[In the following review, Hill comments on the historical significance of Blanchot's oeuvre in general, highlighting the implications of the death theme in The Station Hill Blanchot Readerand Friendship.]

Maurice Blanchot, novelist, critic, philosopher, now in his ninety-second year, is at last receiving the sustained critical attention his work deserves. These two volumes of translations explain why. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader brings together in one compendium edition previously out-of-print English versions of the author’s shorter fiction or récits, including Vicious Circles, the second version of Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, When the Time Comes and The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me; also included is a selection of critical essays from each of the three postwar decades. On rereading these texts, what is perhaps most striking is the peculiar bilingualism of Blanchot’s writing, the ease with which it passes from essay to narrative and back again. In the process, story and essay assume a particular responsiveness to that which exceeds them. Blanchot’s récits, for instance, do not recount historical events, even when those events correspond to crucial turning points in modern history, like the ill-fated signature of the Munich accords that forms the political backdrop to Death Sentence, or the bombing of the synagogue in the rue de la Victoire in Paris in October 1941, recalled almost exactly halfway through When the Time Comes. Such events are nevertheless present in the margins of Blanchot’s texts, but not as episodes in a completed narrative sequence. Events like these are not just crises in history, Blanchot suggests; they are crises of history, and they challenge the possibility of narrative itself. This is why the real events in Blanchot’s narratives, one might say, are the narratives themselves, which thereby turn into reflections on the possibility or impossibility of narrating events at all. Narrative itself is thus an event that both takes place and yet does not take place; it is a form of writing that meditates on its own limits, its perpetual incompletion, and its necessary withdrawal from itself. Readers of Blanchot will remember here how a story like The Madness of the Day (as Derrida has shown with exemplary rigour) ends on its own beginning, and begins with its own ending, while yet surviving itself as an affirmation of the end and of the endlessness of the end. The paradox which is the crux of this analysis is encountered on numerous occasions in Blanchot’s fiction; what it indicates is that, in order for the end to be spoken, the end in fact must forever be postponed. So when does the time come? When does the death sentence fall, that arrêt de mort that, as it draws up (“arrêter”) the verdict, also suspends (“arrêter”) it?

These questions are not just literary ones. For they are also at the centre of Friendship, first published in French in 1971, and dedicated in the first instance to the death of Georges Bataille, one of Blanchot’s closest friends, in July 1962. The volume has a powerful double focus. It endeavours to address the exemplary singularity of the death of Bataille, while being aware of the paradox that to do so at all is inevitably to fail, and that to speak of the exemplarity of a death is to compromise its singularity, and vice versa. As Blanchot points out in an obituary essay on Jean Paulhan, the death of a friend is a supreme occasion, yet it is an occasion that gives rise only to a poverty of discourse. But how else to remember? Blanchot confronts this aporia with extreme patience. For while it is true that the singularity of a death cannot be spoken of except improperly, it has to be acknowledged too that death is what makes language possible. Friendship is aware of this, and explores various possibilities of death: of art (Malraux), of man (Lévi-Strauss), of Marxism (Lefebvre, Mascolo, Marx), of the gods (Pierre Klossowski), and much else besides. But while it meditates on the possibility of death, Blanchot’s prose exposes itself to the impossibility of speaking death. The equanimity of discourse is soon undermined. In these essays (many of them revised since their first appearance in journals), this is reflected in the discreet variations in tone and structure Blanchot employs. “Discretion—reserve—is the place of literature”, he suggests, and the phrase may serve as an epigraph for Blanchot’s entire work. If literature is a response to the solitude of death, and death the final ordeal to which writing, like friendship, must subject itself, this does not mean Blanchot is a melancholy writer. On the contrary, what Blanchot’s stories and essays affirm, beyond finality, is the infinity of the entretien: of the holding-between, the maintaining of relation in the absence of relation. This is one of the things Blanchot understands by friendship, and it is one of the reasons why, for many readers today, Maurice Blanchot’s writing is at the centre of thinking about literature.