This work offers an exploration and critique of Blanchot’s various engagements with psychoanalysis, from the early 1950s onward. Kuzma highlights the political contours of Blanchot’s writings on Freud, Lacan, Leclaire, Winnicott, and others, ultimately suggesting a link between these writings and Blanchot’s broader attempts at rethinking the nature of human relationality, responsibility, and community. This book makes a substantive contribution to our understanding of the political and philosophical dimensions of Blanchot’s writings on madness, narcissism, and trauma, among other topics of critical and clinical relevance. Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis comprises an indispensable text for anyone interested in tracing the history of psychoanalysis in post-War France.

In this landmark volume, Blanchot sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers whose contributions have marked turning points in the history of Western thought and have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect the contemporary literary and philosophical debate today. "Blanchot waits for us still to come, to be read and reread. . . I would say that never as much as today have I pictured him so far ahead of us." Jacques Derrida

Insightful and accessible critique of postmodern ethics.

Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder discusses the conditions of Phantom Limb Syndrome and Body Integrity Identity Disorder together for the first time, exploring examples from literature, film, and psychoanalysis to re-ground theories of the body in material experience. The book outlines the ways in which PLS and BIID involve a feeling of rupture underlined by a desire for wholeness, using the metaphor of the mirror-box (a therapeutic device that alleviates phantom limb pain) to examine how fiction is fundamentally linked to our physical and psychical realities. Using diverse examples from theoretical and fictional works, including thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, D.W. Winnicott, and Georges Perec, and films by Powell and Pressburger and Quentin Tarantino, each chapter offers a detailed exploration of the mind/body relationship and experiences of fragmentation, bodily ownership, and symbolic reconstitution. By tracing these concepts, the monograph demonstrates ways in which fiction can enable us to understand the psychosomatic conditions of PLS and BIID more thoroughly, while providing new ways of reading psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fictional works. The first book to analyse BIID in relation to PLS, Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder will be essential reading for academics and literary readers interested in the body, psychoanalysis, English literature, literary theory, film, and disability.

This is the author's most influential work of literary theory and criticism in which she explores the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

Four striking and novel textual studies of major literary figures and emergent authors. Selected from Cixous's seminars taught between 1980 and 1986 at the Universite de Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) and at the College International de Philosphie, the texts chronicle the French intellectual scene with its shifting tastes over the decade following May 1968. Edited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ch. 9 (pp. 207-234), "Blanchot's 'holocaust'", discusses the French thinker's philosophy of the Holocaust.

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May ’68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the ’30s. Now translated into English, Christophe Bident’s magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident’s book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy. The book is also a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident’s extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot’s work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot’s life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot’s life itself becomes an oeuvre—becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident’s sophisticated reading of Blanchot’s life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot’s detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized. This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.