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“... The Siren’s Song is the first chance English readers have had to experience Maurice Blanchot. If it is the case, as Gabriel Josipovici pre-emptively asserts in his introduction, that Blanchot ‘is, with Walter Benjamin, the finest literary critic of the century’, then we have been grievously remiss in leaving him for so long untranslated ...”

“... dusk. Home, she thought, ought to be open to the outside: to her friends Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, to Alain Resnais and Delphine Seyrig, to those who simply rang the bell on the rue Saint-Benoît, like the Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre. (It helped that she had brought a hunk of Parmesan; it was noon, the 73-year-old ...”

“... now I think it was grappling with something deeper.The sudden stop – ‘l’arrêt de mort’ as Maurice Blanchot called it – takes us back to the ʘ my father added to ‘Mid-Term Break’. If this ʘ symbolises frogspawn, as the comma comes to symbolise tadpoles, it suggests one reason my father would have wished to make this substitution: the ...”

“... caught – possibly jeopardising the lives of others – was too high. Although her good friend Maurice Schumann (later foreign secretary under de Gaulle) patiently explained why nobody in their right mind would send her on a secret mission, Weil reproached him. Why would such an intelligent woman fight so tenaciously for such quixotic projects? Maybe the ...”

“... celebrated the triumph of this conviction. With essays by Derrida, Etienne Balibar, Luce Irigaray, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze, this book both established the distinctly French provenance of the dead-subject argument and, in characteristically French fashion, ‘put into question’ that argument itself by implying that another ...”

“... and ambiguous texture of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or anti-religious, Marxist or ...”

“... who populate the ‘real world’. ‘There is between sleep and us something like a pact,’ Maurice Blanchot says, ‘a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to ...”

“... interpolations’ after she listened ‘more carefully to what it [the text] was telling me’. Maurice Blanchot once wrote that translators are ‘the silent masters of culture’. Kate Briggs amends this, commenting that Blanchot wrote ‘hidden masters of culture’ and that it’s ‘our recognition’ of ...”

“... duty was to confront the void that lies beyond the limits of language. When a writer like Maurice Blanchot takes language to its limits, he wrote, ‘what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will obliterate it’. This void is, to use Miller’s words, ‘the occluded, Dionysian dimension of being human’, and to ...”

“... into something up to the job. These are the terms under which Un coup de dés is written. But, as Maurice Blanchot points out, Mallarmé didn’t see Un coup de dés as the realisation of this: rather ‘it is its reserve and its forever hidden presence, the risk of its venture, the measure of its limitless challenge’. Reserve, risk, venture: the ...”

“... Meanwhile the entertainment industry in Paris was flourishing: performers like Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Django Reinhardt, Tino Rossi, Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf, abetted by the jazz-inspired youth culture of the zazous, offered the Germans opportunities for rest and recreation that scarcely existed back home. On top of that, the occupying ...”

“... to expect. His article is too nuanced to please his boss. Shortly after the novel was published, Maurice Blanchot gave a talk about Berlin after the Wall: ‘Omniscience, even if it were possible, would be of no use in this case … the panoramic view is not a true view.’ The only writer he cited was Johnson. ...”

“... becomes the real story of Le Voyeur. The novel’s ‘clarity reveals everything except itself’, Maurice Blanchot wrote in his magisterial review. ‘It is as if we were seeing everything, without anything being visible. The result is strange.’ Robbe-Grillet’s mother said it was ‘a fine book’, though she would rather it had not been written by ...”

“... Even the literary texts they take here – various works by John Ashbery, Shelley, Wordsworth and Maurice Blanchot – get so thoroughly devoured that they lose any intrinsic interest they might have had for him (which isn’t much); and while he probably won’t understand most of the book if he does attempt to read it, he will find it made pretty plain ...”

“... Maurice Blanchot​ , represented in this anthology by the opaque and mesmerising ‘The Madness of the Day’ (1949), wrote that a story is not the relation of an event but the event itself. It seems true that short stories are often less easy to summarise than novels, with no need to tidy loose ends, or even any obligation to end, and that their content often communicates something other than their subject, as if, at certain levels of compression, brevity starts to tell its own story ...”