This is a history of the darker side of the French Revolution. Through an examination of contemporary visual and literary representations of executions, funerals, processions and ceremonies it aims to bring the often horrific events of the time to life. Among the seven real life cases on which the author focuses are: the public autopsy performed on the corpse of Mirabeau; the exhumation and transportation of Voltaire's body to the Pantheon; the public torture, murder and subsequent mutilation of the Princesse de Lamballe; and the agonizingly slow death of Robespierre.

A Voice from Elsewhere represents one of Maurice Blanchot's most important reflections on the enigma and secret of "literature." The essays here bear down on the necessity and impossibility of witnessing what literature transmits, and--like Beckett and Kafka--on what one might call the "default" of language, the tenuous border that binds writing and silence to each other. In addition to considerations of Rene Char, Paul Celan, and Michel Foucault, Blanchot offers a sustained encounter with the poems of Louis-Rene des Forets and, throughout, a unique and important concentration on music--on...

Maurice Blanchot is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. Blanchot developed a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing; these essays, in form and substance, left their imprint on the work of the most influential French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are unimaginable without Blanchot.

This is a remarkable history of the French Revolution told through the study of images of the body as they appeared in the popular literature of the time, showing how these images were at the very center of the metaphoric language used to describe the revolution in progress.
The author draws upon some 2,000 texts, pamphlets, announcements, opinions, accounts, treatises, and journals to exhume the textual reality of the Revolution, the body of its history. The deployment of bodily imagesthe degeneracy of the nobility, the impotence of the king, the herculean strength of the citizenry, the...

Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of Maurice Blanchot's essays on literature and language, consisting of fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays--like those collected in the other five books of criticism published over several decades--have established Blanchot as the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century. Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and...

This new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh. But the word become flesh is not, or no longer, a theological already-given. It is a millennial goal or telos toward which each text strives. Both witty and immensely erudite, Jacques Ranciere leads the critical reader through a maze of arrivals toward the moment, perhaps always suspended, when the word finds its flesh. That is what he, a valiant and good-humored companion to these texts, goes questing for through seven essays examining a wide variety of...

This new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh. But the word become flesh is not, or no longer, a theological already-given. It is a millennial goal or telos toward which each text strives. Both witty and immensely erudite, Jacques Ranciere leads the critical reader through a maze of arrivals toward the moment, perhaps always suspended, when the word finds its flesh. That is what he, a valiant and good-humored companion to these texts, goes questing for through seven essays examining a wide variety of...

During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot. The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise; almost all of them appear in English for the...

During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot. The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise; almost all of them appear in English for the...