ABSTRACT
I have been reading Blanchot for precisely half a century, since the appearance of Faux pas in 1943, the year in which Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Bataille’s Inner Experience were published. Perhaps it would be helpful to give a comprehensive outline of his workspecifically, his work as a writer, not his journalistic output, about which other contributors to this volume will write. Blanchot’s books fall into three genres: the critical work, the fiction, and finally two books for which there is no generic term, The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster, which appeared in 1973 and 1980 respectively.1
