ABSTRACT
"La loi du genre" was originally given as a lecture at an international colloquium on Genre held in July 1979 in Strasbourg. The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and sense of history. Madness has given birth to, thrown light on genre in the most dazzling, most blinding sense of the word. Paradoxically, and just as impossibly, the law of genre is also binding on that which draws genre into engendering, generations, genealogy, and degenerescence. Maurice Blanchot has often had occasion to modify the genre-designation from one version of his work to the next, or from one edition to the next.
