Maurice Blanchot (September 22, 1907, Devrouze, Saône-et-Loire – February 20, 2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida.
Blanchot's work is not a coherent, all-encompassing 'theory', since it is a work founded on paradox and impossibility. The thread running through all his writing is the constant engagement with the 'question of li...
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Maurice Blanchot (September 22, 1907, Devrouze, Saône-et-Loire – February 20, 2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida.
Blanchot's work is not a coherent, all-encompassing 'theory', since it is a work founded on paradox and impossibility. The thread running through all his writing is the constant engagement with the 'question of literature', a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the profoundly strange experience of writing. For Blanchot, 'literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question' (Literature and the Right to Death).
Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in formulating his conception of literary language as anti-realist and distinct from everyday experience. Literary language, as double negation, demands that we experience the absence masked by the word as absence; it exposes us to the exteriority of language...
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