Marking Time

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.