Faux Pas: Maurice Blanchot on the Ontology of Literature Faux Pas: Maurice Blanchot on the Ontology of Literature

IN 1954, MARTIN HEIDEGGER PUBLISHED A BOOK with the title Was heißt Denken? This question was not only ambiguous, it was chosen in order to mark in a single question a fundamental and guiding distinction in Heidegger’s thought. According to Heidegger, “Was heißt Denken?” can mean either “What is called thinking?” or, somewhat less felicitously, “What calls (for) thinking?”(113-114).’ By entitling his work Was heißt Denken?, Heidegger meant to stress the irreconcilable difference between on the one hand, what is ordinarily called “thinking” and, on the other, the vocation that constitutes authentic thinking. Now, a similar desire to distinguish the ordinary and vulgar from the deep and authentic is also a hallmark of the theoretical and critical work of Maurice Blanchot, one for which the guiding question might be rather ‘Was HeiBt Dichten?”: either “What is called (literary) writing?” or “What calls (literary) writing?” Blanchot’s work constitutes a veritable philosophy of literature, one that turns around this distinction between an everyday conception of literature (what is called “literature”) and the profoundly authentic vocation that is true literature. Unfortunately, this distinction and the philosophy of literature that it underwrites have been as unexamined as they have been influential: though Blanchot’s emulators are legion, his critics are scarce.2 My aim here is to undertake such a critical examination.