SOURCE: A review of The Writing of Disaster, in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 264-5.

In the following review, Caplan mentions the contributions of The Writing of Disaster to contemporary French thought.

In the past few years, English translations of many Blanchot texts (both criticism and fictions) have finally become available. Ann Smock’s beautiful and moving translation of L’Ecriture du désastre will contribute, among other things, to the re-evaluation of Maurice Blanchot’s role in the definition of contemporary French thought. Blanchot’s relentless concern with death and foreboding has a troubling relevance today: not only to the unspeakable disasters which have marked the twentieth century, one of which may yet destroy all life on the planet, but also to the seemingly more gentle, if problematic act of writing. Writing “of” the disaster means writing both about...