Maurice Blanchot: L'ecriture Expiatoire

Dissertation, Washington University (1993)
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Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Maurice Blanchot's critical essays written from 1940 to the present time. It emphasizes his original and precursory approach to the notion of "writing" in which Blanchot seeks to determine the foundations for communicating with the other. Such a concern is displayed through a threefold evolution that first emphasizes the experience, then the theory and finally the ethic of writing. ;The first part illustrates how Blanchot's experience of writing must be understood as an "overflowing" of language that deprives the writer of his own identity. Exposed to a paradoxically neutral drive or impulse that leads him nowhere, if not to death, the writer discovers himself to be in excess. ;Having understood this new definition of language as an ever-changing process leading to the disappearance of the self, the second part concentrates on Blanchot's own critical discourse and shows how such a discourse, which originates from the experience of writing, presents itself as negative knowledge, as fiction. This critical and self-effacing discourse confesses its inability to express the experience from which it evolves. ;The third part analyzes Blanchot's ethic of writing through the notions of "community" and "communism". In this chapter, it is shown how Blanchot's understanding of togetherness relies on the "lessons" drawn from the experience of writing. For Blanchot, writing is to communicate without stripping oneself of one's irreducible otherness. In this, writing becomes the most ethical way to communicate

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