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The relative obscurity of Maurice Blanchot's narratives is remarkable. Despite his stature as a critic whose unrelenting focus on writing played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written, his own literary production has never found much of an audience beyond a narrow circle of artists, writers, and critics (Bident, Maurice Blanchot).1 Part of the problem lies in his inimitable French idiom. Blanchot's style—a blend of classical constructions binding clinical descriptions of space with conundrums of reflexive thought, a negativity that resists synthesis—has often been related to his writings on the neutral as neither immanent nor transcendent, but an entirely other kind of relation.2 Often implicated in its own domestication throughout the history of philosophy, the neutral is either conflated with the impersonal or the universal, or else challenged by "the ethical primacy of the Self-Subject" in its aspirations to the "singular Unique" (Blanchot, Entretien 441). Yet long before he formulates his notion of neutral speech in relation to narrative, Blanchot imagines literature as a nearly autonomous linguistic process. Consider the following claim from "Le mystère dans les lettres," an essay on Jean Paulhan:
La littérature n'est pas uniquement le langage au repos, le langage définitivement fait, immobilisé et mort, elle est plus que cela, car elle aspire au paradoxe d'une langue qui, en train de se faire et comme naissante, voudrait être en même temps définitivement faite: être parfaite. Le langage de la littérature ne veut pas être distinct de la liberté de celui qui parle et, en même temps, il veut avoir la force d'une parole impersonnelle, la subsistance d'une langue qui se parle toute seule.3
(Part du feu, 62).
What interests me in this passage is not so much Blanchot's polemic with Paulhan about rhetoric and terror, but rather the description of literature as "impersonal speech" or a "language that speaks itself on its own." Charlotte Mandell's accurately awkward translation renders the French "une langue qui se parle tout seule," a phrase that is emphasized in the original. What does Blanchot's style owe to the fantasy of such an autonomous, impersonal language? Style, as Ann Banfield notes, is a counterpart of linguistic competence, a writer's internalized knowledge, and what can be said about...