Supplication, Speech, Eating: Maurice Blanchot and Niobe in the Iliad

Abstract:L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation)—Maurice Blanchot’s thick volume of relatively brief essays, originally published in 1969—includes one text on the figure of the supplicant: “La Mesure, le suppliant” (“Measure, the Suppliant”). This essay evokes the scene in Book 24 of the Iliad where Priam enters Achilles’ camp to kiss the hands that killed Hector and beg to take his son’s dead body back to his city. In what follows, we undertake a kind of dialogic experiment: the analytic juxtaposition—roughly corresponding to the interdisciplinary encounter of our own two critical voices—of a reading of Blanchot’s reading of Homer (which is unfamiliar to most classicists) with a re-reading of the Homeric scene in light of Blanchot. We try to think of the Iliad’s final supplication scene in Blanchot’s mode, with the eventual aim of testing how this hermeneutic exercise might prompt us to experience anew the brief appearance of Niobe in Book 24.