ABSTRACT
There are five books where Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) names Kierkegaard directly. Two of them are important sources for his influence on Blanchot and place in Blanchot’s thought: the early collection of essays, Faux Pas, opening with a piece on the journals, as well as an introduction featuring Kierkegaard, and later, The Space of Literature. The other mentions in The Work of Fire, The Infinite Conversation and The Writing of the Disaster are more incidental, but help clarify Blanchot’s core ambivalence toward Kierkegaard. He reads Kierkegaard largely in relation to Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), whose artistic practices explain “the work” of literature in terms of a triple task: solitude, the sacred, and negation.
