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SUNY Series: Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
The Step Not Beyond
This book is a translation of Maurice Blanchot's work that is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challenges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the writing, death, transgression, the neuter, but here the figures around whom his discussion turns are Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarme and Kafka.
The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others.
The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others.
164 pages, Paperback
First published October 5, 1973
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About the author
Maurice Blanchot
144Ìýbooks575ÌýfollowersMaurice Blanchot was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. Blanchot was a distinctly modern writer who broke down generic boundaries, particularly between literature and philosophy. He began his career as a journalist on the political far right, but the experience of fascism altered his thinking to the point that he supported the student protests of May 1968. Like so many members of his generation, Blanchot was influenced by Alexandre Kojeve's humanistic interpretation of Hegel and the rise of modern existentialism. His “Literature and the Right to Deathâ€� shows the influence that Heidegger had on a whole generation of French intellectuals.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
July 7, 2014
Blanchot is like a spiritual brother, speaking my own words back to me from a time both before and after I have thought and said them. It is a fraternity that transcends the absence of any meeting, of any dialogue, for what dialogue is needed when the words are the same? This book, which I discovered while writing the work I am currently working on (brings to mind Blanchot's comments in ), speaks in a similar manner, on similar topics, from a similar saying. Saying transcends and antedates words, tying together thoughts, people and lives.
I guess I should leave something here that actually says something about the book, and not just my relation to it.
Le 'il', the he/it, is for Blanchot the naming that is no naming that is spoken through the Neuter, the no-one that is and is-not; the space that distances and displaces, disseminating and disrupting all meaning, identity and oneness through its eruption. Le 'il' is the rupture that speaks the exiled wandering of Man in the world of deferrals and spaces, blanks and parentheses.
The Neuter, and thus le 'il', moves and erupts, naming with no name, marking as it unmarks, between the Same and Other, the Yes and No, time and the timeless recurrence. It is the between, moving in a space (spacing) that both is and is-not.
Is this a review? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is a trace, in words, of the trace that was glimpsed in my turning back, my looking back, my returning, my re-viewing, of the mark that has, by the time of this remark, unmarked itself. This may not be a review, but it is a step.
Towards the work? Perhaps. Though for sure it is a step not beyond (despite any transgressions, any stepping beyond that it may have ventured).
I guess I should leave something here that actually says something about the book, and not just my relation to it.
Le 'il', the he/it, is for Blanchot the naming that is no naming that is spoken through the Neuter, the no-one that is and is-not; the space that distances and displaces, disseminating and disrupting all meaning, identity and oneness through its eruption. Le 'il' is the rupture that speaks the exiled wandering of Man in the world of deferrals and spaces, blanks and parentheses.
The Neuter, and thus le 'il', moves and erupts, naming with no name, marking as it unmarks, between the Same and Other, the Yes and No, time and the timeless recurrence. It is the between, moving in a space (spacing) that both is and is-not.
Is this a review? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is a trace, in words, of the trace that was glimpsed in my turning back, my looking back, my returning, my re-viewing, of the mark that has, by the time of this remark, unmarked itself. This may not be a review, but it is a step.
Towards the work? Perhaps. Though for sure it is a step not beyond (despite any transgressions, any stepping beyond that it may have ventured).
February 8, 2022
Mi favorito de Maurice Blanchot hasta la fecha. En parte porque es una especie de poema-largo-sueño que es la introducción a las fiestas que luego vendrán en 'La escritura del desastre' y 'La conversación infinita'. Te quiero, Maurice.
June 3, 2017
Blanchot, Blanchot, Blanchot. It is summer warmth and I am writing over the scent of violets. But I keep looking back to this cold book, to this voiced-absence of a book�the speech that returns to us from muteness without passing through the assuaging of silence.
April 7, 2018
This is one of the best books I have read about friendship. One might be baffled by the "jump" - a book that "deals with" what death means turning to a book about inescapable friendship. The book itself is a lot easier to understand if one has read some Levinas, especially something about what he wrote about temporality and time. Nevertheless, also for a familiar reader there are definitely passages that throws one out in more poetical directions regardless theoretical knowledge. The most important philosophical contributions here could be considered to be how Blanchot "locates" Nietzsche's madness with respect to Hegel, drawing on an idea of the "eternal return". The book is also an implicit critique of Hegel's totality. The greatest effort however is how Blanchot NOT tries to understand death theoretically, by stressing its impossible possibility - everyone is already dying, but death is unexpected - death is beyond intention. Hence, Blanchot somehow understands friendship as a prolonged mourning, a forever reaching out, always being a bit too late, insufficient to save the other, but already ready to suffer in this fear of losing each other, a gift of language in a conversation, tainted by the incapacity to express fully this fear, so a conversation of unrequited love, but at the same time the possibility - the capacity of endless desire.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 3, 2021
No sé si es primera vez que lo leo, pero vaya que cuesta entrarle a este señor. Cuesta no sentirse medio hueón cuando hay que ir leyendo las frases subordinadas de una por una para luego ver si la armamos en la cabeza y quizá por lo mismo uno -un lego que hace mucho tiempo asimilaba mejor estas escrituras- siente que triunfa cuando hay algo que subrayar, algo que se parece a eso que dijo este otro escritor, algo que, en definitiva, se parece a esas preguntas de antes de dormir que uno se hace sobre la muerte y qué tipo de cosa es ese lÃmite inhabitable y cómo se relaciona esto con la positividad de la escritura y asÃ. Blanchot se arrima a estos tópicos con una soltura envidiable y es como si el opaco y desordenado pensamiento Ãntimo saliera a pasear fuera e, iluminado por esta puntillosa prosa, se volviera momentáneamente legible.
Shelved as 'sampled'
September 29, 2017Blanchot writes here in his fragmentary form, which at times reads like a series of cryptic aphorisms, while engaging with the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche in his continuing exploration of the act of writing and its personal and philosophical significance. To my reading eye, this is representative of Blanchot's highest level of opacity in prose. Unfortunately at the moment I don't have the concentration needed to consistently parse and digest passages such as this one:
Unknowledge would like to pass itself off as a response to dread's absence of why. But it is its empty echo, its immobile repetition, unless, repeating it or preceding it, it is this night in which dread has already lost itself under the attraction of the loss that it maintains and that maintains it, night without speech of the night without image.
March 2, 2014
The most perfect book.
June 4, 2020
I don't like books written in this loose way, but only because the fragments don't clearly add anything. Instead, Blanchot hangs in the middle of a thought, never coming to confront death or endings very well, instead going over well worth parts looking to mine something from it... truly a passive text that attempts to put the reader in a more receptive mood instead of engaging in a larger structure... to me that this is an abortion of the modernist project, which historically means something -- but today doesn't do much for me. In fact it seems heavily indulgent, truly a "step not beyond" because he goes nowhere that can't already be stated. If anything I got a horrible sense of claustrophobia reading this.
Maybe I miss the point entirely.
Maybe I miss the point entirely.
May 14, 2012
Translation is a little dodgy at point, but it's Blanchot and as such inherently challenging to the translator. I'd never translate "L'angoisse" as "dread," though. That's a somewhat archaic rendering, probably intended to allude to the earlier translation of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety as Dread.
January 21, 2023
Stunning: 'Alone again, offered to the multiple, in the plurality of dread, outside himself, signalling without calling, one dissuaded by the other. Solitude is evidently space without place, when presence calls itself non-presence, where nothing is one-challenge, without distrust, to the unique. Solitude hides me from solitude, sometimes.'
November 24, 2018
Blanchot seemingly aims to confuse and blur the limits of language and destroy the possibility of there ever being anything that we can actually say, despite us constantly saying stuff all the time. there's a strong paradoxical streak in a lot of his work (and this one) that plays off an "impossible possibility" or possible impossibility, whichever. "the neuter" for example is a strange concept ("a name without a name") that I don't quite get but i've read it's similar to derrida's differance which i also don't really get, but it did feel influenced by Derrida quite a bit. This book was like reading a disorienting mixture of Derrida, Bataille, and Cioran. Pretty good, but can get a little repetitive. Free me from this too long review
January 7, 2023
A word perhaps, nothing but a word, but a word in excess, a word too many, which for that reason is always lacking
From where does it come, this power of uprooting, of destruction or change, in the first words written facing the sky, in the solitude of the sky, words by themselves without prospect or pretense: "it, the sea"?
At the border of writing, always having to live without you.
name always irrecuperable, who is always to be named and never names anything, seeks to cure us, a cure in itself incurable
Yes, something always precedes us when we speak
free me from the too long speech
the straight roads, eternal, under a scratched out sky
He does not renounce living, he only closes his eyes.
From where does it come, this power of uprooting, of destruction or change, in the first words written facing the sky, in the solitude of the sky, words by themselves without prospect or pretense: "it, the sea"?
At the border of writing, always having to live without you.
name always irrecuperable, who is always to be named and never names anything, seeks to cure us, a cure in itself incurable
Yes, something always precedes us when we speak
free me from the too long speech
the straight roads, eternal, under a scratched out sky
He does not renounce living, he only closes his eyes.
October 10, 2017
Would it be dialectically appropriate to say that Blanchot, like a certain someone, has all the best words?
December 12, 2020
I see Blanchot had those severe fevers of death too.
October 13, 2022
A definite fan of the more Cioran- like passages, but mostly about�. I forget what exactly about the writing process in general.
July 13, 2022
Pocas cosas me emocionan tanto como leer a Blanchot, seguramente escribió entre culeando y chupando
November 14, 2011
Densest thing I have ever come across!
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April 8, 2013Finiti
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