Radical Indecision

Leslie Hill

Description

In his newest book, Radical Indecision, esteemed scholar Leslie Hill poses the following question: If the task of a literary critic is to make decisions about the value of a literary work or the values embodied in it, decisions in turn based on some inherited or established values, what happens when that piece of literature fails to subscribe to the established values? Put another way, how should literary criticism respond to the paradox that in order to make critical judgments of literary works, it is first necessary to suspend judgment and to consider the impossibility of making a final decision? Hill pursues these ideas in the works of leading French critics Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, discussing writers such as Sade, Mallarmé, Proust, Artaud, Genet, Celan, and Duras.

Hill concludes that, despite their differences, Barthes, Blanchot, and Derrida share a conviction that criticism cannot take place without exposure to that resistance to decision that is inseparable from reading and that they address diversely as the “neuter” or the “undecidable.” Radical Indecision offers the first sustained exploration of the “undecidable.” This comprehensive book breathes new life into the discipline of literary theory and will be essential reading for students and scholars alike.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• modern
• Proust
• French literature
• General officer
• Marcel Proust
• General
• European
• Barthes
• French
• Blanchot
• Duras
• Genet
• Artaud
• Derrida
• Mallarmé
• Roland Barthes
• Maurice Blanchot
• Sade
• Jacques Derrida

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780268081669
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

Radical Indecision Barthes, BLanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism

lesLie HiLL

R a d i c a l I NDEC i SION

R a d i c a l I N D E C i S IO N

Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism

L E S L I E H I L L

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2010 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Hill, Leslie, 1949– Radical indecision : Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the future of criticism / Leslie Hill.  p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN13: 9780268031077 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN10: 026803107 X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Criticism—History—20th century. 2. Criticism (Philosophy) 3. Literature—Philosophy. 4. Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 5. Philosophy, French—20th century. 6. Barthes, Roland—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Blanchot, Maurice—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Derrida, Jacques—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN 94. H 56 2009 801'.950904—dc22  2009041713

This book is printed on recycled paper.

The complaint is sometimes made that criticism is no longer capable of

judging. But why is this? It is not criticism which out of sheer laziness

cannot be bothered to evaluate, but the novel or poem that eschews

evaluation because what it seeks is to affirm itself in isolation from all

value. And in so far as criticism belongs more intimately to the life of

the work, it experiences the work as something that cannot be evaluated,

apprehending it as the depth, but also the absence of depth, that escapes

each and every system of values, being prior to whatever has value and

disqualifying in advance any assertion that would take hold of it to

invest it with value. In this sense, criticism—literature—in my view is

part of one of the most challenging yet important tasks of our time,

unfolding in a movement that is necessarily undecided: the task of

preserving and releasing thought from the notion of value, and

consequently opening history to that which within history is already

moving beyond all forms of value and readying itself for a wholly

different—and still unpredictable—kind of affirmation.

Maurice Blanchot, “Qu’en estil de la critique?”

(The Task of Criticism Today)

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements ix

Preface xi

Chapter One

Instantiations 1

Chapter Two

Roland Barthes: From Ideology to Event 71

Chapter Three

Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of the Unreadable

Chapter Four

Jacques Derrida: Addressing the Future 233

Chapter Five

Radical Indecision 333

Notes 337

Index 432

154

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

I should like to thank the numerous friends, colleagues, and students who, often without realising, have contributed to this book in many dif ferent ways. I am particularly indebted to Kevin Hart for his encourage ment and generosity, to Andrew Benjamin for his unfailing support, to Christophe Bident for his friendship, to Barbara Hanrahan for her belief in this project, and to Linda Paterson who first asked the ques tion. Juliet, Melanie, Mig, and Susie also helped in more ways than I have space to mention. I am also grateful to the University of Warwick and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the pro vision of study leave that enabled me to complete what became a sig nificantly longer book than I first envisaged. But such is the fate, I eventually learned, that befalls anyone who, gambling on the future, dallies with indecision. Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere, and I am grateful for permission to use them again here. Part of chapter 1 was published as “‘Affirmation without precedent’: Maurice Blanchot and Criticism Today,” inBlanchot: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism, After  ed. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); and passages from chapter 3 were incorporated into my “‘Distrust of Poetry’: Levinas, Blanchot, Celan,”MLN120, no. 5 (Winter 2005): 986–1008, copyright © The Johns Hopkins University Press, reprinted with permission.

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