RSSMaurice Blanchot’s philosophical work posits the idea of unnameable trauma, of the impossibility of knowing the experience of death, and the sense that the traumatic event, along with its recording or retelling, has always already happened. The traumatic event can be both familiar and alienating—it seems familiar, “like a movie,” but immediately throws you into the unknown future of it having happened. For Blanchot, you can’t ever be witness to the actual moment of its happening. His challenging ideas demand a leap of faith from the reader, but to let his words seep in is to feel calmed in the face of the anxiety generated by the minutiae and attendant meaninglessness of everyday life. This sort of calm is the same reward offered by Remainder, a novel of astonishing genius in which an unnamed protagonist, who has suffered an unnameable accident, seeks to uncover real feeling again. (continue reading…)