Incite Seminars

(Un)Timely Blanchot

a 4-session seminar with Philippe Lynes, Alex Obrigewitsch, Kim Schoof & Carlos A. Segovia

📅 4 Sundays, October 4, 11, 18, 25, 2026
⏰ 10:00–12:00 Eastern Time Zone • 16:00–18:00 Central European Time. See time zone converter if you’re in a different location to make sure you get the time right. Please consider that your local time may change in the final session.
🔗 A Zoom link will be provided on registration.
💰Three options (registration at bottom of this page):
(i) $100 for non-members (become a member).
(ii) $80 for members.
(iii) Solidarity (new options ⚡ see below).

S e m i n a r   d e s c r i p t i o n

Blanchot’s work delves into how thinking and writing both reflect and un-reflect our relation to life and death, challenging conventional notions of presence and temporality. By tracing his influence on Derrida and Nancy, and exploring the simultaneous timeliness and untimeliness of his thought, we can ask how reading Blanchot today continues to transform our understanding of language, life, and being.

Session I (“Blanchot Today?,” with Alex Obrigewitsch) will explore Blanchot’s considerations of writing and literature in their exposure of alterity, disturbance of temporality, and their inscription of the anonymous and impersonal—for it is the ineluctable binding of writing and mortality which Blanchot has exposed to us, suspending “today” in the double exposure of a coming future which intersects with a “terrifyingly ancient” past. The title of this opening session, expresses the double question of the (un)timeliness of Blanchot’s work. If we agree with Jacques Derrida’s claim that “never as much as today have I imagined him so far ahead of us as today. Awaiting us, still to come, to be read, to be reread by those very same ones that do it ever since they knew how to read and thanks to him,” then it is from Blanchot “himself” that we might learn the double sense of our titular question. What can Blanchot teach us that bears the mark of today? Blanchot has never been more timely to read and think with than today, insofar as “today” is only ever the mobile limit inscribed between a future to come and a past never present. There is no “today,” no “contemporaneity” for literature, and its very writing alters our relation to life, suspending it in a void from whence all emerges and in which all must efface itself.

Session II (“Blanchot & Derrida,” with Philippe Lynes) will, for its part, trace the history of Blanchot’s influence on Derrida, as well as instances of a reciprocal influence in Blanchot’s own work. When discussing the ‘violent’ relationship of deconstruction to its three biggest influences—Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot—Jacques Derrida explains that Blanchot resists this violence best. In the final interview before his death, Derrida insisted that a notion of ‘survivance’ or ‘living-on’ lay at the heart of his entire philosophical trajectory, evoking Blanchot’s notion of “a survival which is not one, a death which does not put an end to anything.” Derrida’s most sustained engagement with Blanchot takes place in the mid 1970s with the publication of “Pas,” as well as the second year of his just-published La Chose seminar (1975-1977). Blanchot’s thought also features importantly in “Discourses of the End”—Derrida’s 1983 conversations on the apocalypse and the disaster with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (2002-2003).

In turn, Session III (“Blanchot & Nancy,” with Kim Schoof) will explore how it is possible that such contrasting perspectives on literature and the experience it offers us of being’s origin emanate from one another. It will do so exploring how Blanchot and Nancy write (occasionally in direct response to one another) about literature, community, ontology and “the neuter.” For Blanchot, literature opens us onto the “Outside” where being originates, where “I am not […]; no one is there, but the impersonal is: the outside, as that which prevents, precedes, and dissolves the possibility of any personal relation.” Yet, it is Blanchot’s perspective on literature that has inspired Jean-Luc Nancy to view literature as an exemplary way of being in the world. In Nancy’s perspective, literature is the “coming of the world” or, in the words of Aukje van Rooden, “the point at which connections are made, in which (the world) is created as being, time and again, a set of relations in which and by which we live.”

Lastly, Session IV (“Blanchot Unreceived,” with Carlos A. Segovia) will focus on how Blanchot seems to approach the question of the relation between language and reality à rebours of much contemporary thought, which, in repudiating their once-assumed transparency, tends instead to affirm their reciprocal opacity. For Blanchot, however, language is neither the thing named nor its mere absence, but the tentative recovery of its presence through its very loss; just as in Mallarmé’s “Sonnet in -yx,” for instance, anguish is neither the one felt in the chest by the poet—which lacks a voice and hence proves at once present to him as something real but absent due to its silence—nor the one named through the universal notion that would conventionally be assigned to it—before whose trivial presence the anguish thus felt would recede into absence: it is rather that thing of hard (whether white or black) “nails” like “onyx” by virtue of which word and world become mutually supplementary and translucent to one another. This will be examined both at the crossroads of today’s thought, thinkable, and unthought and along with Blanchot’s re-inscription of being as otherness.

C o n t e n t s

Session I • October 4, 2026

Blanchot Today?
The Interminable Default, Between a Coming Future and a “Terrifyingly Ancient” Past with Alex Obrigewitsch

1. The “terrible responsibility” of writing
2. The future? today?: surrealism and the encounter
3. Thought, death, writing: “I think therefore I am not”
4. A “scene” in suspension
5. The il, as dissimulation and/of relation
6. The anonymous, the Neutre

Session II • October 11, 2026

Blanchot & Derrida
La Mort La Chose
with Philippe Lynes

1. Blanchot, Heidegger, Derrida (La Chose/L’Écriture du désastre)
2. The thing remembers us (La Chose/Le Pas au-delà)
3. Apocalypse and disaster (“Discours de la fin”/L’Attente l’oubli)
4. Maurice Blanchot is living-on (“Maurice Blanchot est Mort”/Le Pas au-delà)

Session III • October 18, 2026

Blanchot & Nancy
Literature: Being (In and) Outside (of the World)
with Kim Schoof

1. A community (of lovers)
2. The literary experience
3. Writing and ontology
4. The neuter

Session IV • October 25, 2026

Blanchot Unreceived
Transparency, Opaqueness, Translucence
with Carlos A. Segovia

1. Gestell, néant noire, néant blanc…
2. Of literature and life in chiastic reversal
3. The poetic image: I. Being. II. Time
4. Another presence, another absence

F o r m a t

Each session will last 120 mins. It will consist of a 15-min. introductory exposition, followed by the reading, study, and discussion of the texts selected in each case.

B i o s

Philippe Lynes is a researcher with the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and the Philosophy programme at the University of Dundee. His research situates itself at the intersections of continental philosophy, comparative literary studies and the environmental humanities. Lynes is the author of the two-volume Dearth: Deconstruction after Speculative Realism (Northwestern University Press 2025 and 2026) and Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida’s General Ecology (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is the editor (with Matthias Fritsch and David Wood) of Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2018) and of two special issues of the Oxford Literary Review, ‘A Green Blanchot Revisited’ (2025) and ‘What Might Eco-Deconstruction Be?’ (with Timothy Clark, 2023). Lynes is also a translator and editor of French philosophy and literature, notably of the work of Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, and recently edited Derrida’s La Chose. Séminaire (1975-1977). He is associate editor of the journal Derrida Today, and one of the lead editors of Blanchot’s literary estate.

Alex Obrigewitsch is a Canadian, independent researcher with his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sussex. His work primarily focuses on the relations between philosophy and literature (each mutually troubled by the other), and particularly in the works of Maurice Blanchot and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. His PhD thesis has recently been published as Rethinking the Relation Between Philosophy and Literature: The Mortal Agony of Thought (Palgrave Macmillan 2026). His most recent articles may be found in the French Studies Bulletin, Oxford Literary Review, and in the collected volume Homo Mimeticus III: The Metamorphoses of Mimesis with Catherine Malabou (Leuven University Press, 2025). Finally, he has written a postface, entitled “Sans auctoritas” for the forthcoming publication of Pierre Madaule’s novel La faute solitaire (édition Rue des écoles, 2026).

Kim Schoof (she, 1992) is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. She recently completed a PhD at the intersection of literary studies and continental philosophy which reconceptualizes relationality in autobiographical writing in reference to the work of Judith Butler, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy and analyses this relationality in experimental yet widely read contemporary autobiographical literature by authors such as Maggie Nelson and Édouard Louis. Recent publications include an article on Clarice Lispector as thinker of fecundity and an article on literary experimentation in recent Dutch-language literature on childbirth. Apart from publishing in the academic context, she writes literary essays and book reviews for Dutch-language magazines and weeklies such as De Groene Amsterdammer, De Witte Raaf and Hollands Maandblad. She is an editor at the Dutch literary magazine De Gids.

Carlos A. Segovia (PhD) is an independent British-born, Spanish philosopher and writer, working on contemporary philosophy at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology and the philosophy of art. Among his publications, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (with Sofya Shaikut; Brill, 2023), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko; Bloomsbury, 2025), Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought (Peter Lang, 2026), Poetry and Philosophy after Blanchot and Zambrano: Between Word and World (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2028), and Post-Nihilist Aesthetic Explorations: From a Visual Minimal Pneumatology to a Musical Ontology of Experience (in preparation). He collaborates regularly with Incite Seminars, where he has facilitated courses like “Anarchia and Archai: Re-Imagining the Pre-Socratics” (with Hannes Schumacher), “Life as an Untotalizable Enigma: The Lame Ontology of Greek Mythology,” “Plato Inside Out – or: as You Never Imagined It,” “Between Death and Beauty: Diving into René Char’s Post-Nihilist Poetics,” Foucault’s Greeks as Savages? A Cross-cultural Approach to the Aesthetics of Existence (with Camilo Rios), and “Chaosmic Landscapes in Guattari’s Latest Works.”

R e g i s t r a t i o n

Non-Members (become a member)

Members

Solidarity: We are happy to make our offerings available at reduced or no-cost if you can not otherwise join. In exchange, we would like you to get involved at Incite Seminars by promoting this seminar on your blog, website or social media. Depending on your needs and time commitment, we can propose to you one of the following options:

(a) one post after the seminar ($75)
(b) one post during the seminar ($50)
(c) one post before (one week prior) and one after the seminar ($25)
(d) one post before (one week prior), one during, and one after the seminar ($0)

If you would like to request one of these options, please email us at inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com with the following information: (1) seminar of interest; (2) reason for requesting a solidarity ticket; (3) the option you choose. Please note that for options (c) and (d) we ask you to get in touch at least one week prior to the beginning of the seminar.

Thank you.