Blanchot, Maurice

Bio Sketch

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was a French writer, literary theorist, and philosopher, central to postwar French thought on literature, writing, and the "neutral." His essay "Everyday Speech" (L'Entretien infini) is a key reference in theories of the everyday: it figures the everyday as the non-event, "without a subject," a region of speech where the determinations of true and false do not apply. He matters to Geoffrey's research as the thinker who pushes the everyday toward its radical unrepresentability and its "destructive" potential.

Key Works

• "Everyday Speech" (in The Infinite Conversation, 1969) — the everyday as the non-event, "without a subject," the movement of human anonymity.
• The Writing of the Disaster (1980) — the "disaster" and the "neutral" as figures of "subjectivity without a subject."

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Everyday Life — the everyday as the uneventful, the non-event, "without a subject," holding "the principle of its own critique."

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Blanchot's account of the everyday as the non-event — "Nothing happens. This is the everyday" — is a crucial counterpoint in Geoffrey's Theories of the Everyday debate. Against Lefebvre's transformation and de Certeau's tactics, Blanchot reads the everyday's infinity as a negative/destructive potential, refusing to represent it except as radically unrepresentable. His "everyday as ourselves, ordinarily" is also cited by Driscoll as the everyday's most ordinary definition. He was previously flagged in the wiki's "page needed" backlog.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki that draw on Blanchot:

• Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday (Clucas 2000) — the everyday as non-event; the "destructive" potential.
• Rethinking Everyday Life (Seigworth & Gardiner 2004) — the everyday as "indefinite presence," "connected movement."
• The Moving Ground: Locating Everyday Life (Driscoll 2001) — "The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily."