Any fan of Foucault or Blanchot should greatly appreciate these two short homages. Maurice Blanchot was originaly a literary critic who later wrote fictions, philosophical essays, and unusual hybrids of the two. A contemporary and friend of Levinas, his work has had a huge impact on post WWII literature and continental philosophy. With astonishingly articulate language (as translated by Massumi), Foucault offers both a insightful commentary on Blanchot and an idea of what means to exit in the space of writing fiction. It is difficult to categorize Foucaults writing;perphaps he is best known as a writer who encouraged a modified (archealogical) method of examining history, and using this method prolifically wrote social/cultural/philosophical commentary. Blanchot writes on Foucaults writing with clarity and appreciation. If you are unfamiliar with these authors, this book makes for a good introduction; these writers may change the way you think, and you should read more. If you know these authors then you should definitely sympathize with the homage aspect: it's a great quick read (though you will probably need to read the layered language five times, and again late in life.)

The first part of the book is a short story by Blanchot and the seond part is Derrida's analysis. Derrida's critique is amazing stuff. He performs a close-reading, line by line. Derrida is one of the greatest thinkers, if not the most thought provoking theorist/critic, of our time.

Better to read this than to read ten manuals on the subject of writing.

Blanchot evokes the non-presence of death in writing, writing's necessary complicity with death. This death, however, is not the Hegelian death that would negate and finalize the subject (cf Arendt), fixing it in a form on which judgement could finally be passed. No, true to his essay on the absence of any right to death (which appears in _The Work of Fire_ and _The Station Hill Blanchot Reader_), this death never occurs. This death is never present, happens at no particular time, and happens to no one (see also _The Writing of the Disaster_). It cannot be said to happen or occur at all. It is never present, and being so, shares with writing the latter's most unearthly, strange quality - the absense of the writer and of that about which has been written.

In addition to being the most profound book on writing about which I can write with any knowledge, this is also Blanchot's most coherent and accessible set of essays. They possess something of a centrality of purpose and, together, make up something of a book, rather than the collections which make up the remainder of his critical and quasi-critical work. This may be a failing in the eyes of most Blanchotophiles, but it provides a bridge from the normal style of scholarly exposition to his more challenging investigations, and can be recommended as a first approach for the reader who is unfamiliar with his work. Nevertheless, some prior acquaintance with Rilke, Mallarme, Hoelderlin, and Kafka will be of immeasurable aid.

Most importantly, this one stands as its own example of writing that utterly lacks completion, that is haunted throughout with a palpable sensation of absence, a sensation that is at once as appealing as it is astonishing and unsettling.

The tendency of prose to settle while being read will not be found in this book. Stability of the mind will be a memory worth forgetting as you embark into a personalized world of disturbing imagery (disturbing in a good sense)and ambiguity at its absolute height. A must read for anyone interested in non'linear literature.

I have been reading and re-reading this nearly "page-less"(about 80 pages including the translator's introduction ) volume of ___?(what is it? autobiography?poetry?) for about 4 years now . I can't get it out of my mind. I was hard-pressed to read any philosophy until I tried this remarkable author's work. Since then, I've gradually made my way into this new kind of "inquiry" mainly from the inspiration he has provided in this particular volume. Blanchot was born in 1907 so he would have been nearly 80 years old when this was first published in France in 1983. It is difficult reading and you may come away from the initial reading perplexed. Stay with it. It takes some years getting used to this new way of comporting your "self" in the world which the author seems to offer as a kind and patronly "Instructor". Though it is only a few pages, I can't read it all at once. Instead I'll pick it up every few months and read some of it. Usually this is when I am trying to find someone (like Blanchot) who might want to talk to me about why things seem so hopeless in this technologically driven society. Blanchot even quotes another writer here (Edgar Morin) who expresses the view he(Blanchot) shares "in the possibility of another society and another humanity". This also reveals (even as it conceals) some of Blanchot's major themes including the mystery of "friendship", an "impossible" relation enigmatically exposed to the light of day, that is if we get a glimpse of it at all. ( I recall in another essay, these words that Blancot says have been attributed to Aristotle:"Oh my friends, there is no friend"). This might give some sense of the kind of measure and question Blanchot "risks" in each sentence he writes. Here in THE UNAVOWABLE COMMMUNITY, we have the "evidence" most especially of a significant vulnerability toward friendship as it relates to Blanchot's testimonial of a crucial, yet "unavowable" bond with Georges Baitaille and Marguerite Duras (who by the way wrote the book that the movie "The Lover" was based on as well as the screen-play to the film "Hiroshima,Mon Amour"). I only began my interest in Western Philosophy recently and Blanchot has been the main reason, though I have heard he is difficult and "impenetrable" at times. That surprises me! Considering that I have not read deeply in Philosophy until recently, though I did read quite a bit of "literature". Blanchot entrusts some questions to us in the hopes that we might "choose to carry" them with us; and maybe entrust it to others in our stead ( "live the questions as Rilke told a young poet in a letter once) . I can't get away from these deeply personal reminisences. By the same token,once the reader becomes accustomed (somewhat) to the "difficulty"(or newness) of this kind of writing (as well as a kind of "modesty" on Blanchot's account) the reader gradually moves toward some kind of gap that separates his/her experience from that of Blanchot. Somehow, Blanchot's gazes turns quite movingly and touchingly into the visual context of community and friendship. Unless ,of course, it is the other way around.Perhaps, our sense of the community (or whatever may or may not characterize the social relation) IS the very "visual" or "lighted" place risked or illumined in any speech offering or gesture. Its an "unavowable" relation. A relation which Giorgio Agamben characterizes as "irreducibly social and ethical". Otherwise, perhap there is a darkening region now nearer to the eyes, which by our relation and openness towards each other (or the other) changes the homestead of"light"and its shadings into hope, perception, or memory of light ( or is this"re-presention that I'm speaking of?). Somehow Blanchot's tone is toward "meaning " but without asseting itself as anything "meaningful" . To close let me mention two things. Blanchot led me to Giorgio Agamben's book "The Coming Community" because of its similar sounding title , and I quoted from another Agamben book "Stanzas" above. Also, I'm reminded of Blanchot's appropriation of Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent", to which he offers this toward the end of this book of his(Blancot's) we have been discussing here:"given that by enunciating it he has not been able to impose silence on himself....does indicate that in the final analysis one has to talk in order to remain silent. But with what kinds of words?" I first read that sentence 4 years ago, and I still wonder what kind of words we are and are not using still. Up until now, I've been rather silent about the issue.

To rate this book is to do its author a disservice. I might as well have given the text one star, for it makes no 'sense'. It is a multiple work, in the spirit of Nietzsche's aphoristic style, that attempts to lend a few scents to the reader. These scents might lead one to a space of silence in which the artist or writer relates with the source of his or her law, the inactive voice of reason. Can silence be rated? Our mistake is thinking that it can be rated and adhered to, giving rise to the disaster. The disaster is always already past; it is embedded in the way we read, the way we write, and the way we relate to texts. The disaster is something like the silencing of silence, and Blanchot's project attempts to rimind us to forget what we've read, as a historical community, and remember that which gives us pleasure in creating attempts to communicate with others.

I don't know how to answer the question, "was sseor@aol.com's response helpful?"

Perhaps it is not so helpful to readers as it is to sseor@aol.com's psychiatrist.

By the above I don't mean to imply that Blanchot's works are not coherent or that they don't merit reading. I think Blanchot is one of the most important writers of this century. His work is far more significant than Foucault or Derrida, not to denigrate them or deny the vitality of thier work. Readers of Derrida's more recent works (Politics of Friendship, the Gift of Death, Cinders, even Postcards) will find Blanchot quite worthwhile.

In The Infinite Conversation are an extensive collection of essays and dialogues composed by Blanchot over several years and most of them originally published seperately. In this book Blanchot explores in a rigorous and almost orderly fashion "what it would mean for something like literature" to exist. Starting with the idea of literature he explores, through consideration of literature--Hoderlin, Homer, Kafka, Levinas and others--the vacant center of such concepts as identity, agency and subjectivity. Almost ex nihilo, Blanchot constructs an ethics that asks extraordinary responsibility from us without drawing on God, natural law, humanism, or any kind of center.

After reading Blanchot, the weight of words weighs heavily. Anyone with even a slight interest in continental philosophy ought to read this book.

Among Blanchot's publications in American (English), this is one the reader can turn to repeatedly. The index is wonderful, and the Introduction by the translator is very helpful when trying to situate ourselves within the con-text of Blanchot's work.

I never start at the beginning of the book and read it in order. Instead I'll open it randomly and scan the words until I am drawn in, somehow.

Or I'll turn to the marvel of an Index at the back of this book and scan this until I find a topic, or textual arrangement that grabs at me.

Or if you find yourself wanting to pursue a curiosity with a certain writer, poet, or intellectual/thinker it is fascinating to turn to the Index and see what Blanchot's take on it might be.

Make this book your own! Follow its coursings and angulations perhaps as a way of holding your own mind-ful inquiries (conversations) against the page as a mirror and watch where the light dances, refacts, or is obscured. And the cracks, silvered coating ('reflecting glaze'?), and mirrorized display will work and 'un-work' the space which surrounds or unbinds you. And of this "space" what of it is parlayed by the 'space of literature'( to borrow what Blanchot refers to in another book of his ). Isn't this an uncanny notion (or how is it we forget?): that we make our way in the world by thinking, and speaking? And so what or how are we to 'read' into that? What is the topology of this, as such? Do we enter the maps as 'surs'? (Thinking of Michael Palmer's poetry here, perhaps).

What is it that draws us on? What 'calculus' observes or holds us within a 'recognizable context'? Or what one are we observing and holding to, without criticism or re-course?(Palmer again:"An indefinite calculus watches/ writes and re-writes")

What is determined within this "sphere" of recognized forms, gestures, figures, and their articulation,where-in we recognize our movements:

the re-formed un-maskings, shown coverings, and 'un-workings', which pass on to the un-recognizable, the un-accountable, the unavowable? Only to make their way back again, but is this re-transmitted, re-circuited? Or are, we though "acting", somehow short-circuited in our thinking and speaking? Do we have a prayer? Thanks be to Maurice Blanchot...but somehow... and yet...?

Now, finally, to end this review, one way to adjust to the "infinite" in the title of his book, looking at some lines by Isaac-the-Blind,who writes:

For every sphere fills itself from a sphere above it. //

& they are given in order to meditate from the sphere that appears //

in your heart, to meditate //

up to the infinite. //

For there is no path to prayer other than that whereby //

man is sucked up by finite words & rises in thinking to the infinite//

Imagine yourself a leading French theorist: here is a recipe for that troublesome new 'recits'- return to an earlier work (in this case, his first, 'Death Sentence'/L'arrete de Mort')- find a germane incident within that book- rip those pages out. Now set up two charatcters in a situation that mirrors the originary fictional incident- have those two characters try to analyze the event's 'implication' from within the same setting. Digress frequently. Sound a little too Stoppardian for you? Not sure you'll find the Godot-like intertextual rib-tickles very compelling? For fiction his short-stories 'The last word', or 'The idyll' are easily a thousand nights more lucid; for heavy theory, 'The Writing of Disaster' is detonative. This work sadly's just oblivious...

This book is a foray into the deepest heart of relationships, and leaves one unguarded (as few other books have attained) to experience the letting-go that is so difficult for any of us to do, both as singular individuals and in our relationships with our significant others. This *experience* of letting-go is remarkably accessible in this book, and is remarkable for that fact alone, as few books can produce this sort of insight into the human condition of the notion of property, both in our relationships and in our daily experiences. It is an unsettling, uncanny book that stays with you after you have read it. Highly recommended.

The text is an intimate engagment with a question of relation. Perhaps it is not in anyone's (including Blanchot's...) interest to somehow portray a more "accurate" picture of the world, to write a "better" narrative or récit, rather, perhaps there is something more fundamental at stake which places even the practice of reading into question. And if this is at all true, it one of the foremost reasons why I hold almost all of Blanchot's texts in the highest regard.

L'arret de mort (Death Sentence)is a beautifully crafted piece of literary art...and one which starkly draws the boundary line between what is perceived as 'The Art of the Novel' in France and its dumbed-down American counterpart. Blanchot (along with Bataille, Robbe-Grillet and countless others; certainly not all from France) is a writer who dares to ask what fiction is, dares to redefine the form, re-examine his new definitions...he dares to make his novels about ideas, not mere bedtime stories (or worse, Hollywood film-treatments). From the first sentence to the last this novel draws the reader into considerations of our mortality, of the haunting trajectory of our experience, and most daring of all, it questions the very nature of literary endeavor. Magnificent.

A short, harrowing work interested neither in description, character development, nor cleverness but rather in staring death in the eye. If you like Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, or even Raymond Carver you doubtless may detest this abstract gift of a conflicted consciousness of a taciturn man in love with a sickly, dying young woman during troubled times. Perhaps the supreme study of the impossibility of fidelity, let alone true love, in a world where death hangs in the air as the possibility of total absence or, more frighteningly, as the cipher of a total presence condemned to repeat its secret to deaf ears.

Death Sentence is awesome. There are many themes in this book, and if you pay any attention, and that keeps the book interesting. It is alternatingly bleak, hilarious, and sometimes bleakly hilarious.
The funniest line might be, "What do I care about that honor, or even that friend, or even his unhappiness? My own is immense, and next to it other people mean nothing." Or perhaps the line that the narrator throws in about sleeping in open graves may strike your fancy. If you do not find these bleakly funny, perhaps you are not morbid enough to read this book.
Several questions which may keep you up at night are, "Who is the narrator? What is Blanchot saying about French, or other, Cultures? What is the significance of casts? Why does everyone live in hotel rooms? How does Blanchot deal with the concept of death?

"Our dreams are a second life."-Gerard de Nerval
"Dream---a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows---is essentially poetry."-Michel Leiris

Michel Leiris' "Nights as Day, Days as Night": In the introduction to Leiris' forty year collection of dreams, Maurice Blanchot asks, "Who dreams in dreams? Who is the "I" of dreams? Who is the person to whom this "I" is attributed, admitting that there is one? Between the person who is sleeping and the person who is the subject of dream events there is a fissure..." The dislocation which seems to be the source of who exactly we are in dreams may spring from the fact that in our dreams everything takes on an almost theatrical aspect, sometimes we are spectator & sometimes we are actor, other times we are a combination of the two. One of Leiris earliest poetic mentors was Max Jacob, & two of the dreams related in the book involve him. In fact the manner in which Leiris records some of his dreams are reminiscent of certain of Max Jacob's prose poems. The following one by Jacob, "Literary Standards" would not be out of place in Leiris' book: "A dealer in Havana sent me a cigar wrapped in gold which had been smoked a little. The poets sitting with me said he'd done it to mock me, but the old Chinese who was our host said it was the custom in Havana when one wished to show great honor. I brought out two magnificent poems a scholar friend had written down translations of for me because I admired them when I heard them read. The poets said they were well-known and worthless. The old Chinese said they couldn't have known the poems because they only existed in a single manuscript copy in Pehlvi, a language they didn't know. Then the poets started laughing loudly like children while the old Chinese gazed at us sadly." As Blanchot stated in the introduction, "These were once dreams; they are now signs of poetry."

The greatest of the recorded events to be found in Leiris' book are the pages dedicated to dream elements overflowing into his waking life, communicating vessels. In the page dated May 4, 1943 Leiris describes a middle-aged man lurking around who seems to be nightmarishly fake, "A real cop or a mere civilian? Or nobody in particular? I asked myself the question but could not resist considering this shady character to be some sort of specter or macabre merrymaker who, having donned a terrifyingly contemporary disguise, was waiting for some shadowy carnival to begin."

In a few of the recorded dreams he notes that he realized he was dreaming & tried to wake himself up, he tells us it is usually by falling. This is a common dream phenomenon, & it may appear to be simple. We are having a nightmare, realize it is a dream, & then struggle to wake up. The interesting thing though is that it is usually after the realization we are having a dream that things in our dream become even more concrete & real, it is not just about waking up, it is almost as though we are trying to cheat death. Leiris records something similar which Blanchot called a turning back upon himself, "A movement anologous to the one that often tends to elicit similar screams from me just as I am about to awake. But in this case the movement was considerably more frightening; instead of those interminable pangs one experiences when emerging with difficulty from a dream, I was in a sense being precipitated downward by my dream, plunged into a sleep from which I would never escape, and which would be my death."

This book, first published in 1961, is commonly considered to be a companion to Leiris' great autoethnographic work, _Manhood_. It is simply a collection of recorded dreams spanning a couple decades. Beyond the fact that Leiris' dreams are interesting, what adds value to the work is that is that it's historical and biographical context can be reconstructed through Leiris' other work. Highly recommended for those interested in Leiris, surrealism, or the social network surrounding Georges Bataille.