The Almighty

«The Almighty» (1948) is the most extensive and at the same time mysterious work of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003).

In this, his last novel (after which he renounced the large form in favor of more concise speculative narratives), critics tend to see various philosophical themes (the end of history and the victory of Absolute knowledge, the death of God, existential concern of Dasein, death as a guarantee of literary word) and literary paradigms (political pamphlet, apocalyptic dystopia, Kafkaesque parable), but all these ongoing constructions clearly turn out to be mere reductions of a text that is fundamentally irreducible to speculative constructs.

The unexpectedly topical nature of the novel, written in the wake of the upheavals caused by the Second World War, is enhanced by the fact that the action unfolds against the backdrop of social cataclysms provoked in an ideally stable totalitarian state by a monstrous epidemic, which we would today call a pandemic.

«If I have written some books, it is only because I hoped to put an end to all this with my books. If I have written novels, they were born at the moment when words began to retreat before the truth.» Maurice Blanchot

«To enter Blanchot's prose is to enter an unreliable world that defends its freedom from the comfort and deadening familiarity of mimesis.» Gilbert Sorrentino

novel, philosophy, French literature of the 20th century