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By Simon Critchley
The 'death of man', the 'end of history' or even philosophy are powerful and troubling currents working via modern debates. but because Nietzsche's heralding of the 'death of god', philosophy has been not able to provide an explanation for the query of finitude.
Very Little...Almost Nothing is going to the center of this challenge via an exploration of Blanchot's idea of literature, Stanley Cavell's interpretations of romanticism and the significance of demise within the paintings of Samuel Beckett. Simon Critchley hyperlinks those topics to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to offer a strong new photo of ways we needs to process the significance of demise in philosophy.
A compelling analyzing of the convergence of literature and philosophy, Very Little...Almost Nothing opens up new methods of knowing finitude, modernity and the character of the mind's eye.
Read Online or Download Very Little...Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy) PDF
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Extra resources for Very Little...Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)
Example text
By contrast, in an allusive swipe at Heidegger: Those to whom despair is not mere terminology may ask whether it would be better if there was nothing rather than something. (ND 371/NDS 380) Thus, a victim of political intolerance, for example a person in a concentration camp, might legitimately apply the wisdom of Silenus and ask whether it would have been better not to be born. But if, as Adorno insinuates, the problem of nihilism and its overcoming conspires with the very intellectual and political forces that led to the death camps, then what might constitute a response to Auschwitz that takes account of the presque rien of our metaphysical faculties and how might matters then stand with the problem of nihilism?
It is interesting to note how Blanchot’s fiction and criticism reach a point where both undergo fragmentation and pass into one another, something that can be seen particularly acutely in L’écriture du désastre. One way to read Blanchot’s work would be in terms of a movement towards a writing that would result in a certain Aufhebung of the distinction between fiction and criticism and the conceptions of form and content implicit in both genres. ’ Whilst it is certainly true that at times Blanchot’s criticism is best read as a commentary on his fiction, and that Blanchot is perhaps the best, and possibly, with Kafka, the only example of a writer whose practice comes close to the views expressed in his criticism, it is once again perhaps helpful to place Blanchot’s work in the wake of Jena Romanticism, which would have as its central project the production of literature as its own theory, and whose genre of expression is the fragment.
Yet, Adorno shockingly suggests that Beckett’s work is the only appropriate response to the Holocaust, more so than direct witness accounts, precisely because it is not part of the manifest content of Beckett’s work, as if it were subject to a Bilderverbot. What is being alluded to here—and this will be discussed in more critical detail in Lecture 3—is Adorno’s belief that the best modernist artworks, like Beckett’s, in their aesthetic autonomy and their refusal of meaning (hence the superficial accusation of nihilism) function as determinate negations of contemporary society and can give the formal semblance of a society free from domination.