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Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had
a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean
Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present
day, his writings have been shaping the international literary
consciousness.
"The Space of Literature," first published in France in 1955, is
central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects
on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention.
Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of
artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the
literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists
not so much in the application of a critical method or the
demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently
deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most
notably by studies of Mallarme, Kafka, Rilke, and Holderlin.
Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any
language.
In this vivid memoir, Denis Guenoun excavates his family's past and
progressively fills out a portrait of an imposing, enigmatic
father. Rene Guenoun was a teacher and a pioneer, and his secret
support for Algerian independence was just one of the many things
he did not discuss with his teenaged son. To be Algerian,
pro-independence, a French citizen, a Jew, and a Communist were
not, to Rene's mind, dissonant allegiances. He believed Jews and
Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity and could only realize
a free future together. Rene Guenoun called himself a Semite, a
word that he felt united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected
a shared origin. He also believed that Algerians had the same
political rights as Frenchmen. Although his Jewish family was
rooted in Algeria, he inherited French citizenship and revered the
principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French
lycee in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. His
steadfast belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity led him into
trouble, including prison and exile, yet his failures as an
activist never shook his faith in a rational, generous future. Rene
Guenoun was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle
East during World War II. At the same time, Vichy barred him and
his wife from teaching because they were Jewish. When the British
conquered Syria, he was sent home to Oran, and in 1943, after the
Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought
in Europe. After the war, both parents did their best to reconcile
militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands
of work and family. The Guenouns had little interest in Israel and
considered themselves at home in Algeria; yet because he supported
Algerian independence, Rene Guenoun outraged his French neighbors
and was expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary
Organisation Armee Secrete. He spent his final years in Marseille.
Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into
his father's life and times, Denis Guenoun re-creates an Algerian
past that proved lovely, intellectually provocative, and dangerous.
Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the century—world
wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust—grief,
anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still
impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its
very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and
shatters meaning? The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon
efforts to abide in disaster’s infinite threat. First published
in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of writing:
to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what
is not possible. Neither offers consolation. Maurice Blanchot
has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and
criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that
Blanchot's writing is a "language of pure transcendence, without
correlative." Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman
remarked that Blanchot's influence on contemporary writers "cannot
be overestimated."
Werner Hamacher’s witty and elliptical 95 Theses on Philology
challenges the humanities—and particularly academic
philology—that assume language to be a given entity rather than
an event. In Give the Word eleven scholars of literature and
philosophy (Susan Bernstein, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Peter Fenves,
Sean Gurd, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jan Plug, Gerhard Richter, Avital
Ronell, Thomas Schestag, Ann Smock, and Vincent van Gerven Oei)
take up the challenge presented by Hamacher’s theses. At the
close Hamacher responds to them in a spirited text that elaborates
on the context of his 95 Theses and its rich theoretical and
philosophical ramifications. The 95 Theses, included in this
volume, makes this collection a rich resource for the study and
practice of “radical philology.” Hamacher’s philology
interrupts and transforms, parting with tradition precisely in
order to remain faithful to its radical but increasingly occluded
core. The contributors test Hamacher’s break with philology in a
variety of ways, attempting a philological practice that does not
take language as an object of knowledge, study, or even love. Thus,
in responding to Hamacher’s Theses, the authors approach language
that, because it can never be an object of any kind, awakens an
unfamiliar desire. Taken together these essays problematize
philological ontology in a movement toward radical
reconceptualizations of labor, action, and historical time.
"Rue Ordener, Rue Labat" is a moving memoir by the distinguished
French philosopher Sarah Kofman. It opens with the horrifying
moment in July 1942 when the author's father, the rabbi of a small
synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue
Ordener in Paris, then transported to Auschwitz--"the place,"
writes Kofman, "where no eternal rest would or could ever be
granted." It ends in the mid-1950s, when Kofman enrolled at the
Sorbonne.
The book is as eloquent as it is forthright. Kofman recalls her
father and family in the years before the war, then turns to the
terrors and confusions of her own childhood in Paris during the
German occupation. Not long after her father's disappearance,
Kofman and her mother took refuge in the apartment of a Christian
woman on Rue Labat, where they remained until the Liberation. This
bold woman, whom Kofman called Meme, undoubtedly saved the young
girl and her mother from the death camps. But Kofman's close
attachment to Meme also resulted in a rupture between mother and
child that was never to be fully healed.
This slender volume is distinguished by the author's clear prose,
the carefully recounted horrors of her childhood, and the uncommon
poise that came to her only with the passage of many years.
Herman Melville's Bartleby, asked to account for himself, "would
prefer not to." Tongue-tied Billy Budd, urged to defend his
innocence, responds with a murderous blow. The Bavard, by
Louis-Rene des Forets, concerns a man whose power to speak is
replaced by an inability to shut up. In these and other literary
examples a call for speech throws the possibility of speaking into
doubt. What Is There to Say? uses the ideas of Maurice Blanchot to
clarify puzzling works by Melville, des Forets, and Beckett. Ann
Smock's energetic readings of texts about talking, listening, and
recording cast an equally welcome light on Blanchot's paradoxical
thought. Ann Smock is a professor of French at the University of
California, Berkeley and the author of Double Dealing. She
translated Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature and The
Writing of the Disaster, as well as Sarah Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue
Labat, all published by the University of Nebraska Press.
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