LARS IYER is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two books on Blanchot (Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy, Politics and Blanchot’s Vigilance: Phenomenology, Literature, Ethics) and the novels Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus, known collectively as the Spurious Trilogy, about which The Spectator said, “There is a superfluous joy to these novels . . . They are satisfying paradoxes—‘difficult’ books which are consummately readable; exuberant books about bleakness.”