Description
Book SynopsisIn The Eroticization of Distance: Nietzsche, Blanchot and the Legacy of Courtly Love, Joseph D. Kuzma explores the significance of courtly erotic themes in Friedrich Nietzsche's mature philosophy and in Maurice Blanchot's writings of the 1940s and early 1950s. Rather than offering an account of erotic relationality that prioritizes reconciliation, fulfillment, or release, Nietzsche attempts to formulate a nonteleological eroticism that aims at nothing but the perpetual intensification of desire. Kuzma suggests that it is Blanchot who carries Nietzsche's courtly erotic tendencies to their most provocative point, by highlighting potentials for intimate relationality that might be established through a shared experience of dispossession and loss. This first monograph to engage specifically with the theme of eroticism in Blanchot's writings will be of interest not only to students and scholars of Nietzsche, Blanchot, or French philosophy, but also anyone interested in the philosophy of sex
Trade ReviewDuring his years spent on the Mediterranean coast in Èze, where years earlier Nietzsche had similarly completed some of his most decisive thinking, the critic and novelist Maurice Blanchot would often find himself silently retracing his predecessor’s footsteps. In this strikingly original exploration of the implicit dialogue between the pair, which touches in turn on the implications of courtly love, the legacy of Tristan and Isolde, Wagnerian myth, the place of erotic intimacy in Blanchot’s fiction, and much else besides, Joseph Kuzma convincingly demonstrates how Nietzsche and Blanchot were each deeply committed to an experience of desire in which difference took precedence over fusion, distance over proximity, and intensity over finality. This illuminating study not only offers an acutely suggestive rethinking of eternal return, now viewed less as a doctrine than as a deferral of all doctrine, but also gives a fresh and compelling account of Nietzsche’s importance for postwar French thought in general and of the urgency of Blanchot’s distinctive response to Nietzsche in particular. -- Leslie Hill, Emeritus Professor of French Studies, University of Warwick
Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: Courtship and Despondency Chapter 2: Nietzsche and the Ecstasy of Transmogrification Chapter 3: Nietzsche’s Rehabilitation of Erotic Distance Chapter 4: Blanchot’s Eroticization of Distance Chapter 5: Déchirement, Sacrifice, and Refusal Chapter 6: Impersonal Intimacy and the Ruins of Shattered Time Conclusion: “This Beating of a Hesitant Heart”
