Hope and chance are not often associated with the writings of Blanchot, but in this book Potts makes their importance and interrelation critical to any understanding of the writer's work. The tension between hope and chance is shown to be the basis of any writer's impossible task, which is equally the possibility of opening to the new, whether artistically or socially. Overall, Maurice Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance is a very significant work that opens new pathways to understanding Blanchot's writings and the creative work as such.

William S. Allen, researcher at the University of Southampton, UK, and author of Illegibility: Blanchot and Hegel (Bloomsbury, 2021)

The idea of writing, or a practice of art, that seeks to emerge from the suspension of subjectivity and control presents a complex field much neglected in philosophy and aesthetics. In a brilliant analysis Adam Potts' response is to carefully weave together two interrelated ideas in the work of Blanchot: hope and chance, while keeping in play a certain ethics. These are related to a third term: 'the Outside'­ - the absolutely other which resists assimilation to the same - an 'unmooring' in an abyssal deferral of meaning. Hope (as distinct from optimism) is a non-teleological affirmation of the subject's suspended temporality and relation to the Outside. Chance, radical chance, not as mere randomness of nature, nor reduction to technique, presents a 'rupture in thought itself,' signalling the impossible.

Ian Andrews, Lecturer in Media Art, University of New South Wales, Australia

This is a novel and valuable study, drawing Blanchot into conversation with sound studies and music in a manner faithful to the experimentation that, Adam Potts argues, is central to this most enigmatic of thinkers. Potts persuasively argues for the importance of little-noticed Blanchotian themes of hope, chance and the 'second step' as illuminative of the aesthetic and political stakes of a surprising breadth of creative practitioners, encompassing jazz co-operative AACM, dancer and choreographer Léa Tirabasso and composer-theorist John Cage.

Lars Iyer, Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, UK