The Inorganic Community : Hypotheses on Literary Communism in Novalis, Benjamin, and Blanchot
Journal
boundary2. an international journal of literature and culture
ISSN
0190-3659
ISSN-Digital
1527-2141
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2012-10
Author(s)
Abstract
If literary avant-garde journals and their communities have been,
in the twentieth century, a space for creating, if not sustaining,
major political utopias, it should help explain why this "literary
communism," as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, is not a weakened or
substitutional form of politics. No myth without narration, no
implementation without an instrumentation, no organic unity without
a political organ voicing its claim, in short: no organicity
without an organon. But can there be a (literary) community that
does not aim at the achievement of its own assumed truth, a form
of writing in common that does not serve to convey a meaning, but
bears witness, in its very form, to the fragmentation of meaning?
This essay examines three attempts of an affi rmative answer to this
question by reappraising three interrelated experimental cases:
Jena around 1800 and the Athenaeum journal of the Early Romantics;
Walter Benjamin's journal projects, from the Angelus Novus to the
prison camp journal at the end of his life; Maurice Blanchot and
the failed trans-European project of what was arguably the most
ambitious intellectual journal enterprise of the century, the Revue
internationale in the early 1960s.
in the twentieth century, a space for creating, if not sustaining,
major political utopias, it should help explain why this "literary
communism," as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, is not a weakened or
substitutional form of politics. No myth without narration, no
implementation without an instrumentation, no organic unity without
a political organ voicing its claim, in short: no organicity
without an organon. But can there be a (literary) community that
does not aim at the achievement of its own assumed truth, a form
of writing in common that does not serve to convey a meaning, but
bears witness, in its very form, to the fragmentation of meaning?
This essay examines three attempts of an affi rmative answer to this
question by reappraising three interrelated experimental cases:
Jena around 1800 and the Athenaeum journal of the Early Romantics;
Walter Benjamin's journal projects, from the Angelus Novus to the
prison camp journal at the end of his life; Maurice Blanchot and
the failed trans-European project of what was arguably the most
ambitious intellectual journal enterprise of the century, the Revue
internationale in the early 1960s.
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
Duke University Press
Publisher place
New York
Volume
39
Number
03/2012
Start page
75
End page
95
Pages
21
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
215289