Maurice Blanchot’s death went largely unnoticed by the American media. While lengthy obituaries appeared overseas in the Guardian and the Independent, in America Blanchot’s death was greeted with silence. Finally, a week later, an unbelievably curt and dismissive obituary appeared in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, sandwiched between extensive and detailed notices for the founder of a famous diet program and for an advertising executive. Blanchot was portrayed as a minor French author whose only outstanding feature was…

Je voudrais vous remercier du silence dans vos mots. That’s all I remember saying in the one letter I wrote to Maurice Blanchot, a few years before his death. I want to thank you for the silence in your words. I was working on my translation of Le livre à venir, and suddenly I felt an urgent need to write to Blanchot, simply to thank him for his work all these years, for all that he’s written, but especially for all that he has left unwritten: for the voice beneath the words, the sly, quiet, inner voice of all…