ordinary body of work. He is concerned with literature, he writes about art but in no simple sense can he be called an art historian or a literary critic. To those who are familiar with the work of Heidegger and the writers influenced by him, Blanchot might appear to be a thinker, a writer of a similar kind, albeit one who does not couch his work in avowedly philosophical terms. But the apparent reluctance of Blanchot to provide a treatise in which he would expound a philosophical system points towards a hesitation about the practice of philosophy itself that is iden- tifiable in his writings. I seek to attend to Blanchot\u2019s notion and practice of friendship in contradistinction to what I will argue is a certain set of desiderata that have traditionally shaped and informed the cultural form called philosophy.

The word \u201cfriendship\u201d is one word among many that are strongly associated with Blanchot. Nevertheless, it is his notion of friendship that his greatest readers have emphasised when writ- ing of Blanchot. For Derrida, Blanchot\u2019s

one of \u201cthe great canonical meditations on friendship\u201d (The Politics of Friendship 290). Noting that Blanchot is \u201cone of the rare thinkers to consider the meaning of the word friend in philosophy,\u201d Deleuze and Guattari argue that Blanchot takes up the question of the friend in so far as it is \u201cinternal to the conditions of thought as such\u201d (What is Philosophy? 4). But the authors of The Politics of Friendship andWhat

ration of Blanchot\u2019s notion of friendship in their published works. This apparent neglect reflects the surprising absence of reflections on friend- ship in Blanchot\u2019s own writings. Although Blanchot names one of his booksL\u2019A miti\u00e9, an explicit discussion of friendship in that book is confined to an oblique, italicised coda.1

Why is the word friendship so important to Blanchot and his commentators? Although he puts his mark on it in a distinctive manner, Blanchot takes the word friendship, as I will argue, from Bataille. Indeed, Blanchot\u2019s critical essays, dialogues and fragmentary writings produce, as Leslie Hill notes, \u201cfew, if any, authentically philosophical or theoretical concepts that may be called his own\u201d (Blanchot

argue that friendship is a name for his broadest concern \u2013 that, indeed, to keep fidelity with Blanchot\u2019s writings is to postpone the formula- tion of a reductive account of his friendships and his notion of friendship.2 One must not be seduced by ordinary notions of \u201cauthorship,\u201d intellectual history, or biography; one cannot respond to Blanchot\u2019s writings without recalling the external provocation that calls him to write and the specificity of the way in which he meets

this call, each time singular. Not to discern this friendship would be to fall short of the friendship that is required toread Blanchot.

Blanchot differentiates the usual notion of friendship, understood on the basis of a volun- tary evincing of accord or familiarity, from a pre- voluntary relationship that co-constitutes the identity of he or she who would evince friend- ship. The friendship of which Blanchot writes invites a reconception of the human being. Before (although this is not a chronological or even a transcendental \u201cbefore\u201d) the pre-deter- mined categories that prepare and mediate my encounters, defining me as a client or service provider, as a teacher or a pupil, brother or son, etc., I am pledged to the other in a relationship Blanchot calls friendship. I am a friend before I am an individual; the referent of the word \u201cmy\u201d is not a subsistent and perduring self but a delim- itation of a prior and constituting relationship. As I will explain, friendship is not mine to give since I am not there in advance to evince it, nor is it mine to receive since I am not there to receive it. Exploiting the etymology of the word philosophy (philo-sophia), I will argue in the following that Blanchot\u2019s notion of friendship as it is developed in his discussion of the death of his friend Georges Bataille calls for a new elabo- ration of philosophical reflection sourced in a reconception of what it is to think and to be affected.3

Before I turn to Blanchot\u2019s essays, I will make some contextualising remarks on death and mourning.

speculated that one might \u201cfirst define man in terms of these public practices of mourning instead of the purely private knowledge he has of himself as mortal\u201d (Death 7). Human existence is distinctive because \u201chuman life is a life \u2018with\u2019 the dead\u201d; it follows then that the origin of the community can be found in mourning, where mourning means coming to terms with an absence (8). The work of mourning allows this absence to be integrated into the practices of a community.

only help to integrate death into the life of the community, but strengthen the community itself. At the same time, however, death can never be entirely integrated or assumed; to keep a memory of the dead, to observe rites, to allocate a space and a time for mourning makes death no less strange or disruptive. There is an entire cultural apparatus for explaining the causes of death, for measuring its course and predicting its outcome \u2013 but when it arrives it does so eruptively.

The fact that I will die \u2013 a fact I might forget since it seems to happen to others and not to me \u2013 has led certain philosophers to argue that reflection upon death can lead the thinker to confront the fact of his or her individuality. The fact that one dies alone \u2013 no one, after all, can do my dying for me \u2013 leads Martin Heidegger to suppose that it is by relating oneself in the right way to deathqua absencepar excellence that t he individual can assume his or her existence for him- or herself in the face of the community, which can never come to terms with death as such.

that reflecting on the fact that I will die can allow me to assume my existence for myself. The resolute (entschlossen) relation to my death \u201cmakes manifest that all being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all being-wit h-Others, will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-being [eigenste Seink\u00f6nnen] is the issue\u201d (ibid.).Dasein can be said to be authentically itself when it lays claim to its own existence by liberating itself from what Heidegger writes are \u201cthose possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one\u201d (ibid.).Dasein can seize those possibilities as its own, or indeed, chose other ones, only when it has faced up to the fact that it will die.

relation to the death of the other that cuts across any claim that the relation to one\u2019s death has an existential or an ontological priority. The death of the friend reveals the co-constitution of the individual by and through a relationship with the other that is upstream of any determination of a primordial self-relation or selfhood.

\u201cFriendship,\u201d Blanchot\u2019s meditation on the death of Bataille, does not readily accommodate itself to the genre of the memorial essay. Rather than granting his readers certain confidences about the particularities of his relationship to this friend, no details of this friendship appear; the pages we find at the end of the book that bears the same name as this short text are as enigmatic as any of Blanchot\u2019s essays. Blanchot is not reflecting on the vicissitudes of a personal friend- ship, but inquiring as to what the death of the friend reveals about friendship itself. Moreover, he is also considering what friendship is and asking what the stakes of friendship might be.

How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsi- bility, belong to no one [n\u2019appartiennent \u00e0

Blanchot immediately sets aside that which we might expect would recall us to a friend \u2013 i.e., his character, the story that could be recounted of his life. Here, where the friend in question has been engaged on a certain search \u2013 where the friend is an author, a writer \u2013 speaking of him is doubly difficult. To speak of this friend would require that one speaks of a \u201cno one,\u201d a place- holder for a person, who, in a sense I will spec- ify, underlies the idiosyncrasies, the anecdotes, that would recall him to us.

This is why, as Blanchot goes on to reflect, there are \u201cno witnesses\u201d to the life of this friend, since those close to the deceased speak only of what is close to them: they speak of their memo- ries (289, 326). They remember what they shared

with the deceased. What they do not affirm, according to Blanchot, is the distance that is at play in their former proximity to the dead friend. Whilst they seek to speak of the deceased \u2013 to testify, that is, to the presence of the one no longer with us \u2013 these mourners \u201care only look- ing to fill a void,\u201d that is, to speak or write, to remember and thereby also toforget, thereby distancing themselves from the shock that the deceased is no more (289, 326). The memories we speak or write about are merely memories of the modes of our closeness to the deceased; what we do not remember is the trauma we seek to forget by and through the act of memorising. We cannot, Blanchot claims, keep a memory of \u201can insignificance so enormous [d\u00e9mesur\u00e9e] that we do not have a memory capable of containing it and such that we ourselves must already slip [glisser] into forgetting in order to sustain it\u201d (289, 326. Translation amended throughout.). How can we keep a memory of the deceased if memorialising is not, as Blanchot avers, simply a matter of recalling his character traits or the episodes from his life or intellectual career? How can we attempt to remain loyal to this \u201cinsignifi- cance\u201d; to the \u201cno one\u201d that my friend neverthe- less was (289, 326)?

Everything we say at the funeral oration or write in obituaries or memoirs, Blanchot contin- ues, \u201ctends to veil over the one affirmation: that everything must fade and that we can remain loyal only so long as we watch over this self-effac- ing movement, to which something in us that rejects all memory already belongs\u201d (289, 326. Translation amended.). The task of remembering requires something ostensibly impossible: i.e., the keeping of a memory of what cannot be remembered. But even as we might try, and fail, to keep this memory, our uncanny belonging (a belonging that binds us to the other whether or not we remember it) to the self-effacing move- ment remains. Does this mean that we know

despite our speeches, despite our tributes to the deceased, despite the fidelity we might mistake for a truer loyalty, we knowotherwise? If this is the case, then the relationship Blanchot calls \u201cproximity\u201d is a complex, even paradoxical phenomenon, since it names a closeness to the