The Writer's Refusal and Law's Malady

In this piece I want to (re)pose the relation of writing to law and politics, by interrogating the sense of a writing which is simultaneously an unwriting or undoing of legal and political discourse through Maurice Blanchot's involvement in the movement against the French colonial war in Algeria and, in particular, his framing of the Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War in 1960. The piece analyses how the sense of the event of the Declaration continues to call us to acknowledge a 'disastrous responsibility' to a non-community beyond the time of law and politics.