Transparency Dreaming Freedom (Maurice Blanchot's The Most High )

This essay considers the literary deployment of antihumanist tropes as these appear in Blanchot's immediate postwar writings. Centering on Blanchot's "Literature and the Right to Death," and his last novel, the 1948 The Most High, it addresses a series of contemporary Hegelian and phenomenological problems, notably the "end of history," embodiment, and the problem of freedom as well as some political problems related to the debate on communist humanism. Paying particular attention to Blanchot's anti-foundationalist literary engagement with atheism and freedom, it interrogates life in a world where humanism never reached the promised secular utopia, but perverted it to the point of absurdity.