[In the following review, Evenson describes the contents of The Infinite Conversation.]

Written during the struggle between Hegelianism and anti-Hegelianism in French thought preceding poststructuralism, Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation provides a crucial link for understanding the more immediate roots of poststructuralism. Though Blanchot did much of his major writing in the forties, fifties, and sixties, his work has received little attention in America until recently. He is especially important for those interested in contemporary French theory. Blanchot’s writings inform the thought of Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, and can provide contexts for some of the more difficult concepts of these other writers. Behind Foucault’s heterotopia and Deleuze’s disjunctive synthesis lurk Blanchot’s formulations on impossibility, interval, and the outside. Theoretically justifying Lacan’s purposeful inexpressiveness is Blanchot on obscurity.

The Infinite Conversation gathers together texts written for the most part between 1953 and 1965. Originally published in 1969, it can be read as a late, sustained argument with Hegel and Alexandre Kojève. In the place of the Hegelian synthesis, Blanchot suggests what he calls “the relation of the third kind”: a relation of two individuals in which speech “does not tend toward unity, it is not a relation from the perspective of unity or with unity in view, not a relation of unification.” A relationship founded on difference. A good Franco-Nietzschean, Blanchot explores that type of language that moves not towards unity, but outside of it—what he calls here plural speech.

The Infinite Conversation provides a mixture of rigorous theoretical thought and less formal conversations, both of which are intriguing. The first section of the book is philosophical, meditations on how language forms and informs different types of human relationships. The two remaining sections illustrate the first section’s ideas through an exploration of literary texts. Blanchot provides splendid readings of the way in which writers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Pascal, Kafka, Heraclitus, and Sade develop a writing that interrupts being and postulates dissymmetric relations. His readings of other writers are illuminating, and often quite surprising.

Susan Hanson’s translation is well-reasoned and loyal to Blanchot’s intention. Her introduction is adequate. The book is quite expensive, even in paper—those new to Blanchot would be well advised to begin with his less expensive theoretical works—but for libraries and for those with a more profound interest in French thought, The Infinite Conversation is a necessity.