Leslie Hill

Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit

1. Unavowable Community 2. Sacrificing Sacrifice 3. The Inconsistency of Thought 4. Death, Writing, Neutrality Select Bibliography Index

poststructuralist readings of beckett

‘Whither literature?,’ ‘Ou va la litterature?’ It was with these deceptively simple words that, in July 1953, the French novelist, philosopher, and literary critic, Maurice Blanchot, returned to the radical rethinking of the question of literature that had concerned him for a decade or more. Blanchot’s inquiry had many different aspects to it. It referred to literature’s questioning relationship to the world at large. More important, it also had to do, in Blanchot’s eyes, with literature’s challenge to philosophy (and that pale shadow of philosophy, literary criticism), whose authority over literature, since Mallarme, had become increasingly precarious. More significant still was the question that literature posed to itself as to its own origin, purpose, and destiny, for this was a question, Blanchot argued in La Part du feu (The Work of Fire) in 1949, that had become synonymous with literature itself. Ten years later, as Blanchot’s thinking developed, it culminated in an influential and ground-breaking collection of essays entitled Le Livre a venir (The Book to Come). 1 The volume is an important one for many reasons, not least, as far as readers of Beckett are concerned, because it was one of the very first to identify the crucial importance of Beckett’s trilogy for an understanding of modern (or postmodern) writing as such. Indeed, it was with a reprise of the famous opening words of L’Innommable (The Unnamable) — ‘Where now? Who now?’ — that in October 1953 Blanchot began to translate his own earlier question about the future of literature into contemporary terms.2

Filming Ghosts: French Cinema and the Algerian War

March 18, 1992, was a date of some importance in the French historical and political calendar. It marked the thirtieth anniversary of the signature of the Evian accords between the French Government and the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN) that, in Spring 1962, after eight years of increasingly violent conflict, brought to an end the Algerian war and finally led to the granting of independence to Algeria. Although on the one hand the war signalled the ending of Frances role as a major Western colonial power, and eventually served to open a new chapter in the history both of France and of Algeria itself, in other ways, it left behind a controversial and not always happy legacy. Frances reluctance to quit North Africa had played a major part in bringing about the collapse of the French Fourth Republic in 1958, thus enabling the return to power of General de Gaulle with a new constitution that significantly strengthened the personal power of the executive. And as evidence emerged from 1957 onwards that France was engaged in the systematic torture of many of the FLN activists it arrested, Frances vision of itself as a traditional sanctuary for the respect of human rights was seriously compromised, with arguably permanent effect. There were many further, long-lasting problems left behind by the war. In France itself, anti-Arab racism was reinforced; and policing methods, too, became increasingly militarized, as the students of May 1968 were to discover to their cost. There were also other psychological scars that had collective as well as private implications. These arose in

“O Himmlisch Licht!”: cinema and the withdrawal of the gods (straub-huillet, hölderlin, godard, brecht)

In Godards Le Mépris [Contempt, 1963], Fritz Lang, playing a fictional version of himself, evokes the complex relationship between cinemas future and the end of cinema by citing a famous verse from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, according to which what counts in respect of poetry is henceforth no longer the secret persistence of the gods, nor their covert proximity, but their enduring absence. This paper explores the implications of that insight as they come to affect first Godards film, then the three films based on Hölderlins works directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub between 1986 and 1992: Der Tod des Empedokles [The Death of Empedocles]; Schwarze Sünde [Black Sin]; and Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1948) [Sophocles’ Antigone Based on Hölderlins Translation, as Adapted for the Stage by Brecht (published by Suhrkamp, 1948)]. At issue in all those films, and similarly in Straub and Huillets 1974 film of Schoenbergs Moses und Aron, is the tension between the project or dream of sacrifice as a form of fusional politico-religious redemption and its very impossibility as such, attributable (among others) to the necessary subordination of film to spatio-temporal differentiation and, by that token, to what is irreducible to the visible and the invisible alike. Through careful analysis of Huillet and Straubs filmmaking strategy, the paper examines both the aesthetic and political consequences of their interruption of the logic of sacrifice, and seeks to show how the future of cinema is not reducible to the aesthetics of the spectacular but is inseparable from the promise of that which, before or beyond spectacle, has not yet ever been seen before.

A Future for Theory

What is it that guarantees the truth of literary theory? And what is it that testifies to its survival into the future? This paper, intended primarily as a tribute to the work of Malcolm Bowie, examines some of the implications of Bowies view that literary theory, rigorously applied, as in the case of psychoanalysis, was inseparable from its status as creative, productive, futural, perhaps even fictional performance. The paper considers these questions further in the context of that shared commitment to the neuter or the undecidable that is a striking feature of the writing on literature of Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, and which is also a way of thinking the futural possibilities and possible futures of theory.

Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary

Blanchot provides a compelling insight into one of the key figures in the development of postmodern thought. Although Blanchots work is characterised by a fragmentary and complex style, Leslie Hill introduces clearly and accessibly the key themes in his work. He shows how Blanchot questions the very existence of philosophy and literature and how we may distinguish between them, stresses the importance of his political writings and the relationship between writing and history that characterised Blanchots later work; and considers the relationship between Blanchot and key figures such as Emmanuel Levinas and Georges Bataille and how this impacted on his work. Placing Blanchot at the centre stage of writing in the twentieth century, Blanchot also sheds new light on Blanchots political activities before and after the Second World War. This accessible introduction to Blanchots thought also includes one of the most comprehensive bibliographies of his writings of the last twenty years.