School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Author: Hiatt, Marty × End date: 2019 × Start date: 2010 × Type: PhD thesis × Subject: literature ×

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    Maurice Blanchot: three terrors
    Hiatt, Marty ( 2018)
    This thesis studies the political and critical writings of Maurice Blanchot from 1933 to 1949, a period in which he underwent a number of fundamental intellectual changes that were most famously but not only political. Its overarching trope is that of the terror, which appears in three very different guises, in 1936, 1941, and 1947, playing a central role in Blanchot’s engagement each time. The terror is one of the major metaphorical complexes of twentieth century French letters. It is essentially a nested series of discourses (and medical and juridical metaphors) about how discourse connects to reality or only to itself, which makes it essentially reflexive, as well as immediately political, literary and philosophical. In it the twin heritages of revolution and Romanticism are repeatedly struggled over and re-worked into their modern forms. My thesis elaborates Blanchot’s reckonings with this complex as a means to demonstrating the precise nature of his various changes. The goal is not to explain his political ‘turn’ but to specify the categorical modifications to his thinking that it presupposes. I trace the increasing sophistication of Blanchot’s political and literary thinking, arguing that initially Blanchot’s national revolutionary politics are formally anti-Semitic in that the prerequisite for national restoration is the violent expurgation of what is foreign. It is only with his encounter with thinkers like Jean Paulhan and Brice Parain in the 1940s that he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric, or destruction and articulation, mediate but do not limit one another, and begins to conceive of literature as the sovereign creation-destruction of realities via their interaction. It is his encounter with Hegel that enables him to re-link this conception to history by arguing that it directly corresponds to revolution, a view founded on Hegel’s basic homology between language and history. I argue that Blanchot’s identification of himself with revolution, as well as his negative reading of Hegel (his refusal of ‘achieved’ sense and development generally), sets a kind of absolute positioning named ‘ambiguity’ from which Blanchot will endeavour to think henceforth: it leads directly to his tendency to proceed by the unfolding of paradoxes and to the inescapably plural meaning of his 1950s (anti-)categories such as the neuter. It also precludes the possibility of a fixed division between literature and the political, which I argue is sufficient grounds for ruling out modelling his turn on a transition from one to the other. Such a reading, which is more explicitly materialist than most of those proposed to date, provides a different basis from which to approach Blanchot’s celebrated 1950s critical writings: namely, that they are suffused with the absolute experience of the identity with literature and revolution that Blanchot ‘becomes’ in the late 1940s. It also implies that Blanchot was preoccupied with thinking the link between literature and history throughout his career, and that even the rarefied nature of some of his writings is due to this very issue and his responses to it, rather than to his indifference to such a link.