Les Quatre sens du désastre chez Blanchot

Abstract

This article involves identifying what Blanchot calls “désastre” in L’Écriture du désastre (1980). The fragments that make up this collection reveal four meanings that can be unfolded according to this logical order: 1) “désastre” recalls the passage “from the closed world to the infinite universe” (A. Koyré) driven by modern astronomy and philosophy against a humanity that believed itself at the center of everything; 2) “désastre” is akin to Derridean deconstruction: an iconoclastic re-reading of texts. It perverts the Hegelian dialectic: neither negation of “astre” nor promise of a reconciling synthesis; 3) “désastre” is the object, or subject, of an “écriture,” synonymous with a poetic fragment, radicalizing a turning point in Blanchot’s work. Rather than the German Romantics, the rapprochement here is with Nietzsche; 4) this fragmentary turning point obeys a double necessity: on the historical side, “désastre” evokes the yellow star of the Jew discredited; on the biographical side, Blanchot refers to psychoanalysis for the first time with such insistence, especially in the fragment entitled “(Une scène primitive ?).” Disaster is a paradoxical experience that moves from “du catastrophique ou du tragique” to “quelque chose qui s’est passé sans être présent.”

Keywords:

• Blanchot
• Winnicott
• Leclaire
• désastre
• fragment
• scène primitive

Notes

1 Leslie Hill, “Qu’appelle-t-on ‘désastre’?” Blanchot dans son siècle: Colloque de Cerisy 2007, edited by Monique Antelme et al., Lyon, Parangon/Vs, coll. “Sens Public,” 2009, pp. 331–345.

2 Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1957.

3 Maurice Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort. Paris, Gallimard, 1994.

4 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Agonie terminée, agonie interminable: Sur Maurice Blanchot suivi de L’Émoi. Paris, Galilée, 2011.

5 Stéphane Mallarmé, Poésies. 1899. Paris, Gallimard, 1992.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jérémie Majorel

Jérémie Majorel teaches Contemporary French Literature at the University of Lumière Lyon 2, in the laboratory Passages XX–XXI (EA 4160). He has published Maurice Blanchot: Herméneutique et déconstruction (Honoré Champion, 2013) and many studies on this author.