CHAPTER 28

The Disenchantment of the Community: Editorial Activity after Liberation (1944–1946)

Bataille and Blanchot returned to Paris in the fall of 1944. Blanchot spent a difficult winter in his Neuilly apartment. The temperature was freezing, and the Seine flooded the cellars in which the heating fuel was kept (Rue Soyer, where he lived, ended at the river, facing the Île de la Jatte). On returning from Morocco in September 1945, Pierre Prévost remembers going to this apartment where Blanchot lived alone, fairly modestly. In the years following the Liberation, he would sometimes be able to provide his friend with rare supplies (such as milk and coffee).

We can imagine Blanchot’s increasing disappointment during the winter of 1944 and the spring of 1945. This was irreparable, anguish-inducing disappointment. He had narrowly avoided being killed, and he had lost several manuscripts. Levinas returned from Germany, but Bataille left in May and set up home in Vézélay for several years. The same month, Mascolo rescued Antelme from death, and the Allied victory revealed the unthinkable to the world: the unspeakable horror of the concentration and extermination camps. Blanchot would say that anti-Semitism revealed the intellectual to himself—thinking also, or perhaps most of all, of himself. The revelation of the camps further embedded the feeling of responsibility, and definitively ruled out any political complacency.

The categorical imperative, losing the ideal generality given to it by Kant, has become the one which Adorno formulated more or less thus: Think and act in such a way that Auschwitz may never be repeated; which implies that Auschwitz must not become a concept, and that an absolute was reached there, against which other rights and other duties must be judged.1

The climate of purification or épuration in literary circles cast Blanchot into a deep malaise. Maurras was sent to prison, while Brasillach was executed. The agents of justice were primarily attentive to journalists, and the moral épuration was carried out by the Comité National des Ecrivains, led by Aragon and Lettres Françaises: in September 1944 lists of undesirable writers were published. Blanchot attended the first public meeting of the CNE.2 The seven members of the épuration commission featured writers alongside whom Blanchot had coexisted in various guises: Marcel, Queneau, and Rousseaux. The commission’s list of targets also featured those he knew and had supported: Bernanos, Gide, Mauriac, Montherlant, Paulhan, and even Camus, Sartre, and Malraux. There were negotiations, compromises, accusations, slanders, desertions, moments of cowardice, small conspiracies; there was spin, the settling of scores, the rhetoric of hatred: this detestable climate reminded Blanchot of a past that he had definitively rejected. The new atmosphere did not prevent him from being intransigent, however (an ethical attitude on which he and Levinas could agree, an agreement on which he was able to base some authority); Blanchot went on to write an article in favor of Malraux in Actualité as well as taking up an invitation to write for Carrefour, a popular right-wing weekly that had been set up after the Liberation,3 and publishing in Maulnier’s journal, the Cahiers de la Table Ronde, which had been founded precisely to welcome authors rejected by the CNE.4

Although he would go on to align himself with communism, he could not stand the CNE’s diktats. He only took sides in order to calm hearts and minds and to argue against one of his previous attitudes, which he now clearly thought to have been short-sighted: anticommunism.5 His limited sharing of a conception of community, differing considerably from the one that some communists were putting into practice at the time, explains his greater or lesser proximity, over the coming years, to Camus, Breton, and Bataille, who were brought freely together by the same path of refusal.

At this time of disenchantment, nothing could have brought him back toward what he called “everyday politics.” Nothing could have brought him back to what he referred to in a letter to Prévost as the 150 journals then being founded, none of which had any real aim. He turned down the editorship and the political column of an opinion-forming newspaper. He denigrated a political and intellectual life that, unable to renew itself, seemed to him to be stricken with nullity.6 His growing anguish led to uneasy activity. Withdrawal was not simply a refuge: it was also the best way of thinking death, relation, communication—the possibility of community. “Some time has to pass,” he would later write of this period; “the time in which we meet the death that awaits each of us and only barely misses us. I was living very far away. . . . I was silently absent.”7

Thus his concern for politics remained, but was circumscribed by the disquiet that troubled both a measured presence and any sudden return. This concern remained, but had to find other forms than those of mediocrity, failure, and surrender. These other forms were being tested out. In the meantime, Blanchot would remain a public figure—something that he would never cease to be.8 Without always sitting on the panel, he took part in new prize juries,9 for a while produced a new column for a weekly newspaper, and occasionally gave texts to the new journals.10 Some of these mattered to him, taking up as they did important positions.

At the end of 1944 he agreed to participate in Georges Bataille’s journal project, Actualité which had advanced to a stage where these Cahiers would have a clearly political character. Blanchot shared the adjunct editorship of Actualité with Prévost.11 However, only one issue of what had been planned as a journal would appear, addressing L’Espagne libre and published by Calmann-Lévy at the very start of 1946 (the registration of copyright dates to the last trimester of 1945), with violently democratic contributions from Camus and Cassou, texts by Bataille, Fouchet, Grenier, but also García Lorca, Hemingway, and Quero-Morales, a former member of the Republican government. Blanchot’s presence as this issue was conceived and edited, even if his contribution was a literary text on Malraux and L’Espoir, clearly inscribed his political turn. The antirepublican of 1937 now coedited an undertaking that began with this preface by Camus: “Men of my generation have had Spain in their hearts for nine years now. For nine years they have carried it with them like a bad wound.” This was also true for Blanchot, but in a very different sense. Introduced by Camus in the name of the universal struggle for liberty, the text on Malraux was overtly political. Demonstrating his new tolerance for both anarchism and communism, Blanchot worked through theories of permanent revolution, internationalism, revolutionary discipline, class consciousness, all of which were made possible by a single, unconditional choice: the choice of freedom.12

In August 1945, he joined L’Arche for its first “Parisian” issue. He was entrusted with its literary column. Having been launched in February 1944 in Algiers (which at the time was a real literary capital), edited by Amrouche and Lassaigne, and placed under Gide’s patronage, this journal enjoyed a remarkable reputation: it attracted French and foreign authors, and featured many international correspondents. Its publications were interrupted between March and July 1945, before beginning again from Paris on a monthly basis. It was compared to the defunct NRF; the texts by Camus and Blanchot were particularly remarked upon. In February 1946, it gained an editorial committee: Blanchot was part of it, alongside Camus and Lassaigne; Amrouche remained editor-in-chief and Gide the tutelary figure. Blanchot would remain at L’Arche until the end, contributing sixteen articles, his first long critical texts. Thirteen of them would be collected in The Work of Fire, for which they would provide the framework.

The collective, anonymous manifesto printed in the first issue, which had Du Bellay’s famous verse as its epigraph: “France, mother of arts, of arms, and of laws,” clearly placed the journal on the side of the government in Algiers, in a spirit of peace, generosity, and virtue, without any desire for vengeance or destruction. It presented an elegy to the republican and universal French nation (“the history of the past 150 years has been that of peoples being richly sowed with the universal principles of 1789”).

To help France reconquer its compromised freedoms, to once again become aware of itself and of its mission, to recover and reassemble its dispersed strength, to reanimate its energies and its hopes, and thus to allow international recognition of its face, its signification, the capital importance of its role: such is this journal’s aim, its raison d’être.

We can imagine how satisfied Blanchot must have been to belong to the editorial committee of a review whose struggle was that of allowing each Frenchman “[to recognize] the pure face of his country and, stepping beyond the errors and the shames of our recent past, to dream of a new spring in France, of a French order given to its deepest being.” To write such words was to immediately demonstrate the journal’s growing notoriety on the side of a national, republican, and pacific Resistance movement.

As well as being a place in which Blanchot could regularly and fairly freely carry out his critical research, such aims made this journal what he expected of it: a way of restoring his own image, showing what he now was—a brilliant critic, and one of integrity. At the end of 1946, he would confide humorously to Prévost that he was pleased with the first issues of Critique, since he had never been able to bring himself to read a single line in L’Arche.

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