This recent essay by William S. Allen explores the idea of “negative transcendence” in the work of Maurice Blanchot, paying close attention to his response to Jean Paulhan and Franz Kafka. Allen describes negative transcendence in almost Derridean terms: “it is a chthonic rather than an ethereal transcendence…rather, it returns to immanence rather than departing from it, and, in doing so, hollows it out from within, opening up an abyssal transcendence that descends infinitely inside it” (Allen 100). That is, the Divine Comedy is reversed; we escape from purgatory not up into paradise but back into the inferno. As obscure as this citation seems, it is a lucid summary of one of Blanchot’s typically paradoxical and difficult thought experiments.