Maurice Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance

What can Maurice Blanchot—renowned for his reflections on death and literature—teach us about creativity?

According to Adam Potts, the answer is: a lot. Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance brings two often-overlooked yet deeply interwoven ideas—hope and chance—into sharp focus within Blanchot’s thought, offering a fresh perspective on creativity and improvisation.

Through a series of encounters with other thinkers and creative practitioners who grapple with these concepts, each chapter serves as a case study in approaching hope and chance. Figures such as Georges Bataille, John Cage, Robin Kelley, Gabriel Marcel, Ernst Bloch, Yves Bonnefoy, and André Breton emerge as Blanchot’s intellectual and spiritual interlocutors - each pursuing experimental modes of thought and feeling that resist cultural constraints and defy easy conceptualisation.

If this “outside” space represents Blanchot’s refuge from the reductive tendencies of human culture, then chance becomes the method by which he - and these kindred spirits - access it. The book’s final section turns to improvisation, spotlighting the dance praxis of Léa Tirabasso as a vivid example of hope and chance functioning as optimistic, transcendent tools for creative practice.