Abstract

This thesis examines Maurice Blanchot's use and theory of fragmentary writing as a writing of difference. It places Blanchot's use of the fragmentary in relation to his thinking of totality in its various forms: history, presence, the book. In an attempt to situate Blanchot's idea of writing as spatial and temporal discontinuity within the broader field of French post-structuralist thought, and, in particular, French readings of Nietzsche, the thesis is an intertextual reading of numerous essays, full-length fragmentary works and fictions of Blanchot with a number of works by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski. The later chapters of the thesis are concerned with the fragmentary as a displacement of the present through its relation to the notion of an absolute past