Maurice Blanchot has written only infrequently about his life. He has refused to be photographed, interviewed, or seen. This extreme discretion marks a body of writing that has touched everything of importance in modern European philosophy and literature, and, as Geoffrey Hartman has argued in his preface to Blanchot's The Gaze of Orpheus, and Other Literary Essays (1981), will be recognized to have "made French 'discourse' possible."

Blanchot is the author of significant works on George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as the marquis de Sade, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, comte de Lautréament, Stéphane Mallarmé, Franz Kafka, René Char, and Paul Celan. These lists are not exhaustive. Blanchot also had a major influence on contemporary literary theorists and philosophers, above all Jacques Derrida, Foucault, Gilles...