Lautreamont and Sade

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by Maurice Blanchot,

Translated by Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall

Stanford University Press

Due/Published August 2004, 200 pages, paper

ISBN 0804750351

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 LautrŽamont 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.

Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

Review

Originally written in 1949, Lautréamont and Sade distinguished Blanchot’s intellectual project from those of surrealism and existentialism, the two major intellectual movements of the day. In the subsequent 1963 edition, Blanchot prefaced the text by addressing the aims of the critic and challenging Heidegger’s understanding of the role of criticism. And now in 2004, we have the first English translation of Lautréamont and Sade, a work in which Blanchot assesses two of the more scandalous figures in French literature: the Comte de Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade. The opening essay, “Sade’s Reason,” in part a review of Pierre Klossowski’s Sade, My Neighbor, explores the implications of Sadean thought. While recognizing the subversiveness, violence, and shocking character of Sade’s novels, Blanchot also carefully explores how their ideas forcefully challenge philosophical and aesthetic traditions. Turning to the equally troubling and profound Maldoror, Blanchot offers a close reading of Lautréamont’s notorious poem. Blanchot’s imaginative and scrupulous reading reveals Lautréamont’s distinctive use of repetition, motif, and imagery. In both essays, Blanchot provides singular interpretations of the authors’ ideas and aesthetics, as well as revealing the impact and experience of reading their works. Moreover, in the preface, “What is the Purpose of Criticism,” and in the essays themselves, Blanchot investigates the relations between text, critic, and reader.