Maurice Blanchot (September 22, 1907_February 20, 2003) was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. His influence on later post_structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida is difficult to overestimate. It would be wrong to speak of Blanchot's work in terms of a coherent, all-encompassing 'theory', since it is a work founded on paradox and impossibility. If there is a thread running through all his writing, it is the constant engagement with the 'question of literature', a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the profoundly strange experience of writing. For Blanchot, 'literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question' (Literature and the Right to Death).
Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in formulating his conception of literary language as anti-realist and distinct from everyday experience. Literary language, as double negation, demands that we experience the absence masked by the word as absence; it exposes us to the exteriority of language, an experience akin to the impossibility of death. Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question of the philosopher's death, showing how literature and death are both experienced as anonymous passivity.
Blanchot's work was also strongly influenced by his friends Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas. Blanchot's later work in particular is influenced by Levinasian ethics and the question of responsibility to the Other.
His best_known fictional work is Thomas the Obscure, an unsettlingly abstract novel about the experience of reading.
Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question of the philosopher's death, showing how literature and death are both experienced as anonymous passivity.
Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot rejects the possibility of an authentic response to death, because (to put it simply) he rejects the possibility of death, that is to say of the individual's experience of death, and thus rejects, in toto, the possibility of understanding and "properly" engaging with it.
Blanchot was not ready to tell his life story, but we know that he was born in the village of Quain, in Saone et Loire, and went to university in Strasbourg and Paris.
Blanchot believed that it was in writing itself that the author found his purpose; there was the use of language, the reality of silence and the overwhelming reality of death.
Blanchot's devotion to language was comparable to the observations of his friend Georges Bataille on obsessions and impulses, and led him to support new writers, such as Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
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