‘So be it’: Blanchot's Challenge to Ecocriticism

Maurice Blanchot's ‘The Apocalypse Is Disappointing’ deals with the danger of an atomic war that might encompass the entire world and annihilate human life on the planet. It is in this context that, on the one hand, he defends modern science and its experiments with truth, while on the other hand, he advocates the creation of a global communist society. If scientific experiments cannot be risked without putting humankind at risk and opening up the possibility of humanity perishing, then only the unified collective subject of a global communist society is capable of truly and rationally destroying humanity and the world as a whole. Annihilation is the possible cost to be paid for revolutionary change and the overcoming of social antagonism, just as it is the possible cost for research, for stimulating and satisfying the will to truth and the will to knowledge inherent in human beings. Blanchot sides with Nietzsche and exclaims: ‘So be it!’. Ecocriticism, if it is to make ‘any sense whatsoever’, has no choice but to try and measure up to this double wager.