The Step Not Beyond

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State University of New York Press, Jul 1, 1992 - Philosophy - 164 pages
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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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
8
Section 3
11
Section 4
13
Section 5
17
Section 6
18
Section 7
20
Section 8
21
Section 26
67
Section 27
68
Section 28
71
Section 29
77
Section 30
83
Section 31
84
Section 32
86
Section 33
87

Section 9
26
Section 10
27
Section 11
38
Section 12
39
Section 13
42
Section 14
44
Section 15
47
Section 16
49
Section 17
52
Section 18
53
Section 19
55
Section 20
56
Section 21
57
Section 22
58
Section 23
59
Section 24
62
Section 25
66
Section 34
89
Section 35
91
Section 36
94
Section 37
96
Section 38
101
Section 39
102
Section 40
103
Section 41
108
Section 42
109
Section 43
111
Section 44
112
Section 45
115
Section 46
128
Section 47
132
Section 48
134
Section 49
137
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About the author (1992)

Lycette Nelson is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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