{"product_id":"last-steps-maurice-blanchots-exilic-writing-used-condition","title":"Last Steps: Maurice Blanchots Exilic Writing-Used Condition","description":"\u003cp\u003eWriting, Maurice Blanchot taught us, is not something that is in one’s power. It is, rather, a search for a nonpower that refuses mastery, order, and all established authority. For Blanchot, this search was guided by an enigmatic exigency, an arresting rupture, and a promise of justice that required endless contestation of every usurping authority, an endless going out toward the other.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e“The step\/not beyond” (“le pas au-delà”) names this exilic passage as it took form in his influential later work, but not as a theme or concept, because its “step” requires a transgression of discursive limits and any grasp afforded by the labor of the negative. Thus, to follow “the step\/not beyond” is to follow a kind of event in writing, to enter a movement that is never quite captured in any defining or narrating account.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLast Steps attempts a practice of reading that honors the exilic exigency even as it risks drawing Blanchot’s reflective writings and fragmentary narratives into the articulation of a reading. It brings to the fore Blanchot’s exceptional contributions to contemporary thought on the ethico-political relation, language, and the experience\u003cbr\u003e\nof human finitude. It offers the most sustained interpretation of The Step Not Beyond available, with attentive readings of a number of major texts, as well as chapters on Levinass and Blanchot’s relation to Judaism. Its trajectory of reading limns the meaning of a question from The Infinite Conversation that implies an opening and a singular affirmation rather than a closure: “How had he come to will the interruption of the discourse?”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fordham University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47919376662773,"sku":"AIM-0823251039","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/5804\/8501\/files\/71OXAitFF_L.jpg?v=1775222486","url":"https:\/\/ergodebooks.com\/products\/last-steps-maurice-blanchots-exilic-writing-used-condition","provider":"Ergodebooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}