Kirjahaku

This is the first full-length study devoted to Roger Laporte, whose lifelong exploration of the stakes of writing has produced a body of work on the borderline of literature and philosophy. Charting the development of Laporte's writing in relation to the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida, this study offers both a comprehensive reading of Laporte's oeuvre and a new perspective on an important strand of recent thinking about literature. In particular, it is claimed here that the imperfect reflexivity of Laporte's 'Ophic' texts effects a singular opening to reading, and that in doing so it illuminates the ethical dimension of literature which has been the subject of much recent discussion.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Marking Time presents an innovative account of literary time, in which the temporality and ontology of the literary are seen to be essentially intertwined. Individual chapters trace the stakes of this view of time for the status and ‘economy’ of the literary text across five 20th-century writers in French whose work is characterized by a fundamental and searching self-questioning: Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Louis-René des Forêts, Pierre Klossowski, and Roger Laporte. A final chapter draws on these analyses to develop an inherently unstable figure of ‘saving time’, which has important repercussions for how we conceive of literary value.