Iyer argues for the transformative potential for philosophy and political practice of the thought of Maurice Blanchot. The book traces Blanchot's complex negotiations of the thought of Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and Levinas, which allowed him to develop his distinctive account of the work of art and his account of the opening to the Other. Iyer also examines the significance of Blanchot's interventions in French political life, in particular, his participation in the events of May 1968.

Without Maurice Blanchot, literary theory as we know it today would have been unthinkable. Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze: all are key theorists crucially influenced by Blanchot's work. This accessible guide: * works 'idea by idea' through Blanchot's writings, anchoring them in historical and intellectual contexts * examines Blanchot's understanding of literature, death, ethics and politics and the relationship between these themes * unravels even Blanchot's most complex ideas for the beginner * sketches the lasting impact of Blanchot's work on the field of critical theory. For those trying to come to grips with contemporary literary theory and modern French thought, the best advice is to start at the beginning: begin with Blanchot, and begin with this guide.

Of the many questions provoked by Blanchot's thought and writing, that of understanding its ethical and political significance is perhaps the most pressing. Spanning his literary critical and philosophical writings, and addressing such major concepts as the image and the neuter, Blanchot's Vigilance presents a sustained analysis of Blanchot's response to Levinas's ethical thought, the political commitments of the Surrealists, Heidegger's readings of the ancient Greeks, and the claims of psychoanalysis. In a series of thorough and lucid readings, Iyer presents Blanchot's central concern as maintaining a kind of vigilance over a difference which opens in the articulation of sense.

This work explores the status of psychoanalysis in Blanchot’s texts, from the early 1950s onward, elucidating the political and philosophical dimensions of Blanchot’s writings on madness, narcissism, and trauma.

Exploring the meanings and powers of love from ancient Greece to the present day, Richard Gilman-Opalsky argues that what is called “love” by the best thinkers who have approached the subject is in fact the beating heart of communism—understood as a way of living, not as a form of government. Along the way, he reveals with clarity that the capitalist way of assigning value to things is incapable of appreciating what humans value most. Capitalism cannot value the experiences and relationships that make our lives worth living and can only destroy love by turning it into a commodity. The Communism of Love follows the struggles of love in different contexts of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and shows how the aspiration for love is as close as we may get to a universal communist aspiration.

The concept of community is one of the most frequently used and abused of recent philosophical or socio-political concepts. In the 1980s, faced with the imminent collapse of communism and the unchecked supremacy of free-market capitalism, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (in The Inoperative Community) and the writer Maurice Blanchot (in The Unavowable Community) both thought it essential to rethink the fundamental basis of “community” as such. More recently, Nancy has renewed the debate by unexpectedly attacking Blanchot’s account of community, claiming that it embodies a dangerously nostalgic desire for mythic and religious communion. This book examines the history and implications of this controversy. It analyses in forensic detail Nancy’s and Blanchot’s contrasting interpretations of German Romanticism, and the work of Heidegger, Bataille, and Marguerite Duras, and examines closely their divergent approaches to the contradictory legacy of Christianity. At a time when politics are increasingly inseparable from a deep-seated sense of crisis, it provides an incisive account of what, in the concept of community, is thought yet crucially still remains unthought.

Of the many questions provoked by Blanchot's thought and writing, that of understanding its ethical and political significance is perhaps the most pressing. Spanning his literary critical and philosophical writings, and addressing such major concepts as the image and the neuter, Blanchot's Vigilance presents a sustained analysis of Blanchot's response to Levinas's ethical thought, the political commitments of the Surrealists, Heidegger's readings of the ancient Greeks, and the claims of psychoanalysis. In a series of thorough and lucid readings, Iyer presents Blanchot's central concern as maintaining a kind of vigilance over a difference which opens in the articulation of sense.