SOURCE: “The (Im)Possibility of Literature,” in Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, Routledge, 1997, pp. 53-69.

In the following excerpt, Hill provides an overview of the literary techniques and thematic preoccupations of Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab.

Founding Fictions

Literature is perhaps essentially (but neither solely nor overtly) power of contestation: contestation of established authority, contestation of that which is (and the fact of being), contestation of language and the forms of literary language, lastly contestation of itself as power.

‘Les Grands Réducteurs’ (L'Amité, 80)

Blanchot’s two early novels—Thomas l’Obscur (1941) and Aminadab (1942)—are arguably among some of the most compelling yet obscure of all modern literary texts. More than fifty years after publication, their resistance to interpretation remains undiminished.¹ This inscrutability, however, is not merely the product of unfamiliar contextual factors, nor does it derive simply from the systematic withholding of information by the author or narrator...