CHAPTER 58
In February 1975, a few lines bearing a date from the past (October 1974) appeared on the final page of an issue of the collective journal Change, like a discreet epitaph. They were curiously signed Maurice Banchot; the letter “l” had disappeared. There was no doubt, however, that this first prepublication from The Writing of the Disaster, this “fragment” that was declared “previously unpublished,” did indeed come from the pen of the author who had remained silent since the publication of The Step Not Beyond alongside an article in La Quinzaine littéraire in September 1973. The laws of chance and return would mean that it was in issue 22 of the review.
A few further publications would follow, establishing the rhythm adopted in the 1970s: around two texts per year. Until 1980, except for two texts written in homage to the friends that were then closest even while faraway, Emmanuel Levinas and Roger Laporte, all of these publications would concern the major book that Blanchot was to spend nearly six years writing, which, like his previous ones, would appear in the fall, bearing a final date of September 18, 1980, just before its author’s seventy-third birthday.
It is an understatement to say that these years were unhappy ones, and it seems too easy just to say that they were filled with a constant thinking of disaster, of sadness, of distance. And yet they were that, in real and personal ways. Frequently retreating to his brother’s house, little by little giving up his stays in Paris itself, Blanchot barely saw his friends anymore—they regretted this, even secretly resented him for it. When he and his friends wrote to one another, it was often to signal their bad news: Blanchot reserved this signaling for what he named “the innocence of the disaster.”1 In her correspondence with Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, Denise Rollin described a being “in a state of such infinite fatigue that it does not allow him to be present.”2 She added that this being was exhausted by his work as a reader for Gallimard. But what saddened Blanchot above all was his absence from others, which was not a matter of choice, and which meant that most often he felt himself unable to write, even to his friends. This powerlessness overwhelmed him. He resigned himself to sending only the following few words by Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida as a sign of deep friendship, of tragic humor, and of precarious refuge: “We do not speak to one another, because we know one another too well: we are silent with one another, we laugh at our knowledge.” In the same period, Dionys Mascolo recounted to him the following astonishing dream, which gives a sense of the silences flowing from friendship and the works:
I am telephoning you. At the same time, I can see you a little bit, backlit, backlit but still visible so that you are something more than a silhouette, I can see something of your features (at the beginning; then this vision withdraws). I have no idea what I am saying to you. I only know that it is plaintive, perhaps even sentimental (I am slightly ashamed). You respond a little, trying to pacify me, then less and less (what I am saying is in vain—vain is not even the word: this is a lament about nothing—and there is no thought behind your responses: this pacification comes from your voice). Ultimately, you grow silent. I too stop speaking, but don’t hang up. You don’t hang up either. I don’t know how long this lasts. My dream doesn’t end. Has this wait actually lasted a minute, or two hours? It continues to infinity. And it doesn’t wake me. On waking, I find it intact. Nothing else has happened in it, no image or thought has traversed it. Not even any words. Just “speech.” It is absolutely pure. I cannot remember ever having had a dream like it.3
This silent listening, this infinite presence in the density of absence, this voice preceding the vanity of its words attests to the exceptional nature of Maurice Blanchot’s rarest, most faithful friendships. These friendships could only limit the pain of waiting in benefit of the grace that constantly traversed them. Blanchot would reiterate to all those close to him during these years of absence how much his—much regretted—lack of presence was nothing compared to silent faithfulness, to the impossibility of separation. As an embodiment of the “relation without relation,” friendship preserved one from the most terrible of fates. At the heart of a tragedy that was sometimes graceful but often marked by death, it alone provided atheist salvation.
This grace also made demands. The fate that had been pursuing the two friends for twenty years continued its work. In January 1978, Dionys Mascolo lost his mother. The writing of the disaster was at this time also that of correspondence, which gave voice to a shared powerlessness to provide consolation (but there was some consolation in this sharing: “each one restrains himself, clinging to an other, an other who is himself and is the dissolution—the dispersion—of the self”).4 For on January 9, a few days earlier, Maurice Blanchot had lost his brother, René, to cancer. His silent complicity with death had only allowed him to spend two weeks watching over the agony of the one who had protected him his whole life—the one who, in an irony of fate, had so often cared for him on the brink of death. Lacking any protective parental figure, Blanchot would share the solitude of his sister-in-law, Anna, for almost twenty years.
A few days later, on January 23, 1978, the time came for Denise Rollin to pass away.