Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Kafka. Kafka's teeth: the literary gewissenbiss -- The ecstasy of judgment -- Embodied violence and the leap from the law: "in The penal colony" and The trial -- Degradation of the sublime: A hunger artist -- Blanchot. Pointed instants: Blanchot's exigencies -- The shell and the mask: L'arret de mort -- The dead look: The death mask, the corpse image, and the haunting of fiction -- Beckett. Beckett's voices and the paradox of expression -- Company, but not enough -- Conclusion: speech unredeemed: from the call of conscience to the torture of language.

Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer's vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from itand that leave it in ruins? This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture. If Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett mimic a sublime vocation i.

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