Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

Holly Langstaff is a Lecturer in French at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary French literature and thought. She runs the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction‘One of the most difficult but important tasks of our time’TechnologyPolitics1. Blanchot and Mallarmé: ‘The double state of the word’‘The double state of the word’Literary AutonomyFoundation and SuspensionLiterature as Deception‘But when is there literature?’2. An Inhuman InterruptionThe History of Being‘Why Poets?’Death: The Impossibility of PossibilityA TurningAnimals and Automation3. Technology and the NeuterLa TechniqueWriting as techne and Modern TechnologyThe Neuter: Kafka and The Last Man4. Inorganic WritingFragmentary Writing and TechnologyNature Gone HaywireConclusionBibliography

Langstaff offers a full reappraisal of Blanchot’s writing and his profound critical engagement with Martin Heidegger, specifically around the question of technology and its relation to art. She admirably and persuasively demonstrates that Blanchot’s engagement with technology is decisive throughout his career and fundamentally related to his understanding of literature.