SOURCE: A review of Friendship, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 113, No. 5, December, 1998, pp. 1180-82.

In the following review, Conley discusses the main themes of Friendship.

In an August 1997 review of Maurice Blanchot’s Friendship in Library Journal (122.13, p. 90), Robert T. Ivey expressed his perplexity at the regard with which Blanchot is increasingly held among literary theorists and philosophers. Giving Blanchot’s text a grade of “C,” he wrote that those seeking commentaries on friendship such as Montaigne offered readers will be disappointed by these “rambling, disjointed essays …” I agree. Without reservation. It is true that such expectations would only be disappointed by these pages. But perhaps such a reader should be first referred to Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, which carefully elaborates a shared mourning for the friend that characterizes both Blanchot and Montaigne. The contemporary political stakes that Derrida unravels in his extended engagements with classical...