A Voice from Elsewhere

"This welcome new volume, beautifully translated, is an essential addition to our library of Blanchot in English." - Lydia Davis

"Maurice Blanchot devoted himself to what Henry James called 'the strangeness in the strangeness.' A Voice from Elsewhere speaks of what is irreducibly strange in poetry and philosophy in a language of calm simplicity. These mostly late pieces by a writer and thinker of the first rank are as piercing as they are deeply moving." - Kevin Hart

"And if the voice from elsewhere was the poet's voice? It is this hypothesis Blanchot tests 'with obstinate rigor' in this book. Such a language is essentially prophetic, but only in the sense that '[i]t indicates the future, because it does not yet speak: ... finding its meaning and legitimacy only ahead of itself.' This is luminous Blanchot, rendered luminously by Charlotte Mandell, his best, most elegantly literate translator." - Pierre Joris

"Here is a volume of Maurice Blanchot's commentaries on poems by Louis-Ren© des Forªts, Ren© Char, and Paul Celan, together with his celebrated account of Michel Foucault's Å"uvre. In each case Blanchot finds himself obsessed by 'a voice from elsewhere'-a voice that is at once intimate, wordless, and uninhabited: la voix de personne, no-one's voice. These commentaries, superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell, are themselves constituted by this voice, a pure reverberation that readers of Blanchot's writings will not have forgotten. They will say: so here he is, if he ever was." â Gerald L. Bruns