The naïve calculation of the negative

Maurice Blanchot

pp. 86-110

in: Shane Weller, Literature, philosophy, nihilism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

As anticipated by Paul de Man in an essay first published in 1966,¹ Maurice Blanchot has come to be considered one of the most significant French writers of the twentieth century, his theorization of the literary anticipating that of, among others, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and his critical encounters with the thought of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas in particular making him a touchstone in current thinking on the relationship between literature and what Leslie Hill has termed an "ethics of alterity" (Hill 1997: 52). In the growing critical commentary on Blanchot, however, his engagement with the concept of nihilism in his theorization of the literary has remained little analysed, the term occurring rarely (if at all) in the major critical works on his essays, novels, and récits.² It might therefore come as something of a surprise that Blanchot's engagement with this concept is in fact a sustained one, the term being deployed as early as the first pages of his first collection of literary-critical essays, Faux Pas (1943), and as late as The Writing of the Disaster (1980).