In 1959, Maurice Blanchot was invited to write a text for the occasion of Martin Heidegger’s 70th birthday. At this moment, Blanchot was already a famous essayist and writer and he submitted a text entitled L’Attente”. This text will become a basis for his first book of fragmentary writings, L’Attente l’oubli, which was published 3 years later. This book will be followed by Le Pas au-delà (1973) i L’Écriture du désastre (1980) and, like the first books, these subsequent fragmentary works will be generically undecidable and somewhere between philosophy and literature. During this talk about Maurice Blanchot and fragmentary writing, participants will try to show meaning of fragment in Blanchot’s work, to present the most important themes from his fragmentary works, and to emphasize the influence that these works had on Blanchot’s contemporaries (Levinas, Nancy, Derrida). The reason for this discussion panel is the first translation into Serbian language of Blanchot’s fragmentary writing, Le Pas au-delà/Korak (ne) na onu stranu. This book is published by Akademska knjiga, Novi Sad and translated by Maja Bajić and Nemanja Mitrović .

Participants

Tomislav Brlek graduated English Language and Literature and Spanish Language and Literature. His MA was entitled The Placing of Ted Hughes in Shakespeare Criticism (2002). His doctoral dissertation was from the field of literary theory at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb (title: T.S. Eliot in the Context of Contemporary Theory). Since 1996, he works at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. Since 2000, he is a Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature. He is the author of Tvrdi tekst: uvid i nevid moderne hrvatske književnosti (Fraktura: Zaprešić, 2020).

Zrinka Božić is working in the Department of Croatian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. Her MA work was entitled The Construction of National Identity in Croatian Literary Historiography (2005). The title of her doctoral dissertation was Problem of Death in Contemporary Literary Theory: On French reception of Heidegger’s being-toward-death (2009). Her supervisor was Professor Vladimir Biti. She wrote two books: From the Perspective of Death: Heidegger and Others (Plejada: Zagreb, 2012) and The Community in Avant-Garde Literature and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2022).

Sanja Bojanić is the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe, University of Rijeka (CAAS SE UNIRI) and she governs program activities of the Moose Palace on the island of Cres. Since 2010, she lead numerous projects that were financed by the European Commission and various private foundations. Her MA was in Media and Electronic Publishing (2004) at the Department of Hypermedia, University Paris 8. In 2009, she obtained her doctoral degree at Sciences sociales, Pratique et théories du sens, University Paris 8. The title of her doctoral dissertation was Histoires de trahison. She works as an Associate Professor at the Academy of Applied Arts, University of Rijeka. She is the author of numerous books and more than 50 texts. 

Nemanja Mitrović works is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade. His research interests are literary theory, the relationship between ethics, philosophy, and literature, and the work of Maurice Blanchot. He completed his Ph.D. study at the University of Aberdeen under the direction of Professor Christopher Fynsk (2014). In 2017, he published a reworked version of his doctoral dissertation entitled The (Im)Possibility of Literature as the Possibility of Ethics (Delere Press, Singapore). From 2018 until 2022, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty for Media and Communications Belgrade. Together with Maja Bajić, he translated the works of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.