Placing Blanchot at the centre stage of writing in the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary sheds new light on Blanchot's political activities before and after the Second World War.

1 An intellectual itinerary 2 The (im)possibility of literature 3 Writing the neuter 4 The absence of the book 5 Extreme contemporary

Leslie Hill is Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick, and the author of Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words and Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires.