(Un)Timely Blanchot
Description
a 4-session seminar with Philippe Lynes, Alex Obrigewitsch, Kim Schoof & Carlos A. Segovia
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION
Blanchot’s work delves into how thinking and writing both reflect and un-reflect our relation to life and death, challenging conventional notions of presence and temporality. By tracing his influence on Derrida and Nancy, and exploring the simultaneous timeliness and untimeliness of his thought, we can ask how reading Blanchot today continues to transform our understanding of language, life, and being.
Session I (“Blanchot Today?,” with Alex Obrigewitsch) will explore Blanchot’s considerations of writing and literature in their exposure of alterity, disturbance of temporality, and their inscription of the anonymous and impersonal—for it is the ineluctable binding of writing and mortality which Blanchot has exposed to us, suspending “today” in the double exposure of a coming future which intersects with a “terrifyingly ancient” past. The title of this opening session, expresses the double question of the (un)timeliness of Blanchot’s work. If we agree with Jacques Derrida’s claim that “never as much as today have I imagined him so far ahead of us as today. Awaiting us, still to come, to be read, to be reread by those very same ones that do it ever since they knew how to read and thanks to him,” then it is from Blanchot “himself” that we might learn the double sense of our titular question. What can Blanchot teach us that bears the mark of today? Blanchot has never been more timely to read and think with than today, insofar as “today” is only ever the mobile limit inscribed between a future to come and a past never present. There is no “today,” no “contemporaneity” for literature, and its very writing alters our relation to life, suspending it in a void from whence all emerges and in which all must efface itself.
Session II (“Blanchot & Derrida,” with Philippe Lynes) will, for its part, trace the history of Blanchot’s influence on Derrida, as well as instances of a reciprocal influence in Blanchot’s own work. When discussing the ‘violent’ relationship of deconstruction to its three biggest influences—Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot—Jacques Derrida explains that Blanchot resists this violence best. In the final interview before his death, Derrida insisted that a notion of ‘survivance’ or ‘living-on’ lay at the heart of his entire philosophical trajectory, evoking Blanchot’s notion of “a survival which is not one, a death which does not put an end to anything.” Derrida’s most sustained engagement with Blanchot takes place in the mid 1970s with the publication of “Pas,” as well as the second year of his just-published La Chose seminar (1975-1977). Blanchot’s thought also features importantly in “Discourses of the End”—Derrida’s 1983 conversations on the apocalypse and the disaster with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (2002-2003).
In turn, Session III (“Blanchot & Nancy,” with Kim Schoof) will explore how it is possible that such contrasting perspectives on literature and the experience it offers us of being’s origin emanate from one another. It will do so exploring how Blanchot and Nancy write (occasionally in direct response to one another) about literature, community, ontology and “the neuter.” For Blanchot, literature opens us onto the “Outside” where being originates, where “I am not […]; no one is there, but the impersonal is: the outside, as that which prevents, precedes, and dissolves the possibility of any personal relation.” Yet, it is Blanchot’s perspective on literature that has inspired Jean-Luc Nancy to view literature as an exemplary way of being in the world. In Nancy’s perspective, literature is the “coming of the world” or, in the words of Aukje van Rooden, “the point at which connections are made, in which (the world) is created as being, time and again, a set of relations in which and by which we live.”
Lastly, Session IV (“Blanchot Unreceived,” with Carlos A. Segovia) will focus on how Blanchot seems to approach the question of the relation between language and reality à rebours of much contemporary thought, which, in repudiating their once-assumed transparency, tends instead to affirm their reciprocal opacity. For Blanchot, however, language is neither the thing named nor its mere absence, but the tentative recovery of its presence through its very loss; just as in Mallarmé’s “Sonnet in -yx,” for instance, anguish is neither the one felt in the chest by the poet—which lacks a voice and hence proves at once present to him as something real but absent due to its silence—nor the one named through the universal notion that would conventionally be assigned to it—before whose trivial presence the anguish thus felt would recede into absence: it is rather that thing of hard (whether white or black) “nails” like “onyx” by virtue of which word and world become mutually supplementary and translucent to one another. This will be examined both at the crossroads of today’s thought, thinkable, and unthought and along with Blanchot’s re-inscription of being as otherness.
TIME
5 SUNDAYS, weekly, beginning October 4, 2026.
10:00-12:00 Eastern US Time.
SESSIONS
1) Blanchot Today?
The Interminable Default, Between a Coming Future and a “Terrifyingly Ancient” Past with Alex Obrigewitsch
2) Blanchot & Derrida
La Mort La Chose
with Philippe Lynes
3) Blanchot & Nancy
Literature: Being (In and) Outside (of the World)
with Kim Schoof
4) Blanchot Unreceived
Transparency, Opaqueness, Translucence
with Carlos A. Segovia
ABOUT INCITE SEMINARS
We are a mix of rogue scholars, disgruntled academics, disenchanted buddhists, enchantment-hungry anarchists, radical therapists, and general weirdos looking to create autonomous and accessible forms of “higher education.”
We offer online seminars and reading groups to incite personal exploration and inspire community action. Incite Seminars offers an educational experience. We do so by gathering an engaged group of participants for a dynamic exchange of ideas, led by skilled facilitators. All of our facilitators have a deep relationship to a subject or topic through intensive study or practice.
Incite Seminars is a 100% member-supported learning community. We depend on member contributions to continue holding space for radical study and practice groups, putting on rigorous seminars and courses, and providing our facilitators and organizers with fair compensation. If you are unable to pay the full amount for a session or membership at this time, we invite you to join us at reduced or no cost with our Solidarity option.
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION
Blanchot’s work delves into how thinking and writing both reflect and un-reflect our relation to life and death, challenging conventional notions of presence and temporality. By tracing his influence on Derrida and Nancy, and exploring the simultaneous timeliness and untimeliness of his thought, we can ask how reading Blanchot today continues to transform our understanding of language, life, and being.
Session I (“Blanchot Today?,” with Alex Obrigewitsch) will explore Blanchot’s considerations of writing and literature in their exposure of alterity, disturbance of temporality, and their inscription of the anonymous and impersonal—for it is the ineluctable binding of writing and mortality which Blanchot has exposed to us, suspending “today” in the double exposure of a coming future which intersects with a “terrifyingly ancient” past. The title of this opening session, expresses the double question of the (un)timeliness of Blanchot’s work. If we agree with Jacques Derrida’s claim that “never as much as today have I imagined him so far ahead of us as today. Awaiting us, still to come, to be read, to be reread by those very same ones that do it ever since they knew how to read and thanks to him,” then it is from Blanchot “himself” that we might learn the double sense of our titular question. What can Blanchot teach us that bears the mark of today? Blanchot has never been more timely to read and think with than today, insofar as “today” is only ever the mobile limit inscribed between a future to come and a past never present. There is no “today,” no “contemporaneity” for literature, and its very writing alters our relation to life, suspending it in a void from whence all emerges and in which all must efface itself.
Session II (“Blanchot & Derrida,” with Philippe Lynes) will, for its part, trace the history of Blanchot’s influence on Derrida, as well as instances of a reciprocal influence in Blanchot’s own work. When discussing the ‘violent’ relationship of deconstruction to its three biggest influences—Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot—Jacques Derrida explains that Blanchot resists this violence best. In the final interview before his death, Derrida insisted that a notion of ‘survivance’ or ‘living-on’ lay at the heart of his entire philosophical trajectory, evoking Blanchot’s notion of “a survival which is not one, a death which does not put an end to anything.” Derrida’s most sustained engagement with Blanchot takes place in the mid 1970s with the publication of “Pas,” as well as the second year of his just-published La Chose seminar (1975-1977). Blanchot’s thought also features importantly in “Discourses of the End”—Derrida’s 1983 conversations on the apocalypse and the disaster with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (2002-2003).
In turn, Session III (“Blanchot & Nancy,” with Kim Schoof) will explore how it is possible that such contrasting perspectives on literature and the experience it offers us of being’s origin emanate from one another. It will do so exploring how Blanchot and Nancy write (occasionally in direct response to one another) about literature, community, ontology and “the neuter.” For Blanchot, literature opens us onto the “Outside” where being originates, where “I am not […]; no one is there, but the impersonal is: the outside, as that which prevents, precedes, and dissolves the possibility of any personal relation.” Yet, it is Blanchot’s perspective on literature that has inspired Jean-Luc Nancy to view literature as an exemplary way of being in the world. In Nancy’s perspective, literature is the “coming of the world” or, in the words of Aukje van Rooden, “the point at which connections are made, in which (the world) is created as being, time and again, a set of relations in which and by which we live.”
Lastly, Session IV (“Blanchot Unreceived,” with Carlos A. Segovia) will focus on how Blanchot seems to approach the question of the relation between language and reality à rebours of much contemporary thought, which, in repudiating their once-assumed transparency, tends instead to affirm their reciprocal opacity. For Blanchot, however, language is neither the thing named nor its mere absence, but the tentative recovery of its presence through its very loss; just as in Mallarmé’s “Sonnet in -yx,” for instance, anguish is neither the one felt in the chest by the poet—which lacks a voice and hence proves at once present to him as something real but absent due to its silence—nor the one named through the universal notion that would conventionally be assigned to it—before whose trivial presence the anguish thus felt would recede into absence: it is rather that thing of hard (whether white or black) “nails” like “onyx” by virtue of which word and world become mutually supplementary and translucent to one another. This will be examined both at the crossroads of today’s thought, thinkable, and unthought and along with Blanchot’s re-inscription of being as otherness.
TIME
5 SUNDAYS, weekly, beginning October 4, 2026.
10:00-12:00 Eastern US Time.
SESSIONS
1) Blanchot Today?
The Interminable Default, Between a Coming Future and a “Terrifyingly Ancient” Past with Alex Obrigewitsch
2) Blanchot & Derrida
La Mort La Chose
with Philippe Lynes
3) Blanchot & Nancy
Literature: Being (In and) Outside (of the World)
with Kim Schoof
4) Blanchot Unreceived
Transparency, Opaqueness, Translucence
with Carlos A. Segovia
ABOUT INCITE SEMINARS
We are a mix of rogue scholars, disgruntled academics, disenchanted buddhists, enchantment-hungry anarchists, radical therapists, and general weirdos looking to create autonomous and accessible forms of “higher education.”
We offer online seminars and reading groups to incite personal exploration and inspire community action. Incite Seminars offers an educational experience. We do so by gathering an engaged group of participants for a dynamic exchange of ideas, led by skilled facilitators. All of our facilitators have a deep relationship to a subject or topic through intensive study or practice.
Incite Seminars is a 100% member-supported learning community. We depend on member contributions to continue holding space for radical study and practice groups, putting on rigorous seminars and courses, and providing our facilitators and organizers with fair compensation. If you are unable to pay the full amount for a session or membership at this time, we invite you to join us at reduced or no cost with our Solidarity option.
| October 4, 2026 |
Link for additional information
Organisers
Incite Seminars