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The human effaced by writingIn contemporary literary discussions about climate fiction, it is often argued that the alleged anthropocentrism of literature hinders it from fruitful engagement with nonhuman elements of the ecological crisis. While critics have defended literature against this claim by appealing to particular literary techniques to narrate the nonhuman world, in this article, I explore the material non-anthropocentrism of literature through an interpretation of Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death”. For Blanchot, literature is ultimately an ambiguous phenomenon that both at once expresses the power of human imagination and its limitations. These limitations become manifest mostly in the materiality of literary writing, which is a precondition for literary meaning to arise, but, according to Blanchot, never becomes meaningful itself. This material side to literature accompanies but escapes human action and imagination, highlighting their inevitable non-anthropocentric sides. While Blanchot’s non-anthropocentrism does not provide new guidelines for action, it can function as a humbling reflection on the limits of human agency.

W. S. Merwin, in his later poetry, has entered a realm of being that is endless and timeless, where time becomes unhinged and place uncertain. This is no longer the wildness or wilderness celebrated by US poets from Walt Whitman to Gary Snyder, but an adventure into the objectless presence, in which Merwin, troubled by blindness in later years, has to grope for a living sense. Visibility diminishes, and things tend to disappear or return to their nascent states, enshrouded in darkness, although an inner light still illumines his memories. Hence the ghostly resonance in Merwin’s later poetry, the elusive aspects of which will again take the critic to the task. In poems from The Pupil (2001), Present Company (2005), The Shadow of Sirius (2008), The Moon Before Morning (2014), and Garden Time (2016), we encounter neither distinct objects nor divisible mental states, but the arising, lingering, and cessation of consciousness. Writing toward “the great outside,” Merwin implicitly dialogues with thinkers like Maurice Blanchot and Quentin Meillassoux, who have theorized on the outside of subjectivity. Merwin’s indebtedness to various brands of Buddhism, such as Zen, Yogacara, and Tibetan Buddhism, also comes to the foreground. Attending to the rustling “outside,” Merwin’s poetry releases us from cultural anxieties and epistemic bounds. Reading late Merwin in our own postpandemic, postinformation age will refocus our energy on the essentials of life in a constantly updated technocratic world.

According to Copernicus Climate Change Service, June 2024 is the 12th consecutive month where global temperatures have reached 1.5 °C above pre-industrial averages. For us, the problem is much bigger, not the exhaustion of sense, but the concrete tendency of exhaustion of both human and nonhuman life. [...]the sense of human life is now a lesser problem, while the greater problem resides in the relation of human life to the totality of nonhuman life, upon which it depends. Disaster Is the deterioration of the conditions of all life a nihilistic event? The hypothesis I develop here (and in a forthcoming book) is that, instead of explaining it in habitual terms of catastrophe, it needs to be rethought as an unprecedented disaster, of which we have an equally unprecedented impersonal experience.

Estableciendo relaciones entre Kafka y las lecturas que de este autor han realizado Hans Blumemberg, Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben y Elías Canetti, entre otros, se plantea la hipótesis de que Kafka es un escritor post-psicoanalítico o post-edípico en tanto hace de la literatura un espacio sin enfermedad ni cura. The goal of this article is to explore Kafkas relationship with psychoanalysis in one of his most biographical texts, Letter to the Father, and the effects that Kafka's literary imagination has had on the interpretation of modern subjectivity by contemporary philosophers. Establishing relations between Kafka and the readings of this author by Hans Blumemberg, Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben and Elias Canetti, among others, the article proposes that Kafka is a post-psychoanalytic or post-oedipal writer insofar as he makes literature a space without illness or cure. APARATO CORRECTOR Kafka comparte con el psicoanálisis la pasión por el indicio que arroja la condición humana, pero se alejará del fármaco y de la reducción de los desvíos subjetivos a la enfermedad.

This article examines a series of pivotal moments in the history of the postwar French journal Critique , tracing the development, refinement, and reassertion of the journal's singular style of critical practice. We present the journal's founding documents and consider editor Georges Bataille's identification of Maurice Blanchot as the guiding model for the journal. Then we examine two defining texts in the review's development: Alexandre Kojève's \"Hegel, Marx and Christianity\" (1946) and Alain Badiou's \"The (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism\" (1967). Kojève's celebrated article crystallised the ideals of the journal's programme; Badiou's article meanwhile tested those ideals, precipitating a minor editorial crisis.

This article aims to analyze rhizomatic and fragmentary writing as well as their ethical standpoint. The article concludes that both rhizomatic and fragmentary writing have multiple entry points as well as aesthetically dispersed structure of patterns. Rhizomatic and fragmentary writing focus mainly on representation of unseen, unwritten and unconscious aspects of human's life which proves that both type of writing protest against the Symbolic order. Rhizomatic and fragmentary writing have a nomadic narrative voice that functions as a multiplicity and is constantly in a flux meaning that such identity is fractured and relational. Rhizomatic writing is able to produce ethical dimension which manifests via constant becoming, while fragmentary writing encourages responsibility. Keywords: Rhizomatic writing, fragmentary writing, poethics

Literatura si paradoxurile teoriei se constituie ca o incitantă invitaţie la reflecţie asupra necesităţii literaturii într-o existenţă plasată în actualitate, în ultra-modernitate, perioadă oarecum vidată de sensurile supreme ale vieţii: ,,Nu e vorba doar despre orgoliul auctorial, ci despre faptul că orice creaţie presupune existenţa unui subiect creator. Acesta, prin actul său, instituie o lume care nu este echivalentul lumii reale, nici produsul exclusiv şi absolut al minţii creatoare, ci o sinteză subiectiv-obiectivă, în care se regăsesc, interferează şi se potenţează reciproc mai multe realităţi: cea a lumii reprezentate/imaginate, cea a subiectului creator, la rândul lui înrădăcinat în spaţiu şi timp (adică în realitatea lui imediată), lumea (sau lumile) evocată/generată de limbaj şi, nu în ultimul rînd, lumea din care provine cititorul real, în momentul lecturii\" (p. 17). în cel dintâi capitol, Modernitatea si ascensiunea teoriei, autoarea elaborează o sinteză asupra debutului teoriei literare moderne, ilustrat de reprezentanţii formalismului rus, care, într-o reacţie de apărare la contextul istoric, politic şi, mai ales, ideologic, din zorii secolului al XX-lea, articulează un limbaj critic ce respinge, atât cât este cu putinţă, preceptele aşa-zisului realism socialist, refuză însăşi crunta realitate, pentru a se dedica unui soi de purism teoretic, ridicând forma textuală la rang de ideal în literatură. Obsesia obiectivităţii, manifestă în toate intervenţiile teoretice, precum şi în demersurile artistice ale avangardiştilor, reflectă nu doar refuzul categoric al subiectivităţii, ci şi al individualismului, al idealismului şi al metafizicului, ceea ce creează premisele unei accelerate dez-umanizări\" (p. 23). într-un context mai amplu, configurat de paradigma post-umanului, atingând şi resorturile culturale actuale şi, cităm, culminând în retorica avangardei şi în frenezia revoluţiei permanente, situarea adecvată a teoriei literare, în genere, vine să întregească ideea despre necesitatea studiilor culturale într-o epocă modernă, mai mult decât modernă (sic!), care cunoaşte prelungiri şi ecouri neaşteptate. Într-un cadru mai larg, semnalează două macrometafore structurante pentru întreaga literatură, în special în legătură cu proza de provenienţă autobiografică: \"Vizuina şi oglinda, două metafore la fel de sugestive, dar indicând, fiecare, un alt tip de raport între creator şi opera sa: în vreme ce vizuina ascunde şi ocroteşte, oglinda reflectă de fiecare dată chipul celui care o priveşte.

This article proposes a reading of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) as the spiritual swan song of Stanley Kubrick, even though it was completed posthumously by Steven Spielberg. Conceived and developed by Kubrick from the 1970s until the late 1990s, the film emerges as a profound meditation on life, death, and the persistence of memory—one that continues to resonate through another author’s hand. It stands as a singular case of authorial transmission, where Spielberg’s intervention operates less as completion than as curatorship: the act of listening to, translating, and preserving a vision projected beyond its creator’s lifetime. Beyond its production history, which includes Kubrick’s long collaboration with writer Ian Watson, the early story treatments, and Spielberg’s eventual reinterpretation of Kubrick’s design materials and narrative architecture, this essay advances a philosophical reflection on A.I. as a mediated testamentary work. Drawing on the thoughts of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Blanchot, it examines how questions of authorship, memory, and narrative closure intersect with the film’s ontological and affective dimensions. Through these lenses, A.I. reveals itself as both an allegory of survival and a reflection on artistic legacy—suggesting that a swan song may endure beyond its maker, preserved through the curatorship and imagination of another.

This essay draws on Michel Foucault's reflections on his writing practice to develop a reading of his historical inquiries as exercises of what I call \"death-writing.\" Death-writing is a type of writing that is predicated on death, both the death of the past and the death of others, comprising a way of orienting oneself toward the dead. I argue that Foucault mobilizes the theme of death and writing already since his earlier work in the 1970s. As a practice of death-writing, genealogy aims to diagnose the death of others by tracing their conditions of possibility in death's entwinement with power. Finally, I suggest that Foucault began experimenting with another practice of death-writing in his Parallel Lives series, a writing that assumes a different affective bearing toward obscure and brief lives.

This paper argues that Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Georges Bataille use voyeurism as a transgressive mechanism to confront death through the female body, a paradoxical site of life and decay. Though Céline’s clinical, disenchanted gaze contrasts with Bataille’s erotic, metaphysical quest, both employ the act of seeing to reveal death’s presence within vitality. In Céline’s works, voyeurism shifts from erotic curiosity to cold observation, framing the female body as a sterile emblem of mortality. In Bataille’s, it becomes participatory, merging ecstasy with dissolution in a sacred yet destructive form. Drawing on Freud and Sodom motifs, this study shows how their gazes transform the female body into a lens for existential finitude, challenging life–death boundaries in 20th-century French literature.