Proximities: A Workshop on Maurice Blanchot

The workshop is free. To book a place, email [email protected]

Getting to Caulfield Campus by train and tram: The Caulfield Railway Station is adjacent to the campus. Four lines stop at the station: Cranbourne, Dandenong, Frankston and Pakenham. The No. 3 tram from Swanston Street will also take you directly to the Caulfield campus.

10.30 – 11.40: Mark Hewson (University of Melbourne), “The Philosophical Historical Location of Modern Literature in Blanchot”

This paper will focus on certain texts—including “The Museum, Art and Time”, “Literature and the Original Experience” and “The Disappearance of Literature”—in which Blanchot proposes a philosophical-historical sketch of the different epochs of art and literature. The point of orientation of these sketches (and this paper) is the situation of modern literature – which in this context, signifies the literature of the modern age, rather than a literary-historical period such as “modernism”. The paper will interrogate the historical sense of the affirmation that the modern work is “in search of its own origin”.

Dr Mark Hewson is the author of Blanchot and Literary Criticism (Continuum 2011).

11.50 – 1.00: Keren Shlezinger (RUEP, Monash), “‘Torn Intimacy’: Blanchot, Elizabeth Costello, and the (Ailing) Condition of Literature”

The expressions “torn unity” [l’unité déchiré] and “torn intimacy” [l’intimité déchirée] appear repeatedly in Blanchot’s Space of Literature, nodding unmistakably to Bataille’s reworking of Hegelian recognition as recognition of an other who is wounded or torn [déchirure]. Yet if for Bataille communication is conceived in predominantly carnal terms—as “two beings torn by, yet united through, their intimate wounds,” Blanchot makes a more generalized claim for “torn intimacy” as the condition of literature.

This paper asks how Blanchot’s transposition onto literature of Bataillean ipse, itself a contestation of Hegel’s pronouncement that “the wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind,” not only disrupts the notion of literary works as self-enclosed, unified entities but also provides a way of thinking about J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello—a figure whose complicated presence is felt at the intersection of contemporary literature, philosophy and criticism.

In Coetzee’s fictions communication is effected by the mutual exposure of wounds: whether literally, in the coupling of incomplete, or injured beings; or figuratively, in the drunkenness of confession that seeks the intimacy of common shame. The figure of Elizabeth Costello, however, presents a unique case: if it is intimacy that her self-exposure seeks (she describes herself as “an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting … a wound”), it is intimacy of quite a different order to how we’d normally understand it. Her “wound marks and isolates her”, as Cora Diamond argues, but, as Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation avers, a wound [blessure] might also double as a blessing—a mark that tears open human finitude and sets up a new relation to the “Outside”.

Keren Shlezinger is currently writing a doctoral thesis on Blanchot and Coetzee at Monash University.

1.00 – 2.00: Lunch

2.00 - 3.10: Emily Finlay (RUEP, Monash), “Passivity’s Bind: Approaching the Feminine Through Blanchot”

This paper will examine desire alongside the characterisation of the feminine in Blanchot’s Le dernier homme, Le Très-Haut, Au moment voulu, and L’Attente l’oubli.

Blanchot writes of Eurydice, “she is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and death, desire and night seem to tend.” Here, the catalyst for inspiration and desire is attributed a feminine name, what Derrida might categorise as a feminine elusiveness, a resistance to the gaze. In Hegel and Kojève, desire is bound to knowledge. Desire of another is thus the desire to know or grasp them. For Blanchot, Eurydice resists all such attempts. In Blanchot’s récits desire is tempered by passivity: to respect the other is to let them be, to acknowledge their otherness as irreducible to the same. While Blanchot’s female characters often express a desire to control his male narrators, these narrators, in turn, approach their female companions tentatively, as though they are receding from them. This paper sets out to examine two forms of desire in Blanchot’s narratives: one which is active and seeks to possess its object; the other which views its object as though she were (to borrow a phrase from Poulet) “like leaves seen far beneath the ice […] infinitely far away”. These approaches not only shape the relationships between the characters of Blanchot’s narratives; they also relate to the practice of reading.

Hegel defines passivity as “being-for-another”. This paper will argue that communication engendered by desire also entails being-for-self.

Dr Emily Finlay is a research associate in the Research Unit in European Philosophy at Monash University. She has recently completed a doctorate through the University of Sydney on Blanchot and Bataille.

3.20 – 4.30: Chris Danta (English, UNSW), “‘I Cease to be a Man’: Maurice Blanchot and the Theological Grotesque”

Maurice Blanchot is perhaps accurately described as an anthropocentric thinker. “Man alone is the unknown,” writes Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation, “he alone the other.” But Blanchot is also interested in how contact with the nonhuman causes the human being to lose its sense of sovereign agency. A little later in The Infinite Conversation, he writes: “the Other man who is ‘autrui’ also risks being always Other than man, close to what cannot be close to me: close to death, close to the night, and certainly as repulsive as anything that comes to me from these regions without a horizon.” In this paper, I examine how Blanchot uses the animal as a figure of the grotesque that deconstructs the sovereignty of human being. In his fiction, Blanchot shows us animals surrealistically taking the place not just of man but also of the divine. I am thus wondering if we can say the same thing about Blanchot as Blanchot says of Lautréamont in his essay “The Experience of Lautréamont”: “Lautréamont, when he says God, has generally not exceeded the ordinary laws of the grotesque.” The theological grotesque is what I propose to call this deconstructive literary act of identifying with the nonhuman animal in order to separate human from divine.

Dr Chris Danta is a Senior Lecturer in English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot(Continuum, 2011) and the co-editor of Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction(Continuum, 2011). He has co-edited a special issue of Sub-Stance on the Political Animal and published essays in New Literary History, Textual Practice, Modernism/modernity, Sub-Stance and Literature & Theology.