Death, a Surreptitious Friendship

This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close reading of their thought on death and dying. An intellectual and personal friendship, both conceived of death as an "impossible" space and "limit-experience" that not only constituted human subjectivity, but could also puncture it, leading to joy through deindividuation. This could only occur indirectly - for Bataille, via the sacrifice, eroticism, drunkenness or laughter - and for Blanchot, via literature. This line of thinking leads to varying formulations of sovereignty at odds with the prosaic world of use-value. Proceeding first through their friendship, this paper then explores this thinking death through the contexts of French Hegelianism, Kojève and Heidegger. While holding much similar, the paper argues that Bataille's transgressive, embodied and deindividuating visions of death present a form of community that was overlooked by Blanchot subsequently, with consequences for theories of community and collective power today

Aesthetics · Art · Death drive · Epistemology · Eroticism · Friendship · Hegelianism · Laughter · Literature · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sacrifice · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Theology · Value (mathematics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Psychology · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Social Psychology

• The Work of Fire

  Maurice Blanchot•The Work of Fire•1995

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• Reality and Its Shadow

  Emmanuel Levinas•Collected Philosophical Papers•1987

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• Hegel, Death and Sacrifice

  Georges Bataille, Jonathan Strauss•Yale French Studies•1990

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• Gifts Without Presents

  Rebecca Comay•Yale French Studies•1990

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