ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt today that Maurice Blanchot is one of the most challenging and influential literary and philosophical figures in the whole of the twentieth century. Published in the course of more than five decades, Blanchot’s writings are numerous and extensive, and include countless critical essays on literary and philosophical topics as well as several novels and shorter narratives (known in French as récits). For all that, Blanchot is a writer whose exact place is difficult to determine. He approaches philosophy with the recalcitrant singularity of a writer of fictions; he reads literature with the urgency of a philosopher; and he writes fiction with the compelling authority that exists only at the extreme limit where the possible gives way to the impossible. Straddling the literary and the philosophical, his writing remains irreducible to both and asks fundamental questions of each, while also dramatizing the incommensurability that sets the two discourses apart yet thereby brings them into endless dialogue. In his writing, as a result, Blanchot has radically transformed the terms in which it is henceforth possible-indeed necessary-not only to think the question of literature, but also to think that deeper question of which Blanchot writes in The Infinite Conversation that it is the questioning that eludes and outstrips, precedes and exceeds the question of the all.1
