SOURCE: “Blanchot's Suicidal Artist: Writing and the (Im)Possibility of Death,” in Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression, Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 35-45.

In the following essay, Gregg examines Blanchot's preoccupation with death, particularly as associated with suicide, literary creation, and the function of autobiography.

Language and human beings share the same destiny of incompletion. Death as an approach, a passivity that cannot be rendered present or personal, worklessness and failure: these exigencies that Bataille posits as the basis of both sacrifice and his expérience are also categories that serve to organize Blanchot’s account of the experience of the writer’s approach to the space of literature. Literature’s involvement with death is central to Blanchot’s thinking, and it is a theme that I would like to explore in this chapter on three fronts: first, in connection with his comparison of writing and suicide...