Last Steps

Christopher Fynsk is Director of the Centre for Modern Thought and Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities; Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin; Language and Relation: . . . that there is language; and Heidegger: Thought and Historicity.

"The itinerary of Last Steps is unique and initially surprising: the ethico-political import of Blanchot's postwar writings, and particularly The Step Not Beyond. But in the course of this brilliant and compelling reading, Christopher Fynsk demonstrates that Blanchot's political engagement is central not just to his thinking about resistance or community or the events of 1968 but to everything from his views on freedom, justice, and messianic hope, to his practices of reading, critical vigilance, and fragmentary writing. No one is more capable than Fynsk of taking on these difficult subjects, and no one writes on Blanchot with this degree of erudition, rigor, patience, and sensitivity to the complexity and nuances of Blanchot's writing as well as to everything that resists interpretation and must remain unspoken within it. This is a remarkable work of criticism about one of the twentieth century's most remarkable writers." -- -Michael Naas, DePaul Univesity DePaul University "Christopher Fynsk in Last Steps offers a strikingly original and subtly captivating account of some of Maurice Blanchot's most challenging work and demonstrates with acute sympathy and incisive intelligence its far-reaching significance for philosophy and literature today." -- -Leslie Hill University of Warwick