During his years spent on the Mediterranean coast in Èze, where years earlier Nietzsche had similarly completed some of his most decisive thinking, the critic and novelist Maurice Blanchot would often find himself silently retracing his predecessor’s footsteps. In this strikingly original exploration of the implicit dialogue between the pair, which touches in turn on the implications of courtly love, the legacy of Tristan and Isolde, Wagnerian myth, the place of erotic intimacy in Blanchot’s fiction, and much else besides, Joseph Kuzma convincingly demonstrates how Nietzsche and Blanchot were each deeply committed to an experience of desire in which difference took precedence over fusion, distance over proximity, and intensity over finality. This illuminating study not only offers an acutely suggestive rethinking of eternal return, now viewed less as a doctrine than as a deferral of all doctrine, but also gives a fresh and compelling account of Nietzsche’s importance for postwar French thought in general and of the urgency of Blanchot’s distinctive response to Nietzsche in particular.
Leslie Hill, Emeritus Professor of French Studies, University of Warwick