ABSTRACT
Maurice Blanchot is a thinker, neither a critic nor a philosopher in the strict sense of either word, whose quest as a reader of literature is 'to find out what the fact that the poem, the song, exists really signifies'. He is clear that it does not signify anything in aesthetics. Blanchot learns slightly different things from Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé, however, although both occur in the difficult and painful field of modern religious experience. Mallarmé taught Blanchot a great deal about how the felt absence of God could lead one to the 'pure novel', a work of fiction that could come about only through the insights of Mallarmé's atheistic mysticism. Blanchot's affirmation of the sacred in Hölderlin, centered on tragic sacrifice, makes no reference to the role that Christ plays in the poetry.
