The essay on Sade is excellent. Blanchot explicates the ferocious negativity at work in Sade's tales of aristocratic-bandit holocaust--a negativity audacious enough to grasp infinity by the throat through a monstrous series of quantitative negations of bodies and values (an observation also made by Klossowski, another Sade commentator). Man and God are not the only victims of negation in the Sadean coalition-system, however. If Man is nullified in the name of God, and God in turn in the name of Nature, then what of Nature? In the final analysis Nature or creation, too, receives the same treatment. This despite the fact that Sade's attitude towards Nature remains profoundly ambivalent in lieu of his invocation of the natural order as the ultimate justificans. Blanchot seemingly had very little to say about this third type of negation, which is a damn shame.
I have mixed feelings on the essay on Lautreamont. Blanchot advances the claims that (1) Maldoror is a work produced in time and whose valences must be grasped diachonically and (2) sovereign sleep, signified, for example, by the image of the protagonist turning himself into a living eco-system for vermins, is the pre-condition of the true birth of both the novelist Ducasse and Maldoror. This reader finds Blanchot's chain of reasoning obscure and difficult to follow.