Rethinking the Relation between Philosophy and Literature

This book rethinks the relation between philosophy and literature as an agonic relation, not privileging either side. Exploring a re-conception of the tragic and its relation to mortality, this work seeks to reposition the importance of philosophy, literature, and the relation between them within mortal existence. While contributing to knowledge of the tragic and the philosophy of mortal existence, this work also explores novel readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Maurice Blanchot. The work develops through a series of cycles, elaborating key themes and questions for the development of a “tragic thought” emerging from the relation between philosophy and literature. The first cycle of chapters focuses on Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, explicating the themes of writing and the impersonality which its language produces, as well as the paradox of mortality as a state of dying which is refused any experience of death. The next cycle of chapters regard Aristotle’s Poetics, exploring the paradoxical relation between nature and art as it opens onto a rethinking of mimesis. This consideration of mimesis allows for a renewed mediation between truth and fiction, finding the questions of philosophy and literature to be essential to mortal existence. The final cycle of chapters is on Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, highlighting the central role of language and the production of figures and appearances in Nietzsche’s early considerations, as well as the import of experience and passion in thinking the tragic. While providing these novel readings and philosophical explications of several themes binding aesthetics and metaphysics, this work ultimately concedes that a “tragic thought” adequate to rethinking the relation between philosophy and literature demands a mode of thinking which steps beyond the limits of philosophy and of literature as such. This work therefore poses itself, après-coup, as a prolegomenon to such a future thought.