The Step Not BeyondLycette Nelson This book is a translation of Maurice Blanchot's work that is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challenges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the beginning: writing, death, transgression, the neuter, but here the figures around whom his discussion turns are Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarme and Kafka. The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others. |
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Common terms and phrases
able absence accomplished affirmation already anonymous attraction au-delà belongs crossing dead death demand Derrida desire detour Différance disappeared discourse displacement distance dread efface Emmanuel Levinas empty ence Eternal Return everything comes feeling forbidden forget fragment future gift Gilles Deleuze give he/it Hegel hold identity immobile impossible infinite innocence inscribes Jacques Derrida jouissance L'Entretien infini lack language le pas au-delà leave Levinas limit live longer luck madness maintain mark Maurice Blanchot meaning mortal multiple murmur negation neuter never Nietzsche Nietzsche's night once oneself ourselves passivity past perhaps Pierre Klossowski play plurality possibility present pretend prohibition pronounced question refusal relation repeat repetition response Robert Bernasconi Rodolphe Gasché rupture scansion seems separation silence simulacrum singularity space speak speech suddeness suffering take place temporal thing Thing remembers thought threshold tion trace transgression unhappiness unique unity void whole language word