Description: In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul. This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.
Review Quotes:
Blanqui was the great conspiratorial revolutionary of the nineteenth century. Students of nineteenth-century thought will be grateful for this eloquent new translation. Frank Chouraqui's superb introduction locates Eternity in the Stars in the trajectory of Blanqui's thought and life and builds toward a crescendo that links the book to ruminations on the condition of modernity by the likes of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Benjamin and Borges. - Warren Breckman, Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.
Blanqui's Eternity by the Stars is a must read for anyone who has been enthralled by Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, or Borges. This book should certainly be in the canon of philosophical prison literature, alongside writers like Boethius and Gramsci. - Gary Shapiro, Prof. of Philosophy, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, University of Richmond
Here rendered and admirably introduced into English for the first time by Frank Chouraqui, Blanqui's cosmological prose stands alongside Blake's later prophecies, Poe's Eureka, and Borges' Ficciones as an homage to the human mind's capacity "to see the world in a grain of sand" (and "hold infinity in the palm of your hand"). - Richard Sieburth, Professor of French, Comparative Literature, NYU