Special Issue of the Oxford Literary Review 47.2, December 2025
Ed. Philippe Lynes
Since the publication of Timothy Clark’s essays, “A Green Blanchot: Impossible?” (Paragraph 30.3, 2007) and “Blanchot and the End of Nature” (Parallax 16.2, 2010), a new wave of interest in the relevance of Blanchot’s work to ecocriticism and environmental philosophy, as a sort of eco-deconstruction avant la lettre, has made itself felt. This can be read in Holly Langstaff’s Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), which demonstrates Blanchot’s ongoing importance for contemporary philosophical debates about technology, the post-human and ecological thinking, Jonathan Boulter’s Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), which reads Blanchot’s idea of the disaster in relation to contemporary fiction of the United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as the German-language collection Die Apokalypse Enttäuscht: Atomtod, Klimakatastrophe, Kommunismus (eds. Alexander García-Düttmann and Marcus Quent, Diaphanes, 2023), which brings Blanchot’s 1964 essay “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing” into conversation with the climate catastrophe. Along with the recent influx of posthumous archival publications, including Thomas le Solitaire and Premiers récits (eds. Philippe Lynes and Leslie Hill, Kimé, 2022 and 2023), as well as his Notes sur Heidegger (eds. Étienne Pinat, Kimé, 2023), the work of the man who Jacques Derrida called one the three great minds of the 20th Century appears to once again be emerging from its perpetual obscurity.
This special issue of the Oxford Literary Review invites contributions reflecting on Blanchot’s philosophical, critical and literary work in response to the great ecological crises of our time, including species extinction, global warming and environmental degradation. How do Blanchot’s reflections on the disaster and nihilism help us to better conceive of the Anthropocene extinction? How might Blanchot’s thoughts on science fiction, or on literature as the right to death help us better appreciate the ever-growing influx of apocalyptic climate fiction? How do Blanchot’s novels and récits help us rethink of nature, the earth, the animal and vegetal worlds, and our relationship to the nonhuman world in general?
With the kind permission of their respective estates, this special issue will feature a translation of Discourses of the End, an unpublished 1983 conversation between Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy on Blanchot, the apocalypse and the disaster.
The OLR is the UK’s oldest journal of literary theory, published by Edinburgh University Press (see https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/olr). Expressions of interest, with an abstract of up to 500 words (in English or in French), are invited by the end of April 2024. Please contact philippe.g.lynes@durham.ac.uk. The deadline for completed submissions would then be end May 2025, for a publication date of December 2025.