The (Im)Possibility of Literature as the Possibility of Ethics

The aim of this book is to show that precisely in the indeterminacy of literature we can find the possibility of ethics and it will start with the examination of a work that clearly has a paradoxical nature - Sreten Ugričić’s Infinitive. The paradox of Infinitive consists in the fact that it is a monograph, but a monograph about a non-existent book. The examination of the paradox on which Infinitive is based will be associated with Maurice Blanchot’s analysis of the (im)possibility of literature from his essays “Orpheus’s Gaze” and “Encountering the Imaginary.” This study will claim that two most important features of the (im)possibility of literature are: the passage from je to il and the temporal paradox of the time of time’s absence. These two features are interconnected: a loss of personality (and the inability to subsume the work of art under terms of decision and intention) leads to a strange realm that is governed by the time of time’s absence. This is the realm of imaginary or a place where, to paraphrase Blanchot, language becomes its own image.

Through the analysis of specific literary works (Infinitive, Marbot: A Biography and The Lost Estate) this book will try to describe the most important paradoxes of literature. In its final part, through a dialogue between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, two theses will be formulated: first, the passage from je to il will be associated with the impossibility of death and close reading of Blanchot’s reworking of Levinas’s concepts will open a perspective according to which art is capable of offering the experience of fundamental alterity; second, the time of time’s absence will be described as the temporality of artwork, but also as the temporality of the other.