The Writing of the Disaster: L'Ecriture Du Desastre

The Writing of the Disaster is an immensely difficult text- a text which deals with issues as totalizing as writing, the holocaust, and the text itself. Blanchot's style is naturally Nietzschean, drawing on the example of the aphorism, a fragmentary and disjointed fragment of thoughts, remarks, and of course contradictions. True, the use of explicit contradictions is a bit tiresome, and often difficult to comprehend, but Blanchot... Read Full Review

I can't say that I'm usually a huge fan of philosophical texts; I figured I was taking a gamble by picking this one up. A philosophical theory book written in fragments that deals with the holocaust? Not usually my thing. The first few pages I was just mystified; they seemed full of wilfully contradictory phrases about the other, about truth, about literature and death, concepts I understood in my own language but which this... Read Full Review

In my opinion, this book is a purified example of what theory should be, how theory should be written. Granted that I've not read the original in French; but even through this darkened glass, there's enough light that breaks through. Enough to blind one. In reading Blanchot, I think, you must never be "one". There is no Unity in the Disaster of Writing. "Just" Ethics. Blanchot's writing, to me, echoes that of Nietzsche (and... Read Full Review

To rate this book is to do its author a disservice. I might as well have given the text one star, for it makes no 'sense'. It is a multiple work, in the spirit of Nietzsche's aphoristic style, that attempts to lend a few scents to the reader. These scents might lead one to a space of silence in which the artist or writer relates with the source of his or her law, the inactive voice of reason. Can silence be rated? Our... Read Full Review