Eternity by the Stars

In a century of revolutions, final emancipations, and eschatological dreams, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui-the perpetual insurgent-composed Eternity by the Stars in 1871, imprisoned in the sea fortress of Fort du Taureau. From within his cell, Blanqui arrives at a stark and devastating proposition: given infinite time and a finite number of possible configurations, every event must recur, again and again, without end. Each life is lived an infinity of times across the expanse of the universe; nothing is ever concluded, nothing ever redeemed. History itself becomes a vast mechanism of repetition, indifferent to hope or despair.

At once lucid and vertiginous, scientific and hallucinatory, Blanqui's text stands as one of the strangest cosmological speculations of the nineteenth century-and one of its most haunting. This critical edition presents the work in a new English translation, with an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui, situating Blanqui within a wider constellation of thought from Friedrich Nietzsche to Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges, and tracing the afterlife of a text that continues to unsettle our understanding of time, action, and the modern condition.