THE RIGHT TO DEATH AND LITERARY COMMITMENT: MAURICE BLANCHOT AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Maurice Blanchot. Jean-Paul Sartre. Literature. Language. Experience. Dialectic.
This dissertation is about the tension between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Paul Sartre, as to the ethical, political and philosophical aspect of literature. We understand that this tension is part of modern artistic subjectivity, stretched between freedom of sovereign refusal and acceptance of commitment to history, so that both writers stir up this contradiction of literature. If, on the one hand, Blanchot (2011b) affirms that literature is the door to an experience beyond itself, an experience seeks to make death possible, Sartre (2004) says that literature is the space of a relation between freedoms where a fundamental dialectic takes place that implies an awareness. Both authors conceive the human reality as negativity, hence the importance of Hegel as common ground from which tension emerges. The Hegelian philosophy, through the courses of Alexandre Kojéve (2012), with its emphasis on the idea of death, will have in Blanchot an rearticulation without which we could not understand his ideas about literature. In Sartre, Hegel’s philosophy is equally important, since his ideas about existentialism articulate not only phenomenology and Marxism (later), but the dialectic of negativity and the concrete universal. For Blanchot, literature manifests an absolute freedom, a radical interrogation that calls into question all human projects. For Sartre, this absolute freedom, which was the desire of surrealism, is conceived as a temptation to irresponsibility. The literature holds the place of an ambiguity that is present in the two authors.