VARIOUS

Seven sound artists created pieces inspired by the writings of Maurice Blanchot: Steve Roden, Toshyia Tsunoda, Brandon Labelle, Stephen Vitiello, Paulo Raposo, Julien Ottavi, Christof Migone. Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern writing. His work encompasses the writing of novels and récits as well as articles and books of (anti)philosophical criticism. Blanchot - remembered from the few distant relates and a 1922 clandestine photograph as being tall, thin and cadaverous in appearance - chose reclusiveness and uncompromise, isolation and refusal to enter into public realm: Blanchot avoided interviews, photographs, and academic affiliations ;public knowledge of his life consists of a handful of minor anecdotes and of inferences built around the appearance of his books and essays. Blanchot "differs from all other reading experiences, said Paul de Man. His prose is at once limpid and opaque: classically pure, seamlessly articulated, yet inhabited by an obscurity resulting from a thought held at the limit of its own possibility. Blanchot literary works challenges radically the notions of author, reading, interpretation and, ultimately, death. "Noli me legere" - which can be translated by "Do Not Read Me" - problematizes the border between writer and reader, and between writing and reading and, beyond its enigmatical interdiction, forces one to take a hermeneutic shift and abandon all traditional exegesis. So How can one approach the writing of Blanchot? Undermining language itself, by deconstructing and disrupting its relation with the real, the writing experience proposed by the author brings forward dissimulation,evanescence and erasure as elusive forces that, rather than instantiating a purely negative movement, allow the discovery of whole new field of possibilities. He published fiction - L'arrêt de mort [Death Sentence] (1948), Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas [The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me] (1953) and Le dernier homme [The Last Man] (1957)) and also essays and reviews into various critical books - La part du feu [The Work of Fire] (1949), Lautréaumont & Sade (1949), and L'espace littéraire [The Space of Literature] (1955).