Review of Blanchot’s Political Writings

Tis review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953–1993 by Maurice Blanchot as ameans to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting theabsence of his earlier  right-wing political texts from the 1930s in this collection, it attempts to probe Blanchot’s idiosyncratic ‘ultra-left’ turn represented in his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. Inparticular, I analyse how Blanchot develops a communism that focuses on the problem of abstraction: both the abstraction intrinsic to social reality, and the necessity to negate and contest that abstraction through a ‘communist writing’. Te review reconstitutes this unusual form of Marxism, and analyses the possible resources it offers and its limits.
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