Local and general aesthetics: Blanchot and literary criticism

This work is a study of the critical writings of Maurice Blanchot, focusing upon L'espace litteraire and Le livre a venir. The central characteristic of Blanchot's critical works is identified as the definition of literature in relation to what Blanchot calls "the outside", "the erring speech", "the origin", "impossibility". The use of these terms is shown to be necessitated by a thought which seeks to reflect on the total horizon of subjectivity, intelligibility and signification that governs knowledge and understanding and to situate itself in relation to a position beyond this horizon. As such, the lexicon of Blanchot is motivated by an intent similar to that of the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his thinking of the Being of beings. Initial chapters in the thesis show how this orientation develops in Blanchot's critical studies, referring to his interpretation of modern literary history and his studies of Friedrich Holderlin and Stephane Mallarme. The characteristic of literary modernity for Blanchot is a questioning of the concept of art. This questioning is seen as the form in which modern writing registers what Blanchot designates as the attraction of the "outside". Consequently, it also appears as a resistance to the philosophical dominance of subjectivity in the modern period. Later chapters review Blanchot's general conceptuality of the literary work and his elaboration of a concept of non-empirical experience, contrasting these with the concept of the work and of experience maintained by literary study. The final chapters develop the contrast with literary criticism by examining Blanchot's relation to the concept of fiction. Focusing on the theme of the "imaginary" in Blanchot, I investigate the language of attraction, fascination, temptation, and error in his critical texts, suggesting that by re-writing the pathology of imagination, Blanchot secures a position from which to reflect on the limits of the view of imagination and fiction in aesthetics.