Maurice Blanchot

"Among the best things written in English on (these writers).... Presents a lucid and intelligent reading of all three authors, centering on their relationships to Jewish themes and concerns. It demonstrates the intimacy and near-complicity that connects them, but also the distance that separates them from one another.... A major work of scholarship". -- Steven Shaviro, University of Washington

In the first critical study to consider together the work of Emmanuel Levinas (Lithuanian Jew, philosopher), Maurice Blanchot (French Catholic, novelist and literary theorist, and Edmond Jabes (Egyptian Jew, poet), Gary D. Mole demonstrates and compares the ways in which these writers have been instrumental in raising those issues of Jewishness that have been so central to contemporary postmodern thought.

The questions of writing and exile, the opposition between ethics and metaphysics, and the central disaster of the Shoah emerge as the dominant themes of each writer, and Mole explores the ways in which they borrow from, respond to, and challenge each other in a rich intellectual dialogue. Specifically, Mole traces their engagement with Jewish tradition and thought, exploring their overlapping considerations of the etranger; of Revelation and the Law through the figure of Moses; and of ethics, dialogue, and silence in the story ofAbra(ha)m. Finally, he looks at the ways each identifies the imperative of responding to the Shoah and its repercussions for philosophical, fictional, and poetic discourse.

Judicious close readings and an accessible style help t

Gregg organizes his discussion around the notion of transgression, which Blanchot himself took over from Georges Bataille--most palpably in his interpretation of the myth of Orpheus--as a paradigm capable of accounting for the relationships that exist in the textual economies formed by author, work, and reader. Chapters on the critical work address such issues as Blanchot's ambivalent attitude toward the speculative dialectic of Hegelianism, his thematization of literature's involvement with death, and the mythical and Biblical figures he uses to portray the acts of reading and writing. Gregg also performs extended close readings of two representative works of fiction, "Le Tres-Haut and "L'Attente l'oubli, in an effort to trace Blanchot's evolution as a creator of na