Uncontrollable mechanisms : Maurice Blanchot's inorganic writing

This article interrogates a thinking of writing as techne that runs decisively through Blanchot’s thought but is yet to be examined in any systematic manner to date. It is well known that Blanchot was an attentive reader of Heidegger, although some have overstated or simplified the influence of the latter on the French writer; his engagement with Heidegger was close and detailed but also tense and adversarial. This article highlights important differences between Blanchot and Heidegger on the relationship between art and technology. It draws attention to mechanical references in fictional and critical work by Blanchot first published between 1949 and 1980, from a telephone call in La Folie du jour to the impact of mass paperback publishing discussed in ‘Les Grands Réducteurs’ and the careful punctuation of ‘Nietzsche et l’écriture fragmentaire’. The final section examines selected fragments from Le Pas au-delà and L’Écriture du désastre and considers how the opposition between nature and culture is complicated by an inorganic fragmentary writing which proliferates like a cancerous cell, with consequences for the human subject