Voidance: Linguistic Negativism in Maurice Blanchot’s Fiction

This article charts the shifting patterns of linguistic negativism in Maurice Blanchot’s fiction, from his early works of the mid-1930s, through the novels of the 1940s, to the major récits from L’Arrêt de mort (1948) to L’Instant de ma mort (1994). Particular attention is paid to Blanchot’s deployment of negative affixes and negative modifiers. This stylistic analysis provides the groundwork for my exploration of the ‘voidance’ of the semantic in Blanchot’s fiction, achieved through an epanorthotic retraction of the said that becomes ever more prevalent, reaching its most extreme form in L’Attente, l’oubli (1962). This voidance serves as a form of resistance to semantic hypostatization and reification, but at the risk of an evacuation of sense. Through a charting of these patterns of linguistic negativism, and an appreciation of their function as a form of voidance, it becomes possible to detect a trajectory away from a prose that recalls Mallarmé, through one that recalls Kafka, to one akin to Beckett’s. Analysing this trajectory, this article aims to situate Blanchot’s writing of the negative within a broader, language-sceptical tradition that achieves its literary flowering in European late modernism.