Blanchot's Vigilance

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Lars Iyer

   Pages 1-3

3. That Merciful Surplus of Strength

   • Lars Iyer

   Pages 4-49

4. The Inexhaustible Murmur

   • Lars Iyer

   Pages 50-88

5. Irony Mastered and Unmastered

   • Lars Iyer

   Pages 89-116

6. Nothing Is What There Is

   • Lars Iyer

   Pages 117-132

7. Write, Write

   • Lars Iyer

   Pages 133-150

8. Back Matter

   Pages 151-169

   PDF

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.

• concept
• Emmanuel Lévinas
• Martin Heidegger
• phenomenology
• philosophy

'The great strength of the book is Iyers' ability to place Blanchot's thinking close to literary works and the plastic arts, and thus for the literary reader new to Blanchot I believe I would recommend this book above all the others I have mentioned.' - Thomas Carl Wall, Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology

• Philosophical Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

  Lars Iyer

LARS IYER is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. He is the author of Blanchot's Communism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Policies and ethics