Maurice Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance

Can Maurice Blanchot, so often occupied with thoughts of death, dying, affliction, and impossibility, tell us anything about hope? Conversely, can hope tell us anything about Blanchot’s project? Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance offers a bold re-reading of Maurice Blanchot by placing two concepts seldom associated with his work – hope and chance – at its centre.

Against the grain of much Blanchot scholarship, Adam Potts argues that Blanchot’s project is a writing animated by a paradoxical hope for the Outside: hope directed not toward possibility, but impossibility. Taking Blanchot’s definition of impossibility in his essay ‘The Great Refusal’ – impossibility as thought that reveals itself ‘according to a measure other than that of power’ – the book claims that hope for the Outside is both an aesthetic and political concern. Specifically, it contends that language which turns away from power becomes oriented toward the Other. In this turn to alterity, chance helps conceptualise what eludes power.

Alongside Blanchot, Potts traces the intimately complex relationship between hope and chance through key moments and figures in its history – from Yves Bonnefoy, Ernst Bloch, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Gabriel Marcel, to Dada, John Cage, Surrealism, and improvised dance. Through comparative thinking and close readings of The Infinite Conversation and The Step Not Beyond, Potts shows how Blanchot unsettles the concepts of hope and chance, favouring a writing that dwells in suspension and anticipation, where chance interrupts mastery and hope refuses fulfilment.

At once philosophically rigorous and creatively adventurous, Maurice Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance reframes Blanchot as a writer whose work is propelled by a strange, restless, and generative hope – capable of transforming how we understand literature, politics, and experimental practice.