Christophe Bident. Reconnaissances: Antelme, Blanchot, Deleuze. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2003 [Book Review]

Reconnaître: to recognise, to acknowledge. As Christophe Bident states in the incipit of his book, this verb predicates something ambiguous, fluctuat-ing, evasive; but, he adds, at the same time decisive and necessary. Espe-cially in our time, the age of the TV-reality, when everything is proclaimed recognisable in anything else, and therefore everything is undifferentiated. Bident’s slender but dense book is a meditation on the acts of recognition which strongly argues for the inescapable necessity of the reconnaissance, recurring principally – but not exclusively – in the works of Robert Antelme, Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze.