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The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett

Online ISBN:
9780823260836
Print ISBN:
9780823254699
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett

Jeff Fort
Jeff Fort

Assistant Professor of French

University of California, Davis
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Published online:
18 September 2014
Published in print:
3 March 2014
Online ISBN:
9780823260836
Print ISBN:
9780823254699
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

This book poses the question of an imperative to write as it was claimed, elaborated, and undergone by three of the twentieth century’s most philosophically informed writers, Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, and Samuel Beckett. All three of these writers stress repeatedly and in multiple ways the hyperbolic and exclusive nature of the necessity to write, but the terms of this necessity waver between a groundless and categorical imperative that shadows Kant’s moral philosophy, and a sheer, unstoppable compulsion which at its extremes raises the specter of torture. The book shows that in each case this wavering course maps out a trajectory residually similar to that of the classical notion of the sublime found in Kant, but rather than leading to a supersensible power and a metaphysical moral vocation, the adventures undergone by these writers reveal an otherworldly space of uncanny images and endless fictive speech: literary space not as a reflection of the world but as its infernal, unreal and abyssal ground. Drawing on the thought of Heidegger, Freud, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, the book shows that Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett deliberately destitute their texts of any treasures promised by literature in its sublime or redemptive tendencies. Structured as profoundly melancholic, their texts are traversed by dead and dying bodies, ghosts and revenants, and voices compelled to speak in a void, but in their figurative and linguistic specificites they also bear witness to singularities of time and experience from which their extreme fictions, and their haunting imperatives, are derived.

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