Blanchot, the Desert, and Prophesised Disasters

This article concerns Maurice Blanchot's interpretation of the Book of Exodus and the ‘disaster’ of the shattered tablets that precipitated the Jewish people's wandering in the desert for 40 years. I show how Blanchot's recovery of a certain Jewish tradition and idiom may both motivate and inform our ecological reconsideration of the meaning of the ‘without’: of our being today ‘without’ horizon or future, of that spectre of a world ‘without’ us. I argue that we must adopt a ‘prophetic’ thought or thinking that is adequate to this ‘without’, one that suspends the present (and all presence) for the sake of the other.