Writing, Maurice Blanchot taught us, is not something that is in oneGÇÖs power. It is, rather, a search for a nonpower that refuses mastery, order, and all established authority. For Blanchot, this search was guided by an enigmatic exigency, an arresting rupture, and a promise of justice that required endless contestation of every usurping authority, an endless going out toward the other. GÇ£The step/not beyondGÇ¥ (GÇ£le pas au-del+áGÇ¥) names this exilic passage as it took form in his influential later work, but not as a theme or concept, because its GÇ£stepGÇ¥ requires a transgression of discursive limits and any grasp afforded by the labor of the negative. Thus, to follow GÇ£the step/not beyondGÇ¥ is to follow a kind of event in writing, to enter a movement that is never quite captured in any defining or narrating account. Last Steps attempts a practice of reading that honors the exilic exigency even as it risks drawing BlanchotGÇÖs reflective writings and fragmentary narratives into the articulation of a reading. It brings to the fore BlanchotGÇÖs exceptional contributions to contemporary thought on the ethico-political relation, language, and the experience of human finitude. It offers the most sustained interpretation of The Step Not Beyond available, with attentive readings of a number of major texts, as well as chapters on Levinas's and BlanchotGÇÖs relation to Judaism.

Its trajectory of reading limns the meaning of a question from The Infinite Conversation that implies an opening and a singular affirmation rather than a closure: GÇ£How had he come to will the interruption of the discourse?GÇ¥.