A Study of Maurice Blanchot’s Fragmentary Philosophical Style in the Light of his Double View of Death

Despite the influence of Maurice Blanchot’s writings on contemporary critical theory, his lettering has rarely been examined in terms of its formal features. While his fragment-writing seems obscure and incoherent, it can be considered as an exclusive method of merging philosophy and literature, a performance of language facing its limit. Highlighting “death” as the central idea of his writing, the present study traces a double approach to “death” in Blanchot, which paradoxically is introduced as the “beyond time in time”, enjoying an extreme position in the system of signification. With this double image of “death”, language suffers a fissure between two aspects, one corresponding to the waiting for realization of meaning (through signification) and the other to the insistence upon the material un-representing body of the word itself. This double nature is the constitutional element of the form and the structure of Maurice Blanchot’s extreme fragment writing. It is observed how the double conception of “death” affects formal and rhetorical details of his texts, especially his Awaiting Oblivion, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster. It is argued that the fundamental paradoxical and ambiguous nature of his writing is the direct result of writing under a double point-of-view of ‘I’, and its ‘other’, at the same time that it promises a genuine idea of writing to come.