Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch by Leslie Hill (review)

The fragmentary interrupts continuity and contests authority. While it is often conceived as a negation, apophatic in that it can only be defined as what it is not, fragmentary writing for Blanchot exceeds all negation or negativity. In contrast to Adorno and modernist temptations to subordinate fragmentary writing to the unified artwork and dialectic of realization, Leslie Hill describes Blanchot’s conception of the fragmentary as neither governed by negativity nor evocative of a lost totality. Blanchot’s fragmentary is the affirmation of a spectral demand, not one mourning the ghosts of modernity, but rather ‘an always other promise of futurity’ (p. 7). Hill’s remarkable scholarship and profound theoretical analysis are complemented by a compelling portrait of Blanchot as a thinker unequivocally committed to the future. The premise of Hill’s book is to examine Blanchot’s rethinking of the fragment, beginning in the late 1950s. Turning away from the narrative prose of his early fiction, Blanchot pursued an explicitly fragmentary writing in L’Attente l’oubli (1962), Le Pas au-delà (1973), and L’Écriture du désastre (1980), each the focal point of separate chapters here. While the texts are subject to close reading, much of the commentary involves situating the conception of the fragmentary that emerges from each of the key texts in relation to a wide range of thinkers from Hegel and the Jena Romantics to contemporaries such as Derrida and Levinas. If fragmentary writing bears a trace of the future, it also bears a trace of the impossible, and is thus not an identifiable literary or philosophical genre, but rather a spectral demand. Hill is keen to stress Blanchot’s anxiety, following Derrida, that rethinking the elliptical or fragmentary can run the risk of ‘I’ve said virtually nothing and take it back immediately’ (p. 7), but this resistance of the fragmentary to any form of identity is actually where its radical potential might be found. In this respect, Hill stresses the proximity of fragmentary writing to political exigencies in Blanchot’s thought. Blanchot’s turn to fragmentary writing coincided with his return to active involvement in politics in the late fifties. The relationship between literature and politics is thus regularly evoked where it is not explicitly mapped out. The interruption of historical continuity affirmed in the thought of désastre is echoed in Blanchot’s response to May 1968. Just as the thought of désastre can be understood in one formulation as less concerned with the negation of the world than putting its existence into parentheses in order ‘to reflect on its meaningful articulation’ (p. 307), the events of ’68 are similarly affirmed for a suspension, or ‘putting into parentheses of normative politics’ (p. 234). Hill’s refreshingly assertive portrait of Blanchot’s philosophical and political thought is just one of many immensely significant contributions to Blanchot scholarship found in this multifaceted study. While the prose is lucid and consistently engaging, readers less familiar with Blanchot might be better advised to begin with Hill’s earlier Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997).