Blanchot's writings have played a critical role in the development of 20th-century French thought, but the implicit tension in this role has rarely been addressed directly. Reading Blanchot involves understanding how literature can have an effect on philosophy, to the extent of putting philosophy itself in question by exposing a different and literary mode of thought. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature provides a detailed and far-reaching explication of how Blanchot's works changed in the postwar period, when he developed the peculiarly dense form of writing and thinking by which he has become known. Because this form is to be found most substantially in his fictional writings, rather than his theoretical or critical works, the demand on readers to grasp its implications for thought is rendered more difficult. By carefully reading through some of his most distinctive fictional works, including The Most High and The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me , William S. Allen shows in this groundbreaking study how Blanchot develops a profound rethinking of materiality, abstraction, contingency, and finitude, which are reconstrued through the experience of literature. This rethinking goes beyond literature or aesthetics and provides a reformulation of the nature of politics and history, and in particular what may be understood as the outside of literature. This exteriority takes various forms - sickness, nihilism, melancholy, alienation, scepticism, and also suicide - that all give expression to the radical aporias of any thought of relation or possibility.