Crisis of vision, art and indication in Maurice Blanchot’s Thought

Abstract

This paper analyzes the connection between the crisis of vision in the thinking of Maurice Blanchot and his conception of art. The denigration and deconstruction of the visible makes a number of phenomena understandable, including: the postmodern nocturnal nature of art, Hegel’s “end of art” as divine content; the infi nite duplicity of Blanchot’s regard of the mythical fi gures Orpheus and Eurydice; the crisis of representation and its referent spanning Blanchot’s thinking about art. From this perspective, we analyze the importance of Blanchot’s meditation on (indicative) language as a means to thinking the work of art.