Again, still, encore, we begin at the end, with the ending, the “endless ending” that Emmanuel Levinas notes as defining the thought of Maurice Blanchot. The mark of beginning and ending, separating while binding them together, remains suspended as it is written—encore. There is no better way to begin to address (and so to commence with ending) this mortal question which is at once the ultimate exigency and an interminable agony of thought for both Maurice Blanchot and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe—these two thinkers of the mortal question of thought and writing, bound to the problem of the relation between philosophy and literature. That is, to begin by reading, encore, their final texts (never final, never arriving at their “proper” end, demanding another reading). Thus we begin after the end which is no end, suspending the fiction of a proper “beginning.” Encore—already caught up in a movement in suspension, advancing nowhere; the tragic passage in impasse…