Without Maurice Blanchot, literary theory as we know it today would have been unthinkable. Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze: all are key theorists crucially influenced by Blanchot's work.

Gilles Deleuze

In many ways this is a question Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) himself might have asked. Deleuze took nothing for granted  and insisted that the power of life – all life and not just human life – was its power to develop problems. Life poses problems – not just to thinking beings, but to all life. Organisms, cells, machines and sound waves are all responses to the complication or ‘problematising’ force of life.