‘Our Fate, Which Remains Shackled to the Hardened Crust of a Planet’: Blanchot and Derrida’s Lautréamont

This article examines a certain return to nature in Blanchot, particularly in his readings of Lautréamont, albeit one that cannot be reduced to the triumph of light over dark, dawn over night, and life over death. Building from the expanded scene of vegetal metamorphosis that concludes the recently published manuscript version of his novel Aminadab, I show how Blanchot eschews the vitalist, indeed humanist metaphysics that continue to define much work in ecocriticism, particularly in its new materialist, material-ecocritical or elemental-ecocritical offshoots. Drawing from Blanchot's major writings on Lautréamont—‘Lautréamont’ in Faux Pas (1943), ‘Lautréamont and Miller’ in The Work of Fire (1949) and ‘The Experience of Lautréamont’ in Lautréamont and Sade (1949)—as well as Derrida's unpublished Lautréamont seminar (1970–1), this article proposes a few reflections on what Lautréamont calls ‘our fate, which remains shackled to the hardened crust of a planet’.