ABSTRACT
I am mesmerised by the poetics of Blanchot’s writing about ‘the writing of the disaster’. It is a writing that poses the question of ‘the other’ as a question to itself and of itself. It hesitates and pauses as it writes of ‘the other’ and as it turns the other into a question that troubles the very concept of selfhood, at the same time as it fleshes out the self, allowing it to appear in writing as tormented, vulnerable and tired, faced as it is, right from the very beginning, with the face of the other. The question of ‘the other’ as posed by Maurice Blanchot, in the horizon in which one cannot not glimpse the ghostly presence of Emmanuel Levinas, is essentially a philosophical one, not in the sense that his writing contributes to an ethical philosophy (although it may do so), but in the sense that he demonstrates, with Levinas, that the whole philosophical enterprise can only be written as about ‘being’ and the adjacent questions of identity, essence and truth, with a prior forgetting of the intimate responsibility for the other who is, in a very precise sense, ‘before’ being, as that which makes being possible. Philosophy is ethics, and can only betray itself as ethics, if it forgets its intimate responsibility for the other.
