"Ce mot sec et latin par surcroît": Maurice Blanchot, Literature and Nihilism

Although it plays a decisive role in Maurice Blanchot's theorisation of the literary, the concept of nihilism has received surprisingly little critical attention. In this article, I chart Blanchot's deployment of the term "nihilisme" from the early 1940s to the early 1980s, and aim to show the manner in which nihilism as Blanchot conceives it haunts his work as what Nietzsche, in an 1885-86 notebook, describes as "dieser unheimlichste aller Gaste". At the heart of Blanchot's theorisation of the literary as that which he takes to be the only genuine resistance to nihilism, this uncanniness takes the form of a resistance of nihilism, a phrase in which both the subjective and the objective genitive are operative.