Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (review)

Hill, Leslie. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. Warwick Studies in European Philosophy. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 302 pages.

Leslie Hill explains the title of his book in a brief final chapter, where he writes that the name of Maurice Blanchot can be found, whether on a commentary or a literary text, alongside nearly all of those proper names that have come to signify our modernity. Blanchot’s oeuvre, creative and [End Page 134] critical, in its philosophical and generic diversity and in the diversity of his interests, circumscribes the radical turn in our time. Hence, Blanchot: contemporary. Yet the radical turn marked by this contemporary is a turning away from time, toward time’s outside, toward an infinite suspension of temporal teleology, a suspension that finds the present only in an absence, an infinite rupture between past and future. Extremity marks this impossible presence, this impossibility of contemporaneity, and Blanchot’s circumscription of our time describes a circle eternally bereft of a center. For Hill, and for us, Blanchot’s oeuvre offers a present that is already past and will always be yet to come.