About

Jeff Fort is an Associate Professor of French and the Department Chair in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis. His research and teaching interests include twentieth century French studies, film studies, and critical theory, with a focus on modern German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger and twentieth century French thought. Fort's scholarly work has extensively examined the writings of Maurice Blanchot, as well as German authors such as Kafka and Nietzsche. He has contributed to the field through translation work, translating significant texts by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Roubaud, and Jacques Derrida. His notable publication includes the book 'The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett' published by Fordham University Press in 2014. Fort's current research project, titled 'Effacements: Blanchot, the Deathly Image, and the Cinema of Disfiguration,' explores the relationship between Blanchot's writings on the image, cinema, and the representation of death, engaging with filmmakers and writers such as Roland Barthes, Robert Bresson, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. He has also published poetry and numerous articles on topics related to film, literature, and philosophy.

Research topics

• Art
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Art history
• Psychoanalysis
• Metallurgy
• Materials science
• Visual arts
• History
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• <i>Critique du récit pur</i> : gleam of time in Maurice Blanchot’s narratives

  Textual Practice · 2024-07-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Maurice Blanchot's itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned right-wing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a 'pure novel', inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this pure form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that 'pure' literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot's fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author's factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.

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• Le fond du film: Worlds, Images, and the Machining of Grounds (or: Blanchot Not/Beyond Nancy)

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  • Materials science
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• Imagination’s Dead: Beckett’s Catastrophic Realism

  2022-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• André Bazin's Eternal Returns: An Ontological Revision

  Film-Philosophy · 2021-02-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The recent publication of André Bazin's Écrits complets (2018), an enormous two-volume edition of 3000 pages which increases ten-fold Bazin's available corpus, provides opportunities for renewed reflection on, and possibly for substantial revisions of, this key figure in film theory. On the basis of several essays, I propose a drastic rereading of Bazin's most explicitly philosophical notion of “ontology.” This all too familiar notion, long settled into a rather dust-laden couple (“Bazin and ontology”) nonetheless retains its fascination. Rather than attempting to provide a systematic reworking of this couple along well established lines, particularly those defined by realism and indexicality, this article proposes to shift the notion of ontology in Bazin from its determination as actual existence toward a more radical concept of ontology based on the notion of mimesis, particularly as articulated, in a Heideggerian mode, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This more properly ontological concept, also paradoxically and radically improper, is shown to be at work already in Bazin's texts, and it allows us to see that far from simplistically naturalizing photographic technology, Bazin does the contrary: he technicizes nature. If Bazin says that the photograph is a flower or a snowflake, he also implies that, like photographs, these are likewise a kind of technical artifact, an auto-mimetic reproduction of nature. Bazin likewise refers to film as a kind of skin falling away from the body of History, an accumulating pellicule in which nature and history disturbingly merge. This shifted perspective on Bazin's thinking is extended further in reference to Georges Didi-Huberman on the highly mimetic creatures known as phasmids, insects that mimic their environement. I extend this into the dynamic notion of eternal return, an implicit dimension of Bazin's thinking, clarified here in reference to Giorgio Agamben and the “immemorial image” which, like Bazin's “Death Every Afternoon,” presents an eminently repeatable deathly image, an animated corpse-world that can be likened to hell.

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• 2. The Ecstasy of Judgment

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-11-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• L'Antichambre litt�raire: Roland Barthes's Regressive Search

  Mosaic · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Art

  This essay shows that Roland Barthes's La Chambre claire, a work engaged in a revolt against the author's former critical positions, is overdetermined by a desire, announced contemporaneously in his seminars, to write a novel roughly modeled on the Proustian Search; that this Search, as echoed and pursued in this text, drastically distorts and narrows its treatment of photography; and that this restricted treatment of photography, centred on the well-known studium/punctum distinction, reveals a troubling impassivity before images of historical violence, which in turn is linked with a number of regressive gestures and attitudes with deep and likewise troubling political implications.

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• Rumors of the Outside

  Routledge eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Art
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• Poetics of History: Rousseau and the Theater of Originary Mimesis

  2019-02-05 · 2 citations

  bookSenior author

  Rousseau’s opposition to the theater is well known: Far from purging the passions, it serves only to exacerbate them, and to render them hypocritical. But is it possible that Rousseau’s texts reveal a different conception of theatrical imitation, a more originary form of mimesis? Over and against Heidegger’s dismissal of Rousseau in the 1930s, and in the wake of classic readings by Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the deeply philosophical importance of Rousseau as a thinker who, without formalizing it as such, established a dialectical logic that would determine the future of philosophy: an originary theatricality arising from a dialectic between "nature" and its supplements.Beginning with a reading of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Lacoue-Labarthe brings out this dialectic in properly philosophical terms, revealing nothing less than a transcendental thinking of origins. For Rousseau, the origin has the form of a "scene"—that is, of theater. On this basis, Rousseau’s texts on the theater, especially the Letter to d’Alembert, emerge as an incisive interrogation of Aristotle’s Poetics. This can be read not in the false and conventional interpretation of this text that Rousseau had inherited, but rather in relation to its fundamental concepts, mimesis and katharsis, and in Rousseau’s interpretation of Greek theater itself. If for Rousseau mimesis is originary, a transcendental structure, katharsis is in turn the basis of a dialectical movement, an Aufhebung that will translate the word itself (for, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, Aufheben translates katharein). By reversing the facilities of the Platonic critique, Rousseau inaugurates what we could call the philosophical theater of the future

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• Blanchot and the Outside of Literature by William S. Allen

  ˜The œFrench review · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Blanchot and the Outside of Literature by William S. Allen Jeff Fort Allen, William S. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature. Bloomsbury, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5013-4524-1. Pp. xiii + 217. Author of Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (2016), which incisively places Blanchot alongside Adorno, interrogating both thinkers on the question of negativity and the artwork, Allen has continued those interrogations in a remarkable study devoted entirely to Blanchot. Whereas the central stakes of the previous book involved the notion of autonomy, here the pressure is placed rather on the"outside" of literature, taken in several senses: the outside in the sense of the world in which literature takes place, a historical and political dimension of the work that both inhabits and exceeds it, and in which the work itself causes strange and often difficult to discern disruptions and effects; the outside in the peculiar Blanchotian sense of a thought that, dispersed in language, is radically alienated from itself and its own possibility; and most specifically and persistently, the outside as a form of materiality—what Allen often calls contingency—which the linguistic work, the work of literature, must always found itself on, without ever being able to contain, control, or in the end even speak it. As Foucault did in his homage to Blanchot, "La pensée du dehors" (1966), Allen locates this outside in a privileged manner in Blanchot's fiction. Since there is no "locating" the outside, in the most radical and unqualifiable sense at issue here, Allen sees in Blanchot's fictional writings, especially those spanning the period from 1948 to 1962, the most intensive and fine-grained engagement with a dimension of writing that contests the dialectics of meaning, even as it necessarily articulates itself with conceptual and signifying systems it cannot exist without. As Allen nicely puts it, we can see Blanchot's most stripped-down texts of the 1950s, such as Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas (1953),"as an exploration of the microstructure of derangement," analysis of which (however aporetic it will inevitably be) is required for understanding "how any kind of broader relation, historical or critical, ethical or communal, may develop" (12). Following key works during this period also allows Allen to demonstrate the "impressively coherent" (15) passage from the earlier novels and criticism, on the one hand, through the récits, and on toward the fragmentary and "conversational" or dialogic writing (L'entretien infini [1969], Le pas au-delà [1973], L'écriture du désastre [1980]) that would later mark Blanchot's work so profoundly—and that began as an extension of the fictions, namely in the last work discussed here, L'attente l'oubli (1962). Beginning with a fascinating chapter on Blanchot's last novel, Le très-haut (1948), which foregrounds the phenomena of contagion and pathology as fundamental forms of both writing and politics, Allen devotes chapters to the fictional works already mentioned (Le très-haut, Celui qui..., [End Page 187] L'attente l'oubli) as well as to Le dernier homme (1957). Allen shows throughout that a profound and rigorous engagement with Blanchot's enigmatic work can be as lucid as it is respectful of this work's density and difficulty. Jeff Fort University of California, Davis Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

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• Poetics of History

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2019-02-05 · 2 citations

  bookSenior author
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Frequent coauthors

• Jean‐Luc Nancy

  17 shared

• Marc Nichanian

  11 shared

• G. M. Goshgarian

  11 shared

• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

  5 shared

• C. Merck

  Max Planck Institute for Physics

  2 shared

• A. N. Otte

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  2 shared

• K. Mase

  2 shared

• Hans‐Georg Gadamer

  ECW Press (Canada)

  2 shared

Labs

• French and ItalianPI