College Literature

This article revisits Maurice Blanchot’s reading of German Romanticism and the Marquis de Sade in order to develop the concept of the fragmentary imperative of terror. For Blanchot, the romantic theory of literature originally formulated through the fragmentary collections of writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, as well as the scandalous and virtually unreadable publications attached to the name of the Marquis de Sade, places the historical phenomenon of terror at the heart of the aesthetic project of modern literature through which many notable writers of twentieth-century European modernism continued to work. Terror is a fascinating concept for Blanchot precisely because of its historical trajectory out of the space of revolutionary politics and into the space of modern literature. Accordingly, this article provides an historical foundation for Blanchot’s more widely discussed theory of the fragmentary imperative of literature by grounding it in Blanchot’s articulation of the political-cum-literary imperatives of terror.