Reviews for Maurice Blanchot

The average rating for Maurice Blanchot based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-05 00:00:00 Brian Moore Good set of essays mostly dealing with Blanchot's literary theory aspects (but his philosophy and literature can't be separated from this). A lot of them deal with death and absence. Negation. The typical Blanchotian stuff... Gasche is verbose as usual, but the 2nd half picks up. Fynsk's essay and Davies's right after that are really good. There's a lot of connection with Blanchot and Levinas's "il y a" throughout, but Critchley's article focuses on it specifically. The last article by Mehlman was really interesting and dealt with Blanchot's complicated political past most explicitly. Recommended for blanchot freaks...

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-05 00:00:00 Peter S. Hamilton The Publishers' Weekly described it as an 'impenetrable rhapsody to the apotheosis of French intellectualism... overflowing with fawning endearments.' Well I couldnt get through it in the month Wellington public library let me keep it and I had to wait two more months to get it out again to finish it, so readers in Wellington at least evidently want a book about Sartre that isnt more interested in Simone de Beauvoir. "The Beaver" is in fact a rare visitor to these pages, perhaps because Levy's book wants to locate Sartre in the sequence of thinkers whose investigations, it is contended, he brought to a satisfactory conclusion before heading off into the political error -Stalinism- that destroyed his credibility. An error, we understand, which brought such disgrace on the enterprise of asking the really big questions that philosophy since S has cautiously reduced itself to a sort of cultural achaeology. These days we get technicians, not these reckless exponents of philosophy as the urge to write. This might explain why the best thing about Levy's book, his own extravagant language, has been the thing its critics have most resented. OK, we have to tread carefully now that linguistics is the new intellectual black. We know that thought is only as accurate as the words available to the thinker, and words are slippery beasts. But I for one welcome any efforts to rescue 'existentialism' from journalists who use it in such constructions as 'Israel is an existential threat to Palestine.' Philosophy as the urge to write. Plato, Descartes, Berkley, Sartre, Camus. All wrong, probably, but what good reads they gave us. Add Levy to the list.