Tag Archives: Maurice Blanchot

For the Sake of Darkling Playfulness: Michael Brodsky’s “Invidicum” Part Three

Posted on November 30, 2023 by Mark Kerstetter

Packet Five: The aesthetics/ethics dyad I want now to produce a two-headed packet; it really needs two heads, trust me (by the way, this is not the first time Invidicum has recalled for me Brodsky’s novel Dyad, but I digress). … Continue reading →

Posted in book review | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Experience of Lautréamont’

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Mark Kerstetter

My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep, But a continuance of enduring thought…. The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. —Lord Byron, Manfred Maurice Blanchot’s book Lautréamont and Sade (“Sade’s Reason” followed by the much longer essay, “The Experience … Continue reading →

Posted in book review, drawing | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

If There Were a Heaven, It Would Stink with Life

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

maledicta Paradisus in qua tantum cacatur! —William of Auvergne Blanchot wrote that Nietzsche was the first to teach us that, “if you begin to think, then you can hope for no rest.” [The Writing of the Disaster, p 123] And … Continue reading →

Posted in Prayers and Curses | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Beckett’s Labyrinth

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

The Minotaur, not Narcissus, presides over the birth of art —Rosalind Krauss Patrick Bowles records a conversation he had with Samuel Beckett while the two were working on the English translation of Molloy. Bowles had shared a quotation from Blanchot: … Continue reading →

Posted in modernism | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Silence of the Work

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

Blanchot: The writer never knows if the work is done. What he has finished in one book, he begins again or destroys in another. ….although the artist is not capable of ending it, he is nevertheless capable of turning it … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

The Writing of the Disaster and Lucky

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

Where power does not reign—nor initiative, nor the cutting edge of a decision—there, dying is living. There dying is the passivity of life—of life escaped from itself and confounded with the disaster of a time without present which we endure … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kenneth Goldsmith User’s Manual Part 2

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Mark Kerstetter

nobility…. is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. —Wallace Stevens, from The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words [page 665 The Library of … Continue reading →

Posted in modernism, poetry essay | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments