Abstract
Published posthumously in 2011, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, the implications of which are steeped in political and ethical stakes. Ranking alongside the works of better-known interlocutors for Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking such as Plato, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, or Heidegger, Blanchot’s writings represent a decisive crossroads of almost all of Lacoue-Labarthe’s central concerns. The latter converge here on the question of literature and, in particular, of literature as the question of myth–in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death, a myth with which Lacoue-Labarthe himself had to contend, namely through his experience of reading–and writing after–Maurice Blanchot. But the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely (auto)biographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis and to which all Western literature is subject. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot’s thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes. In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot’s writings, setting them among a variety of key texts by writers and thinkers as diverse as Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, or Derrida, this translation further familiarizes English-speaking audiences with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s groundbreaking work and, as such, with contemporary debates in French thought, criticism, and aesthetics.
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