Abstract
In his article "Blanchot's Impossible Kafka" Antoine J. Polgar challenges Maurice Blanchot's theory of the impossibility and futility of writing as applied to Kafka's struggles with the demands of writing and life. Polgar questions Blanchot's claims on the basis of close readings of the texts of Kafka's texts and explores traces of correspondence between the life and the texts yet unmentioned in Kafka scholarship. Referring to Blanchot's focus on survival as a metaphor for writing in a meta-commentary on the writer's facticity and the contingency to which literary creation is consigned, Polgar comments on the intense bio-critical interest — which the scholar is cautioned against and often ignores — in Kafka's lived experience. According to Polgar, if "the disaster" is the truth outside literature, Blanchot's theory that the impossibility of writing defines a philosophy of writing is a thought lacking in equivalence.
Recommended Citation
Polgar, Antoine J.
"Blanchot's "Impossible" Kafka."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
16.1
(2014):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2180>
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