“The Writing of Disaster”, Maurice Blanchot: A Reading Group

Justin Clemens, Joe Hughes, Elliot Patsoura, Jessica Marian

“To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.”

CRAM will lead a reading and discussion group focussing on Maurice Blanchot’s “The Writing of Disaster”. Originally published in French in 1980, Blanchot sought to understand the philosophical meaning of the Holocaust as a violent and absolute historical rupture “where all was lost, including guardian thought”. In the face of an increasingly volatile planet, the sixth great extinction, active genocide in Gaza, and the technological expropriation of human symbolic capabilities, we invite participants to reflect on the contemporary significance of Blanchot’s key question: How can we think or write about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning?

The Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM) is an open network for people working across the various disciplines of critical studies today, based at the University of Melbourne. CRAM supports collaboration between researchers in the humanities, economics, architecture and design, law, and the arts, and aims to carve out institutional space to foster the strong collective interest in critical thought in Melbourne.