BIOGRAPHY
BARNABY NORMAN
Following an MA in 20th Century History of Art at Goldsmiths, 3 years spent living + working in Paris before researching a PhD in French Studies at King’s College London
Thesis on Blanchot + Derrida reading Mallarmé published as a monograph by the academic press Legenda
Articles on Derrida / Blanchot / Mallarmé in leading academic journals, inc. the Oxford Literary Review
Translated 6 books of french philosophy, inc. key works on aesthetics by Stiegler. Received a 2020 French Voices award for excellence in translation for forthcoming After Law by Laurent de Sutter
research
Mallarmé’s Sunset, Poetry at the end of Time (Legenda, 2014)
This book developed out of my doctoral thesis and analyses Jacques Derrida’s and Maurice Blanchot’s readings of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Situating Mallarmé at the culmination of Hegel’s Aesthetics, as the apotheosis of his art historical system (figured across Mallarmé’s text by the motif of the sunset), the book asks why Mallarmé was of such fundamental importance to Blanchot and Derrida.
In close readings of key poems, the book demonstrates how Mallarmé’s poetics seeks to narrate and enact the absorption of a transcendent measure of value within the work.
This movement from transcendence to immanence opens the space of literature (Blanchot) and the general text (Derrida). It is the passage to autonomy.
TRANSLATION
