Maurice Blanchot was a French thinker, novelist and journalist.
According to one witness:
The thread running through all his writing is the constant engagement with the 'question of literature', a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the profoundly strange experience of writing. For Blanchot, 'literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question' (Literature and the Right to Death).
Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in formulating his conception of literary language as anti-realist and distinct from everyday experience. Literary language, as double negation, demands that we experience the absence masked by the word as absence; it exposes us to the exteriority of language, an experience akin to the impossibility of death. Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question of the philosopher's death, showing how literature and death are both experienced as anonymous passivity. Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot rejects the possibility of an authentic response to death, because (to put it simply) he rejects the possibility of death, that is to say of the individual's experience of death, and thus rejects, in total, the possibility of understanding and "properly" engaging with it.
Blanchot also draws heavily from Franz Kafka, and his fictional work (like his theoretical work) is shot through by an engagement with Kafka's writing.
Blanchot's work was also strongly influenced by his friends Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas. Blanchot's later work in particular is influenced by Levinasian ethics and the question of responsibility to the Other. On the other hand, Blanchot's own literary works, like the famous Thomas the Obscure, heavily influenced Levinas' and Bataille's ideas about the possibility that our vision of reality is blurred because of the use of words (thus making everything you perceive automatically as abstract as words are). This search for the 'real' reality is illustrated by the works of Paul Celan and Stéphane Mallarmé.
His best-known fictional works are Thomas the Obscure, an unsettlingly abstract novel about the experience of reading and loss; Death Sentence; Aminadab and The Most High about a bureaucrat in a totalitarian state. His central theoretical works are "Literature and the Right to Death" (in The Work of Fire and The Gaze of Orpheus), The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, and The Writing of Disaster.
Only about three or so photographs of me survive.
"He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead – immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship." - Blanchot, "The Instant of my Death"
