Two Essays by Blanchot on Hölderlin

Blanchot’s critical essays are characterized by the delicate and elusive balance they maintain between the study of particular works and the inde-pendent reflection upon literature. This ambiguity is typically to be ob-served, in passages of greater intensity, in the discussion of those writers, such as Hölderlin, Mallarmé or Kafka, to whose work Blanchot’s studies have frequently returned. The critical study accompanies and reflects upon the manner in which “literature” appears as a motivation and a theme for the particular writer. The reflection does not, however, remain at the level of the commentary, but tends to fuse its standpoint with that of the works studied, to take over their affirmations for its own account or to develop its own affirmations from the language of the source-text. We will study here this movement in the course of two of Blanchot’s essays on Hölderlin.