In both his fiction and criticism Maurice Blanchot, since the 1940s, has figured as one of the great austere voices of French letters. In works that have done more than any others to render in French prose a sensibility that might be described as late Heideggerian, he has made of his writing a meditation on the problematic being--or nonbeing--of language, its ultimate incompatibility with self-consciousness, the exhilarating havoc it wreaks on any claim to either objective or subjective identity. The myth that precariously presides over his work is that of Orpheus: not the poet who conquers death, but he who through art loses both the world (Eurydice) and himself (through dismemberment) in an expenditure without end. To have evoked that myth--and the self-effacing austerity with which Blanchot, to all (public) appearances, has disappeared into his work--is to hint at the specific difficulties facing his would-be literary biographer. For...