Abstract

Throughout his life, contemporaries of Blanchot either sought to relegate his writing to the past, or else espoused it uncritically in a gesture akin to what Jean-Luc Nancy once called syncope. Blanchot thus divided his epoch in a way that was less a polarization than a struggle for the present in which thought takes place. Consequently, readers today in search of what makes Blanchot continue to be a contemporary find that the time of his writing is shrouded in a curiously unstable quantity of oblivion. This article argues that Blanchot's refusal of biography brings about an inaugural disruption of the temporality of rational thought. From the outset, the ‘I am’ of reflection is accompanied in his writing by an ‘I am dead’ which is narrative in nature. Jacques Derrida's work is taken to exemplify the espousal of Blanchot by his contemporaries. Despite the acuity of Derrida's analyses of the fractured present of rational discourse, however, the article seeks to demonstrate that the priority of narrative in Blanchot's thought gives rise to a temporality for which philosophy can never find the measure.