The Space of Literature: A Translation of "l'Espace Littéraire"

by Blanchot, Maurice (2015)

Abstract

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.

Key Passage

The Solitude of the Work: In the solitude of the work -- the work of art, the literary work -- we discover a more essential solitude. It excludes the complacent isolation of individualism; it has nothing to do with the quest for singularity. The fact that one sustains a stalwart attitude throughout the disciplined course of the day does not dissipate it. He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn't know it. This ignorance preserves him. It distracts him by authorizing him to persevere. The writer never knows whether the work is done. What he has finished in one book, he starts over or destroys in another. Valéry, celebrating this infinite quality which the work enjoys, still sees only its least problematic aspect. That the work is infinite means, for him, that the artist, though unable to finish it, can nevertheless make it the delimited site of an endless task whose incompleteness  develops the mastery of the mind, expresses this mastery, expresses it by developing it in the form of power. (p.20)

Keywords

Blanchot, Literature, Reading, History, Death, French, Critical Method, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida

Themes

The Space of Literature , Blanchot Citations

Links to Reference

• https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-SjRCgAAQBAJ
• https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=-SjRCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT7&dq=maurice+blanchot+the+space+of+literature&ots=F2SFj0EJo3&sig=gMG23zwOFhlxbqu3PA66XjVX5a0

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