“This song to come, this reader to become” : the style of paradoxical anachrony in Blanchot's “Rene Char”

Abstract

Maurice Blanchot poses inescapable questions for theoretical discussions of style. Operating on and around the margins of literature, philosophy, and literary theory, he is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of the twentieth century. However, style in Blanchot's work is more than just a signature, the flourish of a paraph that identifies his writing; the more fundamental issue it raises concerns what can be called the conceptual force of style in the relation between style and thought, both in terms of the role style plays in the unfolding of thought as well as in the effect that style may have on readers. Indeed, these are two closely related aspects of style in Blanchot.