[In the following review, Caplan mentions the contributions of The Writing of Disaster to contemporary French thought.]

In the past few years, English translations of many Blanchot texts (both criticism and fictions) have finally become available. Ann Smock’s beautiful and moving translation of L’Ecriture du désastre will contribute, among other things, to the re-evaluation of Maurice Blanchot’s role in the definition of contemporary French thought. Blanchot’s relentless concern with death and foreboding has a troubling relevance today: not only to the unspeakable disasters which have marked the twentieth century, one of which may yet destroy all life on the planet, but also to the seemingly more gentle, if problematic act of writing. Writing “of” the disaster means writing both about disaster and writing by or from it. Hence the fragmentary form of this book. Disaster (Hiroshima, the camps, nuclear war), whose ineffable presence now inhabits all thought, also takes the form of fragments, what remains before or after the unimaginable.

The relationship between imagination and disaster is perhaps stated most clearly in Blanchot’s reading of the Narcissus myth (pp. 125 ff.). In Blanchot’s view, “Narcissus falls ‘in love’ with the image because the image as such—because every image—is attractive: the image exerts the attraction of the void, and of death in its falsity” (p. 125). What makes the image attractive as such would therefore not be its perfect resemblance to a model, but its utter lack of resemblance to any model, its uniqueness. The fatal seduction of the image would lie in the fact that nothing in the world resembles it. After all, Tiresias had predicted that Narcissus’ life would depend upon his never knowing himself, that is, upon his never acquiring that self-sameness or identity which is the basis (however illusory) of life. In this sense, what Narcissus sees is therefore not himself but the divine, incorruptible aspect of the image, that aspect which is also his, even though he does not have the right to see it (p. 128). In this paradoxical sense, The Writing of the Disaster is narcissistic writing. For “[t]he poet is Narcissus to the extent that Narcissus is an anti-Narcissus: he who, turned away from himself …, dying of not re-cognizing himself—leaves the trace of what has not occurred” (p. 135).

The “Translator’s Remarks” provide a helpful supplement to her brilliant general introduction to the earlier Space of Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1982). All writing is, as Blanchot wrote long before Derrida, already a form of translation.