The life of the night: Bolaño, Blanchot, and the impoverishment of openness

Abstract

This article deals with the theme of openness in Roberto Bolaño’s novel Monsieur Pain. Drawing on Blanchot’s formulation of “the other night,” I locate in the hiccups present throughout Bolaño’s novel an openness that suspends and undoes itself, thus critiquing conceptions of openness as pure emptiness such as those at work in Agamben’s philosophy, and in the contemporary discourses around convenience and infinite possibility.