Along with Mascolo, and several others, Blanchot then sought to channel his efforts on the “Manifeste” into an even more ambitious project: the creation of an international journal of “total criticism,” which would meld together political, literary, and scientific discussions. Blanchot’s mother died, in 1957. Secondly, though, beyond this demand to create an interruption in the politics of possibility through concrete, worldly intervention, there is the requirement of bearing witness to an infinite demand for justice which exceeds all calculation, all possibility, and all work. Blanchot and Levinas first met in Strasbourg in 1925 while studying philosophy. Of major importance within Levinas’s philosophy during this period is the figure of the “Other” (Autrui). The early 1940s were a particularly formative time in Blanchot’s life. Indeed, for Blanchot, the neuter is set apart from everything visible and invisible, everything present and absent. Who exactly is this Other to whom Levinas refers? It is that which we can neither forget nor remember, because in order to forget we would have to have been able to remember it as something that ‘happened,’ and that is experienced. Neither offers consolation. The Writing Of The Disaster eBook File: Disaster-writing.PDF Book by Maurice Blanchot, The Writing Of The Disaster Books available in PDF, EPUB, Mobi Format. It demands that the subject put the Other before all else. I think we should think through the relations among these different types of utterances. His 1973 text, The Step Not Beyond, which was written entirely in the fragmentary form, resembles at times a meditation on death—though less as a statement of its impending reality, than as a testimony to its interminable impossibility. In refusing to subordinate difference to identity and distance to presence, Blanchot is already anticipating the ascendency of the simulacral that will play such a prominent role in the post-structuralist theories of the decades to come. In the midst of the il y a, the world and its possibilities vanish, leaving as a palpable residue the preconceptual singularity of being itself. Blanchot writes both in and 'about' the fragmentary. True, Blanchot is much closer to  Heidegger than he is to the more “action” oriented existentialists, namely, Sartre, but he revels in the, The positive value we usually ascribe to knowledge, meaning, and totality is turned to a horror show in Blanchot’s text. In October 1958, Blanchot used, for the first time in his published writing, the notion of “le neuter” as a lexical placeholder for the trace of what remains outside of being and non-being.