Blanchot and the Outside of Literature by William S. Allen

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Reviewed by: Blanchot and the Outside of Literature by William S. Allen Jeff Fort Allen, William S. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature. Bloomsbury, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5013-4524-1. Pp. xiii + 217. Author of Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (2016), which incisively places Blanchot alongside Adorno, interrogating both thinkers on the question of negativity and the artwork, Allen has continued those interrogations in a remarkable study devoted entirely to Blanchot. Whereas the central stakes of the previous book involved the notion of autonomy, here the pressure is placed rather on the"outside" of literature, taken in several senses: the outside in the sense of the world in which literature takes place, a historical and political dimension of the work that both inhabits and exceeds it, and in which the work itself causes strange and often difficult to discern disruptions and effects; the outside in the peculiar Blanchotian sense of a thought that, dispersed in language, is radically alienated from itself and its own possibility; and most specifically and persistently, the outside as a form of materiality—what Allen often calls contingency—which the linguistic work, the work of literature, must always found itself on, without ever being able to contain, control, or in the end even speak it. As Foucault did in his homage to Blanchot, "La pensée du dehors" (1966), Allen locates this outside in a privileged manner in Blanchot's fiction. Since there is no "locating" the outside, in the most radical and unqualifiable sense at issue here, Allen sees in Blanchot's fictional writings, especially those spanning the period from 1948 to 1962, the most intensive and fine-grained engagement with a dimension of writing that contests the dialectics of meaning, even as it necessarily articulates itself with conceptual and signifying systems it cannot exist without. As Allen nicely puts it, we can see Blanchot's most stripped-down texts of the 1950s, such as Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas (1953),"as an exploration of the microstructure of derangement," analysis of which (however aporetic it will inevitably be) is required for understanding "how any kind of broader relation, historical or critical, ethical or communal, may develop" (12). Following key works during this period also allows Allen to demonstrate the "impressively coherent" (15) passage from the earlier novels and criticism, on the one hand, through the récits, and on toward the fragmentary and "conversational" or dialogic writing (L'entretien infini [1969], Le pas au-delà [1973], L'écriture du désastre [1980]) that would later mark Blanchot's work so profoundly—and that began as an extension of the fictions, namely in the last work discussed here, L'attente l'oubli (1962). Beginning with a fascinating chapter on Blanchot's last novel, Le très-haut (1948), which foregrounds the phenomena of contagion and pathology as fundamental forms of both writing and politics, Allen devotes chapters to the fictional works already mentioned (Le très-haut, Celui qui..., [End Page 187] L'attente l'oubli) as well as to Le dernier homme (1957). Allen shows throughout that a profound and rigorous engagement with Blanchot's enigmatic work can be as lucid as it is respectful of this work's density and difficulty. Jeff Fort University of California, Davis Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French