A Study of Blanchot’s Philosophical Fragment-writing in the Light of his Double View of Death

Despite the influence of Maurice Blanchot’s writing on contemporary literary theory, his writing has been rarely examined in terms of its form. While his fragment-writing seems obscure and incoherent, it can be considered as an exclusive way of merging philosophy and literature, a performance of language in confrontation with its limit. Highlighting “death” as the main idea of his writing leads to a double approach to “death” which, as the “beyond time in time”, enjoys an extreme situation in the system of signification. With this double image of “death”, language becomes fissured between two aspects, one corresponding to waiting for the realization of meaning and the other to the insistence upon the material un-representing body of the word. This double nature is the constitutional element of the form and the structure of his extreme fragment writing. It can be observed how the double conception of “death” affects formal and rhetoric details of his texts, especially his Awaiting Oblivion, The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster. It is argued that the paradoxical, ambiguous nature of his writing is the direct result of writing under a simultaneously double point-of-view of ‘I’ and its ‘other’: a unique style of writing