Strangeness beyond estrangement

Ondertitel:bringing Kafka and Blanchot into the debate with critical theory

There is a strangeness at work in Maurice Blanchot’s writings, often accompanied by the name of Franz Kafka: a redoubling in the relation of the self, a gap between an ‘I’ and something which remains impersonal, a struggle between the writing hand and the one which wants to make it rest – meine zwei Hände begannen einen Kampf – a liminal zone between experience and ink on paper where things become uncertain and ambiguous, a rupture between words and the world we think they represent, a radicality of the writing life which gives priority to unreality and imagination revealing the ever-floating anchors of constructed daytime reality. This strangeness is a radical kind of estrangement because it is not – negatively or dialectically – related to notions like ‘home’, ‘the stranger’, ‘God’ or ‘gods’, ‘society’ or ‘the other’. It eventually remains ungraspable, neutral and undetermined. This thesis addresses the radical estrangement at work in the constellation Kafka, Blanchot, writing and literature. How can we think about this strangeness which refuses understanding and does it relate to other kinds of estrangement, such as (Marxist) alienation, the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit), or an estrangement tied to societal and political developments, of which the disastrous effects of Nazism and the question of writing after Auschwitz, is probably the most topical example? In four different parts, I aim to trace the strangeness that opens in Blanchot’s reading of Kafka. Rather than focusing on narrative strategies in their fictional works, the disruptions of the traditional space of narration are understood as a response to a more fundamental strangeness, which is read as a radical questioning of the ontological project of the West, the foundation of culture and the dominance of meaning. Moreover, when reading this strangeness along the discourses of estrangement put forward in what has been called ‘the age of alienation’, it becomes clear that it ties in with these traditions while at the same time undermining them, eventually remaining stranger than estrangement.

Jaar van publicatie:2022

Trefwoorden:Doctoral thesis

Toegankelijkheid:Closed