Papers by Jeff Fort
Textual Practice, 2024
Maurice Blanchot’s itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation
occurring aroun... more Maurice Blanchot’s itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation
occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned rightwing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a ‘pure novel’, inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this "pure" form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that ‘pure’ literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot’s fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author’s factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.
Telos (special issue: The Modern City in World Cinema), 2021
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization... more A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization"); Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la Terre (1961; Paris: La Découverte, 2002), p. 35 ("Proclaimed by some, repressed by others, violence turns in a circle. . ."). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
Film-Philosophy, 2021
The recent publication of André Bazin's Écrits complets (2018), an enormous two-volume edition of... more The recent publication of André Bazin's Écrits complets (2018), an enormous two-volume edition of 3000 pages which increases tenfold Bazin's available corpus, provides opportunities for renewed reflection on, and possibly for substantial revisions of, this key figure in film theory. On the basis of several essays, I propose a drastic rereading of Bazin's most explicitly philosophical notion of "ontology." This all too familiar notion, long settled into a rather dust-laden couple ("Bazin and ontology") nonetheless retains its fascination. Rather than attempting to provide a systematic reworking of this couple along well established lines, particularly those defined by realism and indexicality, this article proposes to shift the notion of ontology in Bazin from its determination as actual existence toward a more radical concept of ontology based on the notion of mimesis, particularly as articulated, in a Heideggerian mode, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This more properly ontological concept, also paradoxically and radically improper, is shown to be at work already in Bazin's texts, and it allows us to see that far from simplistically naturalizing photographic technology, Bazin does the contrary: he technicizes nature. If Bazin says that the photograph is a flower or a snowflake, he also implies that, like photographs, these are likewise a kind of technical artifact, an auto-mimetic reproduction of nature. Bazin likewise refers to film as a kind of skin falling away from the body of History, an accumulating pellicule in which nature and history disturbingly merge. This shifted perspective on Bazin's thinking is extended further in reference to Georges Didi-Huberman on the highly mimetic creatures known as phasmids, insects that mimic their environement. I extend this into the dynamic notion of eternal return, an implicit dimension of Bazin's thinking, clarified here in reference to Giorgio Agamben and the "immemorial
Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 2020
This essay shows that Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire, a work engaged in a revolt against the ... more This essay shows that Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire, a work engaged in a revolt against the author’s former critical positions, is overdetermined by a desire, announced contemporaneously in his seminars, to write a novel roughly modeled on the Proustian Search; that this Search, as echoed and pursued in this text, drastically distorts and narrows its treatment of photography; and that this restricted treatment of photography, centered on the well-known studium/punctum distinction, reveals a troubling impassivity before images of historical violence, which in turn is linked with a number of regressive gestures and attitudes with deep and likewise troubling political implications.
Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, 2018
Angelaki, 2018
Blanchot often evoked the silence required for literary writing, a silence which must “be imposed... more Blanchot often evoked the silence required for literary writing, a silence which must “be imposed” on a pre-existing murmur of language. This murmur itself is for him an originary ground of speech, including literary speech. Less often recognized are ways in which he locates this murmur in the realm of public, everyday speech, the rumor of speech spoken by no one/everyone, a realm he links with exigencies of publication and publicity bearing on literary works within modern societies, mass media and technically mediated communication. Blanchot thus points to an unexpected convergence, in these sonic images of impersonal flows of language, between literary language per se, and a language traditionally considered inauthentic, empty, mere chatter. This essay shows Blanchot’s anxious attempts to maintain the distinction he effaces.
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2010
Book: The Imperative to Write (chapters) by Jeff Fort
The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett
The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
Embodied Violence and the Leap from the Law
The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
Pointed Instants
Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
Kafka’s Teeth
Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
The Ecstasy of Judgment
Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
The Shell and the Mask
Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
The Dead Look
Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
Beckett’s Voices and the Paradox of Expression
Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
Company, But Not Enough
Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett, 2014
Uploads
Papers by Jeff Fort
occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned rightwing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a ‘pure novel’, inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this "pure" form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that ‘pure’ literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot’s fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author’s factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.
Book: The Imperative to Write (chapters) by Jeff Fort