Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;The thesis considers the work of Maurice Blanchot: first, by noting four 'steps' in its gradual clarification of what we might call literature's question to philosophy; second, by reading it alongside the works of Heidegger and Levinas. The aim is to formulate a question from Blanchot to Heidegger and Levinas respectively. ;Heidegger and Levinas both write from, and to, a time in which philosophy itself is called into question. How are we to continue thinking in such a time? How are we to address the future when the very means of relating the future to the present have been undermined? Heidegger and Levinas insist on a radical openness or response. Confronted by an extreme discontinuity , philosophy continues, but differently. I am not to think of the future as mine, not to ground it in the present. The relation into which philosophy is called is one that cannot be thought in terms of a traditional logic of relation. It alters the way in which we talk of nearness and distance. To what does philosophy respond? What brings about this new relation? ;For Heidegger, that which has always concealed itself in the history of the tradition. Not that it is now to to be revealed, for it has concealed itself in and from the dialectic of presence and absence that defines 'revelation'. Neither present nor absent nor on its way to being either, what has been concealed is a more originary concealment. It is this concealment that first provoked the questions of philosophy and it is this concealment, concealed in the answer philosophy has given, that now calls philosophy into question. For Levinas, the alterity of the other person: an alterity always violated when the other is deemed analogous to the same, the self or 'I', or when myself and the other are thought from out of a common ground. My relation with another, however 'symmetrical', is always already vulnerable to the claims of the other as Other