An Impossible Project

An Impossible Project: Thinking through the Meaning of Impossiblity in the work of Maurice Blanchot. A talk by Adam Potts

Maurice Blanchot remains one of the most compelling and enigmatic thinkers of the twentieth century. He writes philosophy, and about philosophy, but often this is done through the lens of literature. At the heart of Blanchot’s project is a thinking of the limit; Blanchot is interested in the way certain kinds of literature push thought to its limits via the limits of language.

If Blanchot’s work is a philosophy of anything, it is a philosophy of language and the ways in which different kinds of language offer different relations with the world. Whereas everyday language seeks to represent the world and philosophical language often seeks to secure meaning, literary language can subvert these responsibilities. In its most radical forms, literature can refuse representation, complicate identity and subjectivity, and even unsettle the self-identical nature of words themselves. Blanchot is interested in this capacity in literature – its ability to open a chasm within the “known” world and create an “atmosphere of uncertainty” (Blanchot, 1985,52). This uncertainty brings us to the limit of possibility and, ultimately, to the idea of impossibility.

Yet this uncertainty is not an invitation to despair or nihilism. Although Blanchot frequently circles negative themes like death, dying, and solitude, by The Infinite Conversation (1969) this uncertain region acquires a distinctly political dimension. This is where he explains how the “impossible” is ultimately “not there in order to make thought capitulate, but in order to allow it to announce itself according to a measure other than that of power” (Blanchot, 1969, 43). Literary language thus becomes a means of resisting the world and opening alternative relations with it. The talk will follow this trajectory, introducing key themes in Blanchot’s work while offering an interpretation of it as a project driven by the pursuit of impossibility.

Dr Adam Potts is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University, UK. He specialises in the philosophy of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, as well as aesthetics, specifically the philosophy of music, sound, and noise. His most recent book, Maurice Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance, explores the notions of hope and chance in Blanchot’s writing, while considering how his understanding of these concepts can illuminate their treatment by other thinkers. This puts Blanchot in contact with thinkers such as Yves Bonnefoy, Ernst Bloch, and Gabriel Marcel, as well as with the aesthetics of Dada and Surrealism, and the work of John Cage, improvised music, and dance.