This essay seeks to think through the encounter staged between literature and philosophy in Maurice Blanchot’s “Bergson et le symbolisme”. It is tempting to read this critique, which challenges the still widely held view that Bergson’s thought is a foundation of modernist aesthetics, as a ground-clearing: as an assertion of literature’s singularity that renders any exchange with philosophy abyssal. But such a reading would be to hold fast to a form of thinking about the relationship between the two disciplines that Blanchot’s essay subtly interrogates. Placing him in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we will see instead that Blanchot opens a space for a more precarious encounter in which contact is not predicated on coincidence, but on a strange dialectic of proximity and distance.