Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary
	Leslie Hill Warwick Studies in European Philosophy

'Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary is an invaluable contribution. It will be an enormous help as an introduction to Blanchot's work; but readers who have long been studying his writing will be no less grateful for Leslie Hill's learned, deeply thoughtful, trustworthy book. No other study of Blanchot is so thorough; no other so useful for picturing the entire trajectory of Blanchot's work. I count on returning often to this instructive and challenging book.'
Ann Smock, University of California, Berkeley

Philosopher, novelist, literary critic, and political journalist, Maurice Blanchot is one of the most remarkable and controversial figures in the whole of twentieth-century literature and thought. His epoch-making writings, which are now widely available in translation, have had a decisive impact on contemporary philosophy, literature, and literary theory. His texts on Sade, Kafka, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Rilke, or Beckett show him to be one of modern literature's most acute and influential commentators. But Blanchot is equally important as a challenging and incisive reader of philosophical texts, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Bataille, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy.

This wide-ranging, rigorous, and accessible introduction to Blanchot is the first in English to be devoted to the entirety of the author's work. It provides a clear and comprehensive assessment of one of the key figures in the development of postmodern thought.

Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary throws new light on Blanchot's much-debated political activities both before and after the Second World War. It also contains the most comprehensive bibliography of Blanchot's writings to appear in any language during the last twenty years. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary will be essential reading for all those concerned with philosophy, literature and poststructuralist thought.

Leslie Hill is Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick