Blanchot and the Negative Criticism: Approaches to Sade and Latréamont

Abstract

This paper analyzes how, in the case of French essayist Maurice Blanchot, literary criticism has produced a substantial change of notions such as judgment, experience and creation. Given that for Blanchot literature as such is justified in its negative fate that leads it to disappear, we can observe that criticism, as writing, as experience, as the overcoming of judgment and as creation itself, is —more than an objective view of the literary object— foremost a desire of writing that transgresses all boundaries. Thus our work discusses, using Blanchot’s essays on Sade and Lautréamont, published in 1947, how a political experience of evil and a poetic experience of the power of imagination in literature allow criticism to drop aside judgment, to become experience of writing.