Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot's Exilic Writing
Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot's Exilic Writing
Christopher Fynsk
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: Fordham University Press
Pages: 320
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wzzfz
Search for reviews of this book
Book Info
Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot's Exilic Writing
Book Description:

Writing, Maurice Blanchot taught us, is not something that is in one's power. It is, rather, a search for a non-power that refuses mastery, order, and all established authority. For Blanchot, this search was guided by an enigmatic exigency, an arresting rupture, and a promise of justice that required endless contestation of every usurping authority, an endless going out toward the other. "The step/not beyond" ("le pas au-dela") names this exilic passage as it took form in his influential later work, but not as a theme or concept, since its "step" requires a transgression of discursive limits and any grasp afforded by the labor of the negative. Thus, to follow "the step/not beyond" is to follow a kind of event in writing, to enter a movement that is never quite captured in any defining or narrating account. Last Steps attempts a practice of reading that honors the exilic exigency even as it risks drawing Blanchot's reflective writings and fragmentary narratives into the articulation of a reading. It brings to the fore Blanchot's exceptional contributions to contemporary thought on the ethico-political relation, language, and the experience of human finitude. It offers the most sustained interpretation of The Step Not Beyond available, with attentive readings of a number of major texts, as well as chapters on Levinas and Blanchot's relation to Judaism. Its trajectory of reading limns the meaning of a question from The Infinite Conversation that implies an opening and a singular affirmation rather than a closure: "How had he come to will the interruption of the discourse?"

eISBN: 978-0-8232-5104-9
Subjects: Language & Literature
You do not have access to this book on JSTOR. Try logging in through your institution for access.
Log in to your personal account or through your institution.
Table of Contents
Export Selected Citations Export to NoodleTools Export to RefWorks Export to EasyBib Export a RIS file (For EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, Zotero, Mendeley...) Export a Text file (For BibTex)
Select / Unselect all
  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. List of Abbreviations
    List of Abbreviations (pp. vii-viii)
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. ix-x)
  5. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-14)

    “An engaged literature”? One cannot easily assign such a phrase to Maurice Blanchot’s writings. But in 1981, Blanchot offered a rather surprising answer to a questionnaire from Catherine David on the theme.¹ “I’m sent back thirty years,” he said, adding that this was a period when almost every writer on the left found this an irritating imperative for literature. Even Sartre himself, Blanchot observed, was obliged to reconsider this simplistic formula under the pressure of a call to answer the appeal that Blanchot had played an important role in drafting, the “Declaration of the 121.”

    Yes, he continued, the writer...

  6. PART ONE: SABBATICAL ACQUIESCENCE
    • ONE Toward the Question of Peace
      ONE Toward the Question of Peace (pp. 17-33)

      Almost midway throughTotality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas makes passing reference to something he calls a “sabbatical existence.” The phrase does not recur and is not significantly defined. But I think we may understand by it a form of life that would honor in its acts a relation to the infinite Good, and thus subordinate all work founded in need to the ethical relation.¹

      What are the conditions of this form of relation to the other and to the world? Is it possible to give this notion of sabbatical existence (introduced in largely theological terms with a reference to a...

    • TWO “The Indestructible”
      TWO “The Indestructible” (pp. 34-54)

      In the reading of Levinas that Blanchot pursues inThe Infinite Conversation, there is little response to what might be termed the first word ofTotality and Infinity. Later, at the very end ofThe Step Not Beyond, and then in subsequent statements, we will hear an evocation of peace.¹ But in the long introduction of the question ofautruiinThe Infinite Conversation, the reference is essentially to a staying of violence and something Blanchot terms later in the volume “the exigency of a different relation” (IC 192/287). The form and ground of this other relation, however, does not...

  7. PART TWO: REFUSAL/AFFIRMATION
    • THREE Beyond Refusal: The Madness of the Day
      THREE Beyond Refusal: The Madness of the Day (pp. 57-75)

      The enigmatic phrase that has impelled this study offers itself innocently and openly in the first paragraphs ofThe Madness of the Day:

      I am not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it; I experience...

    • FOUR A Simple Change in the Play of Words: The Infinite Conversation
      FOUR A Simple Change in the Play of Words: The Infinite Conversation (pp. 76-108)

      In the last lines of the narrated conversation (“l’entretien”) that opensThe Infinite Conversation, we read of a refusal that is perhaps a willing of effacement, perhaps a step. The fragment in which these lines appear should be cited in its entirety, if only for the sheer poise with which it evokes the enigma of a willed departure from the apparent peace of a forever offered present.

      ±± He listened to the speech of the everyday, grave, idle, saying everything, holding up to each one what he would have liked to say, a speech unique, distant and always close, everyone’s...

    • FIVE Compassion for Suffering Humanity: The Instant of My Death
      FIVE Compassion for Suffering Humanity: The Instant of My Death (pp. 109-122)

      These last words follow shortly after the description of an experience ofdeliverancein Blanchot’s last publication,The Instant of My Death—the brief narrative in which Blanchot retells the story of being brought before a firing squad (the scene also figures, as we have seen, inThe Madness of the Day). It is a startling phrase, and not only for the fact of the bridge made between the autobiographical and the conceptual.¹ What gives pause is the further alignment of this thought/experience with a declared joy in deliverance to human finitude. The link is striking not simply for the...

  8. PART THREE: THE EXILIC STEP
    • SIX The Step Not Beyond
      SIX The Step Not Beyond (pp. 125-224)

      Perhaps long before the publication ofThe Step Not Beyond, the anachronous step named in its title will already have been made. In relation, precisely, to what subsequent advent or occurrences, however? Will it have marked every text that follows the recounted event of 1944—every step in Blanchot’s “existence,” in Blanchot’s oeuvre, up until the time ofThe Step Not Beyond(1973), when it formally receives the name that Blanchot apparently cites in his text of 1994?¹ Will it have always been in progress, or already prepared from the time of what Blanchot termed “the instant of my death”...

  9. FINAL NOTE: Through the Double Imperative
    FINAL NOTE: Through the Double Imperative (pp. 225-234)

    For one who has accompanied the movements to which the last pages ofThe Step Not Beyondattest, there can be few grounds for a conclusion: repetition, perhaps, but surely no conclusion. Could one possibly add a final word to the “last words” of this writing or the benediction of the last exchange? Should the site of those disappearing not be marked by silence once it has been limned, at least until a new writing begins?

    The present study began, however, from a question that this closing note of reserve should not leave unaddressed. I recall that Blanchot’s gesture of...

  10. APPENDIX: Blanchot in The International Review
    APPENDIX: Blanchot in The International Review (pp. 235-248)
  11. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 249-298)
  12. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 299-302)
Fordham University Press logo