It is often impossible to distinguish among texts by Bataille, Blanchot, and Levinas written in the 1940s. Blanchot's influence on Levinas was massive and profound. It will take years to sort out the relationship between Derrida and Blanchot. Sometimes when reading Foucault or Lyotard one can feel the influence Blanchot. All this proxmity of thinking comes from the closely interanimated character of French intellectual culture.
Writers borrow freely from one another according to extremely subtle rules of reference.
Bruns readings of Blanchot have tried to take into account the dialogical or, better, the contextual character of his thinking. Much of the study is in fact not just a reading of Blanchot but an inquiry into his engagements and kinships, and in particular Bruns tries to be fairly precise about where Blanchot and his friend Emmanuel Levinas reached an impasse in their long debate. Bruns also says a little bit about Blanchot and Bataille as well as showing the parallel lines between Blanchot and Paul Celan, perhaps owing to the common background of Heidegger. Blanchot works offer a rossetta stone to French postwar intellectual life. In many ways it is possible that greater familiarity with his work will alter major readings of his better known contemporaries.