Writing about The Gaze of Orpheus, Geoffrey Hartman suggested that When we come to write the history of criticism for the 1940 to 1980 period, it will be found that Blanchot, together with Sartre, made French 'discourse' possible, both in its relentlessness and its acuity..This selection.is exemplary for its clearly translated and well-chosen excerpts from Blanchot's many influential books. Reading him now, and in this form, I feel once more the excitement of discovering Blanchot in the 1950s.

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

A Lacanian approach to murder scene investigation. What if Jacques Lacan—the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst—had worked as a police detective, applying his theories to solve crimes? This may conjure up a mental film clip starring Peter Sellers in a trench coat, but in Lacan at the Scene, Henry Bond makes a serious and provocative claim: that apparently impenetrable events of violent death can be more effectively unraveled with Lacan's theory of psychoanalysis than with elaborate, technologically advanced forensic tools. Bond's exposition on murder expands and develops a resolutely Žižekian approach. Seeking out radical and unexpected readings, Bond unpacks his material utilizing Lacan's neurosis-psychosis-perversion grid. Bond places Lacan at the crime scene and builds his argument through a series of archival crime scene photographs from the 1950s—the period when Lacan was developing his influential theories. It is not the horror of the ravished and mutilated corpses that draws his attention; instead, he interrogates seemingly minor details from the everyday, isolating and rephotographing what at first seems insignificant: a single high heeled shoe on a kitchen table, for example, or carefully folded clothes placed over a chair. From these mundane details he carefully builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI's standard-issue Crime Classification Manual.

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other’s work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation that question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a “neutral” voice that arises from the realm of the “outside.” This book is crucial not only to an understanding of these two thinkers, but also to any overview of recent French thought.

The seven essays gathered in this volume are all concerned, more or less directly, with the “unspeakable sentences” of fictional narration, that is, the sentences that do not bear any explicit mark nor any implicit indication of a first person and which are not interpretable as the expression of a speaker’s subjectivity. Chief among them are the sentences of free indirect style, which this book prefers to call sentences of “represented speech and thought.” All of these essays were written after the publication of Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (1982). They take up its theoretical frameworks and extend its analyses into other contexts, where they acquire other uses, other functions, and other values. Taken as a whole, this work bears witness to the richness and vitality of the encounter between linguistics, philosophy, and the theory and analysis of narrative and the novel.

In this book, Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism.

By exploring the concept of the tender gaze in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors.