PART II
Writing as the question of writing, a question that bears writing that bears the question, no longer allows you this relation to being—understood first as tradition, order, certainty, truth, all forms of rootedness—which one day you received from worlds past, a domain that you were called to administer the better to strengthen your “Ego” [Moi], even though it had as it were cracked open, the day the sky opened onto its emptiness.
MAURICE BLANCHOT, The Step Not Beyond
CHAPTER 4
Maurice Blanchot arrived in Strasbourg in 1923 or 1924, aged sixteen or seventeen.1 He began university studies in German and philosophy. According to Roger Laporte, Blanchot and his family chose this town due to its Faculty of Protestant Theology, the only such public institution in France. But a simpler economic and family motivation existed: René was studying architecture in Strasbourg and could share an apartment with his brother. Two further reasons also had an influence: the proximity of Germany and the university’s reputation. In 1919, Kaiser-Wilhelm University was rein-tegrated into French higher education, soon becoming one of its leading lights. Strategic development and political assimilation were at stake. For four decades, Strasbourg had been the figurehead of German culture; now it would play that role for French culture. The buildings themselves, in all their prestige, offered a sumptuous setting for solemn starts to the academic year, marked by political and diplomatic implications. The library was the best endowed in France after the national library. The professors held doctorates from the École Normale Supérieure, along with the national teaching qualification, the agrégation. Every Saturday afternoon, they would gather for a session of historical synthesis, engaging a broad spectrum of disciplines.
We must picture for ourselves the universities of the period, with their formal mode of address (vouvoiement) between students, their codes of honor, their rigorously controlled dress. Ties, jackets, and hats were sometimes accompanied by a walking stick, one bearing a silver pommel if one had nationalist sympathies or even belonged to Action Française. In this provincial town with its ever-present nationalism, Blanchot was one of the students who carried a walking stick with a silver pommel. In doing so, he intensified the values he already held: cultural prestige, social ambition, moral honor. Although deep down he was probably a supporter of Barrès, he nonetheless rejected being earmarked for a career in education. From the outset he preferred journalism or writing to a career as a professor, and we can wonder whether he ever even considered it. A brilliant student, both proud and solemn, he was also academically restive, and although he could inspire tears of admiration in certain professors, he abandoned his studies relatively early, before the stage of thesis writing. A music lover and a constant reader, he impressed his fellow students; one described him as a “sort of grand Meaulnes opening the door of Parisian life for his Strasbourg cousins.”2 In 1929, the 773 students of the Faculty of Letters elected him as a reserve member of the student association committee.
Blanchot must have had a number of well-known professors, such as—in “general philosophy”—Maurice Pradines, a critical inheritor of the Enlightenment and a philosopher who worked on sensation; Henri Carteron, a specialist on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic, and a Maurrassian, to whom Levinas would dedicate his first book;3 Maurice Halbwachs, a sociologist; and Charles Blondel, an anti-Freudian psychologist. Indeed, Blanchot stated as much: “So many great teachers made it impossible for us to think of philosophy as something mediocre.”4 Between 1927 and 1929, he completed sufficient classes to be awarded a Certificate of Higher Education: a module in German, taking the classic literary studies option (July 27, 1927); a module in psychology (March 10, 1928); and two modules in philosophy, one in sociology and moral philosophy (July 25, 1928), and one in general history and general philosophy (July 24, 1929).
In this period, however, the new glory of Strasbourg was already in decline. Lacking any outlet beyond the university, intellectual activity withered away and the professors began to try to return to Paris. Pfister, the dean of faculty, remarked resignedly that “we have the glory of being the waiting room for the Sorbonne.” By the late 1920s, both the established figures and the upstarts of the philosophical scene were in the capital. That is where Bergson and Brunschvicg were teaching their theories of “creative evolution” and of “the progress of consciousness.” With a mixture of lectures, cliques, and reviews, Groethuysen, Berdjaev, Shestov, Gurvitch, Wahl, and Marcel were beginning to break away from the dominant rationalist and spiritualist traditions. Almost unknown until now, Hegel and Kierkegaard were beginning to be read, translated, and commented on; people were beginning to talk about Husserl, who was at the Sorbonne in 1929, and about Heidegger. In Strasbourg, although it was close to Freiburg, the professors rarely mentioned German phenomenology. Blanchot came across these thinkers by chance or due to his own interest, being able to read the texts in the German original (thankfully, given that the first translation of Heidegger only appeared in 1938). His attentiveness to margins and borders brought him closer to philosophical modernity, if not initially in terms of Marxism and psychoanalysis (which he would soon encounter, however), then at least regarding phenomenology.
Jacques Derrida declared himself “impressed,” stating that Blanchot, despite not being a specialist, professor, or historian, had a “philosophical learning [culture] without equal in the French university system.” For him, Blanchot carried out a “double gesture”: a questioning carried out from within literary thought or writing, a place inaccessible to philosophy itself; and an absolute affirmation, a rallying cry for the necessity of philosophy, in a context in which it was threatened institutionally and epistemologically.5 This knowledge and the way it was articulated began in Strasbourg, and they were transformed by meeting Emmanuel Levinas.