Abstract

Blanchot's work may at first seem remote from any sort of environmentalist thinking. While elements of his work share with Levinas and Heidegger a problematic privileging of the human, Blanchot nevertheless offers the basis of what might be seen as a timely ‘deeper ecological’ thinking, one that can engage the destructive anthropocentrism of Western thought and tradition in the very minutiae of its literary and philosophical texts. Unlike in much ‘green’ philosophy, no concept of nature or earth serves as foundation for Blanchot's thought. He is engaged by the ‘impossible’ as that which is not a matter of human power or decision, affirmed in both its ethical force and its contestation of dominant and appropriative conceptions of knowledge, rationality and invention. A comparison is offered between Max Oelschlager's representative ecocritical essay ‘Earth-Talk: Conservation and Ecology’, with its romantic attempt to find and celebrate modes of unalienated or ‘natural’ language, and Blanchot's practice of what can be seen as a more radical and questioning ‘ecology’ based on almost opposite conceptions.