In Lautréamont and Sade, originally published in 1949,
Maurice Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from
the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and
existentialism. Today, Lautréamont and Sade, these unique figures in
the histories of literature and thought, are as crucially relevant to
theorists of language, reason, and cruelty as they were in post-war
Paris.
"Sade's
Reason," in part a review of Pierre Klossowski's Sade, My
Neighbor, was first published in Les Temps modernes. Blanchot
offers Sade's reason, a corrosive rational unreasoning, apathetic
before the cruelty of the passions, as a response to Sartre's
Hegelian politics of commitment.
"The
Experience of Lautréamont," Blanchot's longest sustained essay,
pursues the dark logic of Maldoror through the circular gravitation
of its themes, the grinding of its images, its repetitive and
transformative use of language, and the obsessive metamorphosis of
its motifs. Blanchot's Lautréamont emerges through this search for
experience in the relentless unfolding of language. This treatment of
the experience of Lautréamont unmistakably alludes to Georges
Bataille's "inner experience."
Republishing
the work in 1963, Blanchot prefaced it with an essay distinguishing
his critical practice from that of Heidegger.