ABSTRACT
At the beginning of ‘Literature and the right to death’ Blanchot remarks that all answers to the question ‘What is literature?’ have proved to be meaningless. Further, to the astonishment of all whose approach to literature has been guided by this very question, its answers have underrated and disparaged literature. Even more, the ‘what is’ question, whose form (‘the form of the question’) assumes an essence or substratum for its object, becomes spurious when applied to literature. The question ‘What is literature?’ is a reflective and cognitive question (pp.22-3).1 Such a question and the reflective attitude that it presupposes immediately disintegrate in the face of poetry or the novel, Blanchot holds. However, having thus failed to understand literature does not mean that understanding would be altogether out of the question. Quite the contrary. The lack of essence that the meaningless and belittling answers to the essentializing thrust of the ‘what is’ question imply, as well as the tendency of the reflective approach to consume itself in the presence of literature, or rather of literature’s lack of an essence present to itself, might well provide auspicious conditions for an understanding of literature whose questioning form would be distinct both from the cognitive question addressed by the philosopher about the nature of literature and from the writer’s self-questioning, his own doubts and scruples.
