Since we have been a dialogue: Blanchot's 'Entretiens'

Mckeane, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2141-079X (2013) Since we have been a dialogue: Blanchot's 'Entretiens'. Oxford Literary Review, 35 (1). pp. 47-64. ISSN 1757-1634 doi: 10.3366/olr.2013.0056

Abstract/Summary

At the turn of the 1960s, Maurice Blanchot began publishing texts that he named entretiens, this change in his writing responding to what deconstruction sees as the closure of logocentric or continuous discourse. Paradoxically, this closure does not prevent such discourse, in which philosophical enquiry and technological change are intertwined, from dominating the modern world. By changing his writing, and by reiterating the dialogical form so central to metaphysical tradition since Plato, Blanchot gives voice to the tensions between continuity and its ‘outside’, between philosophy and literature. This is one sense in which his entretiens do not engage in a representation of difference, but instead open themselves to the inflections of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls le partage des voix.