TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Christophe Bident’s book, published in French as Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible: Essai biographique (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), has been translated but not substantially updated. References have been modified to reflect the volumes of Blanchot’s work published since then in French (now listed in the bibliography) and translations of them into English. In general, quotations given by Bident have been taken from Blanchot’s translated works, although they have often been modified. My afterword relates some of the major developments since 1998 concerning Blanchot’s work and life.
My very warmest thanks are due, for their expert help with the type-script in various ways, to Christophe Bident, Holly Langstaff, Pierre de Boissieu, Philip Armstrong, Mike Holland, Leslie Hill, and Lucy Burns. I am also grateful for the support provided by the University of Warwick and the University of Reading, and to Tom Lay, the anonymous readers, and the late Helen Tartar at Fordham.
Ignorance, whether of his life or of his work, was the twentieth century’s favored response to Maurice Blanchot, born in 1907. Yet he incessantly recounted his life to that century, just as he incessantly made his work accessible to it. Baseless and persistent mythologies paint Blanchot as the conspicuous absentee, the invisible ghost, the unreadable author of utterly abstract work, a man literarily terrifying and politically impure. None more than he, however, interrogated the presence, visibility, readability, vitality, culpability, and possibility of the writer. He worked incessantly on these notions, contesting them, placing them in a dialectic, pushing them to their limits, where paradox carries them far from the false simplicity of the political language that masquerades as our common language. This permanent struggle—the struggle of the body, of writing, of thought—fascinated and inspired, in an often reciprocated exchange, the greatest contemporary creators of forms and thoughts (and forms of thought), starting with Blanchot’s two most intimate friends, Emmanuel Levinas and Georges Bataille.
This book in turn will interrogate the presence, visibility, readability, vitality, culpability, and possibility of the biographical, in a life and a work, in a life-made-work, a life sustained through the most extreme confrontations with death. For this life-become-work addresses being, as Bataille wrote, “in an unbearable surpassing of being,” in an unbearable surpassing of the work. This life is bequeathed infinitely through narrative writing, which bears witness with untiring patience, inflexible courage, and excessive pain to the worst visions of death, to the worst wounds caused by it. This life is infinitely conducted via a prose whose sustained intensity and almost drunken attentiveness tears through novels and récits, essays and fragments.1 It addresses our modes of knowledge: What can we make of it together—and where can we take this? In what friendship, in what community of real thought can we discover its obverse and reverse sides, its errors, its lapses and its insights? This life also asks questions of our responsibility: What form of attentiveness and judgment does it demand, what infinite sensitivity, bordering on almost impossible witnessing, does it impose? Within it a political element and a flesh-and-blood existence jostle in uncertain and shifting ways, coming together and moving apart. With respect and care for this man who is still alive, we shall only include in this work knowledge about Blanchot’s life that helps the understanding of its public element, its share of community (of being-together).2 But given the need to bring matters out of the shadows, we shall also include everything that allows this element to be understood.
Beyond Blanchot, what is at issue is the capacity to uphold and maintain a thinking of the most inexplicable reversals in history’s most terrifying century. Here, “beyond” means that whether thought or unthought, but always given to thought on our part, this life puts at our disposition (or indisposition) the elements that allow us to understand what Shestov called “the transformation of one’s convictions.” And it is precisely because such elements are present in this life that attempts have been made to silence them, to cast suspicion on them, to protect, idolize, degrade, ridicule, deform, dramatize, refuse them. Absolute denials and partial cover-ups all stem from the same weakness or negligence (simply justified in different ways): the refusal to see death at work, in the end, facing us. Strategies of literary revisionism, avant-gardist reversals, defensive forms of divisiveness, the will to dominate the intellectual horizon, aesthetic moralism—all of these proceed from the same refusal to read what is at stake here. To read? Reading here means acknowledging what has been said about the inscription of bodies (opened, unlimited, sovereign) in the spaces of memory, what has been said about the shared legibility of these spaces, about the community’s production of this memory; such a reading is the critical goal of the only real capital we hold.
Blanchot’s constant task will have been to write his life as the “last man,” that of a “man like any other existing in a century of unparalleled conflagrations”—whether they were ethical, ideological, or esthetic, he knew them all intimately. He wrote his life in line with the most stubborn demand (that of friendship), the maddest responsibility (that of memory), the most intense promise (that of childhood, as Nietzsche would have said). Writing this incessant back-and-forth between writing and life, between life and writing, is the task of every biography, and is the task that none can fulfill. To write it without recourse to the imaginary, from the position of a third party, with attention focused constantly on the name of the other—and adhering to the movement that, by way of literature and inspired by the friendship of Robert Antelme, allows responsibility to become aware of itself and requires that it be endlessly acknowledged—that is what this biography will at least essay.
The pensive smile of an unenvisageable visage; this much—sky and earth having disappeared, night and day having become one another—is left to he who looks on no longer, and who, destined to return, shall never depart.
—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster