writings if one is to understand how, in the end, they break from phenomenology. Such an account prepares the way for understanding the relation between Blanchot and the great French philosophy of the 1960s. 1 That Merciful Surplus of Strength 1. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences, translated by Goronwy Rees (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953), See The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 57 83; L Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), On the importance of Kierkegaard for Blanchot, see Mark C. Taylor s essay in the collection Nowhere Without No, edited by Kevin Hart (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2003). 3. Ibid., 62; The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), Ibid., Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, , translated by Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), See Corngold, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). I am indebted to this study. 8. The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 20; La Part du Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), Ibid., 20 1; Ibid., 323; Ibid., 323; Ibid., 323; Ibid., 324; Ibid., 324; Kafka, Diaries, Ibid. 17. The Space of Literature, 93; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey, in On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), Or the work itself is the torture device in which Kafka is imprisoned, dreaming of the iron spike which would plunge through his forehead. 151

2 152 Notes 20. The Space of Literature, 240; Ibid. In Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), Levinas writes: in a footnote: Cf. our remarks on death and the future in Time and the Other [ ] which agree on so many points with Blanchot s admirable analysis in Critique (41). The analysis in question, La mort possible is incorporated in The Space of Literature and includes the footnote where Blanchot sends us to Levinas s text. 22. Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macqaurie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Levinas, Time and the Other, translated by Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. 30. Ibid., Ibid. 32. Ibid., Levinas, Existence and Existents, translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Levinas, 1978), Time and the Other, Ibid., Ibid. 37. Ibid., This is Levinas s allusion in Time and the Other, this river is the one in which the very fixity of unity, the form of every existent, cannot be constituted (49). To take up a comparison I made in Blanchot s Communism, for Heidegger, by contrast, there would be no river at all if Dasein were not there in advance. Heidegger s notion of the es gibt refers to a primary unity or wholeness that is, the structure of Dasein s mineness without which being could not be. From Heidegger s perspective, the there is, the Cratylean river itself flows only because Dasein is there, as it were, to understand it. Yet for Levinas, would be the generosity of the es gibt which imposes itself upon the prior donation of the there is. The there is does not flow because Dasein is there, as it were, to understand it (see Blanchot s Communism, ch. 4). 39. The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 44 5; L Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), Ibid., 46; Ibid., 47; Ibid., 42; Ibid., 42; This is what separates Blanchot s account of literary creativity from the Gnosticism which appears in some of Kafka s meditations: it is never a matter of positing a pure outside, which would exist, as it were, in itself, that is, apart from the human being and human existence. As I will argue, Levinas and Blanchot inherit from Heidegger the need to think being and the human being together without making one the ground of one another.

3 Notes 153 As I will show in my discussion of what Heidegger calls mineness, for Blanchot, it is still a matter of what Levinas calls the way in which being is possessed by the human being, only this possession is thought in a different sense. 45. Heidegger, Being and Time, Ibid., The Space of Literature, 106; Ibid., 106; Ibid., 93; Ibid., 103; Anti-Climacus: this name is mean to suggest the Christian Johannes Climacus (another pseudonym) was trying to be: not anti-, then, but ante, before, in anticipation. 52. Gregory Beabout observes the etymological link of tvivl, doubt, with fortvivlelse. But if it is doubt that is at issue here, this is a doubt concerning one s existence. Beabout: Just as in English there is an etymological connection between doubt and double, and in German there is a connection between Zweifel and zwei, there is a connection between the Danish tvivl and the concept two, though it is not as obvious in Danish as it is in English or German (Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1996), 72). Is this doubleness a prefiguration of what Blanchot will call the neuter, drawing on the etymology of this word? Ne uter: neither one nor the other. 53. Erindring is related to the German Erinnerung literally internalising. This resonates interestingly with Hegel s account of the interiorisation which occurs with Christianity which I discuss below. 54. Kierkegaard, Repetition in Fear and Trembling/ Repetition, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), , Gjentagelsen has the sense of taking again, of a re-taking. In Blanchot s Communism, I made use of Kierkegaard s notion of repetition in a different way in order to understand the cry we are all German Jews which went up among the participants of May Blanchot does not comment on Kierkegaard s notion on repetition directly, but he alludes to Fear and Trembling on several occasions, a book published on the same day as Repetition and where another staging of repetition can be found. 56. Repetition, But this is suffering, despair, only insofar as it is measured by the desire to remain the same. Might one conceive of another relation to writing? A relation which is no longer one of suffering but joy? Perhaps we know the disaster by other, perhaps joyful names (The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 6; L Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 15). The disaster is a name, Blanchot might say, in the neutral, which means it is made to the place of what he names elsewhere as the outside, the there is, the immediate, the image, presence etc. On the circulation of such names in Blanchot, see my Logos and Difference: Blanchot, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Parallax, no. 35, Unbecoming, ed. John Paul Rocco, 2005, The Space of Literature, 61; Ibid., 61 2; 70.

4 154 Notes 60. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, The Work of Fire, 77; Ibid., 79; Ibid., 80; Ibid., 79; Ibid., 80 1; Hegel, Aesthetics volume 1 and 2, translated by T. N. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). I am indebted in the following to William Desmond s Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel s Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 67. The Work of Fire, 81; Natanson, Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1962), Ibid. 70. The structure only appears in phenomenology with Heidegger s The Origin of the Work of Art, but as I have argued in chapter two of Blanchot s Communism, this text is still ruled by a logic which favours a certain kind of disclosure, a regulation of the economy of meaning and non-meaning. 71. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book, translated by F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl s Phenomenology, translated by A. Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), Ibid., Being and Time, Ibid., Ibid. 77. Large, Impersonal Existence: A Conceptual Genealogy of the There Is from Heidegger to Blanchot and Levinas, Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 7.3, 2002, Ibid. 79. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), Levinas, Time and the Other, translated by Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), Heidegger, Being and Time, Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, translated by Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), Heidegger, Being and Time, Ibid., Being and Time, Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Kosky, Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), Ibid.

5 Notes He will also use the reduction to refer to the relation to the Other and, later on, to the relation to God. I will examine both claims in the chapters that follow. 90. Cited in Hart, The Dark Gaze, But it is undeniable that there is another sense of the reduction in Blanchot which would reveal that the experience of literary writers and readers is part of a more general experience of suffering. Undeniable, too, that this is joined by a third reduction which has to do with the relation to the Other. 92. The Infinite Conversation, 380; Ibid., 380; Ibid., 379; Ibid., 380; Ibid., 381; Ibid., 382; Ibid., 383; Ibid., 384 5; Ibid., 385; Boa, The Castle in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, edited by Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 61 79, The novel was begun in the first person, Brod notes; it was only later in the manuscript Kafka switched from the first person I to the third person K. Deleted scenes, for example, one in which the villagers make fun of K. behind his back, attest to Kafka s desire to maintain the perspective of the narrator close to that his protagonist The Work of Fire, 81; The Infinite Conversation, 386; Ibid., ; Ibid., 380; Ibid., 390; Ibid., 393; Ibid., 394; It is, of course, the inexhaustibility of commentary which marks Blanchot s fictions. 2 The Inexhaustible Murmur 1. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (The University of Michigan Press, 1972), 30. Translation amended. Early to late, Blanchot attaches enormous importance to Surrealism. The Work of Fire and The Infinite Conversation contain major essays on Surrealism and there are also important reflections in The Space of Literature. A fuller account of his relationship to Surrealism would have to take account of the implicit rejection of Sartre s reading of Surrealism in What is Literature? 2. Ibid., 124; 127; Ibid., Ibid., Bataille, The Absence of Myth. Writings on Surrealism, translated by Michael Richardson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), Ibid.

6 156 Notes 7. The Infinite Conversation, 408; Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. The Work of Fire, 85; The Infinite Conversation, 407; Breton, Nadja, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960), Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (University of California Press, 1995), Nadja, Profane Illumination, Nadja, 13. The French reads : je m efforce, par rapport aux autres hommes, de savoir en quoi consiste, sinon à quoi tient, ma différenciation (Nadja, Paris: Gallimard, 1964), Ibid., Ibid. 23. The Surrealist Manifestos, Ibid., Breton, Mad Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. The Surrealist Manifestos, 14. After the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presents symbolism as on a par to the Kantian categories, innately and universally organising experience according to shared unconscious fantasies. Why didn t this bring Freud closer to the Surrealist desire for the great revolution, the great liberation of desire? Perhaps with fascism on the rise and the Second World War looming, Freud despaired of the liberatory force of desire. All the more significant, then, that Blanchot would celebrate Surrealism in his great essay of 1945, republished in The Work of Fire. 29. Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valery, Breton (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997), Breton recalls: evenings, around seven, she likes to be in the Metro, secondclass. Most of the people in the car with her have finished their day s work. She sits down among them, and tries to detect from their expressions what they are thinking about. Naturally they are thinking about what they have left behind until tomorrow, only until tomorrow, and also of what is waiting for them this evening, which either relaxes or else makes them still more anxious. Nadja stares at something in the air: They are good people. More moved than I care show, this time I grow angry: Oh no. Besides that s not the point. People cannot be interesting insofar as they endure their work, with or without all their other troubles. How can that raise them up if the spirit of revolt is not uppermost within them? Besides, at such moments you see them and they don t see you. How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it,

7 Notes 157 who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labour that disposes me in his favour, it is it can only be the vigour of his protest against it (Nadja, 68). 31. Ibid., Ibid., The Infinite Conversation, 303; Ibid., 303; Ibid., 304; Ibid. 37. The Writing of the Disaster, 9; The Space of Literature, 266 7; Ibid., 267; Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Nadja, The Space of Literature, 258; What is Metaphysics?, translated by David Farrell Krell in Basic Writings, second edition (London: Routledge, 1993), , The Space of Literature, 262; Ibid., 254; Ibid. 50. There is a temptation to adapt what Heidegger writes of anxiety to the experience in question. But Blanchot s claim is subtly different to Heidegger s: the experience he describes is brought about by the encounter with a particular thing rather than opening up through a mood. I am attuned by this encounter rather than this encounter being enabled by my mood. 51. I will drop the expression the other image, referring from now on to what Blanchot means by this word. 52. The Space of Literature, 254; Surrealist Manifestos, Ibid. 55. The Work of Fire, 325; Ibid., 325 6; Ibid., 72; Ibid., 49; Ibid., 191; As such, it is akin to Blanchot s Judaism, where the Messiah is the one who can never come and where waiting, informed by prophecy, is already the suspension in question. See chapter five, below. 61. Nadja, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960), See Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), The Infinite Conversation, 420; The Work of Fire, 323; 313.

8 158 Notes 65. The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3; Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), Ibid., 4; Ibid. 68. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso Books, 1997), viii. 69. The Unavowable Community, translated by Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988), 52; La Communauté Inavouable (Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1983), See Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (University of Chicago Press, 1995), See my The Impossibility of Loving: Blanchot, Sexual Difference, Community, The Journal of Cultural Research, vol. 7, no. 3, The Work of Fire, 322; The Felicities of Paradox: Blanchot on the Null Space of Literature in Carolyn Bailey Gill, ed., Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 34 69, See, for example, the retelling of Orpheus s descent into Hades to rescue Eurydice in The Space of Literature under the title Orpheus s Gaze (171 6). For Blanchot, Orpheus has lost Eurydice just as the poet loses the real existence of that he would write about; he seeks Eurydice just as the poet would seek to recapture the real existence of that which is lost in language. Significantly, Blanchot claims in an untitled foreword to The Space of Literature, that the chapter called, Orpheus s Gaze is the centre of this book (v). See also the opening chapter of The Book to Come, The Sirens Song, which I comment on in Chapter 2, below. 75. See Cixous s Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva, translated by Verena Andermatt Conley (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 1 27, My claim would have to be carefully substantiated. 76. I allude to Deleuze and Guattari s discussions of becoming-woman in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See the debate in the part 10 of Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 3, edited by Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2001). 77. The Book to Come, 5; Ibid., 6; The Theory of Inspiration, Ibid., The Book to Come, 6; Nadja, The Infinite Conversation, 420; Ibid., 414; Irony Mastered and Unmastered 1. Wilson, Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man (Yale University Press, 2003), Blanchot s remarks on Giacometti in the essay I am discussing here is one of the few places where he explicitly considers the visual arts.

9 Notes 159 Does Blanchot privilege literature above other artforms when it comes to his account of the related terms work, worklessness, absence of work, etc? This is a difficult question. In Blanchot s Communism, thinking of his comments in the last part of The Space of Literature, where the influence of Heidegger is very apparent but also Blanchot s attempt to distinguish his position from that of the author of The Origin of the Work of Art I tried to develop a more general account of Blanchotian aesthetics. The following chapter attempts to make the same argument in a more nuanced fashion. 2. Ibid., Ibid., Sartre, Essays in Aesthetics, translated by Wade Baskin (New York Press: The Citadel Press, 1963), Ibid. 6. Ibid., Ibid. 8. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Interview, in Sylvester s Looking at Giacometti (London: Pimlico, 1994), , Ibid. 13. Ibid., Essays in Aesthetics, The Space of Literature, 257; Ibid., 257 8; Ibid., 258; Davies, An Exemplary Beginning in Orpheus Looking Back: A Celebration of Maurice Blanchot (Bracknell: South Hill Park Trust), 3 5, Antelme, The Human Race, Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. In the Night that is Watched Over in On Robert Antelme s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary, edited by Daniel Dobbels, translated by Jeffrey Haight (Evanston: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 2003), 55 60, The Space of Literature, 258; The Infinite Conversation, 215; Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 218; L Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), Ibid., 219; Friendship, 219; Totality and Infinity, Ibid., 269.

10 160 Notes 36. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1998), Totality and Infinity, Friendship, 217; Otherwise than Being, Ibid., The Writing of the Disaster, 76 7; See, for a discussion of Blanchot, Heidegger and etymology, my Logos and Difference. 43. Cited in Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), The Infinite Conversation, 394; The Infinite Conversation, 386 7; Ibid., 386; Ibid., 385; Ibid., 385 6; As we will see, the Other is the occasion of this donation of speech; the Other s height is a name for the height which belongs to language; the eminence of the Other is likewise to be thought in terms of language s inexhaustible murmur. 50. The Infinite Conversation, 304; Ibid., 212; Ibid., ; Ibid., 304; Ibid., 211; See Large, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Language (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2005), ch. four. I am indebted to Large s book in the present study. 56. My interpretation of the Blanchot s account of the relation to the Other in Blanchot s Communism often falls into this trap. 4 Nothing Is What There Is 1. The Writing of the Disaster, 40; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), Otherwise than Being, Ibid., Ibid., Writing of the Disaster, 24; Ibid., 25; The Writing of the Disaster, 72; Freud, Case Histories II, translated by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) 38, Ibid., The Infinite Conversation, 232; See Case Histories II, Laplanche and Pontalis ask, Should we look upon the primal scene as the memory of an actually experienced event or as a pure phantasy? Freud debated this problem with Jung, he debated it in his

11 Notes 161 own mind, and it is raised at several points in the case-history of the Wolf Man (The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973), 335). As they note, Freud gives different responses to this question at different times: in The Wolf Man, he seems to want to establish the reality of the scene. Elsewhere, as Laplanche and Pontalis write, he comes to emphasise the role of retrospective phantasies [Zurückphantasien], he still maintains that reality has at least provided certain clues (noises, animal coitus etc.) (ibid., 335). What is crucial is that the scene has already happened; this scene belongs to the (ontogenetic or phylogenetic) past of the individual and that it constitutes a happening which may be of the order of myth but which is already given prior to any meaning which is attributed to it after the fact (ibid., 336). 13. The Infinite Conversation, 232; A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive, translated by Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. The Writing of the Disaster, 71; Ibid., 71 2; The Writing of the Disaster, 116; I draw on Section II of Totality and Infinity and part II of Time and the Other in this account of Levinas notion of enjoyment. 23. Existence and Existents, Ibid. 25. Ibid., Ibid. 27. Bataille, Primacy of Economy translated by Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), , Proper Names, See Is It Righteous To Be?, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), Existents and Existence, Ibid., 56 7, Ibid., 58 ft Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), Ibid. 35. Proper Names, Ibid. 37. Ibid., The Writing of the Disaster, 116; Ibid. 40. The Work of Fire, 326 7; Ibid., 327; Ibid., 328; Ibid. 44. The Writing of the Disaster, 25; 46.

12 162 Notes 5 Write, Write 1. Smothered Words, translated by Madeleine Dobie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 9. This book was born from an essay written in homage for an edited collection on Blanchot. That collection never appeared; Smothered Words came out as a separate volume. 2. Ibid., Ibid., Kofman, Sarah. Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), Smothered Words, Ibid., The Infinite Conversation, 127; Ibid., 127; Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. The Infinite Conversation, 125; Ibid., 126; Ibid., 127; Ibid. 15. Ibid., 126; Ibid., 126 7; Ibid., 128; Ibid. 19. Ibid., 123; Ibid, 128; The Writing of the Disaster, 63. Josh Cohen s excellent Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003) also explores these themes. 22. Ibid. 23. The Infinite Conversation, 134; Ibid. 25. The Writing of the Disaster, 149; The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79; Ibid., Ibid., 80; Ibid., 81; I discuss this theme at length in chapter three. 31. Our Clandestine Companion, translated by David Allison, Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, l986), The Infinite Conversation, 129; The question as to what role what Levinas calls the third plays for Blanchot remains open; I mean to take it up elsewhere. 34. Otherwise than Being, Ibid., Ibid., Totality and Infinity, Ibid., Otherwise than Being, 13.

13 Notes God, Death and Time, Levinas, God and Philosophy, translated by Bettina Bergo, in Of God Who Comes to Mind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Time and the Other, Levinas, God, Death and Time, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), Levinas, The Truth of Disclosure and the Truth of Testimony, translated by Iain MacDonald, Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan Peperzaak et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), , Ibid., The Infinite Conversation, Ibid. 48. Proper Names, Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990), Ibid., Ibid., Revelation in the Jewish Tradition, translated by Sean Hand, Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), , Ibid., Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1968), Thanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derrida in The Blanchot Reader, translated by Michael Holland et al., edited Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), , Ibid. See Hart s The Dark Gaze, Inert, immobile, less a gathering than the always imminent dispersal of a presence momentarily occupying the whole space and nevertheless without a place (utopia), a kind of messianism announcing nothing but its autonomy and its worklessness (on the condition that it be left to itself, or else it will change immediately and become a network of forces ready to break loose): thus are mankind s people whom it is permissible to consider as the bastardised imitation of God s people (rather similar to what could have been the gathering of the children of Israel in view of the Exodus if they had gathered while at the same time forgetting to leave (The Unavowable Community, 33; 58).

14 Bibliography Blanchot in French L Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). La Communauté Inavouable (Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1983). L Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). L Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). L Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). La Part du Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). Le pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Blanchot in English After the Fact, translated by Paul Auster, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays (New York: Station Hill, 1999). The Blanchot Reader, translated by Michael Holland et al., edited Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). For Friendship, translated by Leslie Hill, Disastrous Blanchot, Oxford Literary Review, 22 (Durham, 2000). The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Foucault/ Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987). In the Night that is Watched Over in On Robert Antelme s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary, edited by Daniel Dobbels, translated by Jeffrey Haight (Evanston: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 2003). Our Clandestine Companion, translated by David Allison, Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, l986). The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). The Step Not Beyond, translated by Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). The Unavowable Community, translated by Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988). The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 164

15 Bibliography 165 Books by other authors Allison David, Face to Face with Levinas, edited Richard Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, l986). Antelme, Robert, The Human Race, translated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston: Marlboro Press, 1992). Bataille, Georges, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, translated by Michael Richardson (London and New York: Verso, 1994). Beabout, Gregory, Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1996). Breton, André, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1928). Breton, André, Nadja, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Breton, André, Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (The University of Michigan Press, 1972). Breton, André, Mad Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). Breton, André et al., The Automatic Message (Atlas Books, 2001). Cixous, Hélène, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva, translated by Verena Andermatt Conley (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). Clark, Timothy, The Impossible Lightness of Reading: Reading and the Communicational Model of Subjectivity in Blanchot, Southern Review, 28 (1995), Clark, Timothy, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). Cohen, Josh, Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003). Corngold, Stanley, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Davies, Paul, An Exemplary Beginning in Orpheus Looking Back: A Celebration of Maurice Blanchot (Bracknell: South Hill Park Trust). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Derrida, Jacques, Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso Books, 1997). Desmond, William, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel s Aesthetics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986). Dobbels, Daniel (ed.), On Robert Antelme s The Human Race: Essays and Commentary, translated by Jeffrey Haight (Evanston: The Marlboro Press, Northwestern University Press, 2003). Freud, Sigmund, Case Histories II, translated by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey, in On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Genosko, Gary (ed.), Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 2001).

16 166 Bibliography Gill, Carolyn Bailey (ed.), Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing (New York and London: Routledge, 1996). Guerlac, Suzanne, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997). Hart, Kevin (ed.), Nowhere Without No (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2003). Hart, Kevin, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Hegel, George Friedrich Wilhelm, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Hegel, George Friedrich Wilhelm, Aesthetics, vol. I, translated by T. N. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Hegel, George Friedrich Wilhelm, Aesthetics, vol. II, translated by T. N. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). Heidegger, Martin, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, translated by Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Heidegger, Martin, The Origin of the Work of Art, translated by David Farrell Krell in Basic Writings, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1993). Heidegger, Martin, What is Metaphysics?, translated by David Farrell Krell in Basic Writings, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1993). Heidegger, Martin, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Hill, Leslie, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Husserl, Edmund, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book, translated by F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983). Iyer, Lars, The Impossibility of Loving: Blanchot, Sexual Difference, Community, The Journal of Cultural Research, vol. 7, no. 3 (2003), Iyer, Lars, Blanchot s Communism: Art, Philosophy, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Iyer, Lars, Logos and Difference: Blanchot, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Parallax, no. 35, Unbecoming, edited by John Paul Rocco, 2005, Janouch, Gustav, Conversations with Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences, translated by Goronwy Rees (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953). Kafka, Franz, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, , translated by Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1948). Kafka, Franz, The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957). Kafka, Franz, The Castle, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1987). Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Kierkegaard, Søren, The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Kierkegaard, Søren, Either/Or, vols 1 and 2, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

17 Bibliography 167 Kofman, Sarah, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). Kofman, Sarah, Smothered Words, translated by Madeleine Dobie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998). Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, translated by James H. Nichols (Cornell University Press, 1980). Kosky, Jeffrey, Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillippe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, translated by Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973). Large, William, Impersonal Existence: A Conceptual Genealogy of the There Is from Heidegger to Blanchot and Levinas, Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 7.3, Large, William, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot (Manchester: Clinamen Books, 2005). Levinas, Emmanuel, God and Philosophy, translated by Bettina Bergo, in Of God Who Comes to Mind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Levinas, Emmanuel, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl s Phenomenology, translated by A. Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Levinas, Emmanuel, Existence and Existents, translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Levinas, 1978). Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). Levinas, Emmanuel, Time and the Other, translated by Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). Levinas, Emmanuel, Proper Names, translated by Michael B. Smith (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996). Levinas, Emmanuel, Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1998). Levinas, Emmanuel, Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, and New York, Columbia University Press, 1999). Levinas, Emmanuel, God, Death and Time, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Levinas, Emmanuel, Is It Righteous To Be?, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Mishima, Yukio, Sun and Steel (Kodansha International, 2003). Mole, Gary, Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997). Natanson, Maurice, Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1962). Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1968). Plato, The Symposium, translated by Christopher Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003).

18 168 Bibliography Preece, Julian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Robbins, Jill, Altered Reading. Levinas and Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Confessions, translated by J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Essays in Aesthetics, translated by Wade Baskin (New York Press: The Citadel Press, 1963). Sylvester, David, Looking at Giacometti (London: Pimlico, 1994). Wall, Thomas Carl, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). Weisel, Elie, The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration, Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1977). Wilson, Laurie, Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man (Yale University Press, 2003).

19 Index Antelme, Robert, 94 6, 97 9, 108 Augustine, 107 Bataille, Georges, 51, , 127 Boa, Elizabeth, 44 Breton, André, 50 63, 65 6, 73 4, 82 8, 156 Brod, Max, 16, 47 Clark, Timothy, 74 Cohen, Margaret, 53 Davies, Paul, 94 Derrida, Jacques, 78 Duras, Marguerite, 79, 82 Flaubert, Gustave, 41 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 16, 50, 58 9, 63, 65, 121 4, 126 Gasché, Rudolphe, 78 Guerlac, Suzanne, 60 Giacometti, Alberto, 45, 89 92, 96 7, 99, 102 3, Hegel, G. W. F., 9 12, 31 3, 104, 138 Heidegger, Martin, 17 19, 23, 35 9, 43, 100 5, , , , 150, 152 Homer, 106 7, 67, 76, 81, 85 Husserl, Edmund, 35 7, 61 Ingarden, Roman, 33 4 Kafka, Franz, 1 16, 20 4, 41 9, 108 9, 113 Kierkegaard, Søren, 25 9, 114, 153 Kosky, Jeffrey, 38 9 Klarsfeld, Serge, Kofman, Sarah, Large, William, 36 7, Leclair, Serge, Mallarmé, Stephane, 71, 78 Mishima, Yukio, 14 Natanson, Maurice, 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 149 Plato, 105 6, 110, 115 Robbins, Jill, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 89 92, 99 Wilson, Laurie,