Abstract
Maurice Blanchot is generally regarded as an atheist In this article I examine his work on Simone Weil, who can be linked to negative theology to the extent that God's absence characterises her discourse. Weil considers desire to be the condition for the possibility of salvation. Blanchot subtilises the point, so that the condition for the possibility of salvation is also its condition for impossibility, dependent on what he calls “the neuter”. The consequent experience, whilst almost identical to that of the mystic, differs to the extent that it is based on the impossibility of any unique being. Language's failure to represent God is seen to be an affirmation of itself, a celebration of the absence of absence.
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