This chapter on Maurice Blanchot turns Formal Matters into a chiasmus. It is the point at which two very different concepts of writing and the body cross over. On one side is the abstract formalism of Garréta and Beckett, in which embodiment takes shape beyond representation, theme, and identity by providing the ground for poetic language. On the other side, as the reader will come to see, is Primo Levi’s testimonial literature, whose self-conscious objective of providing an account of the Holocaust is inseparable from the demands of representation, particularly the representation of the body. Blanchot provides the fulcrum on which this calibrated system rests. The slight structural imbalance that emerges is an essential facet of chiasmus, a rhetorical figure in which the two inverted clauses rarely perfectly mirror each other, providing an asymmetrical rhetorical formulation. The formalist autonomy of Garréta and Beckett combines to provide an uneven counterpoint to the historical specificity of Levi. Looked at from another perspective, however, the concrete materiality of Levi’s work, anchored in the weight of representation – of representation as a weight – grounds Garréta and Beckett’s allusiveness. This chapter thus demonstrates how embodiment shapes the boundaries of thought and interpretation, as well as literary form.

Like all the other tropes Formal Matters has thus far explored, chiasmus is important in both ancient and classical rhetoric and postmodernist thought. It is also, however, the trope that has the most phenomenological dimension, as explored in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of chiasmus, which represents the perceptual interweaving of the body and the world beyond the realm of vision, a haptic form of sensibility that interrupts the primacy of vision. I bring chiasmus’ phenomenological and rhetorical dimensions together with its use in postmodernist deconstruction to explore the work of Maurice Blanchot. Or rather, I use his final short récit, The Instant of My Death (1994, L’Instant de ma mort), to illuminate the relationship between embodiment, form, and interpretation beyond absence.

Blanchot has often been considered a writer of extreme negativity and fragmentation, for whom writing figures an un-figurable presence, “a radical passivity of the self” that is excluded “from the domain of that which can appear, exile[d] from the realm of experience.”