Maurice Blanchot

Awaiting Oblivion (L'attente l'oubli) is one of the crowning works by the French philosopher and novelist Maurice Blanchot. Located at the crossroads of fiction and philosophy, it is a daring, innovative, and strikingly original experiment in literary form. Strongly reminiscent of Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Awaiting Oblivion takes place in an anonymous hotel room, furnished with only a bed, an armchair, and a table. There we encounter a man and a woman who (in the words of translator John Gregg) "are alternately waiting for something to happen to them that never does and vainly trying to remember something that may have already happened to them." Blanchot's portrayal of their relationship is a penetrating reflection upon human nature, language, and literature.

Maurice Blanchot is a towering yet enigmatic figure in 20th-century French thought. Both his fiction and his criticism played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written. This volume collects his political writings from 1953 and 1993.

The Station Hill Blanchot Reader is the only collection in English of Maurice Blanchot's mature fiction - the unique genre he called recits (tellings, narratives) - as well as a selection of literary/philosophical writings drawn from five of his major works. It brings together seven of Blanchot's eight Station Hill books published over the past twenty years: Vicious Circles, Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, When The Time Comes, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, and ten of the eleven essays from The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays.

Blanchot describes a world where the Absolute has finally overcome all other rivals to its authority. The State is unified, universal, and homogeneous, promising perfect satisfaction. Why then does it find revolt everywhere? Could it be the omnipresent police? The plagues? The proliferating prisons and black markets? Written in part as a description of post-World War II Europe, Blanchot's dystopia charts with terrible clarity the endless death of god in an era of constantly metamorphosing but strangely definitive ideologies.

"The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical - from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life - but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses."--BOOK JACKET.