Black Holes in the Space of Literature: Gravitational Spacetime Singularities Applied to Maurice Blanchot’s Fictionality Face-to-Face with the Mystery of the Other

Abstract

This article investigates and substantiates how Maurice Blanchot’s novels and récits collapse under their own gravity or in Blanchot’s words under “the gravity of one single word,” to form spacetime singularities/Neuters in the space of literature, where conception of the classical Einsteinian nonquantum spacetime continuum breaks down and where Hawking-Penrose theorems of spacetime singularities supersede; even though this supersedure entails General Theory of Relativity as its substratum. While spatiotemporal issues in Blanchot’s fictionality have to do with classical spacetime continuum and curvature, with establishing their legitimation through responsible and ethical relation with other persons as the only certain foothold to get at the authentic essence of time under the tutorship of Emmanuel Levinas, they are on the other hand subsisting on quantum theories engaged with the mystery of the Other whose wishful authenticity seems infinite, uncertain, and ungraspable ad infinitum. This is where this twofold Otherness having been dragging and spaghettificating itself from the beginning of time towards its end; that is, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, does emerge “to find the temporal transcendence of the present toward the mystery of the future” as Levinas asserts, so as to actualize our “horizontal escape” towards an infinite ecstasy face-to-face with “the Other that is time.”