Plasticità

The paper retraces the theory of the imaginary of Maurice Blanchot and his philosophical writings on art and image. Blanchot’s restrained presence in turn was not less decisive as a dialogue partner for French post-Heideggerian philosophy (Levinas, Derrida, Foucault). Fimiani shows how his writings are in a constant in dialogues not only with other literary and philosophical texts, both antique and modern–especially of Hegel, Lévinas and Heidegger, and of Bataille–, but with visual artworks too, namely the death mask and the sculpture. The image will be outlined so as to bring forth the fundamental motif of these philosophical considerations: the image as the Latin imago, as a pictorial and iconic substitute, as a picture. The paper argues that the question of the image/picture thus enables us to approach the border which both unites and separates Blanchot and Levinas. This border between philosophy and literature, around which the writings of both revolve, is the question of exteriority, beyond any representational thinking or ethical turn of aesthetic, as in Levinas’ writings. The faint, but decisive difference is between laying patent and laying bare.