Images must travel further: Bataille and Blanchot read Beckett

Perhaps the most prescient of Beckett's early critics were the French writers Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in their analyses of (respectively) Molloy and The Unnamable. In this paper I argue that the essence of the intellectual friendship that the two critics shared - one of the great tacit 'partnerships' of the last century, which has yet to be fully unravelled - can be discerned through their writings on Beckett. His novels are thus treated as a kind of 'border' across which their own ideas continue to emerge and evolve, which in turn has implications for the development of French theory.