Change in the archive: Blanchot's 'L'Entretien infini'

Mckeane, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2141-079X (2014) Change in the archive: Blanchot's 'L'Entretien infini'. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 50 (1). pp. 69-81. ISSN 1471-6860 doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqt027

Abstract/Summary

Today we are faced with the problem of how to relate the archives of deconstructionist thinkers to their thought, which seems opposed to historically-oriented or genetic criticism. This article is the first to look comprehensively at the gestation of Maurice Blanchot's L'Entretien infini, including the work's page-proofs which were made available in 2009. I thus address the multiple processes of change at work throughout Blanchot's writing, with change being a process whose importance goes beyond any single new form of writing resulting from it. My presentation of the archival material is contextualized via a discussion of the notion of L'Absence de livre (the project's working title). Rather than being a straightfoward incompleteness or fragmentation, this notion establishes a fraught relationship between such ideas and what it calls ‘le Livre’.