[In the following review, Lowenthal summarizes The Most High comparing its narrator to that of Kafka's The Trial.]

Despite the wealth of translation of Maurice Blanchot’s work available, the arrival of one of his novels in English tends to be not only welcome but needed: the profound depthlessness, the illuminating opacity of his essays and fiction continue to put the very possibility of literature at stake.

Written in the aftermath of World War II, The Most High depicts a society of vague familiarity, one made up of bureaucracy, an ominous police force, revolutionaries, decay, and a plague not dissimilar to the one described by Camus. If this environment feels more like science fiction than a historical narrative, though, there is good reason: history has ended, and the “Law” has infiltrated every aspect of life. Civil servants are indistinguishable in function from militant revolutionaries, and revolt against the State maintains the State. This homogenized, invaginating space of continual recuperation may indeed strike some resonance for the reader. Posthistoricity may prove to be one of this century’s more potent myths; whether one subscribes to the concept or not, its repercussions are discernible. Dialectics sometimes appears to have run its course, left-wing and right-wing politics too often blur into the defiantly apolitical realm of consumerism, and Alexandre Kojève, the end-of-history theorist at the heart of this novel, has left behind a partial legacy in his participation in the potential capitalist wrap-up of the GATT treaty.

The Most High’s somewhat hallucinatory parables clearly have their precedent in Kafka. But if the novel bears a resemblance to The Trial, it portrays a trial whose stakes are reversed. As Henri Sorge, the novel’s bedridden civil servant/narrator, at one point writes: “there are none of those little secrets that were the petty privilege of the old administrations which trouble the supplicant and make him think that behind the façade there’s something essential going on to which he’ll never have access.”

But if Sorge, like Joseph K, fails to take things “seriously” (evidenced by his incomprehensible failure to get a plague vaccination), he lacks the humor of such a figure as K. Blanchot’s work is of a cold absurdity. If Sorge has any “significance,” it is that he is not even insignificant, not even the anti-hero of modernism, but rather an absolute nonhero—the only role possible in a post-historical society.

The book is ably translated by Allan Stoekl, a scholar of Blanchot’s partner in theory, Georges Bataille. His introduction to The Most High illuminates the essential issues of the novel and enriches the book as a whole.