Disaster and hope [electronic resource] : a study of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot.

9780542651373

2006

1 online resource (157 p.)

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The thesis of this comparative study of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot, arguably the two most important literary theorists of the last century, can be stated in a sentence: Through extremely similar---and similarly extreme---conceptions of literary art which by the singular authority of death itself make of literature an all or nothing, Benjamin and Blanchot portray all of history inexorably as a unique disaster, one in which all things face imminent annihilation to be sure, but precisely in such a way that it is also the source of infinite hope. That this hope points to precisely opposite extremes in their works, namely to the infinite presence of time, in the case of Benjamin, and the infinite absence of time, in Blanchot, constitutes the main challenge of the dissertation but also its main interest. Common to both writers is the fact that hope is pinned in any case to the very end of time, regardless of whether this end is conceived as time's infinite presence or infinite absence (a point that is clarified through a comparative look at Benjamin's and Blanchot's theoretical models in this regard, namely Leibniz and Nietzsche, respectively, who share what the dissertation calls a "tragic optimism"). For both writers, moreover, this end is not only strictly imminent but, more importantly, immanent in time itself at every point and moment, which is what makes this hope so immense but also so real. The end is not only always about to come, it has always already begun, and in this impossibly narrow space between the end and the beginning, between the all and nothingness, is inserted nothing less than the history of the world in its entirety, itself nothing in its entirety but the end of history, an end that cannot itself, therefore, end. Such is the hope, at any rate, that can arise only amidst hopeless disaster, the disaster that can end only in endless hope.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2006.

Yale University.