SOURCE: “Maurice Blanchot,” in The Novelist as Philosopher, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 147-65.

In the following essay, Hartman discusses Blanchot's fiction and critical writings, providing an overview of his literary associations and theoretical principles.

The seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the Negative.

Hegel

Blanchot’s work, says one of his few interpreters, offers no point of approach whatsoever. Today, twenty years after his first novel, he is still the most esoteric writer of contemporary France. There have appeared only three or four essays on his fiction; his novels remain untranslated. This is the more remarkable as Blanchot is also a prolific and well-known critic: besides his three novels, a number of récits, and a dyad of short stories, he has published five thick volumes of criticism. But then his criticism has its difficulties too.

One could draw on his criticism to illumine his...