Blanchot without Blanchot

Abstract This article explores the arc of Blanchot's life, in conversation with a recent critical biography, to suggest what the significance of his writing might be today. It first situates Blanchot in the 1930s through the lens of contemporary debates about the period. It then explores what his turn to literary criticism and narrative in the 1940s might have signified and allowed him to negotiate as a “counter-law.” Finally, it turns to his time as a dissident postwar thinker who sought to invent ways of thinking capable of forgoing power, often formulated as an inoperative “relation without relation.”