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WRAP THESIS Stamp 1999
The Work of Friendship: Blanchot, Bataille, Hegel
A Warwick dissertation on friendship, complicity, sovereignty, and impossible relation in Blanchot, Bataille, and Hegel.
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Core idea
Stamp treats friendship as a difficult philosophical and literary relation rather than a moral sentiment. The dissertation asks how friendship is entangled with impersonality, sacrifice, sovereignty, and the impossibility of full communion.
It stages a triangular argument across Blanchot, Bataille, and Hegel, using friendship to test the limits of politics, communication, and recognition. The text repeatedly shifts between literature, philosophy, and questions of relation.
For the Warwick map, the thesis matters because it broadens what counts as formation context. It shows a department in which philosophy and literature could be forced together around relation, loss, and impossible community.
How to read this text
Read the summary of thesis and introduction first, then move to the chapters on impossible friendship and sovereignty. Those sections make the central tension legible quickly.
Keep an eye on how friendship changes register from ethics to politics to poetics. The argument is strongest when it lets those frames interfere with one another.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 24
By passing through a reading of Kojeve's account of the 'master-slave dialectic' in Chapter Three, we will show how Bataille's composition of sovereignty, friendship and the work of art is founded upon his "'Hegelian" opposition' to Hegel and the dialectical 'work' of philosophy. Finally, in Chapter 4, we will return to Blanchot's essays of the late 1940's and 1950's in order to bring together the two strands of the preceding enquiry - friendship and the 'work
Definition · paragraph 24
By passing through a reading of Kojeve's account of the 'master-slave dialectic' in Chapter Three, we will show how Bataille's composition of sovereignty, friendship and the work of art is founded upon his "'Hegelian" opposition' to Hegel and the dialectical 'work' of philosophy.
History · paragraph 2
The work of friendship : Blanchot, Bataille, Hegel Richard Stamp Ph. D. Thesis in Philosophy and Literature submitted to the University of Warwick in the Department of Philosophy September 1999 0
History · paragraph 2
D. Thesis in Philosophy and Literature submitted to the University of Warwick in the Department of Philosophy September 1999 0
Method · paragraph 20
In Chapter 3, therefore, it will be a matter of allowing Kojeve's account of Hegel to unfold so that it becomes possible to identify those structures which Bataille exploits and exascerbates in his characterisations of sovereignty, friendship and the work of art. The question of how Blanchot reads Hegel, therefore, is vital to understanding the exact nature of his differences with Bataille over the rela
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.