Journal Article

Schrijvend de mens uitwissen

van Meurs, Boris R.

2026

Overview

The human effaced by writingIn contemporary literary discussions about climate fiction, it is often argued that the alleged anthropocentrism of literature hinders it from fruitful engagement with nonhuman elements of the ecological crisis. While critics have defended literature against this claim by appealing to particular literary techniques to narrate the nonhuman world, in this article, I explore the material non-anthropocentrism of literature through an interpretation of Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death”. For Blanchot, literature is ultimately an ambiguous phenomenon that both at once expresses the power of human imagination and its limitations. These limitations become manifest mostly in the materiality of literary writing, which is a precondition for literary meaning to arise, but, according to Blanchot, never becomes meaningful itself. This material side to literature accompanies but escapes human action and imagination, highlighting their inevitable non-anthropocentric sides. While Blanchot’s non-anthropocentrism does not provide new guidelines for action, it can function as a humbling reflection on the limits of human agency.

• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• Subject: Blanchot, Maurice (1907-2003)