The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot (review)

Recent years have seen a number of landmark publications relating to Maurice Blanchot. Most notably, work by Michael Holland, Leslie Hill, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Christophe Bident has set the standard, and an appropriately high one, too. This work has established Blanchot scholarship as a field distinguished by its exceptionally attentive discussions of every aspect of its object, from textual detail (including the most patient tracing of genetic minutiae) to political context and implications, to philosophical resonance and interrogation. In so doing, of course, such work is only responding to Blanchot's own engagement with the multiple demands made by and on the artwork, but it remains remarkable that this response has lately been of such consistently high quality. The current volume (whose contributors include Holland, Hill and Lacoue-Labarthe) is by no means out of place in such company. If the collection cannot in itself be said to constitute a landmark publication, this is no bad thing, for it demonstrates that the intellectual values evident in these exceptional works also permeate Blanchot criticism as it continues day to day, as it were. The editors certainly demonstrate a useful sense of the pertinence of their collection: in twenty pages, their introduction manages not only to give an accurate and succinct account of Blanchot's signature concerns, but also to situate him in terms of his political contexts, and, especially, to delineate the syncopated rhythms of his reception, in France and the United States. The range of references and approaches provided by the contributors' essays is extraordinary: we move from Roman law to Carl Schmitt, Adorno to Duchamp, Artaud to Montaigne, always with exemplary rigour, patience and verve. Unusually among Blanchot critics, the editors, in their respective pieces, interrogate Blanchot from an avowedly, and provocatively, theological perspective, again with superb argumentative rigour. This openness to weakly affirmative theological positions is a distinctive feature of this collection, and probably to be welcomed as such, since it takes seriously — without exaggeration, and ultimately without undue assertion — what is clearly a necessary horizon of interpretation. Less religiously minded readers may, however, occasionally find themselves recalling the injunction in L'Entretien infini that God be left to one side. This aside, it is, happily, difficult to find substantive criticisms of the collection. Editorially, though, it must be said that there are more typographical errors, especially in titles, than befits a volume of this quality. (Particularly when the works in question are canonical: Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes is twice amputated to Phänomenologie des Geist; of Blanchot's own essays, 'Le Chant des Sirènes' becomes 'La Chant des sirè ns', and the crucial 'La Littérature et le droit à la mort' repeatedly appears as 'Littérature et la droit à la mort'.) However, the work gathered here is impressive, inspiring, and a pleasure to read.