Les Figures de la mort et la création littéraire chez Maurice Blanchot
Date Issued
2024
Author(s)
Abstract
This thesis aims to analyze the way in which two experiences are intertwined in the work of Maurice Blanchot: the experience of literary creation and that of death. My goal is not to establish a Blanchotian phenomenology of death, but to examine the process of metaphorization in which Blanchot joins analogically these two seemingly disparate experiences. I will explain how he defines literature by a series of metaphorical displacements of the notion of death, as well as how the experience of mortality mediates his phenomenology of literary creation. I argue that, in this phenomenology which depicts a writer's encounter with language — with its materiality and its power of idealization at the same time — and his encounter with work (in the Blanchotian sense of an ideal state pursued by never attained by the writer), Blanchot creates the following figures: suicide, murder, corpse, survivor, witness and the “other”, each of which maintains an intimate relation with death that serves to define the process of literary creation. These figures presuppose not only a philosophy of death, philosophy that we should study in the context of Heidegger's and Levinas's influence, but also a conception of literary creation formulated by Blanchot's reading of Mallarmé, Valéry and Rilke. Through an analysis of the polysemy and the paradox of death in Blanchot's writing, I intend to understand his argumentative strategies and rhetorical devices which induce his claim that the experience of writing is equivalent to that of death.
Publisher
Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur
Type
dissertation