Lautréamont and Sade
by Maurice Blanchot
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In Lautréamont and Sade, originally published in 1949, Maurice Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism. Today, Lautréamont and Sade, these unique figures in the histories of literature and thought, are as crucially relevant to theorists of language, reason, and cruelty as they were in post-war Paris."Sade's Reason," in part a review of Pierre Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor, was first published in show more Les Temps modernes. Blanchot offers Sade's reason, a corrosive rational unreasoning, apathetic before the cruelty of the passions, as a response to Sartre's Hegelian politics of commitment."The Experience of Lautréamont," Blanchot's longest sustained essay, pursues the dark logic of Maldoror through the circular gravitation of its themes, the grinding of its images, its repetitive and transformative use of language, and the obsessive metamorphosis of its motifs. Blanchot's Lautréamont emerges through this search for experience in the relentless unfolding of language. This treatment of the experience of Lautréamont unmistakably alludes to Georges Bataille's "inner experience."Republishing the work in 1963, Blanchot prefaced it with an essay distinguishing his critical practice from that of Heidegger. show lessTags
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The essay on Lautréamont is great, but the one on Sade is one of my favorite essays ever.
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Author Information
126+ Works 4,328 Members
Maurice Blanchot, 1907 - Novelist and critic Maurice Blanchot was born in 1907. Some of his works in translation include "Death Sentence" (1978), "The Gaze of Orpheus" (1981), "Madness of the Day" (1988), "The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me" (1993), all of which were translated by Lydia Davis, and "Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him" (translated show more by Jeffrey Mehlman, 1987). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Lautréamont and Sade
- Original title
- Lautréamont et Sade
- Original publication date
- 1949
- Original language
- French
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Literature Studies and Criticism, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 841.8 — Literature & rhetoric French Literature French poetry Later 19th century, 1848–1900
- LCC
- PQ2220 .D723 .Z613 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures French literature Modern literature 19th century
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 106
- Popularity
- 306,835
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- 6 — Czech, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 10
- ASINs
- 2
