“The Almighty” (1948) is the most ambitious and at the same time mysterious work of one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). In this last novel (he later abandoned the large form for more condensed speculative stories) critics tend to see a variety of philosophical themes (the end of history and the victory of Absolute knowledge, the death of God, the existential concern of Dasein, death as a guarantor of the literary word) and literary paradigms (political pamphlet, apocalyptic dystopia, Kafkaesque parable), but all these ongoing to this day, the constructions obviously turn out to be only reductions of a text that is fundamentally indecomposable into speculative constructs. The unexpected topicality of the novel, written in the wake of the upheavals caused by the Second World War, is given by the fact that the action in it takes place against the backdrop of social cataclysms provoked in an ideally stable totalitarian state a monstrous epidemic, which today we would call a pandemic. “If I wrote some books, it was only because I hoped to put an end to all this with books. If he wrote novels, then they were born at the moment when words began to recede before the truth.” Maurice Blanchot “To enter Blanchot’s prose is to enter an unreliable world that defends its freedom from the comfort and deadening familiarity of mimesis.” Gilbert Sorrentino