Blanchot's Three Voices: Notes for Dark Times

Divided between the literary, the philosophico-critical, and the political, Blanchot's writing was particularly sensitive to the plurality of these divergent modes of expression, each of which, in distinctive ways, was fragmentary and incomplete. Literature, philosophy, and history in other words were never the site of totalising power, but always already premissed on their interruption. From that standpoint Blanchot reacted to the postwar threat of mass destruction represented by the atomic bomb. This paper examines how Blanchot's three discourses, without losing their mutual untranslatability, came into critical alignment in the late 1950s and 1960s, and assesses their implications for a response to today's climate emergency.