SOURCE: A review of L'Écriture du désastre, in World Literature Today, Vol. 55, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, p. 642.

In the following review, Morot-Sir outlines Blanchot's literary principles and theoretical perspectives in L'Écriture du désastre.

Blanchot warns his eventual critics and, by the same token, himself that any commentary is an effort at “producing meaning” and thus of reconstructing a text; it is heavy prattling and gross distortion. Far from being the “ideal reader,” the critic destroys the pure quality of writing and brings writing back to an oral status; he forces it into the artificial world of Letters. Once and for all, Hegel gave the outrageous and inevitable model of this universal and rational garrulity behind which man hides his impotence. “Writing of disaster” [L'Écriture du désastre]—or disaster of Writing, as one could wish to put it—refuses the comments which would pretend to...