Abstract

If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word “authentic.”In 1956, Emmanuel Levinas devoted a provocative essay to the writing of his friend and companion in thought, Maurice Blanchot, entitled “The Poet’s Vision.” Therein, Levinas closely examines Blanchot’s meditations on the origin and essence of the literary work, focusing in particular on the collection of essays assembled together in the book The Space of Literature, which appeared one year beforehand in 1955. His contention, broadly speaking, is that Blanchot’s literary criticism and fiction does not reduce “the limit of the human” to the domain of possibility. Instead, it places into question the definition...