Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary by Leslie Hill

Hill, Leslie. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. London and New York. Routledge. 1997. ISBN 0-415-09174-8. $24.99. 302 pages.

There are many reasons to study Blanchot. Not least among them is that his writings, in particular but not limited to his fiction, are maddeningly ambiguous. Upon reading him we sense that he has dreamt a nightmare which upon awaking to the day, he does not wish to recount. It might be because he does not remember the entirety of its details. Perhaps, too, he believes, that, emerging from the night cave, if he turns his shoulder he will lose all he sought to retain; and yet, upon coming to the light of day, he is damned, struck mad by a blinding sun. Further, his writings provoke. Critics cannot be faulted in their wish to elucidate the details of his work, to disambiguate the dark passages. The novel of 1941, Thomas l’obscur, would be no less obscure had Blanchot not revised it, excising close to a third of it, for a new version (1950). In L’Arrêt de mort, a key paragraph, the last one, which has aroused the curiosity of Pierre Madaule and others, does not appear in the second edition (1971).