Divided between the literary, the philosophico-critical, and the political, Blanchot's writing was particularly sensitive to the plurality of these divergent modes of expression, each of which, in distinctive ways, was fragmentary and incomplete. Literature, philosophy, and history in other words were never the site of totalising power, but always already premissed on their interruption. From that standpoint Blanchot reacted to the postwar threat of mass destruction represented by the atomic bomb. This paper examines how Blanchot's three discourses, without losing their mutual untranslatability, came into critical alignment in the late 1950s and 1960s, and assesses their implications for a response to today's climate emergency.

This article examines a certain return to nature in Blanchot, particularly in his readings of Lautréamont, albeit one that cannot be reduced to the triumph of light over dark, dawn over night, and life over death. Building from the expanded scene of vegetal metamorphosis that concludes the recently published manuscript version of his novel Aminadab, I show how Blanchot eschews the vitalist, indeed humanist metaphysics that continue to define much work in ecocriticism, particularly in its new materialist, material-ecocritical or elemental-ecocritical offshoots. Drawing from Blanchot's major writings on Lautréamont—‘Lautréamont’ in Faux Pas (1943), ‘Lautréamont and Miller’ in The Work of Fire (1949) and ‘The Experience of Lautréamont’ in Lautréamont and Sade (1949)—as well as Derrida's unpublished Lautréamont seminar (1970–1), this article proposes a few reflections on what Lautréamont calls ‘our fate, which remains shackled to the hardened crust of a planet’.

This article concerns Maurice Blanchot's interpretation of the Book of Exodus and the ‘disaster’ of the shattered tablets that precipitated the Jewish people's wandering in the desert for 40 years. I show how Blanchot's recovery of a certain Jewish tradition and idiom may both motivate and inform our ecological reconsideration of the meaning of the ‘without’: of our being today ‘without’ horizon or future, of that spectre of a world ‘without’ us. I argue that we must adopt a ‘prophetic’ thought or thinking that is adequate to this ‘without’, one that suspends the present (and all presence) for the sake of the other.

Blanchot's writings evince a recurrent preoccupation with figures of lastness, such as the last man or the last writer. However, within his adaptation of Nietzsche's Eternal Return, ‘lastness’ not only calls up (what may or may not come after) death and extinction but is indissociable from an ‘always already’ joining first and last, originariness (the ‘first man’) and destination (the ‘ends of man’). The essay will first clarify Blanchot's reworking of the figure of the last man as a universal first man within nature's cyclical return, before considering the role of prehistoric art in shaping his (and Bataille's) conception of a truly human history as (re)beginning at the end of history. Bataille's essay on Blanchot's Le Dernier homme will afford final thoughts on how ‘the world we live in’ may well (not) be at the same time ‘the world we die in’.

If, following Timothy Clark, thinking ecology or nature with Blanchot entails the paradox of thinking the impossible, thinking it otherwise than simply surrendering to contradiction by way of abandonment of the question, then how might such a ‘thought’, per impossible, reflect itself in and to thinking? To better explore this paradox and its demand, this article proposes the distantiated manner of an echological thought which approaches nature, and the approach to nature, qua impossible, by means of its only ever exposing an echo of an absence in the place of origin. This article argues that it is therefore only in tracing the echo-effect of ‘nature’ that one might begin to undertake the questioning of a relation between the writings and thought of Blanchot and ecological thought which would be more than (simply) negative.

Maurice Blanchot's ‘The Apocalypse Is Disappointing’ deals with the danger of an atomic war that might encompass the entire world and annihilate human life on the planet. It is in this context that, on the one hand, he defends modern science and its experiments with truth, while on the other hand, he advocates the creation of a global communist society. If scientific experiments cannot be risked without putting humankind at risk and opening up the possibility of humanity perishing, then only the unified collective subject of a global communist society is capable of truly and rationally destroying humanity and the world as a whole. Annihilation is the possible cost to be paid for revolutionary change and the overcoming of social antagonism, just as it is the possible cost for research, for stimulating and satisfying the will to truth and the will to knowledge inherent in human beings. Blanchot sides with Nietzsche and exclaims: ‘So be it!’. Ecocriticism, if it is to make ‘any sense whatsoever’, has no choice but to try and measure up to this double wager.