There is something undeniably curious about the work of Maurice Blanchot. His writings would seem to belong to the obscurities of the night in such a way that they refuse critical interpretation even as they suggest the possibility of a reflection on the practice of literary-critical reading. There is a sense in which Blanchot is to be located always someplace else, both somewhere beyond his text and sometime not yet contemporaneous with it. The imprint of his hand might hover over the grain of

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... the page cast-ing its hermitic shadow and guarding against what might gather itself there, but this hand, if ever it did, no longer belongs to him. The writer writes, Blanchot argues, to the extent that the writer has always already been writ-ten by writing; writing is what the writer must give up in order to write so that writing, in fact, would carry always within itself a resistance to any of the advances a hermeneutic or metalanguage might feign to hazard.