Negativity and death in Maurice Blanchot’s thought

Abstract

This paper undertakes a reading of Maurice Blanchot’s conception of death confronted with the Hegelian idea of force of negativity and Heidegger’s “being-towards-death”. Despite the echoes of the two predecessors, Blanchot gives another way to his thinking on death, deviating from Hegel and from the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, performing a jump, associating the idea of death to art, to literature, to the space in which things may not be said clearly, in which there’s no authenticity neither in life nor in death, in which death is a continuous dying, that never starts and never ceases. The basic blanchotian text used for this research is “Rilke et l’exigence de la mort”, de L’espace littéraire.