Adam Potts - Böcker

Sonic Encounters with Blanchot is the first book to explore the relationship of sound and music with the work of Maurice Blanchot. The volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines who listen closely to the sounds and resonances emanating from within Blanchot’s work and who consider their significance both within his work and beyond. The latent and explicit sonic content of Blanchot’s writing is explored, as is his treatment of music and the possibilities of thinking about contemporary music and sound art through his work. Although Blanchot is best known for his engagement with literature, an engagement that often relies on visual references and experiences, this collection takes a sonic route into one of the most exciting and demanding thinkers of the twentieth century. As an interdisciplinary exploration of sound and Blanchot’s work, this book will be interest to those studying sound in literature and music, as well as students of Blanchot’s work in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Sonic Encounters with Blanchot is the first book to explore the relationship of sound and music with the work of Maurice Blanchot. The volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines who listen closely to the sounds and resonances emanating from within Blanchot’s work and who consider their significance both within his work and beyond. The latent and explicit sonic content of Blanchot’s writing is explored, as is his treatment of music and the possibilities of thinking about contemporary music and sound art through his work. Although Blanchot is best known for his engagement with literature, an engagement that often relies on visual references and experiences, this collection takes a sonic route into one of the most exciting and demanding thinkers of the twentieth century. As an interdisciplinary exploration of sound and Blanchot’s work, this book will be interest to those studying sound in literature and music, as well as students of Blanchot’s work in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Can Maurice Blanchot, so often occupied with thoughts of death, dying, affliction, and impossibility, tell us anything about hope? Conversely, can hope tell us anything about Blanchot’s project? Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance offers a bold re-reading of Maurice Blanchot by placing two concepts seldom associated with his work – hope and chance – at its centre. Against the grain of much Blanchot scholarship, Adam Potts argues that Blanchot’s project is a writing animated by a paradoxical hope for the Outside: hope directed not toward possibility, but impossibility. Taking Blanchot’s definition of impossibility in his essay ‘The Great Refusal’ – impossibility as thought that reveals itself ‘according to a measure other than that of power’ – the book claims that hope for the Outside is both an aesthetic and political concern. Specifically, it contends that language which turns away from power becomes oriented toward the Other. In this turn to alterity, chance helps conceptualise what eludes power.Alongside Blanchot, Potts traces the intimately complex relationship between hope and chance through key moments and figures in its history – from Yves Bonnefoy, Ernst Bloch, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Gabriel Marcel, to Dada, John Cage, Surrealism, and improvised dance. Through comparative thinking and close readings of The Infinite Conversation and The Step Not Beyond, Potts shows how Blanchot unsettles the concepts of hope and chance, favouring a writing that dwells in suspension and anticipation, where chance interrupts mastery and hope refuses fulfilment.At once philosophically rigorous and creatively adventurous, Maurice Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance reframes Blanchot as a writer whose work is propelled by a strange, restless, and generative hope – capable of transforming how we understand literature, politics, and experimental practice.