The Intimate Blanchot

In this article I explore the status of intimate relationality in Maurice Blanchot's fictional writings and critical essays of the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing primarily on his 1951 text When the Time Comes, I show that intimacy in Blanchot's writings is an impersonal covenant established at the extreme limit of separation. Rather than thinking of intimacy and distance in a traditional manner, as fundamentally at odds with one another, Blanchot insists that the most profound intimacy occurs only when separation has been experienced, and affirmed, in its most radical form.