Blanchot and the Anarchic Anachrony of Style

Abstract

Blanchot’s relation to literary studies is problematic. His work is hardly containable within disciplinary boundaries — ‘critical essayist’, ‘experimental author’ and ‘philosopher’ are labels that promise to but do not quite do justice to his writing, which tends to radically hybridise if not transcend generic considerations. His status in that strand of continental literary theory, whose genealogy can be traced back through figures like de Man, Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger and Nietzsche, is firmly solid, although this tradition is in itself characterised by ambiguous relations to literary studies. And even here, Blanchot’s continued relevance is guaranteed primarily through the almost obsessive way in which a number of thinkers keep returning to Blanchot; Derrida, for instance, is very often on the marges of Blanchot. One way to account for this ambivalence is not only the difficulty of Blanchot’s work, which, it must be said, is not attributable to any obscurity of style or use of jargon, but the resistance of his thought to being developed into an applicable method. Indeed, resistance to linearity of thinking and to applicability, and a simultaneous attraction towards the fragmentary, interruption and what he terms ‘the impossible’ — that which is beyond conceptualisation — mean that Blanchot keeps escaping institutionalisation.