The Call of the Disaster at the Borderland of Silence

Bibliographic Data

ID3774013
AuthorsLeslie Anne Boldt (French Studies Department of Modern Languages Brock University St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1 Canada)
Year2018
Volume23
Issue3
Pages125-143
Publication date2018-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAngelaki (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0969-725X • E-ISSN: 1469-2899
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0969725x.2018.1473934
OpenAlexW2806210164
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (second version) and Death Sentence are marked by the imperative to hear the call of night, of darkness, and death. In each work, the ear is enlisted to undermine the prominence accorded to the eye. If sight is essential to measure and confirm the space separating subjects from objects or subjects from other subjects, Blanchot introduces hearing as a way to collapse this protective distance. The border between inside and outside becomes porous, and the subject is no longer protected by vision’s capacity to establish a neutral and demonstrable distance between itself and the object of sight. As vision becomes catastrophic, hearing assumes an ascendant role. Thomas and Anne each hear the call of death, as well as cries, laments and sudden sounds that burst through silence. The characters of Death Sentence also hear and respond to a variety of calls, including the call to yield to death and the open grave. In both works, Blanchot provides a literary space in which sounds of various intensities resist silence, including the noise of the final rattle, the ultimate struggle with silence. In order to further explore the nature of this literary struggle, in the final section of my paper I compare Blanchot’s interrogation of silence to various musical experiments with the limits of sound, including the twentieth-century works of composers such as Anton Webern, Luigi Nono and Salvatore Sciarrino

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Sentence · Sight · Silence · Subject (documents · Variety (cybernetics · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Joseph Conrad and Literature · History · Philosophy

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