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) and . 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.