that is a rather hard question when it comes to Blanchot. usually one just 'knows' (or rather 'hears') when you pick up a text of his. if you have any interest in writing and literature, he's a must read. he is a personal friend of Levinas', so you'll find some similarities with levinas' thoughts; but also with Heideggers'. yet he has a very unique touch and approach. but if you find any of these two interesting, you'll like Blanchot. Heidegger has a text 'Was heißt denken?" ('what is thinking?' but also 'what calls (for) thinking?') in which he stresses the irreconcilable difference between what is ordinarily called thinking and the vocation that constitutes 'eigentliches' ('authentic'; as 'coming truly from oneself') thinking. Blanchots guiding question could be said to be 'what is literature', 'what calls literature', and it also turns around a distinction between ordinary literature and the profoundly 'authentic' vocation or 'beckoning to and from*' that is true literature (true to itself). he'll also find it in an 'Outside'; but his conception and the workings of this 'outside' and death are different from Heideggers.
* the revealing of significance; which draws us forward while it withdraws from us. or in 'der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes': the relation constituting earth and world through the lichtung des Seins.
"Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we are, somewhat like migratory birds, but in an entirely different way, caught in the pull of what draws, attracts us by its withdrawal. And once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward what draws us, our essential being already bears the stamp of that 'pull'." (-Was heißt denken?)
while heidegger states that an authentic relation to the experience of death itself can be achieved, Blanchot holds that the experience itself cannot be accessed. for him, 'authenticity' is achieved rather in an an 'inbetween'; the 'vocation', the call of Being is heard through the paradox at the heart of this 'beckoning', not in Being itself. which i believe Blanchot is right about. i personally think heideggers major flaw lies indeed in the primordiality he ascribes to eigentlichkeit ('authenticity'), in such a way it becomes an absolute. though at the same time he does imply, many times, that it is not. i cannot help but feel, that deep down, there is an inconsistency regarding this point in his thinking. you can see this surfacing very clearly in "Was ist metaphysik?"; even he himself considers his venture to come to an understanding of Being itself as unsatisfying, and never gets past this 'nothing' his ontology brings one to over and over again. After his Kehre, you see him amending a lot to this, but he never seems to really get to the core of it, as it is, infact, the core of his entire ontology. Levinas, for this reason, deemed Heideggers ontology "an ontology of power" in "Totality and Infinity".
(pardon all the heidegger and his terminology; im re-reading him atm, so he dominates my thinking for the time being)
