PREFACE
1. [Throughout, the term récits will be retained in French. The alternative translation narratives does not allow for the important distinction between récits and novels made by Blanchot. Also, I have usually translated l’attention (often used by Bident) with “attentiveness,” its literal quality underlining the importance of this notion for Blanchot. —Trans.]
2. [Blanchot was still alive when this text was written and published. He died in 2003. —Trans.]
1. BLANCHOT OF QUAIN: GENEALOGY, BIRTH, CHILDHOOD (1907–1918)
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3.
2. The surname Blanchot, whose emptiness and whiteness would be commented on at length, is a derivative of the name Blanc (White), which is common in the South of France. It can also sometimes mean “white woollen fabric.”
3. Half a century later, Élise would end her days at her goddaughter’s house.
4. Isidore and Edmond Blanchot’s younger sister, Marthe, born in 1866, had married a man named Jules Thevenot. She would die in 1922.
5. Interview given by Marguerite Blanchot to Philippe Merley, Le Courrier de Saône-et-Loire, July 27, 1979.
6. A great composer and organist, both as a theorist and a practitioner, Marcel Dupré, who was internationally recognized, would teach at the Conservatory in Paris beginning in 1926, eventually becoming its director. In 1936, the great organ of Saint-Sulpice was placed in his care. He died in Meudon in 1971.
7. Jean Suquet remembers a German teacher at the lycée in Châteauroux at the beginning of the Second World War. Wearing a long black cape, he looked like the ghost of some German Romantic. The schoolchildren called George Blanchot “the corpse.”
8. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, 5. [The French noun demeure used by Blanchot means “dwelling,” but it also suggests a conjugation of the verb demeurer (to remain) and of the verb mourir (to die; e.g., il meurt). The old French demourance is related to the sense of dwelling but recalls mourir even more strongly. Bident uses demeure regularly throughout the work. —Trans.]
9. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 72.
10. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet” (VI, December 23, 1903), in Sonnets to Orpheus with Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Cohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), 191.
11. Louis-René des Forêts, Ostinato, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002), 5, 123. There is no childhood to be rediscovered: “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will”—Charles Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 2010), 11. Instead, we can see it as both a privilege and a letdown, a continual source or resource for the imaginary and the neuter. Blanchot uses quite extraordinary language, in a letter to Dionys Mascolo, to describe “impersonal misfortune [malheur]”: “close to the feeling of personal misfortune one would feel in seeing a child throwing itself under the wheels of a car one was driving” (August 7, 1961).
12. Maurice Blanchot, “The ‘Sacred’ Speech of Hölderlin” (1946), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 117.
13. Georges Bataille, “Celestial Bodies” (1938), trans. Annette Michelson, October 36 (1986): 78.
14. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, 9.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” (1952), in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 59; “The Very Last Word” (1968), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 280.
2. MUSIC AND FAMILY MEMORY: MARGUERITE BLANCHOT IN CHALON (1920S)
1. Two children resulted from this marriage, the only two grandchildren of Alexandrine and Isidore.
2. Philippe Merley, presentation of the interview given by Marguerite Blanchot in the Courrier de Sâone-et-Loire.
3. Her cars were also a subject of conversation: a gray traction avant before the war, a Citroën 2CV after it. People in Chalon said she had a rather eccentric way of driving.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Le Docteur Faustus” (1950), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 168–171.
3. THE FEDORA OF DEATH: ILLNESS (1922–1923)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Turn of the Screw” (1954), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 259 n.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Story and Scandal” (1956), in ibid., 190.
3. Dionys Mascolo would invoke “Maurice Blanchot’s grilled steak,” a special diet reserved for him when staying at the Rue Saint-Benoît and ordered for him by Marguerite Duras. Georges Bataille makes an allusion to this in a letter to Mascolo: “I am myself in a bad way, and the diet that suits Maurice Blanchot will apparently be suitable for me too.” In Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 577–578. Louis Olliver, who often ate lunch with Blanchot in 1940–42, confirms that the latter ate little, although without following any particular dietary regime.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Sleep, Night,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 265.
5. “My existence is surprisingly solid; even fatal diseases find me too tough. I’m sorry, but I must bury a few others before I bury myself,” in Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 9.
6. An expression used in a letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, July 10, 1972.
7. Interview in François Poiré, Emmanuel Levinas, 2d ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 60.
8. Michel Butor in Didier Cahen and Jean-Claude Loiseau, “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” a France-Culture radio show first broadcast on September 17, 1994.
9. [The affair concerning the rightist author Benoist is discussed in a note in the final chapter. —Trans.]
10. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, undated, 1960s.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.
12. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 85. In “My Properties,” Henri Michaux writes: “At the stake where he finds himself, the atheist cannot believe in God. His health would not allow him to. / But all this is neither determining nor clear for well people. Everything suits these crass individuals, as it suits those with strong stomachs.” La nuit remue (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 19; emphasis added. The atheist is the writer who writes “for reasons of hygiene,” “for [his] health.” “Doubtless one writes for nothing else,” Michaux warned.
13. “I am forced to wait, without knowing how and when the waiting will end, a waiting which is surveyed here in the most affectionate and discreet way. It is as if, all of a sudden, all I have written has caught up with me and, to tell the truth, I have borne it badly. More simply, let us say what Robert once said: that illness and life are one and the same and that doctors can only give us provisional assistance in giving one the appearance of the other” (letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, July 18, 1965). This was a constant in Blanchot’s life: his extreme—and understandable—mistrust of doctors, which would often lead him to consult several rather than just one, and on which the récit that is The Madness of the Day is more than eloquent. Nonetheless, he was extremely affectionate toward the staff dispensing care.
14. Maurice Nadeau, “Maurice Blanchot” in Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 70.
15. Louis-René des Forêts in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot.”
16. Marie-Anne Lescourret in Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 64, 68.
17. Pierre Monnier, À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 205–206.
18. From a study by his son, Jean-Luc Maxence, L’ombre d’un père (Paris: Hallier, 1978), 127.
19. Dominique Aury, “Propos,” L’Infini, 55 (Autumn 1996): 21.
20. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 244. Roger Laporte described Blanchot’s voice as slightly lilting; for Michaël Levinas, it was unique and “very French,” belonging to a time that no longer existed; for him it has always evoked passages from Couperin’s Tombeau.
21. Georges Bataille, L’être indifférencié n’est rien, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 3:369 and 559. The second verse of the poem recalls the world of Thomas the Obscure, which is often quoted by Bataille.
22. Roger Laporte, “Un sourire mozartien,” Ralentir travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 75.
23. Marguerite Duras, Écrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 45. “I have known great writers, they were never able to speak about it [where writing came from]—I knew intimately Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille,” she writes elsewhere. “They were never able to, they never spoke about it”: Marguerite Duras, Le monde extérieur, in Outside (Paris: POL, 1993), 2:24–25.
24. [“Muffle” recalls the verb feutrer, a cognate of which is evidently chosen (and italicized) by Bident due to its association with the previous use of le feutre, a fedora hat. —Trans.]
4. THE WALKING STICK WITH THE SILVER POMMEL: THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASBOURG (1920S)
1. Blanchot himself, in a letter he has made available, suggests the date of 1923. This date is nonetheless not certain, although it is the most probable.
2. For more details on the Strasbourg context and on meeting Levinas, we refer the reader to Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), especially the first chapter.
3. Henri Carteron had died in 1929 at the age of thirty-seven.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Do Not Forget” (1988), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 124–129, at 124.
5. See Jacques Derrida, “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” radio program.
5. A FLASH IN THE DARKNESS: MEETING EMMANUEL LEVINAS (1925–1930)
1. Jacques Derrida, Adieu—to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8.
2. Emmanuel Levinas in François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 59–60.
3. Maurice Blanchot, letter of February 11, 1980, cited in Exercices de la Patience 1 (1980): 67.
4. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Pierre Prévost of November 16, 1987.
5. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 143.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Do Not Forget” (1988), in ibid., 124.
7. Several accounts confirm that Emmanuel Levinas never considered his friend an anti-Semite. He saw Blanchot’s monarchism as a curiosity, barely compatible with the rest of his personality, although a thinkable incompatibility.
8. [Aristide Briand (1862–1932) was a seven-time prime minister of France and joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. —Trans.]
9. Emmanuel Levinas, “Comme un consentement à l’horrible,” Le Nouvel Observateur (January 22, 1988), 82.
10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 47.
6. THERE IS: PHILOSOPHICAL APPRENTICESHIP (1927–1930)
1. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 38.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Thinking the Apocalypse” (1987), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 123.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion” (1980), in ibid., 144.
4. Here and for the quotation above, Emmanuel Levinas’s words are taken from François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 61–62.
5. Emmanuel Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 12. On the relations between Heidegger, Husserl, and Blanchot, see the articles by Francis Wybrands and Alain David in Exercices de la patience 2 (Winter 1981): 79–87, 131–138. The less well-known influence of Bergson (1927 Nobel prize winner) on the development of Levinas and Blanchot (via a writer like Massis) is found in a certain approach to time (“the infinite in us,” Levinas would say); to duration (understood as pure and creative, i.e., when intuition completes the mind’s movements); to substance and to Being, or even to a critique of language that “lets be lost the mobility of consciousness, the dream of inner life, all that has its source and reality in duration,” thus leading to a theory of symbolism that nonetheless retains the abysses of Mallarmé’s poetry; see Maurice Blanchot, “Bergson et le symbolisme” (1942), partly reprinted as “Bergson and Symbolism” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 112–115.
6. Emmanuel Levinas, “Intentionality and Metaphysics,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith, 2nd ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 190.
7. Husserl’s sometime assistant Eugen Fink would speak of a “nonknowl-edge of the Being of beings” characterizing astonishment in its “horrifying” (entsetzend) essence; see the French translation, De la phénoménologie (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 203. The fate awaiting such words in Blanchot is well known; he was first able to read Fink’s work in 1939 in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie under the title “Le problème de la phénoménologie d’Edmond Husserl.”
8. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 63–64; Ethics and Infinity, 48.
9. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 63.
10. Ibid., 61; preface to second edition of De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 10–11, not included in Existence and Existents; Ethics and Infinity, 48.
11. Françoise Collin, “La peur,” in Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1991), 351.
7. ALIGNING ONE’S CONVICTIONS: PARIS AND FAR-RIGHT CIRCLES (1930S)
1. Blanchot would return at length to skepticism in numerous fragments of The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
2. [The “two hundred families” refers to criticism from the Left of the influence of the two hundred biggest shareholders of the Banque de France, who exercised disproportionate influence on it. —Trans.]
3. Pierre Monnier, À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 206. According to Xavier de Lignac, Blanchot earned 12,000 francs a month at the Journal des Débats—perhaps an exaggerated figure. According to another account, each month Blanchot earned 900 francs each month at the Journal, and later 300 at L’Insurgé.
4. For relevant background, see in particular Jean Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années trentes: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Seuil, 1969); and Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violence: Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite, des années trentes aux retombées de la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Les français et le couronnement,” L’Insurgé 19 (May 19, 1937): 4.
6. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 242.
7. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 211. Maurice Barrès: The adolescent who read this author must have noticed that he had the same first name and the same initials.
8. According to Jean Rollin, Denise Rollin used to say that Maurice Blanchot had been seduced by Maurras’s personality, more than he had been convinced by his ideology. We can have doubts about this, even if the first part of the statement should not be excluded. Similarly, the far-reaching influence of Barrès on Blanchot should not be excluded, with its egotism, the importance of the terroir, love for one’s humiliated neighbor, a nationalism with roots.
9. Lucien Rebatet, Les décombres (Paris: Denoël, 1942), 127.
10. Étienne de Montety, Thierry Maulnier (Paris: Juillard, 1994), 181.
11. Thierry Maulnier, La crise est dans l’homme (Paris: Librairie de la Revue Française, 1932), 240.
12. Pierre Boutang does this in the interview related by Bernard-Henri Lévy in Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Harvill, 1995), 153 (“it is beyond question that Maurrassian ideas acted as a barrier,” “preventing excesses” that could have led to fascism).
8. “MAHATMA GANDHI”: A FIRST TEXT BY BLANCHOT (1931)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Mahatma Gandhi” (July 1931), trans. Franson Manjali in consultation with Michael Holland in Journal for Cultural Research 16, no. 4 (2012): 366–370. Thirteen years later, Blanchot’s position on Gandhi would remain unchanged: see “Le pèlerinage aux sources,” Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 536–540.
2. Blanchot, “Mahatma Gandhi,” 366.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, 367.
5. Ibid. [Rendering the French spirituel and esprit poses difficulties: “spiritual” and “spirit,” while they do align well with philosophical and religious traditions, also lose the connection to what in everyday English and in philosophy is identified as “(the) mind.” —Trans.]
6. Ibid., 368.
7. Ibid., 369.
8. G. K. Chesterton cited in ibid., 370.
9. Ibid., 369–370.
9. REFUSAL, I. THE REVOLUTION OF SPIRIT: LA REVUE FRANÇAISE, RÉACTION, AND LA REVUE DU SIÈCLE (1931–1934)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Le monde sans âme” (August 25, 1932), in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 74–88, at 75. (Here and elsewhere, references to this volume relate to the pages in the untranslated French edition.) Several months later, on March 21, 1933, in the Journal des Débats, Blanchot would return to the work by Daniel-Rops and notably to its follow-up, Les années tournantes, this time in an article containing little reserve; see “Les années tournantes,” in Chroniques politiques, 93–96.
2. Georges Bataille, “Materialism” and “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 15–16 and 45–52.
3. Blanchot, “Le monde sans âme,” 87.
4. Ibid., 81.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Le marxisme contre la revolution” (April 25, 1933), in Chroniques politiques, 100–113.
6. Ibid., 105.
7. Ibid., 108.
8. Ibid., 110.
9. Ibid., 111.
10. Ibid., 112.
11. Ibid.
12. The journal would publish with “great joy,” in its seventh issue, a telegram from the count and countess of Paris expressing thanks for the good wishes that had been published by the journal on the occasion of their recent marriage.
13. Maurice Blanchot, “Nouvelle querelle des anciens et des modernes” (April–May 1932), in Chroniques politiques, 47–54, at 54.
14. [Bident is referring to the slogan used under Vichy: “work, family, nation.” —Trans.]
15. Blanchot, “Morale et politique” (May 1933), in Chroniques politiques, 126–133.
16. Ibid., 130.
17. Ibid., 129.
18. Ibid., 127.
19. Ibid., 133.
10. JOURNALIST, OPPONENT OF HITLER, NATIONAL-REVOLUTIONARY: LE JOURNAL DES DÉBATS, LE REMPART, AUX ÉCOUTES, AND LA REVUE DU VINGTIÈME SIÈCLE (1931–1935)
1. This may not have been Blanchot’s first contribution to a daily newspaper. We have not been able to verify reports that he worked for La Nouvelliste de Lyon, one of the newspapers that covered the whole of France while retaining the name of a town or a region. None of its articles were signed, and nowhere is a list given of the editorial teams.
2. An article of August 18, 1931, bears the initials M.B. The next one, signed M.Bl. and attributable to Blanchot without too much doubt, is dated May 2, 1932. Two publicity announcements for the Journal des Débats in sympathetic journals list the paper’s contributors, helping us to confirm Blanchot’s role and his importance. One—in Réaction in April 1932—gives his name, unlike the second, from the last issue of the Cahiers Mensuels (July 1931). Finally, Emmanuel Levinas attributes to Blanchot the anonymous editorial of March 9, 1932: “Mr. Briand” (who had just died). The philosopher quotes from memory thus: “Each time he spoke he created a law, each time he acted he failed”: see Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 112. The words actually written by Blanchot were even harsher: “Each time he spoke he always triumphed, his actions were always failures” in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 44. In the article Blanchot provided a remarkable portrait of the “shared solitude” of Briand (44).
3. After the First World War he moved to the Revue de Paris, then to Figaro, as well as being the literary critic for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and from 1930 being a member of the Académie Française, where he was influential. Chaumeix (1874–1955) was later accused by the collaborationist and pro-Nazi weekly paper L’Appel of having treated Maurice Blanchot as a “negro”; “Videz Thomas,” L’Appel (May 28, 1942), 4.
4. He probably authored an article in the Journal des Débats of August 18, 1931, entitled “Comment s’emparer du pouvoir?” in which the technique of coups d’état is analyzed; it is collected in Chroniques politiques des années trente, 36–39. He argued for the relevance to the revolution of Daniel-Rops’s work, Les années tournantes, in an eponymous article in the Journal des Débats of March 21, 1933; Chroniques politiques, 93–96. Daniel-Rops himself often contributed to the newspaper, thus ensuring that Ordre Nouveau was represented there.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Un discours logique,” as “Avant Genève—M. de Neurath expose les principes de la politique allemande—Un discours logique,” in Chroniques politiques, 324–327.
6. Blanchot would return to the nature and necessity of the call for force in L’Insurgé, 10 (March 1937): 5, in terms of the work by Alphonse Séché, Réflexions sur la force. “That force should demand to be rehabilitated” is strange but necessary in terms of history, he wrote. “The moment a regime starts discrediting violence and recommending incapacity is also the moment when the society that accepts this becomes incapable and loses the will to do what is required for power.” However, Blanchot criticized the more outrageous and fascistic aspects of a rehabilitation of force that “even Nietzsche would not accept,” thus demonstrating a right-leaning but not extreme reading of the philosopher who wrote on the will to power.
7. Maurice Blanchot, “Les communistes, gardiens de la culture,” Journal des Débats (March 25, 1933); Chroniques politiques, 97–99. The two following citations are from pages 98 and 99.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Le rajeunissement de la politique,” Journal des Débats (May 2, 1932); Chroniques politiques, 56.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Au Congrès pour l’éducation nouvelle,” Journal des Débats (June 23, 1932), and Chroniques politiques, 61; “L’histoire désarmée,” Journal des Débats (July 21, 1932), and Chroniques politiques, 68.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “La doctrine catholique et les relations internationales,” Journal des Débats (May 9, 1932), and Chroniques politiques, 59.
11. The library collection is incomplete (85 issues of at least 130). I have therefore been unable to read all Blanchot’s articles for Rempart, while still having read enough (60) to be able to discern his political and ideological positions in 1933. In the remainder of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses provide page-references to the Chroniques politiques.
12. Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans, 1927–1937 (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 257–258.
13. One of the early, biographical fragments of The Step (Not) Beyond can be read in this way. See Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 2.
14. Le Rempart, issue 50.
15. Maxence, Histoire de dix ans. Maxence is not completely wrong to discuss the “singular lucidity” of the era: “We were able to see the significance of everyday events. We underlined this popular movement, this movement of revolt that eventually would lead to the February events. . . . And Le Rempart was doubtless the only newspaper which, at the time, took up a position that was at once antiparliamentarian and anticapitalist.” On Paul Lévy’s friendship with Georges Mandel, see Bertrand Favreau, Georges Mandel ou la passion de la République (Paris: Fayard, 1996), notably 69, 80, 269–270.
16. [Although it seems clear that salut here bears a meaning distinct from “salvation,” several alternatives remain. It could be translated as “safety,” “security,” or “well-being.” I have chosen the first of these here in order to align with something that was doubtless in Blanchot’s mind: the postrevolutionary Comité de Salut Publique to which Robespierre belonged, and which is commonly translated as the “committee of public safety.” In a related (non-theological) register, a variant of the verb “to save” has been used in some cases. —Trans.]
17. Maurice Blanchot, reader’s notes on L’école du renégat by Jean Fontenoy in L’Insurgé 30 (August 4, 1937): 5.
18. Blanchot would long remain close to Paul Lévy as a faithful friend, even to the point of seconding him in a duel. The affair is recounted in Aux Écoutes 1024 (January 1, 1938): 17. At the end of December 1937, Lévy learned from the press that he had been “violently offended” by Albert Naud in the high court in Paris. He straightaway sent two witnesses, Henri Israel and Maurice Blanchot, to demand “a formal apology or the chance to defend his honor by arms.” According to the statement by Israel and Blanchot, as it is reported in Aux Écoutes, Albert Naud hid from them. On December 30, they drew up a legal claim against Naud following his lack of action. Paul Lévy excused himself to his friends thus: “Mr. Naud insults people and then runs away. Please excuse me for having disturbed you on account of this coward.” We can note here that a certain confrontation with death is always present for Blanchot. We can also see the kind of aristocratic world, with its absolute and outmoded forms of dignity, to which he belonged.
19. In parallel to Le Rempart, Paul Lévy had launched a “great illustrated newspaper,” Aujourd’hui, containing four full pages of photographic reproductions, which probably folded in 1934. A number of the editorial team from Le Rempart could be found there; the two newspapers even had the same headquarters at 17 Rue d’Anjou. It seems that unlike Maxence or Maulnier, Blanchot did not put his name to any article for this paper. This allows us to reasonably suppose that a large part of his activity was now dedicated to Aux Écoutes.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “La fin du 6 février,” Combat (February 1936), and Chroniques politiques, 364.
21. Paul Lévy, “La révolution nationale,” Aujourd’hui 259 (February 8, 1934): 3.
22. Maurice Blanchot, note to “Nietzsche, Today,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 448–449.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Seán Hand, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 62–71.
24. This is the title of one of the two articles, “Le dérèglement de la diplomatie française,” La Revue du Vingtième Siècle (May–June 1935); see Chroniques politiques, 355–362.
11. THE ESCALATION OF RHETORIC: THE LAUNCH OF COMBAT (1936)
1. Jeannine Verdès-Leroux usefully underlines the radicalization of tone that took place between Réaction and Combat and how it can be understood in terms of the demands of the era and the pressure of history. She also shows how the vehement “juvenile and tragic” indignation of Blanchot and Maulnier differed from the vulgar extremism of a figure such as Brasillach. She quite rightly discusses their “national-revolutionary” mindset, which was separate from the fascist grouping that fell out with Combat in 1937, and that a few years later would become involved in collaboration. Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violences: Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite, des années trentes aux retombées de la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 70–73.
2. It is nonetheless important to point out that the contributors’ positions differed from one another: from the Maurrassian orthodoxy of Gaxotte, who above all was concerned to keep France’s borders and therefore also its culture intact, to Fabrègues’s confused timidity on the subject of Nazism, or Maulnier’s fairly unequivocal condemnation of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies (which were said to be unacceptable from a humanitarian point of view, but also because they prevented “the Jewish problem” from being posed).
3. Keeping his paradigms coherent, eight months later Brasillach would write an article named “The Machine for Kicking Asses” before quitting a journal that for him had become “absurd”; Robert Brasillach, letter to Jacques Brousse, February 12, 1940, cited by Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violences, 71.
4. [The meaning of Marchenoir is unclear. It does not seem to be a typo for marché noir (black market), since this would have been noticed from one issue to another, though it could be a deliberate play on that expression (though one whose meaning is unclear). It may refer to a small village of the same name in central France (although it is not clear why it would). —Trans.]
5. Maurice Blanchot, “La fin du 6 Février” (February 2, 1936), in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 363. In the remainder of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses provide page references to the Chroniques politiques.
6. Later, Blanchot would see the invasion of the Rhineland as the crux of the Second World War. March 1936 already equaled September 1938: Munich.
12. TERRORISM AS A METHOD OF PUBLIC SAFETY: COMBAT (JULY–DECEMBER 1936)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Le terrorisme, méthode de salut public” (July 7, 1936) in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 379. In the remainder of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses provide page references to the Chroniques politiques.
2. Maximilien de Robespierre, extracts from speeches of July 15, 1791, and February 5, 1794 (17 pluviôse year II).
3. Maurice Blanchot, “La grande passion des Modérés,” Chroniques politiques, 383–387.
13. PATRIOTISM’S BREAKING POINT: L’INSURGÉ (1937)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Réquisitoire contre la France,” in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 393–395. [In the rest of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses are the page references for Chroniques politiques. —Trans.]
2. On L’Insurgé, see notably Etienne de Montety, Thierry Maulnier (Paris: Juillard, 1994), 126–136; Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 65; Eugen Weber, L’Action française (1962; reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1985), 585–562. According to Pierre Monnier, who was an associate of Deloncle and contributed to L’Insurgé, Blanchot knew Deloncle; he had at least made “approaches,” but he never carried out any activities for La Cagoule, and neither did Maxence or Maulnier; Pierre Monnier, À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 193.
3. The text is included in Chroniques politiques, 413–414.
4. Was he even the editor-in-chief? Pierre Prévost suggests that he was; see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 546.
5. Pierre Viénot was undersecretary of state at the Foreign Ministry in Blum’s government.
6. Like Action Française, Blanchot spoke of Blum in the feminine.
7. In fact, given the venue in which Blanchot was publishing, this diplomacy was nonetheless situated in relation to Maulnier’s thinking of “national revolution.” It was therefore positioned in relation to a particular theory—albeit one lacking any practical consequences.
8. Should we read this date as symbolizing that this break was made in the name of the Republic? Should it be linked to the recent fall of Blum’s government? These readings are both tempting and unlikely. As we shall see, other events had a role to play.
9. Letter from Thierry Maulnier to Charles Maurras, July 23, 1937, quoted by Etienne de Montety in Thierry Maulnier, 135. According to a brief anonymous article in the collaborationist weekly paper L’Appel on May 28, 1942, it was Blanchot who “sank [L’Insurgé] together with the aforementioned Thalagrand [Thierry Maulnier].”
10. Blanchot would write to Diane Rubenstein on this point: “I remember that, being totally opposed to Brasillach, who had been utterly won over by fascism and anti-Semitism, I had stipulated as a condition for my collaborating on the journal that he would not be involved with it”; letter of August 20, 1983, in Diane Rubenstein, What’s Left? (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 187. This condition was granted only with difficulty. Relations with Maulnier at the time were fraught. Blanchot would later say that his texts were sometimes altered at Combat and L’Insurgé without his view being sought. They were thought to be too anti-Nazi or not anti-Semitic enough. He demanded corrections, which he did not receive; he then brought his participation to an end.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “On demande des dissidents,” Chroniques politiques, 474–478.
14. THESE EVENTS HAPPENED TO ME IN 1937: DEATH SENTENCES (1937–1938)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Hommage à Claude Séverac,” Aux Écoutes 997 (June 26, 1937): 11.
2. “The only date of which I am sure is the 13th October, Wednesday 13th October”; Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, trans. Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1999), 129–187, at 133. For our reconstruction of the chronology, all subsequent quotations are taken from the first part of the narrative and indeed from the first fifteen pages.
3. Blanchot, Death Sentence, 173.
4. The narrator of Death Sentence spends several weeks in an establishment being treated for “illness of the lungs”; ibid., 160. We can also think of the sanatorium in The Last Man, and of the descriptions in The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 7, 11–12.
5. Blanchot, Death Sentence, 163.
6. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 6.
15. ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF CONVICTIONS: A JOURNALIST OF THE FAR RIGHT (1930S)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “M. Briand” (March 9, 1932), in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 46. This editorial is not signed, but it is attributed to Blanchot by Emmanuel Levinas.
2. The advent of Hitler was “for us and above all for the Jews the interregnum when all rights, all recourse ceased, when friendship became uncertain and the silence of the highest spiritual authorities left us without guarantee, not only threatened but anxious about not responding as one should to the silent call of others”; Maurice Blanchot in “Do Not Forget” (1988), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 127. Such incompatibilities were opening up an ever-larger fissure in his thinking. At the time, he remained silent on the attitude of Catholic and Jewish authorities. He would later say that this objectively undeniable lack of engagement was in line with the wish most shared by the Jews that he knew: “The most commonly shared view was: let us not exaggerate anything, we must be prudent, reserved, warn the Jews about the consequences of any action”; Maurice Blanchot, letter to Roger Laporte, December 9, 1984, cited in Leslie Hill, “Introduction,” in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York: Routledge, 1996), 9.
3. We can therefore better understand what, beyond the absence of any partisan or institutional involvement with fascist parties, distinguished his position from that of Heidegger. Blanchot did not have Being and Time behind him, but rather Thomas the Obscure ahead of him, a work whose form he was searching for, slowly and with difficulty. He had not developed any thinking that he could put forth as his own because neither he nor anyone else recognized any theoretical authority in his writing, and because in parallel fashion he was struggling to assume a literary authority that was as yet unknown to everyone. He accused Heidegger on the contrary of compromising his language and his thinking: Heidegger’s main “political” text of 1933 “put in Hitler’s service the very language and the very writing through which, at a great moment in the history of thought, we had been invited to participate in the questioning designated as the most lofty—that which would come to us from Being and from Time”; in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 451. See also Jean-Michel Rabaté’s “Le scandale de l’après-coup,” Critique 594 (November 1996): 921–922: “There was nothing comparable to Heidegger’s attitude here . . .”
4. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Raymond Bellour in Cahiers de l’Herne: Henri Michaux (Paris: L’Herne, 1966), 88; Maurice Blanchot, “Intellectuals Under Scrutiny” (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 223.
5. “The story of the transformation of convictions! In the whole realm of literature there is no other story of such thrilling interest!” Lev Shestov cited in Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 504, 506.
6. “Is it simply an accident, for example, that Blanchot distanced himself from the far right and from journalism at the same time? Ought one not ask whether the message is to some degree determined by the medium? Could one not say that an entire sector of French literary production became simultaneously fascist and journalistic? That the temptations of fascism had a lot to do with journalistic exaggeration?” Denis Hollier, “Fahrenheit 452 (Below Zero),” Critique 594 (November 1996): 934.
7. Beyond the stakes in politics, economics, social questions, or war, Georges Bataille recognized the power of fascism, as early as 1933, in what he named this power of “irrational attraction” in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” trans. Carl R. Lovitt, New German Critique 16 (Winter, 1979): 64–87; see also “Le fascisme en France,” ibid., 2:205–213).
8. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 2.
16. FROM REVOLUTION TO LITERATURE: LITERARY CRITICISM (1930S)
1. We know how highly Maulnier—a personality who at the time was clearly much better known—thought of Blanchot. Their postwar relations were more distant but still continued, probably until the end of the 1950s. See also Pierre Monnier’s remarks in À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (In the Shadow of the Great and Spineless) (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 192.
2. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 244.
3. Monnier, A l’ombre des grandes têtes molles, 223–224.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1999), 490–491.
5. There is also a 1973 text that addresses Valéry, “La comédie d’avoir de l’ordre.” The beginning of the article suggests what attracted the young reader of the 1920s: the “pressure of the morning mind which demanded—to the point of suffering, or exaltation—that [Valéry] think quickly, too quickly, that he think everything and also what is beyond everything.” We can also infer what gradually distanced this young reader: the tendency toward academic stiffness in the organization of thought, the search for and publication of the “System,” the desire to insert the slightest morning jotting into it, to use even what was unusable, to erase nothing. See La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident, 339–342 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
6. Maurice Blanchot, “De la révolution à la littérature,” L’Insurgé 1 (January 13, 1937): 3.
7. Maurice Blanchot, review of La dentelle du Rempart by Charles Maurras, L’Insurgé, 7 (February 24, 1937): 5. Along with Denis de Rougemont, Maurras was the only author to whom Blanchot dedicated two columns over the ten months (the other appeared on July 28, 1937).
8. Bl. (Maurice Blanchot), review of Médée by Léon Daudet, Aux Écoutes 895 (July 13, 1935): 30.
9. We know of the existence of a letter from Drieu to Blanchot, dated March 28, 1937, which is to say a good month before the appearance of the article on Rêveuse bourgeoisie in L’Insurgé. This letter is referred to by Pierre Andreu and Frédéric Grover in Drieu La Rochelle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1989). Blanchot himself confirms that he met Drieu on this occasion in For Friendship (1993) in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul, 135–136 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
10. Maurice Blanchot, review of Alain, Souvenirs de guerre, L’Insurgé 24 (June 23, 1937): 5.
11. Bl. (Maurice Blanchot), review of Maeterlinck, Avant le grand silence, Aux Écoutes, 864 (February 8, 1934): 35.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “La culture française vue par un allemande,” La Revue Française 10 (March 27, 1932): 363–365.
13. Today, who knows Georges Reyer, Guy Mazeline, Hubert Chatelion, Jean Guirec, Jolan Foldes? Who still reads Louise Hervieu, Thyde Monnier, or even Charles Plisnier (the Goncourt Prize winner in 1937)? These are only a few of the now obscure names to whom Blanchot dedicates texts as long as those treating Virginia Woolf or Thomas Mann.
14. Maurice Blanchot, review of André Rousseaux, Âmes et visages du vingtième siècle, La Revue Universelle 18 (December 15, 1932): 742–745.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Les communistes, gardiens de la culture” (25 March 1933), in Chroniques politiques, 97.
16. Maurice Blanchot, review of Daniel-Rops, Deux hommes en moi, La Revue Universelle 21 (February 1931): 367–368.
17. Maurice Blanchot, review of Penser avec les mains by Denis de Rougemont, L’Insurgé 3 (January 27, 1937): 5.
18. See notably the end of the reading of Ramuz, Le garçon savoyard: “This is also what makes admirable language such a gift in this writer who, today, through the rigor of his refusals, the purity of his innovations and through his heightened awareness most makes us think of what could be, in the novel, the work of a new Mallarmé.” L’Insurgé 37 (September 22, 1937): 6.
19. Maurice Blanchot, review of Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, L’Insurgé 33 (August 25, 1937): 4; of Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, L’Insurgé 14 (April 14, 1937): 5; of Woolf, The Waves, in “Time and the Novel” (1937) in Faux Pas, trans Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 248–251.
20. Maurice Blanchot, review of Martin du Gard, L’Eté 1914, L’Insurgé 4 (February 3, 1937): 5. Eight years was also the interval separating the beginning and the publication of Thomas the Obscure, another work constructed in silence.
21. Maurice Blanchot, review of Mauriac, Journal, L’Insurgé 20 (May 26, 1937): 5.
22. Blanchot, review of Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Blanchot already addressed the “impure elements of biography” and “the abolition of the writer” on December 15, 1932, in a reading of André Rousseaux, Âmes et visages du vingtième siècle. It is therefore one of his few points of convergence with the Surrealists. In the Journal des Débats, he railed against the false science of surveys, most of all surveys sent out in search of literary anecdotes, “the wish to know others’ secrets,” the search for intimacy and “scandalous anecdotes”; “Les faux-semblants du savoir” (February 27, 1933), 1. However, in June 1939 in a reading of Haeden’s work on Nerval, he rehabilitated—already in Bataillean mode—Nerval’s attempt “to give existence the necessity, the rigor, and the quality of absoluteness that befit the work of art” in “Un essai sur Gérard de Nerval,” Journal des Débats (June 22, 1939), 2.
23. Maurice Blanchot, “Les écrivains et la politique” (July 27, 1932), in Chroniques politiques, 73.
24. Maurice Blanchot, review of Denis de Rougemont, Penser avec les mains.
25. Maurice Blanchot, “De la révolution à la littérature.”
26. Blanchot distinguished between “allegory, the poison which condemns all symbolism to the most certain death” and the symbol, “the burning center of a dialectics that devours what it completes until it has brought forth from the enigma itself the light of clarity” in a reading of Claudel, Les aventures de Sophie, L’Insurgé 25 (June 30, 1937): 5.
27. Maurice Blanchot, review of Chardonne, Romanesques, L’Insurgé 9 (March 10, 1937): 6.
28. Maurice Blanchot, “Time and the Novel,” reading of Mann, Joseph and His Brothers.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Interior Monologue” (1937), in Faux Pas, 244–247.
30. Maurice Blanchot, review of Bernanos, Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, L’Insurgé 23 (June 16, 1937): 5.
31. Maurice Blanchot, review of Daniel-Rops, Ce qui meurt et ce qui naît, L’Insurgé 12 (March 31, 1937): 5; Maurice Blanchot, review of Mazeline, Bêtafeu, L’Insurgé 11 (March 24, 1937): 5.
32. Maurice Blanchot, review of Petit, Un homme veut rester vivant, L’Insurgé 18 (May 12, 1937): 5.
33. Maurice Blanchot, review of Rougemont, Journal d’un intellectuel au chômage, L’Insurgé 32 (August 18, 1937): 4.
34. Maurice Blanchot, “Interior Monologue.”
35. Maurice Blanchot, “The Beginnings of a Novel” (1938), in The Blanchot Reader, 33–34. For their part, Maxence and Brasillach railed against Sartre: see Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 237–238. Sartre had not yet made public any political commitment, although he was close to Paul Nizan, who was a member of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, he had already come out against Mauriac’s Catholic, academic, and conventionally moralistic literature.
36. Maurice Blanchot, “François Mauriac et ceux qui étaient perdus,” La Revue Française 26 (June 28, 1931): 610–611.
37. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 9.
17. MURDEROUS OMENS OF TIMES TO COME. WRITING THE RÉCITS: “THE LAST WORD” AND “THE IDYLL” (1935–1936)
1. Pierre Prévost recounts that Pelorson introduced Blanchot to him as follows: “He was so acutely demanding that he had destroyed his manuscripts several times.” In Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 86.
2. This is if we believe Pierre Monnier, who depicts Blanchot’s editorial activities at L’Insurgé thus: “We knew that he was writing his first book. Kléber Haedens had seen extracts from it, and told me that Thomas the Obscure would be a masterpiece. Guy Richelet and I, a little intimidated, used to watch Blanchot and admire him.” Monnier, A l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 205–206. His supposed correspondence with Drieu was that of two novelists discussing the preoccupations and certainties of their creative processes. This rare passage speaks to this correspondence: “What we need, I believe,” wrote Drieu, “is for all our characters to be within the very movement of our most quotidian and our most profound reflexes, that they should be tied to our difficulties in living. They are the temperature charts of our two or three illnesses—and also of our recoveries” (letter of March 28, 1937). Finally, Georges Bataille would later confirm (around 1954) that “novels and tales of an excessively strange character” existed before 1940, in “Maurice Blanchot . . . ,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 218.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in Vicious Circles: Two Fictions and “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 64.
4. Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste, trans. Jackson Matthews (London: Peter Owen, 1951), 4–5.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” 64.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “The Idyll,” in Vicious Circles, 5.
7. “At a time when you are already beginning to worry about middle age, do you know what it is like to find a young woman who has more gaiety and freshness than all the others?’ Ibid., 7. This presence of parental figures is all the more worthy of attention for being very rare in Blanchot’s narratives, except for The Most High, where the father figure is absent and replaced by a hated stepfather.
8. “The Idyll,” 4.
9. “The burning of libraries will always be the calamity that foretells the death of the mind,” Blanchot would write in “The Book” in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 29. “The Last Word” opens with the disappearance of the library and closes with the tower in flames.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” 65. “These innocent texts in which echoed the murderous omens of times to come,” he would also write. Ibid., 64. It is possible to be struck in a similar way on reading poems by Robert Antelme written prior to his arrest, but which according to Daniel Dobbels provide “an unexpected form of premonition”; see Robert Antelme, Textes inédits (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 52–57.
11. See in particular “L’Allemagne nouvelle ou le triomphe de la Prusse,” Le Rempart 17 (May 8, 1933): 2.
12. For some time yet, Blanchot would continue to live this life of a journalist of the far right, which he was nonetheless beginning to disdain. He would later recognize the same paradoxical fate at work in Tocqueville: “Yet he devotes himself to this [political] life that he does not like and that is beneath him. He sacrifices his projects as a historian to it. He allows it to jeopardize his health. In order to live it, he gives up being fully what he ought to be.” In “Tocqueville’s Recollections” (1943), in A World in Ruins, 61.
13. Blanchot, “The Last Word,” in Vicious Circles, 39. Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from the three texts collected in Vicious Circles.
14. [Le mot can be translated both as word and as saying (as in a bon mot). —Trans.]
15. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 57.
16. Ibid., 83.
18. NIGHT FREELY RECIRCLED, WHICH PLAYS US: THOMAS THE OBSCURE (1932–1940)
1. Perhaps it is this indulgence that he is commenting on obliquely, in a 1947 article on Julien Gracq’s “magical world,” when he underlines that it might so happen that a writer could “desire to be weighty. It is perhaps necessary for him to move forward along a path that he blocks to the precise degree that he clears it” (such a way of moving forward describes that of Thomas, and even more that of Thomas in Aminadab). The abundance of adjectives clouds one’s vision and places events at a remove. “Grève désolée, obscur malaise” (1947), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 95–100. Nonetheless, we must add that from the outset Blanchot fights against this tendency, and that it is less the abundance of adjectives than the abundance of “movements” that characterizes the precision of his prose.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Lautréamont,” Revue Française des Idées et des Oeuvres 1 (April 1940): 67–72. This article was republished, with a few modifications, in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 172–176. The expression “the cancer of the French novel,” for instance, does not feature in this later version.
3. Although mentioned in the apostolic lists, Thomas or Didymus (twin) only appears in the New Testament in the gospel of John. Arrogant and unbelieving, trusting touch more than sight, he would also be the only apostle to recognize Christ’s divine nature, calling him “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). In the Oxyrynchus papyrus, discovered in the third century, the Lord says to Thomas: “whoever listens to these words shall not taste death.” In the Acts of Thomas, a Syriac text also of the third century, Thomas who in the dividing-up of the world had received India is killed with spears; but even once dead, his body continues to perform miracles. In the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal book once again of the third century (and discovered in 1947), Thomas’s full name is Didymus Jude Thomas, the “twin brother” of the Lord. He would be the only one to respond correctly when Christ asks what he looks like—the answer is that he is Ungraspable, Unknowable. He is the only one who knows the secret words of Revelation.
4. Letter from Hegel to Niethammer, quoted by Jacques Derrida in Glas, II (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1981), 247.
5. Daniel Wilhem, Maurice Blanchot: La voix narrative (Paris: UGE, 1974), 276; Pierre Klossowski: Le corps impie (Paris: UGE, 1979), 228–229.
6. Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 39.
7. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1.
8. This is the paradox of Gracchus, which repeatedly appears in Blanchot’s fictional and critical work. From the 1930s, through the character of Thomas, and from the first texts on Kafka: “We do not die, it is true, but because of that we do not live either; we are dead while we are alive, we are essentially survivors”; Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka” (1945), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 8, or on Lautréamont: Maldoror’s “definitive impossibility of having done with things”; Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 106.
9. [For the remainder of this chapter, references in parentheses refer to the first version of Thomas the Obscure (reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 2005), which is untranslated. —Trans.]
10. Drawing notably on the scene of being devoured by the rat (which Lacan would address), Frédéric Nef reads not the impossibility of contact (“fear before the threat of a mortal contact”) but the presence in this literary experience “of fascination as a way of living through the phantasm”; “Le piège,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 71–88. There is indeed no need to prove that the novel is full of phantasmatic scenes or scenarios. The a priori concerns of any reading must surely be dialed down a notch by the idea that writing is the unfolding of such phantasms, their still-secret opening, that it investigates their movement even as it abstains from providing a single figure for it, and that is elaborated (whether through a phobic or joyful relationship to the same, through the immanence of the double, the transcendence of metamorphosis) as the unending analysis of an originary scene.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Roman et poésie” (1941), in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 43–48.
12. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 64.
13. René Char, “Even if . . . ,” in Poems of René Char, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Jonathan Griffin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 259.
19. THE UNIVERSE IS TO BE FOUND IN NIGHT: RESISTANCE (1940–1944)
The epigraph from James Joyce is cited by Maurice Blanchot in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 609.
1. See Edmond Buchet, Les auteurs de ma vie ou ma vie d’éditeur (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1969), 65.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Lautréamont” (1940), in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 172–176.
3. From 1938 to 1940, Blanchot did not put his name to any texts of a political nature. But he was responsible for numerous editorials in the Journal des Débats, which we can identify stylistically. They regularly denounced Germanic nihilism and particularly Hitler’s totalitarianism.
4. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle on May 3, 1940, in Journal 1939–1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 180.
5. If we are to believe Death Sentence, 1940 was a year of pain. In any case, what Blanchot’s narrative states regarding his shock corroborates the accounts we have heard. See The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 131.
6. When exactly? It is not impossible that Blanchot could have written until mid-October the daily “Letter from Clermont” on the front page of the Journal des Débats. The author of this column did not forgo praising, at first moderately and then clearly under external pressure, the regime and the figure of Marshal Pétain. Brought to heel from the outset—as sometimes he contradicted his own writing from the previous day—for a certain period this author set out to justify each government measure historically and ideologically.
7. Another question must be asked: to when is the religious “transformation of convictions,” the abandonment of faith, to be dated? Did it not give rise to a more radical rupture? Had it already taken place around 1937 or 1938? Was there, would there ever be anything like Pascal’s night, but in inverse form? Can we not see this night, charged with the return of the “primal scene,” in the dedication to Lignac? Did the death sentence, providing the unbearable image of a corpse left to rot, “remove this man’s faith” like the Holbein painting that so astonished Prince Myshkin?
8. “Private assistance for the middle class continues to fulfill a task in which it cannot be replaced. It alone reaches the social categories that official aid cannot, because the poverty they suffer is a hidden poverty. It has its own methods, tried and tested through long experience. It intervenes when necessary and its intervention is like the concern of a friend,” in M. Bl., “Une oeuvre à sauver,” Journal des Débats (June 5, 1941), 1. This text is not included in Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
9. Paul Lévy, Journal d’un exilé (Paris: Grasset, 1949), 29–30.
10. See Emmanuel Levinas in François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 59; Maire-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 121–122, 138; Maurice Blanchot, “Do Not Forget” (1988), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 124; and a reader’s letter in Le Monde signed Simone Hansel, née Levinas, “J’ai lu votre article . . .” (December 1–2, 1996), 10.
11. See also Roger Laporte, Maurice Blanchot: L’ancien, l’effroyablement ancien (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), 56. Claude Roy even places Blanchot, as early as the war, among former right-wing extremists now “close to the Communist Party,” in Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 200.
12. Quain was in the so-called free zone, around 25 miles (40 km) to the west of the demarcation line and around 60 miles (100 km) from the Swiss border.
13. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals Under Scrutiny (1984) in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 222.
14. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 148.
20. USING VICHY AGAINST VICHY: JEUNE FRANCE (1941–1942)
1. Regarding Jeune France, the reader is referred to Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987); Pierre Schaeffer, Les antennes de Jéricho (Paris: Stock, 1978); Véronique Chabrol, “Jeune France: Une expérience de recherche et de décentralisation culturelle” (PhD thesis, Université de Paris, Institut d’Etudes Théâtrales, Bibliothèque Gaston-Baty, June 1974). (Véronique Chabrol is Paul Flamand’s daughter.) See also Serge Added’s book on Le théâtre dans les années Vichy (Paris: Ramsay, 1992). We owe a lot to interviews with Jean Bazaine, Louis Ollivier, and above all Xavier de Lignac, who lent us precious archives. The chapter that Marc Fumaroli dedicates to Jeune France in L’etat culturel: Une religion moderne (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992) ascribes too much importance to the ideological and strategic role played by Mounier (for whom Jeune France was a “working tool” whose “soul” was provided by the team from Esprit). Fumaroli does not mention the existence of a faction that was radically opposed to that of Flamand or Schaeffer, namely that of Lignac and Blanchot, who, as we shall see, would provoke the breakup of Jeune France in 1942.
2. The publisher Edmond Buchet confirms this, but in different terms: “A few days ago, Maurice Blanchot took me to an exhibition of young painters that he is praising. I was not able to hide my disappointment from him. How could a mind as sharp as his be duped by such mediocrity? It is true that he is literary above all else”; note of December 5, 1942, in Les auteurs de ma vie ou ma vie d’éditeur (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1969), 91–92. This taste was not new. In the 1930s, he was interested in surrealism. Pierre Roy, the only contemporary painter mentioned in the first version of Thomas the Obscure (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 205, alongside Da Vinci and Titian, belonged to this movement. He is known for his trompe-l’oeil pictures.
3. Blanchot would admit: “The situation was too ambiguous. Jeune France, which had been founded by unknown musicians who would later become famous, was subsidized by Vichy, and our naïve project to use this association against Vichy . . . failed because of this contradiction,” in For Friendship (1993) in Political Writings, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 135.
21. ADMIRATION AND AGREEMENT: MEETING GEORGES BATAILLE (1940–1943)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Play of Thought,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 212–213. Another singular similarity is demonstrated by the 1944 portrait of Bataille by Henri-François Rey, which seems to retain only those characteristics which could also be attributed to Blanchot: “a very handsome face, a quiet voice, a very abstract way of moving in space, both absent and present at the very same time. . . . He was the most fascinating man I have ever met, who had his mysteries, his ambiguities and his contradictions. I have never seen or experienced the existence of a being who unceasingly pursued the same quest, that for the absolute, which so much sheer passion, so much suffering and unhappiness, so many hopes and doubts” in Le Magazine Littéraire 44 (January 1979): 58.
2. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 104.
3. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, May 9 (1961?), quoted in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 594.
4. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals Under Scrutiny (1984) in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 226. Bataille presents the encounter as follows: “At the end of 1940, he met Maurice Blanchot, to whom he soon became linked through admiration and agreement.” In “Notice autobiographique,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 7:462. Everything or almost everything it is possible to say about the relationship between Blanchot and Bataille has been said in Michel Surya’s biography, to which we refer the reader: Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002).
5. We can note that due to their multiple acquaintances, Bataille and Blanchot could have met earlier. Drieu frequented the Collège de Sociologie; Denis de Rougement spoke there. Pelorson edited a journal, Volontés, to which Queneau was a regular contributor. Denis Hollier also remarks, “Curiously, the first time the names of Blanchot and Bataille were associated was in 1938, without either of them knowing about it, in Commune, the communist publication whose press review was written by Sadoul. Sadoul took apart in a very insulting way the dossier by the Collège de Sociologie from the July 1938 Nouvelle Revue Française, before moving—without a pause—on to a detailed denunciation of a long Blanchot article from Combat, the far-right newspaper of the era.” Denis Hollier, in Art Press 204 (July–August 1995): 47–48.
6. Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 10.
7. Ibid., 97.
8. Bataille met Blanchot at the end of 1940. He contracted pulmonary tuberculosis in 1942. Later, in 1955, he was doomed by cerebral arteriosclerosis: he would suffer more and more intensely over the final seven years of his life.
9. Bataille, Guilty, 28. [In this and the following quotation, the switching between tenses is Bataille’s own. —Trans.]
10. Ibid., 15.
11. Ibid., 4. Blanchot would return to this phrase in the homage paid to Bataille after his death in Critique. This fear is clearly what enabled their immediate understanding. It is a shared, physical, concrete, oral fear; it is the fear to which their dialogue leads them, not a dialogue of construction, confrontation, or contestation, but a movement at once resolute and uncertain, a cavernous and spoken word, “a neutral, infinite, powerless speech, where the limitlessness of thought . . . is at stake,” “it is thought itself that is put at stake by calling upon us to sustain, and in the direction of the unknown, the limitlessness of this play.” Thus “between two men speaking, bound by what is essential, the nonfamiliar intimacy of thought establishes a boundless distance and proximity. . . . Relations that are strange, privileged, sometimes exclusive, and that can only with difficulty withstand being shared with others; relations of invisibility in full light that are guaranteed by nothing and which, when they have endured over a lifetime, represent the unforeseeable chance, the unique chance in view of which they were risked.” The Infinite Conversation, 215–217.
12. Bataille himself would underline how close the three men’s thinking was: “Levinas’s thinking . . . did not seem to me to differ from that of Blanchot or from my own.” “L’existentialisme au primat de l’économie” (1947), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 9:293. Even before the war, Levinas must have read passages of Thomas the Obscure and must have recognized in it what he and Blanchot had lived through and thought together in Strasbourg, which he named the there is; between the submission and publication of the book, Bataille must also have read it and have seen in it the demand of experience (he quotes a long section of the second chapter in Inner Experience). After the Liberation, Levinas published Existence and Existents, in which he refers to the same chapter, which he sees as an admirable description of the there is; trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 63. For Bataille, the word “description” “is not wholly just: Levinas describes and Blanchot somehow cries the there is. . . . Levinas describes as an object, through a formal generalization (in other words through discourse) what, in Blanchot’s literary text, is the pure cry of an existence.” “L’existentialisme au primat de l’économie,” 292–294. In this article, Bataille calls into question whether discourse can be external to experience, in Levinas as in all existentialists and in almost all philosophers. Nonetheless, he recognizes that Levinas “retains to some degree the quality of a cry in his writing.” Finally, we can recall the “incident” whereby Heidegger, referring to the person he thought to be “the best French mind” confused Bataille and Blanchot; see Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 582.
13. Bataille’s expression quoted by Blanchot in the epigraph to Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
14. “Now, ‘the basis of communication’ is not necessarily speech, or even the silence that is its foundation and punctuation, but exposure to death, no longer my own exposure, but someone else’s, whose living and closest presence is already eternal and unbearable absence, an absence that the work of deepest mourning does not diminish. And it is in life itself that the absence of someone else has to be met; it is with that absence . . . that friendship is brought into play and lost at each moment, a relation without relation or without relation other than the incommensurable.” The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 25. “The community of friendship, with Blanchot, would no more be founded on this specular similarity, but on the necessary, definitive dissimilitude into which its death causes me to enter.” Michel Surya, “Les hommes mortels et l’amitié,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 69.
15. The metaphor is Blake’s in The Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Bataille would also say that “one must be a god in order to die.” Inner Experience, 75.
16. Blanchot believes, and there seems to be no doubt about this, that he was “one of the first” to read Madame Edwarda, a récit written by Bataille in September–October 1941.
17. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). “I have seen too many things and I have suffered too much to bother myself with what does not cause major problems for our everyday understanding. I no longer know—or no longer am —anything but an unlimited force of negation that divinizes everything I have not emptied of meaning. And to divinize for me also means to ‘empty of meaning.’ It is difficult to imagine how silent I have become, so much so that I tell myself that any word would break if it touched me (it would either fall apart or become so comical that the sentence could only finish with an outburst of laughter). As for the rest: I am walking oddly, as gaily as ever and if I slip, I hold the rope of silence.” Letter of February 3, 1942, from Georges Bataille to André Masson in Choix de lettres, 179.
18. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), 10.
19. “Aimer avant d’être aimé,” ibid., 291.
20. Ibid., 296. “These two are not in solidarity with one another (solidaires); they are solitary (solitaires), but they ally themselves in silence within the necessity of keeping silent together—each, however, in his own corner.” Ibid., 54–55.
21. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 24.
22. This exception of belonging to two groups, alongside Bataille, recalls the similar case of Breton in the Marat and Sade groups of Contre-Attaque. Authority and recognition had their obligations.
23. Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 102.
24. Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, “Le Collège socratique,” unpublished text of May 27, 1987, read at the Collège de Philosophie.
25. Bataille, Inner Experience, 14, 104, 19. In a letter of January 31, 1962, to Jérôme Lindon, he wrote: “I shall then declare that the impossible is literature, and that one cannot grasp the meaning of literature without seeing this. But above all, philosophy is the meaning of the impossible, though philosophy insofar as it is the impossible ceases to have anything in common with the dominant formal philosophy. In this sense, the impossible is better stated by Blanchot and me. Blanchot has written on Sade. Myself.” Choix de lettres, 582.
26. What Bataille states about his and Blanchot’s positions regarding a book by Alexandre Marc, in 1946, nicely reflects what could be said about all their positions: “You know what Blanchot thinks: I would gladly think it too, if I did not see that it risks being impossible. But above all I fundamentally think what Blanchot thinks.” Choix de lettres, 283.
27. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, September 1966.
28. Michel Surya has found in “La folie de Nietzsche,” a 1939 text, this phrase by Bataille: “the very love of life and of fate means that from the outset he himself commits the crime of authority which he would atone for [expiera].” Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 317.
29. Whether these statements were “philosophical” or literary, they addressed as in Blanchot’s writing the essence of the récit, of its power and its readability: “My récit does not live up to what one expects of a récit,” says Charles C.; “If I say what is essential about it, if I allow it to be understood, if I speak about it—it is ultimately only in order to leave it all the more in shadow” in L’Abbé C. in Oeuvres complètes, 3:338–339. This recalls the moments in which the reader is addressed (in the epigraph and the final note) in The Most High or in Death Sentence, which were both published two years later.
30. See the text of Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe (Paris: Macula, 1995), notably 216–252.
31. In a letter to the Gallimard publishing house of December 29, 1948, Bataille announced the existence of a book named Maurice Blanchot and Existentialism. Subsequent projects tended to take the form of long chapters as part of larger ensembles rather than that of books. In March 1950, Bataille wrote to Queneau in order to inform him of a vast project named The Atheo-logical Summa, including republished and new texts. In it, Maurice Blanchot appeared after History of a Secret Society, in the second part of the Summa named Friendship. In 1958, in an overarching plan for Pure Happiness, he intended to add Alleluiah and The Narratives of Maurice Blanchot to Guilty, in the same section of the Summa; see Oeuvres complètes, 6:361–364; 7:610; 12:645. Blanchot was something like the impossible authority of the Summa. Instead of remarking on this, Bataille would eventually settle on . . . an epigraph. Oeuvres complètes, 8:582.
32. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1.
33. Georges Bataille, “Collège socratique,” in Oeuvres complètes, 6:279–291.
34. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 18.
35. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998); Georges Bataille, “Maurice Blanchot . . . ,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 220.
22. IN THE NAME OF THE OTHER: LITERARY CHRONICLES AT THE JOURNAL DES DÉBATS (1941–1944)
1. [Chroniques can be translated as either “chronicles” or “column.” In this chapter I have largely chosen the former in order to align with the recent, multivolume translation of these texts. —Trans.]
2. Blanchot’s column, which became shorter in 1944 because of difficulties in paper supply that forced the newspaper to reduce its length, stopped in the penultimate issue of August 17. The newspaper had become more and more favorable to Pétain and to Hitler. In June 1944, it did not run headlines on the “Anglo-American” landings (i.e., foreign, enemy landings) or on the actions of “the ex-General de Gaulle,” instead choosing to focus its coverage on the reactions of Marshal Pétain and Prime Minister Laval. The accounts given of the operations were favorable to the Nazi troops. The newspaper definitively ceased publication in the midst of the fighting for the liberation of Paris.
3. “The habitual critic is a sovereign who avoids immolation, claiming to exercise authority without atoning for it [l’expier] and to be the ruler of a kingdom over which he rules without danger. There is no more poorer sovereign than this, and none who—because he has not refused to be something—is in fact closer to being nothing.” Maurice Blanchot, “Le mystère de la critique” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 533–536.
4. Blanchot asked himself this question apropos of a novel by Raymond Dumay, L’herbe pousse dans la prairie, which he addressed in one of his first articles: “Whence then does the pleasure it provides originate? Quite clearly, from the hum of idleness and musing, the murmur of lazy absent-mindedness that rises faintly from the meadows, woods, and water.” In Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 25. In one way or another, this type of reading must also have been imposed on Blanchot: by the editors of the newspaper, by the need to make concessions to his readers, by the dizzying lack of awareness, by the wish for respite, for humor, or for freshness.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Charles Cros” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, 618–622.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Tales and Stories” (1942), in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 32.
7. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 408.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Fils de personne” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, 660–663.
9. It would be interesting to read more precisely into the respective influence of these authors in the forming of Blanchot’s judgment. The genesis of Blanchot’s readings is still to be established, notably these 1930s readings, which come into the open at this stage. It is often (too often) said that he had read everything. He did read an enormous amount, and not only Kafka or Mallarmé; no one has yet determined how influential the silenced voices of Giraudoux or Valéry were for him (whether he admired or rejected them). Such a reading would perhaps allow Blanchot to be seen, as if in a mirror, as a critical memory of the century’s literary history.
10. In Faux pas, the superlatives on Péguy disappear, either because the article in question was not collected (as with “Chronicle of Intellectual Life II” (1941), now available in Into Disaster, 18–22), or because less extreme expressions are used: “overbrimming purity and ripe inspiration, of which there is no greater example” becomes “a kind of pure tranquility and the calm concern of his salvation,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 282. Regarding Claudel, “what is divine in his own mind” became “what is ‘divine’ in his own mind” (ibid., 295), the inverted commas setting the lyrical judgment at a distance and likening it to a metaphor that can be found in Bataille. Numerous references to the thought and the work of Giraudoux disappear from the articles in Faux Pas; see also the articles from which the quotations in the text are taken: “The Art of Montesquieu” (1941), in Into Disaster, 34–39; “The Man in a Hurry,” ibid., 119–124; “Charles-Louis Philippe” (17 February 1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 45.
11. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 55.
12. [In the English version of Faux pas, the chapter entitled “Le jeune roman” is rendered as “The New Novel.” —Trans.]
13. Maurice Blanchot, “Chronicle of Intellectual Life 1” (1941), in Into Disaster, 8–12; “The Writers’ Silence” (1941), ibid., 13–17.
14. Blanchot would take sides just as openly in an article of September 1941 against the theater policy of Vichy and Jeune France, which was said to be “a dangerous temptation, aimed at luring the artist away from his essential vocation” and distorting the theatrical act, reducing it in a crude and artificial way to what appeared to be “an unrivaled means of creating unity” in “Theater and the Public” (1941), in Into Disaster, 82–87, at 87.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “The Search for Tradition” (1941), in Into Disaster, 41–45, at 45.
16. Maurice Blanchot, “The Writer and the Public” (1941), ibid., 107–112.
17. Maurice Blanchot, “The New Novel” (1941), in Faux Pas, 183–186; see also “The Enigma of the Novel” (1942), ibid., 187–191, and ”The Angel of the Bizarre” (1941), ibid., 222–226.
18. Maurice Blanchot, “Mythological Novels” (1942), ibid., 196.
19. Maurice Blanchot, “The Angel of the Bizarre,” in ibid., 224.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “The Misfortunes of Duranty” (1942), in Desperate Clarity, 84.
21. Jean Paulhan, The Flower of Tarbes or, Terror in Literature, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 91–92.
22. Ibid., 24.
23. The opening of Laurent Jenny’s book La terreur et les signes is thus very Blanchotian: “The space of expression, which cannot be reconciled with itself, is the space of terror.” La terreur et les signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 11. In the period in question, this irreconcilability denotes the impossible for Bataille and Blanchot. The subsequent inevitability of Terror and its status as “a regulated violence” (20) are the starting points for the movement that directed Blanchot toward language; he would submit it once again to an infinite contestation, whose various critical movements bear the names of Mallarmé, Sade, and Lautréamont.
24. Maurice Blanchot, “How Is Literature Possible?” (1941), in Faux Pas, 76–84.
25. We must also note the role played by Brice Parain, who provides an intermediate point between Paulhan and Mallarmé. “As Brice Parain writes in a remarkable formulation about invention in language, it is not the object that gives the sign its meaning, but the sign that imposes on us the necessity of finding an object for its meaning” in “Studies on Language” (1943), ibid., 87. This justifies anew the law of inner necessity and opens the path to the conception of language autonomously creating a universe. Parain, Mallarmé, and Valéry allow Blanchot to recognize the specificity of poetic language: “to communicate silence through words and to express freedom through rules,” “to be evoked as having been destroyed by the circumstances which make it what it is”; ibid., 90. Blanchot would often cite—either directly or allusively—an expression by Valéry which must have been the object of debate between him and Bataille: “poetry is the attempt . . . to reconstitute via the means of articulated language these things or this thing which cries, tears, embraces, sighs obscurely try to express.”
26. Maurice Blanchot, “The Secret of Melville” (1941), ibid., 240.
27. Maurice Blanchot, “Is Mallarmé’s Poetry Obscure?” (1942), ibid., 109.
28. 28 Maurice Blanchot, “After Rimbaud” (1943), ibid., 145.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “De Jean-Paul à Giraudoux” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, 548–552. See also “The Pure Novel” (1943), in A World in Ruins, 262–268.
30. Maurice Blanchot, “Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel” (1943), in Faux Pas, 165–171. “We dream of a writer, a symbol of purity and pride, who would be for the novel what Mallarmé was for poetry, and we glimpse the work that this poet wanted to make into an equivalent of the absolute. But how are we to feed such a dream?” In “The New Novel,” 186. Blanchot dreamed that he was this impossible writer.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “On Hindu Thought” (1942), ibid., 36.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on the New Poetry” (1942), ibid., 128–131.
33. Maurice Blanchot, “Master Eckhart” (1942), ibid., 23–27; “On the Subject of The Fruits of the Earth” (1942), ibid., 296–300; “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), ibid., 53–58. In the same period, in two articles of late November and early December, the first two references to the myth of Orpheus in Blanchot’s critical work can be found. It was also at the end of 1942 that the military and political situation became clearer: the Allies landed in Algeria on November 8, the Germans invaded the free zone on November 11.
34. Maurice Blanchot, “On the Subject of Fruits of the Earth,” 296–297. What Blanchot says about the essay, beginning with Montaigne (an essayist who did not shy away from self-portraiture), can be applied to any of his pieces: “the essay is above all the effort of a mind that goes from personal secrets to thoughts, from the concrete to the abstract, and that offers itself as an example in order to go beyond itself. The essay is an endeavor that is focused less on the subject it is concerned with, Corneille or his style, than on the author who is in search of himself through writing it, and wants to discover himself there in the most general form possible. It is an experience during which, sometimes indirectly, the writer does not only become involved, but opens himself up to dispute, presents himself as a problem, leads his ideas to a point where he is rejected by them, derives from his personal ordeals a meaning that is acceptable to everyone, in short, makes himself the hero of an adventures whose significance lies beyond him.” In “Mediterranean Inspirations” (1941), in Into Disaster, 88–93, at 89. Writing is thus a continuation of inner experience (it will have been noted that the same language is at work), where the writer only locates the other and himself in order to lose himself and to give himself over to the others, the readers, the invisible partners of the written work.
35. For example, a passage on landscapes and beings in Bosco seems to be a description of Thomas the Obscure: “It seems that a mysterious hand has withdrawn from the trees, the houses and the marshes the physical appearance that they usually take on for us, and instead reveals them as they really are, sites of pure mind [esprit], fields where light itself can be perceived, regions that are bizarrely conscious of the gaze that contemplates them and of the thought that penetrates them. There, [mankind] compares itself to emptiness, to absence, to the perpetual exhaustion that is its ultimate fate. Without rest, without consolation, it detaches itself from all that appears. It goes to the most intimate part of itself, having no object save waiting and only finding in this waiting the expression of a frivolous fatedness.” In “Birth of a Myth,” in Faux Pas, 195; the article was written in June 1941. Again regarding Bosco, the following sentences evoke Aminadab, which was being finished at the time: “We have abandoned the universe of abstract forms where we truly seem to touch the order of profound things. However, we are not in the mystery of the banal world, since the reality we enter remains distant and extraordinary” (194), and this: The beings who come and go “seek the unique image of which they are a distant reflection. They try to rediscover the radiant meaning that is their true life through a rigorous series of experiences,” 195. This research is mentioned only in order to then say immediately that Bosco has not succeeded in it, thus raising the possibility of another novel. And as early as May 1941, we read this which evokes the narrator of The Most High: “A yearning for prison, a familiarity with solitude, an unease when confronted with anonymous crowds, a need to live a dutiful life as if one were above the world: these are all products of the anxiety in which everyone has lived and sometimes continues to live” in “Chronicle of Intellectual Life II” (1941), in Into Disaster, 22.
36. Maurice Blanchot, “The Silence of Mallarmé” (1942), in Faux Pas, 99–102.
37. Maurice Blanchot, “Goethe and Eckermann” (1941), ibid., 270. In the name of such demands, Blanchot showed his anger at a biography of Rimbaud by Pierre Arnoult, inventing scenes “to make him come alive,” distorting the poems, amalgamating them into the overall story, etc.; “Après Rimbaud” in Journal des Débats (September 15, 1943), 2, in a passage not retained in Faux pas.
38. Maurice Blanchot, “Molière” (1942), in Faux Pas, 259.
39. Maurice Blanchot, “An Edition of Flowers of Evil” (1942), ibid., 157.
40. Maurice Blanchot, “The Silence of Mallarmé” (1942), ibid., 101.
23. A TRUE WRITER HAS APPEARED: THE PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION OF THOMAS THE OBSCURE (1941–1942)
1. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 136. The printer’s achevé d’imprimer (completion of print) date for the first edition of Thomas l’obscur is given as September 5, 1941.
2. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Claude Roy of November 9, 1941; letter 207 in Jean Paulhan, Choix de lettres, II: Traité des jours sombres (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 248. It was not Brasillach but probably Rebatet who reviewed the novel in Je Suis Partout: “Mr. Blanchot, who was editor-in-chief on behalf of the Jew Lévy, has made his debut in what he calls the novel, just as he previously made his debut in what he must have called a political newspaper. He brings to the task the same sort of bad faith. Indeed, in the same way that he refused to see reality in order to align himself with his employers’ ethics, so he refuses to know what the art of narrating and the art of writing are about. If the reader does not give up before the end, prodigiously bored by this shapeless little book, he will have time to notice the faded influences upon it: here is some lymphatic Giraudoux, here is some bland Surrealism, here is some Rilke without poetry. These are all colorless larvae crawling through a sort of humid fog, around a Thomas who would have appeared boring twenty years ago, and who today adds to his other graces that of being as out-of-date as the Jewish art to which he lays claim. In a period where there is a crisis in the availability of paper, the publication of Thomas the Obscure is an affront to common sense as well as to art. It is a superb monument of pretentious imbecility—R.” In Je Suis Partout 534 (October 18, 1941): 8.
3. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Roger Caillois, number 102, December 25, 1941, in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Roger Caillois, 1934–1967 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 147.
4. Letter from Monique Saint-Hélier to Jean Paulhan, number 49, 3 March 1942, in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 120–122.
5. Albert Camus, Carnets (1942), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 6:221–222.
6. Thierry Mauliner, review of Thomas the Obscure in L’Action Française (January 28, 1942), 3. See also “Quelques romans,” La Revue Universelle 30 (March 25, 1942): 464–467.
7. Marcel Arland, “Chronique des romans,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 335 (January 1, 1942): 94.
8. August Rivet, review of Thomas the Obscure in Confluences 7 (January 1942): 103–104.
9. Jean Mousset, “Un roman de M. Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur,” Journal des Débats 30 (October 1941): 2–3.
24. LIFT THIS FOG WHICH IS ALREADY OF THE DAWN: THE PUBLICATION OF AMINADAB (1942)
1. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Drieu La Rochelle (January 1942); letter number 219 in Jean Paulhan, Choix de lettres, II: Traité des jours sombres (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 263.
2. Georges Bataille, notes on “La religion surréaliste,” in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard), 7:610. Thierry Maulnier’s brilliant article also insisted on the tragedy of knowledge staged by the novel, this new mythical search for the Golden Fleece or Grail; review of Aminadab in L’Action Française (November 26, 1942), 3.
3. Albert Camus, Carnets (1942), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 6:222.
4. Ultimately, this is what Sartre could not stand, writing as he did in 1943 in the Cahiers du Sud two powerful articles against Bataille and Blanchot: “Un nouveau mystique” and “Aminadab ou du fantastique considéré comme un langage,” collected in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Beyond Bataille’s influence, on which he says nothing, he criticizes the “extraordinary resemblance [of Aminadab] to the novels of Kafka.” Blanchot is thus said to have established a “cliché of the fantastic ‘à la Kafka.’ ” The two criticisms rely heavily on each other: Although they seem to address fairly different literary questions, they end up denouncing the two books’ archaicism, artificiality, and mystification. Regarding Blanchot, Sartre is not wholly wrong in underlining the similarity with Kafka; but the reflex of attributing the narrative to a “world turned upside down” reduces and constrains the reading to nothing more than an imitation of every reading of Kafka. After the war, Maurice Nadeau would say both how exact and how limited Sartre’s criticism was: “He placed himself as a ‘consciousness’ before another consciousness: that of the novelist.” Le roman français depuis la guerre, new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 75. Sartre’s positioning makes him both closed to Blanchot and Bataille’s work and mockingly heretical toward them. He sets in opposition transcendence and immanence, limits his interest to the reader’s relation to the character (an upside-down character who in an upside-down world could only appear the right way up), criticizes Blanchot for not having chosen between identifying with or distancing himself from Thomas, and carries out a literary investigation that does not fully suit his aims. In all of these ways, Sartre closes down his reading of the narrative at the point where it begins to be interesting: the reversals in the status of the body and in the interpretative positions.
We must also recall that Sartre’s critical intervention was part of his strategy of eliminating potential rivals on the intellectual scene; see Anna Boschetti, Sartre et ‘Les Temps Modernes’: Une entreprise intellectuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 18–19, 53, 176–177, which interestingly outlines his strategies, despite making multiple mistakes of judgment regarding authors. In this light, it is necessary to consider the following points:
Blanchot was the first to publicly express a “judgment” on Sartre in Aux écoutes, and the mixture of negatives and positives in this judgment was returned to him with an additional touch of irony and severity, sometimes even word for word (the alignment with the fantastic replaced that with the mythical; the overreliance on Heidegger became an overreliance on Kafka; where the undertaking had been called “imperfect,” the mode of writing was now “uncertain”; whereas one writer had been said to lack rigor and to conform to the “usages” of “habitual psychology,” the other “only had to find his own style” in order not to remain limited to “some banal ideas on human life”). Sartre replied by taking things apart more violently and a little less briefly; at the beginning—with a touch that only appeared to be anodyne—he recalled Blanchot’s Maurrasian origins (this was 1943). At the end of his article, and more seriously because it was not without slander, he began the much later tradition of forced readings of Blanchot’s narratives in light of his extreme right-wing activities by evoking his “transcendence tainted with Maurrassism.” Leiris would tell Sartre how harsh this was (as he would confide in a letter to Bataille on July 6, 1943).
In May 1941, Blanchot produced another unfavorable judgment on Sartre’s novel writing by placing it, alongside Bernanos and Drieu, among the disappointments of the French novel, which was said to be too conventional in its desire for change. “They have used up as much energy trying to conform to novelistic habits as they would have creating new ones. They have done violence to themselves and, having desired much less than they could have accomplished, they have ended up exchanging themselves for more modest authors.” “Le Jeune roman,” Journal des Débats (May 14, 1941), 3. The whole passage can be found in “The New Novel” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 186, but lacking the direct references to the names of the authors discussed. We should add that in the meantime, Sartre had published his article.
Blanchot, like Bataille, would always see Sartre as too moderate, and even in the largely laudatory article on The Flies in July 1943 would conclude on the mediocrity of the world of the gods as depicted by Sartre; in “The Myth of Orestes,” in Faux Pas, 63–64. Moreover, Blanchot confesses to Bataille by letter that this praise was strategic in the first instance, a reply to the generally “discouraging” criticism that had greeted the play: “I therefore decided to discuss it while silencing my reservations.” We can imagine that there must have been many of the latter.
In October 1945, Blanchot gave a very positive view of Nausea (see “The Novels of Sartre,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995], 196), just as he would in July 1946 on the entirety of Sartre’s novels (see “Translated from . . .” in ibid., 187). But in March 1947 his piece in L’Arche on the Baudelaire book, which followed Bataille’s piece in Critique (January–February), and then at the end of the year several passages in “Literature and the Right to Death,” would be extremely harsh. Sartre would nonetheless publish a Blanchot text on Sade in Les Temps Modernes in October 1947.
Blanchot refused the existential, secretly nihilist, and paradoxically cathartic goals (finalité) of Sartre’s criticism. Thus in October 1953 he would be fairly reticent regarding Saint Genet (see “Where Now? Who Now?” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 210–217), in which Sartre cited him as a Mallarmean advocate for Being’s unavoidable reduction to nothingness in language. Something of the two men’s lack of understanding can be found here, just as it can in the gap between their positions on the “act” or the “versions” of the imaginary.
5. Aminadab is also the name of two biblical characters with minor roles. One is Aaron’s father-in-law (Exodus 6:23), and the other belongs to David’s line (Luke 3:33). He is also a demon discussed by the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross. As the shadowy, voiceless, and faceless guardian of subterranean spaces, the character in Blanchot’s narrative appears only in the course of a single conversation at the end of the narrative: Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab, trans. Jeff Fort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 145. We can also add that in Arabic Adab refers to a discursive and humorous literary genre, which grew with the expansion of the Islamic empire and evokes the diversity of peoples and culture. Last, Michael Holland looks at the importance of a Nathaniel Hawthorne tale, The Birth-Mark, in which a character named Aminadab appears in “La marque de naissance” (1998), in Avant-dire: Essais sur Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2015), 381–386.
6. Joë Bousquet, “Maurice Blanchot,” collected in Maurice Blanchot/Joë Bousquet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), 47.
7. This quotation and the one that closes the paragraph in the main text are taken from several passages in Guilty in which Bataille refers to the ending of Aminadab: Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 216 n., 71–72, 221 n., 126. He would also quote the novel in the epigraph to The History of Eroticism: “Soon we’ll be united for good. I’ll lie down and take you in my arms. I’ll roll with you in the midst of great secrets. We’ll lose ourselves, and find ourselves again. Nothing will come between us any more. How unfortunate that you won’t be present for this happiness!” Aminadab, quoted in The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 13. We can see all that proved attractive to Bataille here, between death and jouissance, immanence and transcendence. What is more, he was not the only one to be marked by this ending: Michel Leiris was too—he wrote about it in a letter of July 6, 1943. Where Bataille saw “feverish humor,” Leiris read “sinister joking,” which recalled “the gaiety of Socrates as he lay dying.”
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Encountering the Imaginary” (July 1954), in The Book to Come, 9–10.
9. Blanchot, Aminadab, 68. Thus, once again, Thomas is unable to name the beings and things that surround him; he is constantly on the lookout for signs. He does not know whether a person he encounters should be addressed as a staff member (ibid., 71, 143), he hears “poorly” the answers he is given (a paucity of meaning: what does “free” mean, he asks himself, when I am told that I am free even though I am being chained up? [24]). Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from Aminadab unless otherwise stated.
10. This “syntactical torsion and twisting” is the object of Derrida’s analyses in “Pas,” in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 33. Derrida was probably the first to be so attentive to Blanchot’s syntax, notably to the paradoxical links of the “without” and the “pas” that place the sign beyond the reach of “the logic of identity, even of the dialectics of contradiction.” This is to say that the narrative sign is never fully present or on display; it is not given over to reading as such, but always spliced with its own negation, for instance being suspended because it is logically incompatible with neighboring signs or because the fact of being uttered makes it virtual. This is another trace of the provocative aspect of l’écriture, which disallows any reading seeking to memorize the entire narrative, and which a fortiori blocks any representation through the imaginary. [Pas can mean “not,” “step,” “nots,” “steps.” —Trans.]
11. Bousquet, “Maurice Blanchot,” 48.
12. Ibid., 35.
13. The expression is Rilke’s concerning El Greco’s saints, which he calls “giant plants” that “flower at the highest point” and “open themselves to storms of visions.”
14. Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, trans. Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 261–339, at 315.
25. WRITERS WHO HAVE GIVEN TOO MUCH TO THE PRESENT: NRF CIRCLES (1941–1942)
1. See Maurice Blanchot, “The Ease of Dying” (1969), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 149.
2. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 312–314.
3. José-Flore Tappy, “Présentation,” in Jean Paulhan and Monique Saint-Hélier, Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 21.
4. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 135.
5. Cupid, the lover of this mortal woman whom some believe to be more beautiful than Venus, visits her nightly, on condition that she always refuse to see him; he leaves as soon as day comes.
6. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Monique Saint-Hélier, no. 11 (November 22, 1941) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 47–48. Paulhan adds: “You will think that these articles pay me a lot of compliments. They do not; in fact, there is above all (I believe) a tragic tone that gives me confidence.” Paulhan would not always appreciate this “tragic tone.” For example he would write to Maurice-Jean Lefebvre on April 15, 1948: “There is a certain je ne sais quoi that I find revolting in Blanchot’s philosophy (a sort of pessimism). But it would be a hellishly long task to explain why.” Letter 32 in Jean Paulhan, Choix de lettres, III, 1946–1968: Le don des langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 60.
7. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Jean Prévost, no. 209 November 22, 1941) in Choix de lettres, II: Traité des jours sombres (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 252–253. See also the letter to Henri Pourrat, no. 210 (November 24, 1941), ibid., 253–254.
8. The Flowers of Tarbes and Blanchot’s articles were bound to interest Ponge, both because of his friends and especially for literary reasons. Was Paulhan trying to retain his influence over the poet? “I am irritated at not having the three articles from Débats (!) on the Fleurs, which I am told are greatly superior to the Fleurs,” were his words to Ponge, who replied happily: “[Blanchot] is quivering before what you have discovered (in your prudent but inexorable way). Ultimately, he is placing you where I want you to be placed (as a new Copernicus, if you allow me to say so).” Letters 257 and 258 in Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge, Correspondance 1923–1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 1:263–264.
9. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Francis Ponge, no. 260 (January 29, 1942), ibid., 268.
10. Letter from Jean Paulhan to André Dhôtel, no. 216 (January 10, 1942) in Choix de lettres, II, 259.
11. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Monique Saint-Hélier, no. 24 (December 22, 1941) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier, 67.
12. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Drieu La Rochelle, no. 219 (January 1942) in Choix de lettres, II, 262.
13. Paul Léautaud, Journal littéraire, III (février 1940–février 1956) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 596–597. At the end of August, Léautaud relates a meeting with the head of production at the NRF: “Mr. Blanchot? That (ça) no longer exists,” he was told by Festy, for whom Blanchot had only replaced Drieu “for a short time.” Ibid., 687–688.
14. Letters from Jean Paulhan to Drieu La Rochelle, nos. 239 and 240 (June 9 and 10, 1942), in Choix de lettres, II, 280. On this whole episode, see also Pierre Andreu and Frédéric Glover, Drieu La Rochelle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1989), 489–492; Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship, 135–136.
15. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Monique Saint-Hélier, no. 75 (June 25, 1942) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier, 169.
16. See Pascal Fouché, L’édition française sous l’Occupation (Paris: Bibliothèque de littérature contemporaine de l’Université Paris-VII, 1987), 280; Jeffrey Mehlman, Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 116–117.
17. Maurice Blanchot, “The Writer and the Public” (1941), in Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 107–112.
18. Montherlant and Goethe, cited in ibid., 111.
19. Maurice Blanchot, “On Insolence Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1942) in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 306–309.
20. Montherlant cited in ibid., 308–309.
21. Ibid., 309.
22. Maurice Blanchot, “A User’s Guide to Montherlant” (1942) in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 114–121.
23. Maurice Blanchot, “From the Middle Ages to Symbolism” (1942), ibid., 15–20, at 16.
24. Ibid., 17.
25. Ibid., 18.
26. Ibid., 19–20.
27. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature” (1942), in Faux Pas, 91–95.
28. Ibid., 91ff. The article nonetheless still contains some strange populist and demagogic moments: “what is furthest from Montaigne and Marivaux is the well-read Frenchman, but what is closest is the Gascon wine-grower or the Parisian milliner.” Faux Pas, 95. We might think of this as some kind of humor, but a few years previously Blanchot made similar statements much more seriously (or perhaps ironically).
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Machiavelli” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 99.
30. Maurice Blanchot, “French Suite” (1943), ibid., 141–147.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “The Myth of Orestes” (1943), in Faux Pas, 64.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “Considerations on the Hero” (1942), in Desperate Clarity, 122–129.
26. FROM ANGUISH TO LANGUAGE: THE PUBLICATION OF FAUX PAS (1943)
1. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 136.
2. Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 100.
3. See Pierre Assouline, Gaston Gallimard (Paris: Balland, 1984), 351.
4. See ibid., p. 328; Blanchot, For Friendship, 134–136.
5. On 30 August 1943, Dionys Mascolo wrote to Marguerite Antelme (later Marguerite Duras), on the Control Committee: “the text of ‘DIGRESSIONS’ agreed in May (no. 18159) will appear under the title ‘FAUX PAS’ ”; letter in Marguerite Duras, Romans, cinéma, théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 16.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “France and Contemporary Civilization” (1941), in Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 29.
7. Maurice Blanchot, “Realism’s Chances” (1942), in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 88.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “A World in Ruins” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 287–290.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “How Is Literature Possible?” (1941), in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 83.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “On Hindu Thought” (1942), ibid., p. 35.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “L’expérience magique d’Henri Michaux” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, pp. 663–67.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “From Anguish to Language,” in Faux Pas, 2.
13. Ibid., 3–6.
14. There is little of note in the reception of Faux pas. There was little chance of the major players, who were already familiar with the quality of the articles, expressing their views on a collection of this kind. The few articles that did appear often took issue with the conception of language and literature that Blanchot was developing, but nonetheless recognized his as “the only original and profound criticism” in the French press (Anglès, in Confluences), and saw this author as “nonetheless the best of our young critics” (Blanzat, in Poésie 44). This praise came from the Resistance press.
27. THE PRISONER OF THE EYES THAT CAPTURE HIM: QUAIN (SUMMER 1944)
1. See Georges Bataille, “Discussion sur le péché,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 6:315–359; Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 111–115.
2. Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille, 115.
3. Maurice Nadeau, “Maurice Blanchot,” in Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 71; Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille, 116; Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 6.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Des diverses façons de mourir” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 632–636.
5. The letter to Prévost, a written source and the closest to the event, seems the trustworthiest. It places the firing squad in June. June 29 is the most likely date according to local memories of the fighting. But there may not have been any direct battles the day Blanchot was placed before a firing squad. Ultimately, June 20 seems to be the most likely date. Derrida mentions a letter written by Blanchot on July 20, 1994, described as being fifty years to the day after the event; Demeure in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 52. There seems to be little doubt that Blanchot’s memory was mistaken by one month, and yet perhaps the day is correct. This would allow us to explain the content of the article published in the Journal des Débats on June 29.
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 2.
7. André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard: 1967), chapter 6, esp. 217–218).
8. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 5.
9. Bataille finished this book in August 1944; it would therefore presuppose that Blanchot had told him of the event by letter, which he did rarely at the time, there being multiple obstacles to delivery. We read the sentence quoted, from Sur Nietzsche in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 6: 23, as a chance echo of the astonishing proximity of these two friends’ “experiences,” and of their similarities in written expression.
10. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 11.
11. [Blanchot, in The Instant of My Death, and Derrida, in his response to it in Demeure, insist upon the term demeure: meaning dwelling, but recalling demeurer (to remain), and of course meure, the third-person singular subjunctive of the verb mourir (whence the term demourance in Bident’s text). —Trans.]
12. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 6.
13. Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka” (1945), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 8.
14. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 5, 6.
15. Emmanuel Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 60–61.
16. Blanchot recalls this almost offhandedly in an article of July 1946; see The Work of Fire, 183.
17. Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 173–174.
28. THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE COMMUNITY: EDITORIAL ACTIVITY AFTER LIBERATION (1944–1946)
1. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 223).
2. See Vercours, Cent ans d’histoire en France, III (Paris: Plon, 1984), 53–54.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “L’énigme de la critique” (1946), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 53–56.
4. Blanchot published an extract from The Most High in the third issue of Cahiers de la Table Ronde, in July 1945. However, he would keep his distance from the later journal of the same name, founded in 1948 by Mauriac, published by Plon and coedited by Maulnier, which quickly adopted a reactionary line.
5. At this time Blanchot’s political positions were in agreement with those of Bataille. Only the awareness of past responsibility seemed to constrain him to silence on contemporary matters. This much is suggested by a parenthesis in a letter from Bataille of late April 1946: telling Prévost to allow Blanchot free reign regarding the choice of subjects he wrote on in Critique, he added: “(perhaps it is also necessary to be attentive to the unfortunate question of politics)” in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 209–291 (and 316, note 1); Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 133, 135.
6. Ibid., 117.
7. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 136–137.
8. “Is not the most singular thing in the case of Maurice Blanchot that as a withdrawal—a paradoxical withdrawal—from the absence that is attributed to him, people are generally unaware that all his life he bore witness to an intense public presence. . . . There is no movement in Blanchot allowing us to claim that he withdrew from the world that is not accompanied by an inverse and often simultaneous movement linking him to it all the more firmly; which is to say, all the more politically” Michel Surya, “Présentation du projet de revue internationale,” Lignes, 11 (September 1990): 161.
9. In 1945, Blanchot was still part of the panel for the Prix de la Pléiade. In November, he volunteered his services for the Prix des Critiques, which had been founded by the Pavois publishing house. He thus joined Arland and Paulhan; Nadeau, Bataille, and Maulnier would also later participate. This panel would award the prize to Romain Gary, Albert Camus, and Françoise Sagan (against the latter, Blanchot voted for André Dhôtel). Char and Prévert refused the prize, which would eventually come under the influence of Paulhan and Gallimard. It continued to be awarded until the 1970s, gradually falling into distaff (quenouille), as Maurice Nadeau put it (the members stopped meeting). Blanchot seems to have remained until the end (he was still present in 1970 when the prize was awarded to Jabès).
In 1947, he was also part of the first panel of the Prix Sainte-Beuve, with Queneau, Nadeau, Aron, Fouchet, Buchet, and Paulhan. This was meant to be a sort of alternative prize: Edmond Buchet reported that its purpose was “to select each year a novel or a work of criticism that had not been considered by the numerous prizes, which are generally badly awarded”; Les auteurs de ma vie ou ma vie d’éditeur (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2001), 139. Later, at the end of the 1950s, he would refuse, as did Beckett, to sit on another jury, which had been dreamed up by Nadeau and Pingaud, intending to use the springtime to evaluate books that had been overlooked by the end-of-year prizes. He would refuse humorously, telling Nadeau that the prize would only succeed if it were awarded by members of the Académie Française. Nonetheless he did take part in the first Prix de Mai, in 1957, although not without hesitations, and he remained uncertain about its long-term prospects; see the article that he gave to L’Express, “Is Something Happening?” (1957), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 12–14. In fact, two letters from Bernard Pingaud confirm that it was Blanchot’s doing that on March 6, 1961, the Prix de Mai fell on its own sword, calling into question less the prize itself than “the very notion of prizes.” We know how much Blanchot would approve of Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize three years later.
10. This paper was Paysage Dimanche, a weekly, Sunday publication founded in June 1945, which would exist under various titles for just over three years. Opening with a text by Jules Romains, “Démocratie et grandeur,” its aim was to restore the faith and pride in the nation necessary for all democracies. The cultural dimension had an important role (three pages of six), and the other material addressed political and economic current affairs. The books column was initially written alternately by Marcel Arland and Henri Thomas. For several months, between October and December 1945, Blanchot replaced Thomas; in November, Arland stopped his contributions, leaving his place for Roger Giron. Lacking any coherent aesthetic line, Paysage Dimanche had room for both the most modern and the most conventional viewpoints. Blanchot would publish seven texts with this paper, on Giraudoux, Sartre (a twin article to the contemporaneous one for L’Arche), Dhôtel, Du Bos, Melville, and Malraux (the latter was reprinted with hardly any variations in The Work of Fire, and contemporaneous to the one given to Actualité).
11. See Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 364–367; Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 243, 251, 256.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “Days of Hope by André Malraux” (1946), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 5–11. Blanchot himself had insisted that Bataille allow an article on Malraux to be included: “I really find it impossible that we discuss neither Malraux nor the question of communism,” he had written to him on May 8, 1945.
29. THE YEAR OF CRITICISM: L’ARCHE, LES TEMPS MODERNES, AND CRITIQUE (1946)
1. Sometimes he would not see his friends for a year (he wrote as much to Bataille, sometimes complaining about it in a very moving way).
2. Leiris and Merleau-Ponty were Blanchot’s main supporters with regard to Sartre.
3. On Critique, see Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 119–149; Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 368–375.
30. RESPECTING SCANDAL: LITERARY CRITICISM (1945–1948)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Surrealism” (1945) in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 85. References in brackets in this chapter are henceforth to this work.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Quelques réflexions sur le surréalisme,” L’Arche 8 (August 1945): 93–104; “Reflections on Surrealism.”
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Du merveilleux” (1947), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 128–129.
4. Blanchot, “Reflections on Surrealism.” The article on René Char published in October 1946 addressed the relation of literature and politics in the same terms. “The struggle of the partisan in the world” belongs to poetry, which “puts us in contact with all that is sovereignty in the world.” This sovereignty places us on the path to “Terror” since poetry “is itself in everything, the presence of everything, the search for totality”: “it alone has the ability and the right to speak of everything, to speak everything” (105–106). It is also in this text that Blanchot first uses the term “community” in the sense he will later give to it, drawing on both presence within a struggle, and the distance of an interruption: in the sense of uncommitment in the mode of commitment.
5. Although Blanchot was now closer to Sartre regarding politics stricto sensu, he would not hesitate to affirm this particular understanding of commitment. And it was precisely during an analysis of “Sartre’s novels” that he would cite, not by accident, this passage from the Paths of Freedom in which the character Mathieu reflects his own image back at him: “you have spent 35 years cleansing yourself and the result is emptiness. You are a strange body . . . you live in the air, you have cut your bourgeois attachments, you have no tie to the proletariat, you float, you are an abstract, an absentee” (204). Blanchot wrote the article for the October 1945 issue of L’Arche; he had just turned thirty-eight. Of course, the portrait captured in this citation does not correspond exactly to Blanchot’s reality; it nevertheless remains suggestive: it is doubly sarcastic, first toward Sartre (Blanchot using his fiction as a mirror) and second toward Blanchot himself (because he was anything but a floating body, but far sooner a cumbersome, withdrawn body). The citation is therefore significant in terms of his critical, public, and resolute commitment as early as the summer of 1945.
6. “It is quite clear that reality does not exist in order to provide a guarantee for extravagance, but that it exists because it is the very site of the unreal which endlessly interrupts it, tears it apart, which is its deepest manifestation and guarantee”; Maurice Blanchot, “Du merveilleux” (1947), 119.
7. Ibid., 115–129. Blanchot would later abandon the term “fantastic” when referring to this sovereignty of the invisible, of inner experience. He would replace it with the “imaginary,” an imaginary infinitely open to the subterranean figure of the unimaginable. For instance, in 1947 he wrote: “Unreality begins with the whole. The realm of the imaginary is not a strange region situated beyond the world, it is the world itself, but the world as entire, manifold, the world as a whole” (316).
8. See “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, 341–344. It must be added that the privileging of the ambiguity of literature is not without relation to the debate with Sartre. The notion is already present in “From Anguish to Language,” notably regarding Kafka; here it comes to the fore. In Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 9–11. It can be found twice in the critical articles of The Work of Fire: apropos of Baudelaire (“we can think along with Sartre that . . . poetic creation is pure only in the equivocal,” 141) and of Sartre himself (“the novel has its own moral, which is ambiguity and equivocation,” 207); the first version in L’Arche 10 (October 1945): 134, evoked Sartre’s respect for “the statute of bad faith which is the moral [of the novel].” Ambiguity also plays against Sartre’s concept of bad faith; this informs the strategy of the article “The Novel Is a Work of Bad Faith” (April 1947), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 61–73. It turns that concept’s immorality and its relative indifference to ethics back on themselves and, agreeing with the thinking of Bataille and Levinas, transcends it in poetic (semiological), aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
9. This approach was all the more influential given that it was repeated almost forty years later and in the same terms: see “After the Fact” in Vicious Circles, followed by “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 59–60. On Blanchot’s relation to the Hegel of Kojève (whose work appeared in 1947), and on the influence of this strand on Lacan, see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 192–194 and 272–273.
10. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 73, 55. This lecture was first given in November 1935 in Freiburg, before being updated and given again in 1936 in Zurich, and then divided into three lectures at the end of the same year in Frankfurt.
11. Ibid., 45–46.
12. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” in Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 71.
13. See Maurice Blanchot, “From Lautréamont to Miller” (1946), in The Work of Fire, 174–175. On what this lack means for his differences with Heidegger, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (New York: Routledge, 1997), 77–91.
14. See notably the openings of “Reading Kafka” (1945), in The Work of Fire, 1, or of “Gide and the Literature of Experience” (1947), ibid., 212.
15. The organization of the texts in The Work of Fire, which does not separate them into groups, responds to this notion: the chapters on the relation between literature and the secret or silence are followed by several on poetic language (from Char to Lautréamont), then by others on the experience of the prose writer. On the whole, there are few alterations from previous versions. Some of them are important, however: a full study of them is still to be carried out. Mostly it is simply a question of style: simplifying syntax, removing passive forms, overloaded adverbs, and peremptory formulations (for example the frequent “it is clear that”). Sometimes the changes make the thinking seem more swift, the contradictions more vertiginous and the statements more effective. The corrections aim to produce spontaneity on the basis of complete control (notably in the case of “Reading Kafka,” which becomes prodigiously jubilant in the collected version). The collection’s title is linked to Bataille. It can be found in his writing, in a manuscript for The History of Eroticism, contemporaneous with Blanchot’s publication: “the accursed share must be sacrificed, it must be that given unto the work of fire” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 8:553; passage not included in The Accursed Share, vols. 2 or 3. The Work of Fire replaced the title originally planned, which in the first edition of The Most High (1948) the publisher announced as being soon to appear: Between Day and Night (Entre chiens et loups). While Blanchot chose the Bataille citation over the one from Hölderlin, he nonetheless used the famous extract by the German poet as the epigraph to the book, and would cite it on two further occasions, in the articles on Paulhan and on Hölderlin himself: “It behooves morals / To speak with restraint of the gods. / If, between day and night [entre chien et loup], / One time a truth should appear to you, / In a triple metamorphosis transcribe it; / Though always unexpressed, as it is, / O innocent, so it must remain” (xi).
16. See Blanchot’s very fine reading of Nietzsche’s confrontation with the thought of God, which, touching on Bataille’s reading of the Incarnated, rejoins the infinite movement of “inner experience”; “On Nietzsche’s Side” in The Work of Fire, 291–297.
17. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, January 12, 1971.
18. “Each time that the “is” or the “it is” takes form in this text, it does so in order to withdraw from the logic of identity, even from the dialectics of contradiction,” Derrida writes in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 32. This is the injunction of come, the imperative of the pas (the step and the not). The event is that which happens endlessly. The coming of the wholly other prevents any full manifestation of essence. This leads to the interplay between without (sans) and not (pas) in the texts, which “disarticulates any logic of identity or of contradiction” (ibid., 46), and which therefore disarticulates dialectics as well as the récit, “in which the presence of the present is paralyzed” (74).
19. See Michel Surya, “Pour une matériologie sadienne,” preface to D.A.F. de Sade, Français encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 21.
20. See Maurice Blanchot, “The ‘Sacred’ Speech of Hölderlin” (1946), in The Work of Fire, 126.
21. Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 7–8. Blanchot called for the same respect to be given to Rimbaud (who had in him “something howling and ferocious that one finds again exactly in the Marquis de Sade” in “The Sleep of Rimbaud” (1947) in The Work of Fire, 158.
22. Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, 14.
23. Ibid., 41.
24. Ibid., 153. Bataille would state as early as spring 1949, announcing in Critique the publication of Lautréamont and Sade, that Sade’s thinking pushes that of Blanchot to the point of completion, and likewise Blanchot’s thought completes that of Sade; see The Accursed Share, vols. II and III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991), 174–175. He would remain impressed by Blanchot’s work on Sade, sometimes citing entire pages from it.
25. Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, 69.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 117.
28. Ibid., 145.
29. Ibid., 143.
30. Ibid., 94, 109, 105, 117.
31. Ibid., 153–154.
31. THE BLACK STAIN: WRITING THE MOST HIGH (1946–1947)
1. The surnames in The Most High are strangely rare and sometimes hard to understand. Most of them, even those of secondary characters or those only mentioned once, are formed of four or five letters. Sorge, the name of the narrator, means “care” in German and is a fundamental notion in Heidegger’s philosophy. It is also the name of a German expressionist dramaturge who died at twenty-four, who was strongly influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche, and whose hero, Unruh, is searching for the new man and seems ready to bear the entire weight of the world on his shoulders (“Unruh” means disquiet, agitation, and even riot or revolution; see The Young Man, a work published posthumously in 1925). Dorte evokes death (la mort). Bouxx evokes the English word books; Sorge even tells him: “you are a book” (Maurice Blanchot, The Most High, trans. Allan Stoekl [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], 48); or the mouth (bouche) if the x is pronounced as in Basque. Blanchot feigns astonishment over the strangeness of the name in a letter to his Japanese translator: see Exercices de la patience 2 (Winter 1981): 107. Bouxx might also recall the name of a person and a building in Beausoleil, Roux (pronounced “Rouks”), which was inscribed on a building that must have faced the villa Margot where Blanchot stayed; he cannot have missed the fact that the name is immediately followed by a stylized letter, probably a V which, the way it is written, gives the strange feeling of reading: “Rouxx” . . .
2. Blanchot, The Most High, 1. Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from this text unless otherwise stated.
3. There is something of Myshkin in Sorge, and also something of Dostoevsky’s chatty characters, who agitate for evil, in Bouxx.
4. Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab, trans. Jeff Fort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 6.
5. Let us recall that there are two tombs, probably both empty, in the garden of the house in Quain. There are no surnames among the inscriptions on the family tomb in the church cemetery at Devrouze. Yet we know that the body of Blanchot’s father was taken there after being exhumed from the cemetery in Chalon at an unknown time.
The scene of the grave’s desecration is overtly Bataillean. We can think of what Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange says about it: to desecrate a grave, “the last site of desecration,” is “to give more room to absence.” In G.B. ou un ami présomptueux (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1969), 92.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Musil II” (March 1958), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 148.
7. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 13.
8. [Bident’s phrase is a play on the last line of The Madness of the Day (18), which reads, “No. No récits, never again.” —Trans.]
9. This was underlined by Levinas: “the face, behind the countenance it gives itself, is like the exposure of a being to death, it is the defenselessness, the nudity, and the poverty of those who are always the others. It is also the command to take others into one’s charge, to not leave them alone; in this the word of God is heard. If you understand the face as the photographer’s object, then of course you are dealing with an object like any other. But if you meet the face, then the responsibility lies in this strangeness and poverty of the others. The face offers itself to your mercy and obliges you.” François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 83.
10. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 15, 16. [“Elle” referring to the law should be rendered as “it”—however, here it is clear that, as elsewhere, Blanchot is playing with the idea of female personalization. —Trans.]
32. THE PASSION OF SILENCE: DENISE ROLLIN (1940S)
1. When he was in Paris, Blanchot regularly went to the Rue Vaugirard, where Denise Rollin lived. A child at the time (he had just turned five at the Liberation), Jean Rollin remembers a very kind, humorous man who was also ill and extremely weak. You had to be quiet when he came. Jean Rollin also reports an anecdote: The concierge, an old, difficult woman, did not look favorably on this man who regularly visited a woman living alone with her child. Every time, she would open the door as he arrived and would ask him where he was going. Blanchot would reply with unfailing politeness and go up to the sixth floor. Every time Denise Rollin would get angry at this inconvenience.
2. She would remain close to Michel and Francine Fardoulis-Lagrange, to whom she would write regularly. This correspondence is of value, and we thank especially Francine Fardoulis-Lagrange for having made it available to us. Unfortunately it is neither dated nor catalogued: the extracts cited therefore usually lack references.
3. We are drawing on Michel Surya’s interviews with Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange and Laurence Bataille; Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 281. We can read Fardoulis on Rollin’s silent nature: “she was the woman who incarnated silence. She metaphorically recorded ideas. . . . We were astonished by the echoes they had produced in her.” And Bataille stated: “I have never felt, except with Laure, such easy purity, such silent simplicity”; “such a fragile illusion would dissipate over the slightest thing, at the slightest relaxation of inattention.” In Carnets pour Le Coupable in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 5:509.
4. Ibid., 521, 515, 524.
5. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), esp. 232–237.
6. Ibid., 237.
7. Ibid., 235.
8. Not only is there no doubt that Denise Rollin knew the book and the character, but they were also popular at the time: on June 7, 1946, Georges Lampin’s film showcasing Gérard Philipe came to cinemas. The character Myshkin and notably his Pascalian skillfulness (everything that brings Blanchot into proximity with Pascal is important) are discussed in an article by Georges Philippenko, “La sainteté impossible,” Le Nouveau Receuil 37 (December 1995): 88–98.
9. “His experience is certainly the most atrocious, the most inhumane that it is possible to undergo, for me it is the experience of God, you must feel what I am trying to say because it absolutely cannot be explained in the meaning of words it is absurd, but it is true.”
“I use the word ‘God’ after the sense of Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ ” (Letter from Denise Rollin).
10. Blanchot’s relative silence on Dostoevsky is remarkable. Also remarkable are the final pages of ‘On Nietzsche’s Side’ (1945/6) in The Work of Fire, 285–286, which first appeared in L’Arche in December 1945. Blanchot was reviewing a critical work by Father De Lubac containing several studies, including one on Dostoevsky, “the most remarkable thing,” he states, but still without spending more than a few lines on it, is that “the characters are always different to what they are, and when they are relatively simple, they share with each other and receive from other characters reflections that make them invisible” (298). And when he cites Myshkin, it is in order to underline his ambiguity as an expression of anguish: “Raskolnikov, Kirilov, Stavrogin, Prince Myshkin answer, in the dramatic richness of their story, to an emptiness without history, to something frozen that the burning of their passions makes unbearable” (ibid.). The récits of the 1950s will evoke this burning cold of passion.
11. Maurice Blanchot and Denise Rollin would continue to correspond until the latter’s death. Perhaps ultimately they spent more time corresponding than in one another’s company. But this takes nothing away from the intensity of their encounters and their love. Indeed it adds a great deal to their stories of solitude, to the sensation of having been burnt that marks their readings, of Dostoevsky for Denise Rollin, of Kafka for Maurice Blanchot. After the article on Constant came “L’échec de Milena” (November 1954), another great critical text in which Blanchot addressed passion, and which would remain almost secret, kept out of The Book to Come, The Infinite Conversation and even of Friendship, only being republished after Denise Rollin’s death in De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). Although he did not see them as a model, Blanchot approached Kafka’s loves in light of the tragic, uncertain, and hasty manner in which he lived through his own. “His relations with the young woman are first and foremost established on the level of written notes,” he wrote in “The Very Last Word” (May 1968), thus using an expression fetishized by Denise Rollin apropos of Felice. In Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 273; CB’s emphasis. As with Kafka, and in proximity to Bataille, it is certain that other women featured in Blanchot’s life, just as the need for discretion imposed by the passing of time is also certain.
33. THE MEDITERRANEAN SOJOURN: THE WRITING OF THE NIGHT (1947)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Inquisition Destroyed the Catholic Religion . . .” trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 43.
2. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Pierre Prévost, October 15, 1947.
3. Maurice Blanchot in A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 5.
4. Pierre Fedida in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” France-Culture radio show broadcast on September 17, 1994.
5. The theoretical importance Blanchot gave to the distinction between novel and récit is well known: “the récit begins where the novel does not go.” In “Encountering the Imaginary” (July 1954), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 6; see also “Autobiographical Narratives” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 223–229, an article originally published on October 13, 1943, a highly important date in Death Sentence.
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 15.
34. SOMETHING INFLEXIBLE: THE MADNESS OF THE DAY, A NEW STATUS FOR SPEECH (1947–1949)
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 11. All future references in this chapter are to this translated version, unless otherwise indicated.
2. Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 139, 150.
3. “Whoever has seen the madness of the day is unable to tell the tale of having done so, for he will have lost the thread of the story, the ability to set the negative to work, to leave an impression on the ordeals undergone, to lay out any figures,” Emmanuel Tibloux writes in his fine study “Dérives du génitif,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 119–121. The narrator plunges into the madness of the essence of light, which is still brimming with the dawn that contains and fills everything, refusing to be sublated; Hegel named it “the holocaust of being-for-itself.” Having been plunged into mud by the doctors, the narrator rediscovers the fire of the earth and remains insensible to the development of light (which produces light thanks to pacification).
This point of visibility, beyond (or before) Hegel, also breaks with all technological thought, any dialectical interrogation, any “Platonism.” This is what Sarah Kofman implies in stating that the expression that both opens and closes the récit, “I am not learned; I am not ignorant,” describes the Eros of the Banquet. She concludes her book Comment s’en sortir (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) with long citations of The Madness of the Day, the same passages that Tibloux would analyze. How to get out (s’en sortir)? How, without getting out (sans sortir)? Only a few autobiographical notes are added to the “aporia” that closes the book without providing closure. What kind of autobiographical narrative is possible? It is well known that this will also be the question asked by Kofman’s Smothered Words (1987), trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998). What then remains is nothing but to inscribe death (la disparition) in writing, if “the work which is its drifting from the outset gives up on making an work, indicating only the space in which resounds, for all and for each, and thus for nobody, the always-yet-to-come words of worklessness.” Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 46. From this point of view too, The Madness of the Day is indeed the rupture inaugurating Blanchot’s final récits.
4. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 9.
5. The link established between power and the récit, a theme shared by The Most High, will leave its mark on the 1950s generation of readers, among them Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
35. THE TURN OF THE SCREW: THE SECOND VERSION OF THOMAS THE OBSCURE (1947–1948)
1. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (1950 version), trans. Robert Lamberton (1973; Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 1. On the relation between the two versions, Blanchot wrote as follows to Bataille as early as January 1948: “In recent days I have been working on a different version of Thomas the Obscure. It is different insofar as it reduces the first version by two thirds. And yet it is a true book and not just sections of a book; I can even say that this project is not dictated by circumstances or by the vanities of publishing, but that I have often thought of it, having always wanted to see through the thickness of my first books—like the very small and very far-away image of the outside can be seen in opera glasses—the very small and very far-away book which seemed to be their kernel.” See also what Jean Starobinski writes about the imaginary demand of disappearance (la disparition); “Thomas l’obscur, premier chapitre,” Critique 229 (June 1966): 502.
2. This question of the relation of parts to the whole as part of a mobile search for a center would frequently guide Blanchot’s criticism. It is not surprising to find it resurfacing regarding his own fiction given that it had been one of his interests for some time. Examples can be found as early as 1941, at the start of a chapter in Faux pas on Bosco (192); or in “Paradoxes on the novel,” December 30 the same year: “What can best reveal the validity of a novel . . . is thus a particular orientation, a mysterious magnetization, the rotation of all the elements of the work around an invisible and constantly mobile center.” He then lists the questions that must be asked of the most remarkable works: “What did the book want? Did it want it completely? Where is it headed in that secret state of supreme tension that is its true soul and its primary reason for existing?” In Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 135. [Gallimard reissued the first version of Thomas l’obscur in 2005. —Trans.]
3. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988).
4. Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, 83, 76.
5. Ibid., 96, 98, 91, 93.
36. THE AUTHORITY OF FRIENDSHIP: THE COMPLETION OF DEATH SENTENCE (1947–1948)
1. Georges Bataille, fragment of an autobiographical note, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 6:486.
2. Georges Bataille, Foreword (1957) to Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Mathews (New York: Penguin, 2001), 127.
3. Bernard Noël’s intuition concerning the link between the deaths of J. and Laure is therefore not without foundation, despite what he modestly claims. He himself condemns it as a protective “antifiction,” and he does so in the unconscious humility of not claiming to enter into the friendship that is at stake in the case of Bataille. This leaves wide open the possibility of sinking into, or being sunk by, this récit; “D’une main obscure,” in Roger Laporte and Bernard Noël, Deux lectures de Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973), 25. Let us recall that in February 1956 Blanchot would evoke Laure by name in an article on Michel Leiris; “Battle with the Angel” (1956), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 139.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and Literature” (1949) in The Work of Fire, Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 21.
5. Let us remember that in one of Blanchot’s earliest critical texts the expression “death sentence” (l’arrêt de mort) referred to the effacement of the author. It was also the title of a novel by Vicki Baum translated into French in 1933, prefaced by Ramon Fernandez, and announced in large type against a pink background in an advertisement in La Revue du Siècle, in May 1933, an issue containing a contribution by Blanchot. Such are the reasons why Blanchot probably must have known about this title, even though it belonged to an insignificant novel with no other link to his own text. Finally, the expression can be found in the second epistle to the Corinthians: “Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death”: 1 Corinthians 9 (the French version reads “arrêt de mort”). Here it is a form of recognition preceding divine reassurance.
6. Claude Rabant, “Cette mort dure encore . . .” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 25.
7. [Bident’s first two examples are taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Dostoevsky’s Idiot. —Trans.]
8. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 18.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Death Sentence,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 177–178.
37. QUARRELS IN THE LITERARY WORLD: PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION (1948–1949)
1. On the relationship between Gallimard and Minuit, see Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942–1955, le devoir d’insoumission (Paris: IMEC, 1994), esp. 420–422.
2. These assertions were made by Henri Hell at the start of his article “À propos des romans de Maurice Blanchot,” La Table Ronde 12 (December 1948): 2051. Another critic, Gabriel Venaissin, thought Thomas the Obscure too simplistic, with its rhetoric “that anyone can reproduce, once they know the rules of the game” in “Le suicide du roman,” La Vie intellectuelle 44 (April 1951): 152.
3. Blanchot? Nothing more than an “alchemist who will doubtless one day notice that to get water, it is best to turn on the kitchen tap. And that in order to say: “it’s nice weather,” the best way of proceeding is to say: “it’s nice weather”,” J.P.—Jean Paulhac?—reader’s notes on Death Sentence in Cahiers du Monde Nouveau 5 (May 1949): 125. As for the far right, it continued to settle scores with the writer who had betrayed it; see Pierre Boutang, “A propos du Très-Haut de Maurice Blanchot,” Aspects de la France et du Monde 22 (December 9, 1948): 3–4.
4. Luc Decaunes, review of Death Sentence in Cahiers du Sud 291 (second semester 1948): 377–378.
5. Pierre Klossowski, “On Maurice Blanchot,” in Such a Deathly Desire, trans. Russell Ford (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 89 n.
38. INVISIBLE PARTNER: ÈZE, WITHDRAWAL (1949–1957)
1. To this should be added the 1951 publication by Minuit of “The Idyll” and “The Last Word” under the title Le ressassement éternel.
2. In this vein, he wrote to Bataille: “I have been here for about a month, in a fairly hidden spot in the countryside, in a solitary house, and myself alone. Your thought is thus doubly present for me” (no date).
3. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille (June 9, 1958 or 1959), in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 589.
4. René Char, “The Fatal Partner,” in The Word as Archipelago, trans. by Robert Baker (Richmond, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2012), 69. Blanchot was already the author of two articles on Char: one appeared in Critique in October 1946, the other in the NNRF in April 1953. In a letter to Bataille, Char states: “I believe Blanchot to be indispensable to the field in which he works, as you are indispensable to yours. An entire, major region of mankind today depends on you”; letter of December 7, 1946, cited in Bataille, Choix de lettres, 402.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Three Metamorphoses,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), 55.
6. Char, “The Fatal Partner,” 69.
39. THE ESSENTIAL SOLITUDE: WRITING THE RÉCITS (1949–1953)
1. Georges Bataille, “Maurice Blanchot . . . ,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 221. In an article of 1955, Blanchot referred to the way a fictional récit can give a better account than a journal of the author’s most personal experience, and therefore has an autobiographical content; this article referred to Hope, Nausea, and Nadja. “Sur le journal intime,” Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 28 (April 1955): 683–684. He removed the three paragraphs making this claim when he included the article in The Book to Come.
2. Marguerite Duras, Écrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 13. An incidental remark: we know that for several years, before the revolution of 1979, the village of Neauphle was where Ayatollah Khomeini lived. When Blanchot would “invite” his successor to Èze, perhaps some memory of Khomeini’s stay was in his mind.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude” (April 1953) in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 19–34. Citations in the rest of the chapter are taken from this article.
4. “The Essential Solitude” was the first article in which, with an almost prophetic density, the notion of “neuter” appeared. This adjective, however, had not yet been turned into noun form.
5. A similar approach, although more justified this time, would be used in the article on “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” with the abrupt, unexpected appearance of the theme of magic during a reflection on the image (see The Space of Literature, 262); the first version of the text dates from 1951, but this passage comes at the end of the much longer development which only appears in the new, book version). The link between children and the universe of the fantastic and more particularly to magic is a frequent one in Blanchot (it is explicitly addressed by a citation from Kafka in “L’échec de Milena” (November 1954), in De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 162.
6. This expression can also be found in Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985): “[It] touches me with its gaze,” 73.
40. THE RADIANCE OF A BLIND POWER: WHEN THE TIME COMES (1949–1951)
1. Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 57. Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from this text unless otherwise stated.
2. Denise Rollin had several friendships with women; it is difficult to rule out love. For example, she was strongly linked to a singer from Lorraine, Marianne Oswald, to whom the character of Claudia seems to owe a great deal (her singing, her language, but also her temperament). Denise Rollin’s husband, whom she left for Georges Bataille, was named Claude.
3. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 31. See also “The Essential Solitude and Solitude in the World,” in ibid., 253.
4. “Things happened to me, to me and to the story, events that were more and more curtailed (in the sense that, just as I had become no one or almost no one, the traits of my character weakened, the world was readily merging with its limit), but this sort of unraveling of time disclosed above all the exorbitant pressure of ‘Something is happening,’ a possessive immensity that could only curtail or suspend the natural progress of the story” (63–64). We can compare this to “the absence of time” from “The Essential Solitude.”
5. In When the Time Comes there are even some precise references to places and events which allow us to think that the apartment in the récit is in Paris, and more precisely in front of the synagogue on the Rue de la Victoire (no. 44), which suffered an arson attack on the night of October 2–3, 1941. The fire is referred to on several occasions in When the Time Comes, and information on it can be found in Michael R. Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (1973; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). The quarter around the Opera is always the one mentioned in Blanchot’s récits featuring Paris.
6. Dionys Mascolo would say that he was: “incomparably attentive to the smallest things, the least abstract of men” in “Parler de Blanchot” (1981), in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 441.
7. This is a recurrent motif in the reading proposed by Bataille: “no novel describes happiness more,” in “Silence et littérature” (1952), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 12:174. The commentaries on When the Time Comes and The Last Man published by Bataille in Critique in 1952 and 1957 are both intensely visual. Both begin by evoking apparently arbitrary images: a scene from H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man, or photographs published by the journal Life on the origin of the world. Both constantly set aside the normal visibility of these images in order to see in them what Bataille calls “apparent otherness”: something dazzling, invisible, for Bataille “the gaze on (the gaze open to) death” in “Ce monde où nous mourons” (1957), Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 12:460.
8. We also find this in The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me and again in When the Time Comes, 15.
9. “Dance, then, lay in an arc between two deaths,” Doris Humphrey, cited at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Doris-Humphrey (consulted July 8, 2016).
10. “Yet I have met beings who have never said to life, ‘Quiet!’ who have never said to death, ‘Go away!’ Almost always women, beautiful creatures” in The Madness of the Day, 7.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “On Nietzsche’s Side” (1945–1946) in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 298. Blanchot cites this phrase again in The Space of Literature, with the same meaning, but in a different translation: “Die at the given time,” 116.
41. ARE YOU WRITING, ARE YOU WRITING EVEN NOW? THE ONE WHO WAS STANDING APART FROM ME (1951–1953)
1. Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 329. Citations in this chapter are taken from this text unless otherwise stated.
2. Maurice Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 5.
3. “It seemed that only the presence of someone could transform [the silence of the room] into true solitude” (286). Only this could transform it into an “essential solitude.”
4. Just as Death Sentence cites Vicky Baum and a biblical formulation, just as When the Time Comes and The Last Man allude to Nietzsche, the title of this récit is taken from a Rilke passage also cited in The Space of Literature: “O seek to understand that he must disappear! / Even if the anguish of it dismay him. / While his word extends this world, / Already he is beyond, where you may not accompany him . . . / And he obeys by going beyond”; Maurice Blanchot, “Rilke and Death’s Demand” (1953) in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 156. Rilke is announcing Orpheus in this figure, who here becomes the partner of the writer-narrator.
5. “ ‘I have been doing a lot of thinking lately. I have the impression that you used to remain more hidden. You were perhaps something extraordinary, but I lived with the extraordinary without being disturbed by it, without seeing it and without knowing it.’ ‘Do you miss those days?’ ‘No, I do not miss them’ ” (300).
6. “I wish (for example) for a psychoanalyst to whom the disaster would beckon [ferait signe],” Blanchot would write in The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 9. Pierre Fedida underscores this: “Language is the true interlocutor of such speech. Language as it exists in this form of the silent other who is listening. Might language be the reverse-side of speech? . . . It is not certain that psychoanalysts have wholly comprehended what Blanchot has said.” In “Blanchot pose cette question de la mémoire,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 67.
7. Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 71.
8. “I was surprised that I was now very near the windows and yet felt that I was still in the middle of the room” (276).
9. “He turned to the window and, without pausing on me, stared rapidly, with an intense but rapid gaze, at the whole expanse and depth of the room” (275). “The figure was over there, I saw it motionless, it seemed to me that it was almost turned away, and I had the feeling that at the moment my eyes were fixed on it, it was preparing to climb the last steps and disappear. . . . It was nevertheless stopped and suspended under my gaze, as though the fact that my gaze was riveted to it had, in fact, riveted it to that point” (289). The bay window and the staircase are also the sites where specters appear in The Turn of the Screw, a récit that Blanchot discussed in 1954 in an article for the NNRF, in a way strangely resembling the analogy that he himself drew between his critical essays and his récits (and his life): “The ambiguity of the story is explained not just by the abnormal sensitivity of the governess but also because this governess is the narrator. She not only sees ghosts, which perhaps haunt the children, it is she who also talks about them, drawing them into the indistinct space of the narration”; “The Turn of the Screw” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 130. Blanchot adds that the subject of the récit, like that of James’s Notebooks, is indeed the turn of the screw, “the pressure to which he submits the work,” “the pressure of the narration itself.” Ibid., 133.
10. “Someone who has disappeared completely is suddenly there, in front of you, behind a pane of glass, becoming the most powerful figure.” Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 161.
11. “What had been there was frightening [effrayant], was what I could not associate with [frayer] and, in this shift, it seemed to me that I myself could no longer associate with anyone, not even with myself” (294). Etymologically, effrayer comes from the Vulgar Latin exfridare, literally “expel from peace,” and frayer from fricare, “to rub.”
12. It is also found in The Space of Literature, in a form using the informal “you,” as part of an imaginary inner dialogue attributed to Kafka, and to all authors: “Are you writing? Yes? Might you be writing?” in “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” (1952) in The Space of Literature, 57.
42. THE CRITICAL DETOUR: A FEW ARTICLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM (1950–1951)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time” (1950), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 34, 18.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Madness par excellence” (1951), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 113.
3. See Frédéric Badré, Paulhan le juste (Paris: Grasset, 1996), 294.
4. Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time,” 17, 24.
5. Ibid., 32. As if in echo to this, Blanchot would repeat and comment on these passages in “The Two Versions of the Imaginary”: “to resemble himself . . . is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn’t we say: the deceased person resembles who he was when he was alive? ‘Resembles himself ’ is, however, correct. ‘Himself ’ resembles the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone’s, draws toward the day.” In The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 257.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “The Two Versions of the Imaginary” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 258. The interrogative form of the phrase is dropped in the move from article to book.
7. Blanchot, “The Museum, Art and Time,” 39, 40.
8. This emerges from his readings of Hölderlin, Mann, or Lowry, whose novel “is at once marvelously lost and controlled in a sovereign way,” just as its hero is “awfully dominated, although master of himself until the end”; “Au-dessous du volcan” (1950), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 175–177.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Madness par excellence,” in The Blanchot Reader, 125, 125, 119, 115. However, in an article from January 1955, Blanchot would place more emphasis on the theory of a “turning point” in Hölderlin’s poetry (see The Space of Literature, 269–276). Michel Foucault would cast light on the paradoxical break in this discourse: the way that “the absolute of rupture” is found in the “inseparable unity” of madness and writing; “Le ‘non’ du père,” Critique 178 (March 1962), reprinted in Dits et écrits (Gallimard, 1994), 1:199–200. Jacques Derrida would also address it at the beginning of “La parole soufflée” (Winter 1965), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001), 212–245.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “Les justes” (1950), in La condition critique, 180. This might seem rather late for Blanchot’s first mention of the extermination camps. It does not mean that he had not felt a pain that he had preferred to keep secret, or that he was not asking questions that as yet had led nowhere. Bataille was the first to be made aware of this pain and this questioning: in a 1946 letter to Prévost, he cast doubt over whether Rousset’s Univers concentrationnaire could form the object of an article for Critique by Blanchot, “also, it is perhaps at the opposite pole to what Blanchot wishes to discuss” (May 7, 1946). In Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 318.
43. THE AUTHOR IN REVERSE: THE BIRTH OF THE SPACE OF LITERATURE (1951–1953)
1. Only one of the constituent articles appeared in 1951. The first important text was published in March 1952. A fairly regular series of articles followed until June 1953. Two further ones would appear in November and December of that year, and a final one, much later, in January 1955.
2. Was it a sign of his glory? Blanchot’s research caused critics to think conservatively. In 1956, the jury of the Prix de la Critique was unanimous that they should not consider The Space of Literature, owing to their hesitations over whether it belonged to the genre of criticism.
3. “Introduction” to the first issue, signed NRF (January 1, 1953): 2–3.
4. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Roger Caillois, no. 178 (July 12, 1957) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Roger Caillois, 1934–1967 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 232.
5. Remark reported in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 79.
6. If we set aside Bataille’s two articles on the récits and Levinas’s on his critical thought, no major writer or philosopher wrote on Blanchot in the 1950s. Although these texts are no less remarkable for this reason, they were nonetheless written by his two best friends.
7. Kafka cited by Blanchot in “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” (March 1952), in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 64, 61.
8. “This way of reading—this presence to the work as a genesis—worsens, and thus produces the critical reading through which the reader, now the specialist, interrogates the work in order to know how it was made, asks it the secrets and the conditions of its creation, then examines it closely if it responds well to these conditions, etc. The reader, having become the specialist, becomes an author in reverse”; “Communication” (December 1953), in The Space of Literature, 203; this passage was added in the 1955 version.
9. Blanchot, “Kafka and the Work’s Demand,” 58–60.
10. Blanchot here cites Hegel as cited by Bataille (the article was originally published in Critique): life “does not fear surrendering to the devastation of death, but endures death, supports death, and persists in death”; “Death as Possibility” (November 1952) in The Space of Literature, 101.
11. [Le désoeuvrement is an important term in Blanchot’s writing. In normal French it means “idleness” or “unemployment.” But Blanchot uses it in close proximity to his notion of the work, l’oeuvre (itself always impossible and withdrawn), playing on its literal meaning, dés-oeuvrement being an “un-oeuvre-ing” or “un-working.” —Trans.]
12. “The ordeal which always destroys the work in advance and always restores in it the futile overabundance of worklessness”; “Mallarmé’s Experience” (July 1952), in The Space of Literature, 46. The work “is always in excess, it is the superfluous quality of what is always lacking, what we have called: the overabundance of refusal”; “Characteristics of the Work of Art” (1952), in ibid., 221–233, at 228; see also 215.
13. The editors of Les Temps Modernes placed the first installment of the article at the start of the May issue.
14. Maurice Blanchot, “On One Approach to Communism” (December 1953), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 93–96. What was described as only a “strange coincidence” in December 1953 became the “remarkable coincidence” in the version published in 1971.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Original Experience” (May–June 1952), in The Space of Literature, 228. The word “beginning” was underlined in the first version in Les Temps Modernes.
16. Ibid., 215. The words “the gift” were underlined in the first version.
17. Ibid., 246. In the book version, “present and visible” replace a more Bataillean vocabulary (the article used the words “impossible and sovereign”).
18. Ibid., 238.
19. The article from Les Temps Modernes closes with these words: “the poem is solitude’s poverty. This solitude is an understanding of the future, but a powerless understanding: prophetic isolation which, before time, forever announces the beginning” (“Literature and the Original Experience,” 247). A few years later, Blanchot would say strikingly that prophetic speech does not give the future, but takes away the present; The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79.
20. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 30; see also Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, in Foucault—Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 63–64.
21. René Char cited in “Literature and the Original Experience,” 214.
22. Maurice Blanchot, “The Beast of Lascaux,” trans. Leslie Hill, in Oxford Literary Review 22 (2000): 9–18, at 12–13.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, “Le regard du poète,” in Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 22–26. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate this process of reversal, this deconstruction; it begins by recalling the heritage of the 1936 lectures. In Blanchot, he writes, “the accent with which the word Being is offered is Heideggerian” (12).
24. Blanchot would return to this critique of Heideggerian thought as a “philosophy of rootedness” (and as the thought of a “slightly shameful Neuter”) in “L’étrange et l’étranger” (1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 278–288.
25. Emmanuel Levinas, “Le regard du poète,” 24.
26. Maurice Blanchot, “Où va la littérature?” NNRF 8 (August 1953): 303.
27. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 94, 220.
28. “Impatience is the failing of one who wants to escape the absence of time; patience is the ruse that seeks to master this absence of time by making it into a different time, measured otherwise. But true patience does not exclude impatience, it is intimacy with impatience, it is impatience suffered and endlessly endured”; Maurice Blanchot, “Orpheus’s Gaze” (June 1953), in The Space of Literature, 173.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Inspiration, Lack of Inspiration” (March 1953), in The Space of Literature, 187.
44. ALWAYS ALREADY (THE POETIC AND POLITICAL INTERRUPTION OF THOUGHT): TOWARD THE BOOK TO COME (1953–1958)
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Unless indicated otherwise, references in this chapter henceforth refer to this translated work.
2. “How can one speak of oneself?” The question was still a valid one, but it was no longer a major concern. Blanchot returned to this formulation in articles of February 1956 (on Michel Leiris; “Battle with the Angel” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 129) and June 1958 (“Rousseau” in The Book to Come, 45). See also the article on Hesse: “Not all his books are autobiographical, but almost all speak intimately about him”; “H.H.” (May 1956) in The Book to Come, 167; indeed, the elements shared by the Steppenwolf and Blanchot’s personality are not without interest. Last, some purely anecdotal allusions can be found. In the article on Caillois’s and Huizinga’s books on gambling, Blanchot evokes chance in games of luck. The example of roulette given is not accidental: “that 22 should be the number that emerges, I cannot expect this, it is the unexpected,” he writes with secret humor; “L’attrait, l’horreur du jeu” (May 1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 269–278. Choosing his birthday in a nod to chance is itself a game—or a way of believing in magic. It is sometimes said that Blanchot liked gambling (games of chance, casino games; he did live near Monte Carlo for many years). Could this explain the conclusion of the article on Caillois and Huizinga? “We will be better able to understand how gambling can lead to great passions and why the greatest passion is that of games of chance.” Ibid., 278.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Hell: 2” (May 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 181. This sentence, which offers a summary of the critical thought of the 1950s, nonetheless only appeared in 1969.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “The Fall: The Flight” (1956) in Friendship, 205.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Hoax” (1957), trans. Ann Smock, in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 157–166.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and Brod” (1954), in Friendship, 246.
7. The tone has significantly changed since the article from Faux pas, which concluded with the “divinity” of Claudel’s mind (288–295). The phrase cited here appears as such only in 1959, and in a note to the text (the number of the NNRF of 1955 was, it is true, a homage to Claudel).
8. See notably “A toute extrémité” (1955) in The Book to Come, 107–110. [This chapter title is translated as “At Every Extreme,” but might be better rendered “At the Very Last.” —Trans.]
9. Maurice Blanchot, “The Power and the Glory” (1958), in The Book to Come, esp. 245–246.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “L’étrange et l’étranger” (1958), in La condition critique, 279.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Nihilism: 2” (May 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, 177. The expression “movement of detour” was added in the 1969 version.
12. For example, Gaëtan Picon’s accusation that Blanchot was an “ontolo-gist of non-Being” is not far from suggesting as much. Even in recognizing that the experience of literature in his critical oeuvre has “the greatest authority,” Picon denounces its incomplete logic, the lack of a final stage where “negative transcendence” would open onto “living transcendence,” thus freeing art of its subordination to the void of nothingness; see “L’oeuvre critique de Maurice Blanchot II,” Critique 113 (October 1956): 845–854.
13. Maurice Blanchot, “The Terror of Identification” (1958), in Friendship, 216. The final words, on detour, are found in the book version only.
14. “Nihilism has become the commonplace of thought and of literature.” In “Reflections on Nihilism: 1” (August 1958), in The Infinite Conversation, 143.
15. References to Marxism become increasingly common in this period, as do signs of sympathy. For instance, Blanchot even sees the meeting of Breton and Trotsky as “an exalting sign”; “There could be no question of ending well,” in The Book to Come, 29. He translates The Man Without Qualities as “the man without particularities”: “is he not essentially the proletarian, if the proletariat, characterized by not-having, is directed only toward the suppression of any individual mode of being?” He thought it a shame that Musil had avoided this question; “Musil: 2” (March 1958), in The Book to Come, 260 n.
16. Thomas the Obscure (1950 version), trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 14.
17. The expression “always already” appeared in April 1953 in an article (“Rilke and Death’s Demand”) collected in The Space of Literature, 141; it is found four times between 1954 and 1958. It was used widely in the texts of the 1960s. It is well known how much it would influence Derrida’s thinking. On the “violent gap,” see “Man at Point Zero” (April 1956) in Friendship, 82.
18. See “Tragic Thought” (August 1956), in The Infinite Conversation, 96–105.
19. Maurice Blanchot, “The Speech of Analysis” (September 1956), in ibid., 455. Blanchot nonetheless adds that this situation is a fragile one, and always tends to be reappropriated by institutions.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “The Pain of Dialogue” (March 1956), in The Book to Come, 155. Blanchot evokes similar modern modes of interrupted dialogue regarding Malraux, James, Kafka, and Camus.
21. Maurice Blanchot, “The Book to Come: 2” (November 1957), in ibid., 233–244; “The Effect of Strangeness” (February 1957), in The Infinite Conversation, 360–367 (the two contemporary poets are only cited in the 1969 version).
22. Ibid., 363.
23. Maurice Blanchot, “Artaud” (November 1956), in The Book to Come, 34–40. In its review version, the text is preceded by a page that sets out in the form of four fragments the relations between suffering and thought. “Forgotten” in The Book to Come, this page is nonetheless not dissimilar to various passages in The Last Man.
24. Maurice Blanchot, “Museum Sickness” (April 1957), in Friendship, 48. This conception of the power to separate time was shared by Blanchot and Bataille; Sartre judged it to be illusory in “Un nouveau mystique.”
25. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Nihilism” (May 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, 149.
26. Ibid. When he reworked these pages written in summer 1958 for publication in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot set himself in clear opposition to Heidegger (see particularly the end of the footnote on 449–451). Among the Heideggerian strategies he rejected was the undeniable conflation of an implicit discourse (regarding the philosopher’s rejection of Nietzsche) with an explicit one (his commitment, the commitment of his discourse to Nazism).
27. It also came indirectly from Mr. Chouchani, the mad teacher-figure and nomad of thought from whom Levinas learned a lot about Jewish mysticism between 1945 and 1949. Blanchot did not meet him in person, but heard reports through his friend as well as through his brother René and his sister-in-law Anna, who also met Chouchani.
28. Maurice Blanchot, “Affirmation (Desire, Affliction)” (July–August 1957), in The Infinite Conversation, 106–122.
29. Ibid., 116–117.
30. Ibid., 119.
31. Stéphane Mallarmé in Selected Letters, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 77.
32. As early as April 1954, Blanchot develops a reflection on misfortune, with a veiled reference to the camps (“these overwhelming, so vast upheavals produced in our time”; in its original version it read “these overwhelming, so vast upheavals that our times have unveiled”). It would be interesting to compare this reflection with one by Robert Antelme, named “Pauvre-Prolétaire-Déporté” and published without fanfare in a Christian journal in 1948. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Hell: 1” (April 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, 171–176, at 173; Robert Antelme, Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 25–32.
33. Maurice Blanchot in “Affirmation (Desire, Affliction)” (July–August 1957), in The Infinite Conversation, 120.
34. Ibid., 121, 122.
35. Ibid.
36. Maurice Blanchot in “The Great Hoax” (1957), in The Blanchot Reader, 166.
37. [This refers to an episode concerning “the Manifesto of the 121,” a petition against conscription for the Algerian war, which was signed by Sartre. De Gaulle, wary of the implications of arresting this leading writer, declared: “Voltaire must not be thrown in jail.” Of course, Voltaire was thrown in jail. —Trans.]
38. Maurice Blanchot, “Man at Point Zero” (April 1956), in Friendship, 82. In 1956, he had written, “perish in order to begin.”
39. Some of the pearls are as follows: “a fierce determination to perform intellectual gymnastics,” “a sort of swindle” (Claude Ernoult in Les Lettres nouvelles), “a sample of hardline obscurantism” in which he “persists in following his friend Bataille” (Ed Ewbank in La Lanterne). “Paradox can be positive, it spices things up, adds salt to the mixture. But Mr. Blanchot adds salt by the spoonful, by the ladleful, an avalanche of salt” (E.B. in La Libre Belgique). The Space of Literature was said to be “a curious, picturesque text, which could prove interesting to any reader who, wishing to win the Great Prize for Translation, might attempt to turn it into lucid and clear French” (anonymous reviewer in Phare Dimanche). The Last Man “beats all records for hermeticism in the genre of the novel” (Albert Loranquin in Le Bulletin des Lettres).
Fortunately, we find some more fortunate texts by Butor, Carrouges, Dalmas, Dufrenne, Pingaud, Poulet, or Rida, as well as a very good commentary by Jean Pfeiffer, “L’expérience de Maurice Blanchot,” Empédocle 11 (July–August 1950): 55–64.
40. Roger Judrin, review of The Last Man in NNRF 52 (April 1957): 725–726.
45. OF AN AMAZING LIGHTNESS: THE LAST MAN (1953–1957)
1. Printing was completed in January. Four excerpts appeared in Botteghe Oscure, the NNRF, and Monde nouveau between 1955 and January 1957. The “new version” that would appear in 1971, even though it would carry this description only from 1977 onward, seems only to have minor differences.
2. Maurice Blanchot, The Last Man, trans. by Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 18. References in the remainder of this chapter are to this work.
3. See Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 176–179, note. It must also be said that for Blanchot the Nietzschean “last man” is “he who does not want to be the last man”: “the man of the last rank, the man of permanence, of subsistence.” In The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 155.
4. See Franz Kafka, Journal (Paris: Grasset, 1954), 3.
5. “Like a wolf, he said” (3, 19). Let us recall that Blanchot published a double article on Hesse in May and June 1956, when he was likely to have been about to finish his récit.
6. Indeed, Michel Gauthier picked up a large number of similarities between the two fictions. See “La montagne magique” (Fall 1983), 16. We can also think of the links possible between Claudia in When the Time Comes and Clavdia Chauchat in The Magic Mountain.
7. In November 1956, Blanchot published an article on Artaud in the NNRF, which would be collected in The Book to Come—apart from four fragments which, in the third person and without ever naming Artaud, describe the relation he felt to suffering and to thought. Three months before the récit was published, the phrases were strikingly similar. For example: “For him, each thought was the greatest suffering, and not to think, the absence of thought, was the bare presence of suffering. It seems that he wished to encounter a small thought that, in giving some time to pain, would have allowed him to suffer it.” “Artaud,” Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 47 (November 1956): 873. And in The Last Man, the following words are spoken by the woman character: “When he thinks, he suffers, and when he doesn’t think, his suffering is naked. . . . He must be given a little thought that isn’t a thought of pain, a brief moment, I think that would be enough.” The narrator remarks, “So she tried to procure for him that little bit of time—that single moment that might allow him to recover the pain, to suffer it?” (51).
8. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 65–66.
9. “Her body seemed incredibly hard to me, more so than any truly hard thing could be. Scarcely had I even grazed her than she leaped up, crying out indistinct words which surely expressed an excruciating ignorance and rejection. I didn’t have time to study them, I wanted only to grab her again, and in fact, she immediately collapsed into my arms, everything in her that was hard melted, became soft, of a dreamlike fluidity, while she wept and wept” (47). This scene, which recalls J.’s collapse in Death Sentence, mixes together the motifs of jealousy, guilt, and incommunicability. Above all, it marks the absolute, intense, unbearable toughening imposed by entering alone the passive experience of dying.
10. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, première version, 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 191.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “At Every Extreme” (February 1955), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 107. This article, like that of the following month, “Death of the Last Writer” (March 1955) in ibid., responds implicitly to a text by Cioran, “La fin du roman,” published in December 1953 in the NNRF, which only praised Blanchot as a novelist in order to paint him as a nihilist, although this was in fact to be reductive in relation to his thinking, which constantly condemned nihilism.
12. [À toute extremité means “at the last moment” or “at death’s door.” In the pages that follow, Bident plays on this sense of extremity, which, for Blanchot, links the thinking of death to extreme models of writing and thought. —Trans.]
13. Blanchot, “Artaud,” 40. We should also compare the two articles on Simone Weil and the thought of misfortune, of July and August 1957, to passages such as the following: “he had the weakness of an absolutely unfortunate man, and that measureless weakness struggled against the force of that measureless thought, that weakness always seemed to find that great thought insufficient, and it demanded this, that what had been thought in such a strong way should be thought again and re-thought on the level of extreme weakness” (16–17).
14. Georges Bataille, Manet, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 9:157.
15. See Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” in Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 71.
46. GRACE, STRENGTH, GENTLENESS: MEETING ROBERT ANTELME (1958)
1. Blanchot succinctly describes the encounter in For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 137.
2. “Do we know when it begins? There is no friendship at first sight; instead, it develops little by little, in a slow labor of time. We were friends and we did not know it,” Blanchot writes as he begins a text dedicated to Mascolo; ibid., 134. These words also apply to Robert Antelme.
3. Mascolo said that he, Duras, Antelme, and a few others had been “Judaized” by the war.
4. Robert Antelme, “Vengeance?” (November 1945), collected in Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 17–24.
5. Ibid.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 494.
7. Daniel Dobbels in Antelme, Textes inédits, 9.
8. Marguerite Duras in ibid., 252.
9. Michel Surya, “Une absence d’issue,” in ibid., 114–119.
10. Robert Antelme, “broadly” remembered by Dionys Mascolo in interview with Aliette Armel, Le Magazine Littéraire 278 (June 1990): 38.
11. This is what he wrote to his friend Georges Bataille: “That something which can be called misfortune, but which we must also leave nameless, can in a sense be shared; it is a mysterious, perhaps misleading, perhaps unsayably true thing”; letter of August 8, 1961, cited in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 592.
47. IN THE GAZE OF FASCINATION: THE RETURN TO PARIS (1957–1958)
1. Maurice Blanchot, “On Jouhandeau’s Work,” in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 107–110, at 109. Parts of this article were included in “Chaminadour” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 227–233, but not these words on the mother.
2. Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 33.
3. Louis-René des Forêts in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” France-Culture radio show first broadcast on September 17, 1994. Were there no books or many books, then? With Blanchot, who sold many of his (too) numerous books, and who would say more than once that in order to stop writing it was necessary to write (too much), absence and presence always go in hand. [Des Forêts is referring to Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. —Trans.]
48. REFUSAL, II. IN THE NAME OF THE ANONYMOUS: THE 14 JUILLET PROJECT (1958–1959)
1. This manifesto was published as an annex to the complete reedition of the 14 Juillet journal in Lignes, in an unnumbered special edition of 1990.
2. For a more precise history of the Rue Saint-Benoît group, see Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire (Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 1987), and his interview with Aliette Armel in Le Magazine Littéraire 278 (June 1990): 36–40.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Intellectuals under Scrutiny” (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 217. The conditions in which the Republic was trying to save itself recalled the summer of 1940 too closely for Blanchot not to emerge from his withdrawal.
4. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Dionys Mascolo, trans. Michael Holland in ibid., 107.
5. His joy was all the greater given that, the same day or very nearly, Mascolo received a letter from Bataille that was equally unexpected, but for different reasons; see Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 491; see also 481–483.
6. Maurice Blanchot in For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 137.
7. This sense of passage explains, it seems to us, the two moments of For Friendship that are indirectly quite “harsh” toward Mascolo. Having just discussed how their friendship began in 1958, Blanchot adds: “It was doubtless then that I met Robert Antelme,” For Friendship, 137. And concluding the book, which originated as a preface that Mascolo did not dare request from him (leaving Maurice Nadeau to pass on his request), he recognizes Emmanuel Levinas, “the only friend—ah, distant friend—whom I call tu and who calls me tu” (ibid., 143).
8. Maurice Blanchot in “On One Approach to Communism” (December 1953), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 97.
9. Robert Antelme, “Les principes à l’épreuve,” Le 14 Juillet 1:11–12; Dionys Mascolo, “Refus inconditionnel,” ibid., 19; Louis-René des Forêts, “Le droit à la vérité,” ibid., 20.
10. The similarity of the two titles is proof less of borrowing than of recognition. In fact, the word “refusal” belongs to the vocabulary of all Blanchot’s political periods. It came back into force in 1958, having also been used in “The Power and the Glory” (April) in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 249, and in “L’étrange et l’étranger”: “Literature, like thought, is nothing but the experience of itself and for itself: this experience of strangeness nonetheless only grasps or institutes the movement of refusal that tirelessly constitutes it and tirelessly fails to constitute it” in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 288.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Refusal” (October 1958), in Friendship, 112, 297.
12. Ibid., 7.
13. Let us recall the sentence with which Blanchot signed off, in December 1937, from his militancy on the far right: “The true communist dissident is he who leaves communism, not in order to move closer to capitalist beliefs, but in order to define the true conditions of the struggle against capitalism”; Combat 20:155. It defines rather well the situation of this new group of friends.
14. [June 18 was the date of De Gaulle’s famous radio broadcast in 1940. —Trans.]
15. Blanchot, “Refusal,” 10–11.
16. For example this phrase: “[the dictator] is the man of dictare, of imperious repetition, the one who, each time the danger of an unknown language appears, tries to struggle against it with the rigor of a commandment without rejoinder and without content,” in “Death of the Last Writer” (March 1955), in The Book to Come, 220. The phrase was repeated in a letter to Mascolo of November 29, 1958 (which is to say, when the article was being readied for republication in The Book to Come).
17. Maurice Blanchot “The Essential Perversion” (1958), in Political Writings, 10.
18. Ibid., 9.
19. “The prodigious hatred for reflection, the hatred focused on revenge against thought, are revealed in the reactions of the sheep [veaux] . . . those that De Gaulle delicately called sheep”; Francis Marmande, “Par haine de la pensée” (From Hatred for Thought) in the introduction to the republication of Le 14 Juillet 1:10. [De Gaulle’s term was veaux, the sense of which seems best rendered in English by reference to a different animal. —Trans.]
20. Etienne Balibar was the one who formulated or reformulated these principles, in circumstances analogous to those of 1959 or 1960, during the movement of winter 1997 against the Debré law on declaring foreigners’ periods of stay in France. At the height of the Algerian war, at the height of reactionary Gaullism or neo-Gaullism (mimicked by Debré), at the height of power’s arrogance (claiming for itself the right of surveillance, of casting suspicion, of potentially making guilty any citizen acting as host), a community of artists and intellectuals demonstrated its refusal of the law’s ignorance by using principles that are like the “higher laws of humanity”—the very same ones, if we read those listed by Balibar, backed by Robert Antelme; “État d’urgence démocratique,” Le Monde (February 19, 1997), 1, 13.
21. See Blanchot, Friendship, 149; Jean Paulhan, letters 162 and 163 in Choix des lettres, 1946–1968, Le don des langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 3:181–183.
22. René Char, “Note à propos d’une deuxième lecture de ‘La perversion essentielle’ dans “Le 14 Juillet 1959’ ” (1964), in Recherche de la base et du sommet (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 124–125.
49. NOTE THAT I SAY “RIGHT” AND NOT “DUTY”: THE DECLARATION ON THE RIGHT TO INSUBORDINATION IN THE ALGERIAN WAR (1960)
1. This account is based primarily on four sources, the fullest and most reliable. They are: Dionys Mascolo’s personal archives (notably fourteen of the preparatory versions of the final text); “Le droit à l’insoumission: Le dossier des ‘121,’ ” in Cahiers Libres 14 (January 1961), including an interview given by Blanchot to Madeleine Chapsal for L’Express in fall 1960 but censured by the editors at the weekly paper; a section of Anne Cohen-Solal’s Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 694–717; and an MA thesis by Fabien Augier on the manifesto, from University Paris-VII in 1988: “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie.”
2. Maurice Blanchot et al., “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 15–17. In an unpublished text (from Dionys Mascolo’s archives and only referred to, to our knowledge, by Fabien Augier in “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie”), Blanchot qualified the political and military situation of France and Algeria precisely as “of a nihilist character.” This text dates from 1960, probably from the fall.
3. “The undersigned . . . declare:
—We respect the refusal to take arms against the Algerian people, and we judge this to be justified.
—We respect the conduct of the French citizens who consider it their duty to bring help and protection to the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people, and we judge this to be justified.
—The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes to ruining the colonial system in a decisive way, is the cause of all free men.” “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination,” Ibid., 16–17.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “First I would like to say . . . ,” in ibid., 33–34. This interview took place several months before the one between Georges Bataille and the same journalist, in February 1961 in Orléans. It is also significant that it was the only interview Blanchot ever gave, and that it was rejected by the editors of L’Express and not published.
5. Dionys Mascolo, “Aux heures d’un communisme de pensée,” in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 441. See also the interview with Aliette Armel, Le Magazine Littéraire 278 (June 1990): 39. Marguerite Duras, too, would state in 1985: “The Declaration on the right to insubordination did not order men to rebel against the state. It gave no orders. It did not and does not demand that the individual disobey the orders of the state. It teaches him that within him he has, both clearly and intelligibly, all the reasons needed to be insubordinate and also all those needed to not be so. . . . It places the men who are ‘called’ before their essential responsibility: their sovereignty”; she added that this was probably “an absolute text.’ ” In “Écrit pour tous les temps, tous les carêmes,” in Outside (Paris: POL, 1993), 2:79.
6. Claude Roy, Somme toute (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 285; Madeleine Chapsal, L’Express (October 6, 1960).
7. “The approach that led us to say these words together, in response to this question for our consciences, was no different to the approach that leads the solitary writer to speak—to write—on his own account. Or if you will, the thinking man here (by intervening in things) was only following his own thinking.” Mascolo, À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée, 441.
8. Unpublished text of fall 1960 from the archive of Dionys Mascolo; quoted in Augier, “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie.”
9. “Is it necessary to recall that fifteen years after the destruction of Hitler’s order, French militarism as a result of the demands of this war has managed to reinstate torture and to make it like an institution in Europe once again?” “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” 16. Blanchot was the one who came up with the definitive version of this phrase, adding notably the word “like.”
10. Unpublished text of fall 1960 from the archive of Dionys Mascolo; quoted in Augier, “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie.”
11. “Anarchy lies in the fact of letting the army become a political power as well as in the fact that the current regime owes its rise to a military coup d’état that thereby sealed from the beginning the illegality of the imperious order that in its august manner it claims to represent and to impose upon us. Since May 1958 we have been in a situation of anarchy, this is the truth that everyone has vaguely grasped.” The army introduced the trap of dictatorship, which made the people the prisoners of their own children: “because their sons are participating in it—albeit automatically, by the automatism of military service—they can no longer recognize that this war is unjust, and they make themselves its accomplices.” Political Writings, 34, 35.
12. Among the 121 signatories, beyond the “main authors” of the text, were Adamov, Blin, Boulez, Damisch, Dort, Lefebvre, Lévy (Paul), Lindon, Losfeld, Malraux (Florence), Maspero, Masson, Monod (Théodore), Mounin, Pontalis, Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Signoret, Simon, Vercors, and Vernant.
13. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 137.
14. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, July 31, 1960. “If you wish, something will be done, and I shall stand close by you as you may desire, to help you, if I can. Beyond simple respect, of which it is ashamed, this is a type of necessity that can only be imposed through rare individuals such as yourself, I am sure of it.”
15. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo of August 8, 1960.
16. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo of July 22, 1960.
17. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Dupin, July 1960 (between the 23rd and the 26th).
18. Mascolo, À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée, 440; Maurice Blanchot, letter to Christian Limousin, July 28, 1975, trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 17.
19. Three periodicals with small readerships, sometimes quasi-clandestine ones, would publish the Manifesto in full: Témoignages et Documents, which published dossiers on the Algerian war, defined itself as a force of opposition and the site of freedom of expression and was seized on September 20 for having printed the piece; Vérité-Liberté, a review created in May 1960 by opponents of the war in Algeria, coming from Esprit as did Jean-Marie Domenach or from Les Temps Modernes as did Jean Pouillon, and whose editorial committee had roughly as many signatories as nonsignatories; and La Voie Communiste, which was Leninist, anti-Stalinist, and opposed to the Communist Party, placed the manifesto on the front page of its September issue. The September–October issue of Les Temps Modernes would appear with two blank pages and the list of 121 signatories, and it was also seized. The manifesto was reproduced in great numbers abroad (Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Colombia, the United States, and elsewhere).
20. Thierry Maulnier, editorial in Le Figaro (September 30, 1960).
21. Blanchot recounts the scene in For Friendship, 139. He had already alluded to it discreetly in “A Plural Speech” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 81.
22. Among the new signatories were Châtelet, Debord, Danièle Delorme, Bernard Frank, Limbour, Clara Malraux, Olliver, Madeleine Rebérioux, Sagan, Siné, Terzieff, Truffaut, Tzara, Vildrac, and Wahl.
23. The event is briefly described by Maurice Nadeau in Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 71.
24. Mascolo, À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée, 443.
50. INVISIBLE PARTNERS: THE PROJECT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW (1960–1965)
1. Maurice Blanchot, letter of December 2, 1960 to Jean-Paul Sartre in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 37. The richest dossier on the International Review was published in number 11 of the journal Lignes in September 1990. It contains an ensemble of documents written by the editors in 1961 and many letters from between 1960 and 1965, which came from the archives of the Italian publishing house Einaudi (the Gulliver collection) and from those of the cantonal library in Lugano (Vittorini collection). In this issue the letters are arranged in chronological order.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Blanchot’s reservations regarding Sartre are well known. They did not prevent him from truly admiring the “generosity of spirit” that he saw, as it were, incarnated in him (“Sartre’s readiness to make affirmations makes many of his thoughts polemical ones, but it expresses his generosity of spirit, for if he offers up even his most instantaneous affirmations unhesitatingly, as if his whole life had always revolved around them,” he wrote in “L’étrange et l’étranger” (1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 278–288). Blanchot appealed to Sartre in the name of this generosity on the subject of the International Review.
5. Blanchot, Political Writings, 37.
6. Iris Murdoch, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Seaver, Carlos Fuentes, and Ernesto Sabato were the Review’s correspondents, although they (co)responded with varying levels of interest.
7. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, August 7, 1961.
8. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, without date (1960?), cited in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 593–594.
9. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, postscript, August 19, 1961.
10. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, August 8, 1961, cited in Bataille, Choix de lettres, 591–592.
11. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, May 16, 1962.
12. Blanchot, Political Writings, 56. Blanchot used exactly the same terms in a letter to Dionys Mascolo. The commentaries that follow cite the preparatory texts written by Blanchot and published in Political Writings, 56–69.
13. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, June 29, 1961.
14. Blanchot, Political Writings, 57, 59. The International Review would also be different to any other international review, such as Botteghe Oscure, the trilingual (English-French-Italian) review edited by Margeurite de Bassaiano, to which Blanchot, Bataille, and most of all René Char had contributed; these contributions bear witness to their longstanding interest in confronting texts, languages, and modes of knowledge.
15. Blanchot, Political Writings, 59.
16. Ibid., 56–57.
17. Maurice Blanchot, “Reading,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 197.
18. Blanchot, Political Writings, 57.
19. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in ibid., 140.
20. Maurice Nadeau, Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 71 (on the meeting with the publisher, see 460). In a letter of November 1962, a furious Blanchot would speak of Gallimard and its “ways of doing things which would be more suited to a lunatic asylum”; letter to Dionys Mascolo published in Lignes 11 (September 1990): 258. The negotiations bear witness to how publishers failed to understand the International Review, which aimed to end the territorial logic of the world of reviews.
21. Maurice Blanchot attended his funeral in Vézélay. Jacques Pimpaneau does not mention his presence, but Jean Piel confirms that he was there, alongside himself and Michel Leiris; see “Critique, l’histoire souterraine de l’intelligence contemporaine,” Libération (December 13–14, 1980), 20–21. Other, private accounts confirm Piel’s. Blanchot went to Vézélay with his sister-in-law. He took with him a wide wreath of flowers.
22. Letter from Elio Vittorini to Louis-René des Forêts, February 1963, in Lignes 11 (September 1990): 272.
23. Italo Calvino, article in Menabò quoted by Marina Galletti in “Le monstre souterrain,” in Georges Bataille après-tout (Georges Bataille After All), ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Paris: Belin, 1995), 251. Concerning collective and fragmentary writing, Vittorini let it be understood that only a centralized country such as France had the luxury of thinking the interruption of a relation which was not yet established between friends in a country whose geographical separation and linguistic difference (Blanchot himself remarked upon this) made it necessary to “hold the relation” before any other absolute. This was an interesting objection that applied above all to the Germans, now separated by a wall. However, it should have been one more reason to begin and then continue the Review, as it offered precisely something like the siteless site where the absolute could be related to the demand of thinking separation.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Friend,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), 82.
25. Blanchot, Political Writings, 57, 61.
26. “The fragment linked to the mobility of seeking, of the traveling thought that fulfills itself in separate affirmations and demands this separation (Nietzsche)”; “Truth is nomadic,” the project stated, leaning on Nietzsche and Levinas against “Heideggerian paganism, the poetic paganism of rootedness”; Political Writings, 63, 64.
Another remark: This column would have been the best in which to address texts’ translatability. Blanchot had thought about this both explicitly (see “Course of Things” in Political Writings, 62) and in more general terms; “Translating” (September 1960) in Friendship, 57–61; and previously, “Translated from . . .” (July 1946), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 176–190.
27. As early as the end of the 1950s, Blanchot had already suggested to Queneau to ask a foreign critic to write the chapter on French literature in the Pléiade Histoire des littératures.
28. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Dionys Mascolo, in Political Writings, 50.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Berlin” in ibid., 73.
30. Ibid.
31. Missing in French until 1983, Blanchot having lost the original manuscript, The Name Berlin was republished in a bilingual edition by Merve Verlag in Berlin thanks to Hélène Jean and Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposal to “reconstitute a French text from the foreign versions,” with the author agreeing to “sign this text [as] his text” (see the preface by the translator-editors, 4). The first French edition was therefore fulfilled according to the law of the text and the spirit of the review. Once more, the authority of a “Blanchot text” goes beyond any singular attribution and lays claim to a communitarian essence.
32. René Char, “Maurice Blanchot, nous n’eussions aimé répondre . . . ,” in Le nu perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 57; in 1966 this poem opened the issue of Critique in homage to Blanchot.
51. CHARACTERS IN THOUGHT: HOW IS FRIENDSHIP POSSIBLE? (1958–1971)
1. A little less than a year before dying, Georges Bataille wrote the following to Dionys Mascolo: “I have written several times to Maurice Blanchot for whom my friendship counts more and more. His letters have counted a lot for me” (September 5, 1961) in Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 576.
2. Louis-René des Forêts, Poems of Samuel Wood, trans. Anthony Barnett (Lewes: Allardyce, 2011), 9. “An immense, infinite, irremediable catastrophe,” “the abyss, absolute disaster”; Maurice Blanchot, A Voice From Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 11.
3. Georges Bataille, Le coupable, translated as Guilty by Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011).
4. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, December 7, 1969.
5. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, August 8, 1961, cited in Bataille, Choix de lettres, 591–592.
6. We can also read the following, written barely a month after the previous letter cited: “It seems to me that, in these days of distress, therefore ordinary days, something has been given to both of us, to which we also have to respond together, as if we were both tasked, at the limits of our strength, with keeping silent watch over this relation with I know not what, and which is so lowly (perhaps physical, perhaps metaphysical, necessarily both one and the other)”; letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, September 2, 1961.
7. [Numantia was an ancient settlement in what is now Spain, famously besieged by troops of the Roman Empire. —Trans.]
8. He wrote as much to Dionys Mascolo: “Dionys, I would like to tell you that I do not think that friendship is a positive thing, I mean something like a value, but much more than that, something like a state, an identification of death and therefore a way of sharing it, of sharing questions. It is the most miraculously neutral site from which the constant unknown can be seen and felt, the site where what is most acute about difference is fully experienced—as it would be at ‘the end of history’—only in its opposite; the proximity of death”; letter of 1949 or 1950, cited in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Paris: Nadeau, 1987), 23–24.
9. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, March 11, 1981.
10. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, November or December 1969, published in Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 33. Mascolo would speak of “the friendship of No” in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” France-Culture radio show broadcast on September 17, 1994.
11. Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire, 52.
12. Letter from Mascolo to Blanchot, November or December 1969.
13. Perhaps we should see this movement beyond direct address as the meaning of the untranslatable words attributed to Aristotle: “O friends, there is no friend,” discussed by Jacques Derrida in Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997).
14. See Dionys Mascolo’s singular dream where Maurice Blanchot appears as an empty, continuous presence on the other end of the telephone line; in Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 34.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Friendship,” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 291.
52. ACT IN SUCH A WAY THAT I CAN SPEAK TO YOU: AWAITING OBLIVION (1957–1962)
1. At this start, the narrator warns us that this “is not a fiction, although he is unable to utter the word truth in connection with all of that. Something happened to him, and he can neither say that it is true, nor the contrary. Later, he thought that the event consisted in this way of being neither true nor false.” Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 4. In this chapter, references in brackets refer to this translation.
2. [Entretien in French sits somewhere between interview, dialogue, and conversation; I have therefore retained the French term. —Trans.]
3. Emmanuel Levinas in “The Servant and Her Master,” trans. Michael Holland, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 154.
4. The description of the woman entering the man’s room (29) recalls those in Death Sentence. The image of resurrection is evoked as a memory (“if I were to die, you would not fail to call me back to life,” 17). The “Come,” which is already present in The Most High (53, 55, 238) and also in Death Sentence, now punctuates the récit: it is the speech of awaiting and of the quest for oblivion.
5. Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 47.
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Last Man, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 89.
7. There is something of Heraclitus in the aphoristic and paradoxical phrasing of certain fragments; in January 1960, Blanchot published a text on the philosopher in the NRF.
8. “While poetry is dispersion itself which, as such, finds its form, the work of the novel can also claim to be struggling against the spirit of dispersion and to be starting from that spirit”; reprinted in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 301–302.
9. René Char in Word as Archipelago, cited by Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 458.
10. [The French title, L’attente l’oubli, provides a starker juxtaposition (referred to above by Bident) than the English one Awaiting Oblivion, where the first word can be read as a noun, but more naturally functions as a verb. —Trans.]
11. “And he could see how much he had wanted to know” (6). “As if the proper dimension of pain were thought” (10). “Stagnant waiting, waiting that at first took itself as its object, complacent with itself and finally full of hatred for itself. Waiting, the calm anguish of waiting; waiting become the calm expanse where thought is present in waiting” (29).
12. “When I speak to you, it is as if the entire part of me that covers and protects me abandoned me and left me exposed and very vulnerable” (10), the woman tells the narrator.
13. “Lying down and showing herself through a passion to appear that turns her away from everything visible and invisible” (67).
14. “In proximity, touching not presence, but rather difference” (61).
15. See Maurice Blanchot, “Oh All to End” (1990) in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 299. Alongside Bataille, Blanchot had been the first to write on Beckett’s work; alongside Blanzat and Nadeau, he had tried in vain to give him the Prix des Critiques, in 1951. Suzanne Dumesnil states how important this recognition was for her husband: “to have been defended by a man such as Blanchot, that will have been the main thing for Beckett, whatever happens”; letter to Jérôme Lindon, May 25, 1951, archives of the Éditions de Minuit, quoted by Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942–1955 (Paris: IMEC, 1994), 378. Gilles Deleuze, for whom reading Beckett and Blanchot was decisive as early as the 1950s, is one of the few who have compared them, even if he did so fugitively: see notably “The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann in Sub-Stance 24, no. 3/78 (1995): 3–28. The way in which both writers constantly pursue an exhausting of literary speech calls for them to be brought together in greater depth. With infinite attentiveness, there is at work an awaiting ultimately without object except speech itself (a speech lived with or for the other, and beyond this, with the question of the possibility of companionship, of friendship), an interruption of thought, an exhaustion of bodies without cause, a constant dying of these bodies, a repetition carved out until it becomes a murmur, an insomnia, a certain community of thought and of writing.
16. Awaiting Oblivion could be for Blanchot what Phaedra was for Racine, at least according to what he himself had written about that play twenty years earlier: “Phaedra is there to remind us of the meaning of silence and to admit, at the same time as its own ruin, the effacement of the mind that has tried to use this meaning to understand night. Although she expires in an almost peaceful death because she surpasses the torments of ordinary misfortune, it is only natural that she seems to drag down with her the one who has touched the mystery of what cannot be unveiled, and whom henceforth cannot represent in the world anything more than its silent secrecy.” In Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 70.
53. THE THOUGHT OF THE NEUTER: LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM—THE ENTRETIEN AND THE FRAGMENT (1959–1969)
1. The first article where the notion of the Neuter is substantivized is “L’étrange et l’étranger” (October 1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 278–288. [Le neutre can be rendered either as “the neuter” or as “the neutral.” I have usually (but not always) chosen the former, in line with Blanchot’s thinking of a relation of a third gender or kind (genre), and also to avoid the suggestion of neutrality in the sense of indifference. —Trans.]
2. Setting aside those written in 1968 for Committee, between 1959 and 1969 Blanchot wrote nearly seventy articles, the vast majority of them for the NRF; forty-four were collected in The Infinite Conversation and seventeen in Friendship. In both works they were placed alongside other, less numerous texts from the 1950s.
3. There are extremely notable similarities between the récit and two articles in particular: “Speaking Is Not Seeing” (July 1960), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 25–32; and the opening of “Forgetting, Unreason” (October 1961), ibid., 194–201.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “What Is the Purpose of Criticism?” (January–March 1959), in Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5. [This article, entitled in French “Qu’en est-il de la critique?” is better translated as “How Do Things Stand with Criticism?” since “purpose” is foreign to Blanchot’s understanding of criticism. —Trans.]
5. On the Neuter as “partner invisible,” see The Infinite Conversation, 460. The récit that opens the work also features the phrase “the neuter, the neuter, how strangely this sounds to me” (xxi), which is also found later, in an article of 1962, “The Relation of the Third Kind,” 71.
6. The final note of The Infinite Conversation underscores this: these “already posthumous” and “nearly anonymous” texts do not have any authority stemming from a single author; “belonging to everyone, even and always written not by a single person, but by several: all those to whom falls the task of maintaining and prolonging the demand to which I believe these texts, with a stubbornness that today astonishes me, have constantly attempted to respond even unto the absence of book that they designate in vain,” 435.
7. He had already written as much to Bataille, probably at the end of the 1950s: “I am wearied by this work which I find a burden, perhaps because I have not managed to make it essential” (the fact that others did find it essential means that Blanchot’s aim was really to say that he had not managed to make it so for himself). He also wrote as much to Sartre: “knowing the strong aversion that I have . . . to participating in the kind of literary reality that a review is . . . I would feel capable of overcoming this repulsion only if the project were strong enough to maintain and develop all the reasons that made me participate in the Declaration,” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 38. He also wrote to Vittorini, indicating an essential reason which is another proof of the immense renewal he was expecting from the International Review, whose failure confirmed that his judgment was correct: “All the journals are dying, the ‘journal’ genre is dying” (February 8, 1963) in Lignes 11 (September 1990): 277.
8. Maurice Blanchot citing René Char in “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral” (Summer 1963), in The Infinite Conversation, 302. Henceforth and unless otherwise stated, references in brackets refer to this volume.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Le bon usage de la science-fiction” (January 1959), in La condition critique, 289–298. There was another allusion to De Gaulle: “We are still living under a First Consul” (229).
10. Blanchot does not use the term “depoliticization” without precautions; he gives it scare quotes. For in the very use of the word there is a risk of nihilism.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Slow Obsequies” (August 1959), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 84–85. See also his refusal of Jaspers’s liberal anticommunism, “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing” (March 1964), in ibid., 101–108.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “The Indestructible. 1. Being Jewish” (August 1962), in ibid., 123. The citation is an addition of 1969.
13. Ibid., 124.
14. Maurice Blanchot, “Gog and Magog” (June 1959) in Friendship, 229.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” in The Infinite Conversation, 343; “Idle Speech” (1963) in Friendship, 125.
16. Blanchot, Friendship, 125; The Infinite Conversation, 437 n.
17. “In a simplification that is clearly misplaced, the entire history of philosophy can be seen as an effort either to acclimatize and domesticate the neuter by replacing it with the law of the impersonal and the reign of the universal, or to refuse it by affirming the ethical primacy of the Self-subject, the mystical aspiration to the singular Unique.” Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 299.
18. Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Reducers” (April 1965), in Friendship, 68.
19. Denouncing the power of criticism, notably in its journalistic and academic forms, therefore becomes often wisely and rationally, sometimes comically and meanly, vigorous: see, notably, “What Is the Purpose of Criticism?” (1959), in Lautréamont and Sade, 1–6; “Forgetting, Unreason” (October 1961), in The Infinite Conversation, 194–201; “The Great Reducers” (April 1965) in Friendship, 64–65. Let us recall that the climate in the 1960s was particularly lively, setting traditional and new critics against one another. Blanchot would not intervene directly in the debate; what’s more, he had little faith in the new disciplines’ purported scientific status (see his sarcasm over the “already outmoded distinctions” of the signifier and the signified, the only time these notions occur in his work [261]). However at the time he himself was using logical and geometrical models. He would still cite—confirming his positive view of them—Barthes, Damisch, Dort, Doubrovsky, Faye, Poulet, Marthe Robert, and Starobinski, as well as Lacan, of course, and philosophers such as Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault.
20. Blanchot hears this relation with the unknown in all “narrative voice,” just as he does in its backdrop and even in its possibility, the latter reflected by the contemporary récits that he would come to write on in the 1960s, including those by Marguerite Duras, Roger Laporte, and Louis-René des Forêts.
21. In Blanchot’s eyes, “the feeling of a distance never abolished, but on the contrary kept pure and preserved” is what characterizes Hebraic mysticism (Friendship, 231) and, beyond it, the entirety of Jewish experience. Not without the obvious influence of Levinas, the figure of the Jew now begins to give shape to the very existence of the “third relation” in Blanchot’s work: Judaism “exists in order that the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a just movement; it exists, through exile and through this initiative that exodus is, in order that the experience of strangeness may be affirmed near to us in an irreducible relation” (125). The essence of these affirmations could not be reduced to the political question of the Zionist state (Blanchot’s first public stance on this subject dates from this article; see the long note in “Being Jewish” in ibid., 447–448, lines that in 1962 were part of the main text, which they concluded). These affirmations are closer to the poetic demand that Blanchot would see as if embodied in the work of someone such as Jabès, by reflection on this kind of equivalence between condition, speech, and writing; “Traces” (May 1964), in Friendship, 223.
22. See also Maurice Blanchot, “Thought and the Exigency of Discontinuity” (9–10). The section from “but what does this mean?” to the end was added in 1969.
23. We could also say: in the interruption of any fusional link. For in posing the question of community by beginning with the hospitality of lovers (Klossowski), the same formulation, this difference aside, could be used. Roberte was “a great figure who will say nothing, and even when she lets herself be seen in the most provocative manner, will continue to belong to the sovereign invisibility of the sign”; in “The Laughter of the Gods” (July 1965), in Friendship, 174.
Here, in any case, the question of community arises—Blanchot would return to it. What influence can the thought of the Neuter have on that of community? The question is asked for the first time as follows: “if the question ‘who are others [autrui]?’ has no direct meaning, it is because it must be replaced by another: ‘how do things stand with human “community” when it has to respond to the strange relation between man and man that the experience of language allows one to sense: a relation without common measure, an exorbitant relation?’ ” (71).
24. See Maurice Blanchot, “On a Change of Epoch: The Exigency of Return” (April 1960), in ibid., 264–281 (the final part of the text published in 1969 had not appeared previously).
25. In Blanchot there seems to have been something like a wish to overturn the proposed structure that Genette was preparing at the time, according to which “narrative inserted into discourse becomes an element of discourse, while discourse inserted into narrative remains discourse”; “Frontières du récit,” Communications 8 (1966): 161. Here, the narrative voice sheds light on the backdrop against which speech is used; what is actually said remains subject to the law of a time that is other; discourse remains neutral.
26. This would mark a whole generation of writers and philosophers, beginning with the twin, “unrecognizable” authority of Deleuze and Guattari.
27. See notably the end, added in the book version, of the article “On a Change of Epoch,” in ibid., 271–281.
28. See “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral,” 298–306, and “The Fragment Word” (1964), in ibid., 307–313. See also the attention he gave to Heraclitus’s language; “Heraclitus” (January 1960), in ibid., 85–92.
29. Blanchot, “The Fragment Word,” 308, 310.
30. Ibid., 310.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “The Last Word” (May 1968), in Friendship, 266.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude” (January 1953), in The Space of Literature, 33.
33. This weakness grows more extreme, this ability to walk lessens further: “Taking three steps, stopping, falling.” The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 135.
34. Emmanuel Levinas in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), 76.
35. Moreover, the récit contains a fairly long passage describing the situation the author of the book it introduces finds himself it: “he has lost the ability to express himself in a continuous manner. . . . This makes him neither happy nor unhappy” (xxi).
36. [Disparaître has the double meaning of “to disappear” and “to die.” The voice that speaks in this dialogue plays on this double term, as Bident will regularly do in the remainder of the work. I have most often chosen “disappear” as the translation, but its usage in referring to a death, which is relatively common in French, is one to bear in mind. —Trans.]
54. A FIRST HOMAGE: THE SPECIAL ISSUE OF CRITIQUE (1966)
1. Dionys Mascolo, “Hommage à Maurice Blanchot,” La Quinzaine Littéraire 12 (September 15, 1966), collected in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), pp. 205–10.
2. See Roger Laporte, “Un sourire mozartien,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 74.
3. Roger Laporte was born in 1925, Michel Foucault in 1926.
4. Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression” (1963), in Dits et écrits, 1954–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1:240; “Guetter le jour qui vient” (1963), in ibid., 267–268; “La prose d’Actéon” (1964), in ibid., 336. See also the later “De l’archéologie à la dynastique” (1973), in ibid., 2:412.
5. Michel Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’Histoire” (1967), in ibid., 1:593.
6. “If Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Kafka fully exist in the language that we speak, it is precisely thanks to Blanchot. He is therefore the Hegel of literature, but at the same time Hegel’s opposite.” Foucault then develops the opposition between a dialectical conception of the historical existence of works of art (which makes them available to the memory addressing and uniting them), and the free establishment of a relation without relation that exposes works of art to the exteriority that terrifies them and disperses them into the infinite neutrality of oblivion. See “Folie, littérature, société” (1970), in Dits et écrits, 2: 124.
7. We can read what he said about it to Watanabe in “La scène de la philosophie,” in ibid., 3:589. Here Foucault invokes his debt to Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski. But having been taken aback on several occasions by students’ ignorance even of Blanchot’s existence (this did not happen with Bataille or Klossowski), he emphasizes how much work of recognition still needed to be done in terms of the man and his work being known.
8. After Bataille’s death, Foucault had joined the editorial committee of Critique alongside Roland Barthes and Michel Deguy, here too taking up the invitation of Jean Piel, who had taken over the editorship.
9. Twenty years later, Todorov would show much less enthusiasm, accusing Foucault, Levinas, all the authors of the issue, with the exception of Poulet and de Man, of paraphrasing; “Les critiques-écrivains,” in Critique de la critique (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 66–67.
10. Georges Poulet, “Maurice Blanchot, critique et romancier,” Critique 229 (June 1966): 485–497. This text expands an article of fifteen years earlier in Yale French Studies 7 (Fall 1951): 77–81.
11. These are the remarks of Jean Starobinski, “Thomas l’obscur, chapitre premier,” Critique, 229 (June 1966): 506–507, 513.
12. A remark made by Emmanuel Levinas in a note at the beginning of his article, collected in Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 77–78.
13. See the opening of the article by Paul de Man, “La circularité de l’inteprétation dans l’oeuvre critique de Maurice Blanchot,” Critique 229 (June 1966): 547.
14. Michel Foucault, “The Thought from Outside,” trans. Brian Massumi in Foucault—Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 7–58.
15. Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’Histoire,” 593.
16. “With JLG/JLG, I wanted to make a film similar to the books I read as a teenager, those by Blanchot, by Bataille” Jean-Luc Godard in “Il est de règle de vouloir la mort de l’exception,” interview in the journal Théâtre de la Bastille 7 (September 1995): 28. Blanchot’s work always watches over Godard, being his “clandestine companion” (Godard cites the text of that name on Levinas in For Ever Mozart in 1996).
17. Roland Barthes, “On The Fashion System and the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 51. See also “Literature and Signification” (1963) in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 261–264.
18. He wrote hot-tempered outbursts such as the following: “You theoreticians, know that you are mortal, and that theory is already death in you,” in a fragment of The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 43. The accent here recalls Valéry’s famous phrase: “As for us, civilizations, we now know that we are mortal.” In another fragment, Blanchot stated that “theories are necessary (the theories of language, for example): necessary and useless. . . . We must pass by way of this knowledge and forget it”; ibid., 75–76. A little later still, evoking structuralism in Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, Blanchot would reduce the scope of his silence, not without malice: “I realize that until now I have never pronounced, either in approval or disapproval, the name of that ephemeral discipline, despite the friendship I bore certain of its adherents.” Foucault—Blanchot, 70.
19. Beyond the explicit references to Blanchot’s name and to his investigations of the absence of work or the essential solitude, the entire tone is imbued with the pages of The Space of Literature on reading; Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (1966; New York: Continuum, 2004), 38–40.
20. On the relation between Barthes and Tel Quel, see Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel (Paris: Seuil, 1995), notably 195–199.
21. Philippe Sollers, “Le roman et l’expérience des limites” (1965), in Logiques (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 226–249. Like in Criticism and Truth, the last pages of the article take up Blanchot’s theories about reading as developed in The Space of Literature. Furthermore, Philippe Forest shows how Sollers’s new novel Drame of the same year owes much to Blanchot’s conception of literature: see Histoire de Tel Quel, 233. Sollers’s Blanchot is therefore close to Foucault’s: he guarantees the awareness, in language itself, of what is radically external to language.
22. In the first volume of Figures, every sentence following a citation from Blanchot is interspersed with an “indeed” or an “evidently”; Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 1:61–63, 79.
23. A radio show by France-Culture on September 15, 1970, presented him in this way. The same year, Jean Pfeiffer prepared a show dedicated to Blanchot for Belgian Radio.
24. See Tito Perlini, “Maurice Blanchot: L’opera come presenza-assenza,” Nuova Corrente 45 (1968).
25. Michel Foucault, “La scène de la philosophie,” in Dits et écrits, 3.
26. Deleuze only ever cites Blanchot’s critical work, and often the same passages return multiple times. For example he uses Blanchot’s distinction between dying and death in his discussion of Freud’s theory of drives; in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New York: Continuum), 138–139; he returns to the same thinking for his analysis of “the event” in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (1969; New York: Continuum, 2001), 172–174. In the same works, Deleuze also addresses an “eternal scintillation,” in terms of the Blanchotian reading of the image and of “the absence of origin” (respectively 162–163, 318).
27. Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 20.
28. Roger Laporte has underscored this importance of Derrida and his authority on the very manuscript of The Infinite Conversation. Blanchot modified numerous passages of the articles collected in the volume after reading Writing and Difference, Voice and Phenomenon, and Of Grammatology in 1967. See Roger Laporte, À l’extrême pointe (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 40–42; see also Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 127–142. This preoccupation was taken up and—if you will—signed by multiple fragments of The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 10–12, 30–32.
55. BETWEEN TWO FORMS OF THE UNAVOWABLE: THE BEAUFRET AFFAIR (1967–1968)
1. It seems that Laporte did so without imagining what the consequences would be; for him, Beaufret’s comment had not seemed so serious as to prevent him from contributing to the volume.
2. There were also other less serious statements, slippages in the rhetoric of everyday conversation, hot-tempered Freudian slips. While Blanchot and Derrida agreed at the time—not without difficulty—to “attenuate” their seriousness (recognizing only that they could not take such statements as “a declaration of anti-Semitism”), these lapses in language nonetheless did not paint a favorable picture of a philosopher whose attitude, during the whole affair, remained unchanged. Although Beaufret agreed to explain himself regarding these remarks, whose context could attenuate their scope and their offhand nature, he never accepted that he had made the statements aimed at Emmanuel Levinas. We must also recall that following Beaufret’s death it was revealed that he had supported the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson.
3. The text was already almost written when Fédier had approached Derrida, because he was working on Heidegger at the time. It would be collected in Margins of Philosophy (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
4. They would not see each other again thereafter, but they would often write to and telephone each other.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “The Fragment Word” (1964) in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 307–313.
6. “For Emmanuel Levinas / with whom, for forty years, / I have been bound by a friendship / which is closer to me than myself: / in a relation of invisibility with Judaism.”
7. “At no moment did we cease to have full confidence in Roger Laporte, never having doubted either his good faith or his sense of truth.”
8. Maurice Blanchot had attended the defense and went to see Levinas three days later.
56. THE FAR SIDE OF FEAR: POLITICAL DISILLUSIONMENT (MAY 1968)
1. From the Nile, close to Aswan, he wrote to Mascolo: “Everything is different, but does one ever forget? Yes, for a few moments, only for harsh memories to then return” (postcard from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, January 4, 1965).
2. This is what Blanchot wrote in the text that he proposed for a call for a boycott of the ORTF; noting that all forms of artistic and intellectual expression, even the most critical, were immediately recuperated by power (by De Gaulle) as “proof of ‘national’ prestige,” he called on “all men of thought, writers, scholars, journalists to refuse to work together with the services, organizations, institutions, or mouthpieces controlled by the government, and without any true autonomy, such as the ORTF” (unpublished text).
3. Maurice Blanchot et al., “The Solidarity That We Assert Here,” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 79.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “On the Movement” (1968), ibid., 109.
5. Leiris did write a laconic note (September 12, 1968) on “the ridiculous aspect of Mascolo, Blanchot, Schuster, etc.” Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 628. But he had taken part in several demonstrations (see For Friendship [1993], in Political Writings, 141), and the following year would express his deep admiration for Schuster when he appeared before a correctional tribunal after having reproduced in Coupure an issue of La cause du peuple, which had once again been banned by the ministry of the Interior; see Jean Schuster, Magazine littéraire (February 1992): 51–52.
6. [The Confédération Générale du Travail is one of France’s largest confederations of labor unions. —Trans.]
7. “I addressed a few words to him, he himself unaware of who was speaking to him,” in Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, in Foucault—Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 63. Foucault would say that he never met or recognized Blanchot. And in any case that spring and early summer the philosopher was most often in Tunisia. There were several possible dates when they could have met, however: on May 27, for example, Foucault was at Charléty, and at the end of June he was indeed at the demonstrations and assemblies at the Sorbonne.
8. Dionys Mascolo, cited in Marianne Alphant, “Une présence secrete,” Libération (January 28–29, 1984), 23.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Intellectuals under Scrutiny” (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 224.
10. Mascolo recounts how one of the most famous slogans of May, “Be realistic / Demand the impossible,” originated in a discussion at the Renault factory in Billancourt. A trade unionist said to two members of the Committee, “We must be realistic, we must not demand the impossible.” Mascolo stated that that afternoon, at Censier, “We had some paper, and a print worker available to us, and we were searching for themes. It was spontaneous, I can only present it as a collective intuition.” The trade unionist’s statement was inverted. Naming the possible, responding to the impossible: we also know that for several years this had been the major formulation in Blanchot’s thinking of both the necessity of dialectics and the demand of the wholly other.
11. Blanchot retained the greatest respect for Derrida’s reservations over the “fusional spontaneity” of May ’68, reservations which in his eyes only confirmed the necessity of retaining a distance in all friendships within thought. This paradoxical essence of friendship meant that 1968 was both the year when they were continuously present for one another, and that when they did not converge politically (in this sense, there is a symbolism in the fact that they took part separately in the march of May 13: Blanchot with Antelme, Mascolo, Nadeau; Derrida with Goux, Sollers, Baudry).
12. Maurice Blanchot in “The Most Profound Question” (February 1961), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 22 (“this being-other that it is,” read the first version). See the lines written by Blanchot in 1961 on revolutionary speech, something that would be embodied in the movement of May (ibid., 22–23); as well as, six months before the événements, the final pages of “Atheism and Writing. Humanism and the Cry” (November 1967), ibid., 246–263, quoted by Levinas in an explicit reference to May ’68 in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 74. Last, one should cite the entire preface to Sade: “Insurrection, the Madness of Writing” (1965), in The Infinite Conversation, 217–229.
13. “What founds it is rather an insurrection of thought,” Blanchot would say of Contre-Attaque, which retrospectively he saw as “prefiguration of what happened in May ’68”; The Unavowable Community, 13. Robert Antelme would recall that “in that month of May . . . history, as has been said, was thought”; “Sur L’écriture du désastre de Maurice Blanchot,” Textes inédits (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 68. On this point, the two thinkers express one of the essential truths about the May movement.
14. Maurice Blanchot, “The Most Profound Question” (1960), in The Infinite Conversation, 23.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Insurrection, the Madness of Writing” (1965), ibid., 222, 226.
16. Such was the famous saying by Sade, cited by Blanchot at the end of his preface, just before the main text: “HOWEVER MUCH IT MAY MAKE MANKIND TREMBLE, PHILOSOPHY MUST SAY EVERYTHING,” in “Insurrection, the Madness of Writing” (1965), in The Infinite Conversation, 229. “Say everything,” Blanchot remarked, “one must say everything, freedom is the freedom to say everything” (this was the very truth of the May movement), “this limitless movement that is the temptation of reason, its secret vow, its madness.”
17. “We have crossed over to the far side of fear”: according to Blanchot, this was one of the statements made by the erection of the barricades. “Exemplary Acts” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 99.
18. Blanchot, Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, 63.
19. Ibid., 63–64. See also The Unavowable Community, 29–33, and For Friendship, 141–142.
20. “Communism: what excludes (and is excluded from) any already constituted community,” writes Blanchot in 1968; as well as this, which will also return later: “Communism cannot be an heir. We must be convinced of this: it is not the heir of itself. . . . Between the liberal-capitalist world, our world, and the present of the communist demand (present without presence), there is only the hyphen of a disaster, of a change of star”; “Communism without Heirs” (October 1968), Political Writings, 93.
21. Maurice Blanchot, “Atheism and Writing: Humanism and the Cry” (1967), in The Infinite Conversation, 262.
22. Ibid., 30.
23. Whence such phrases as: “Everything was accepted. The impossibility of recognizing an enemy, of taking into account a particular form of adversity, all that was vivifying while hastening the resolution, though there was nothing to be resolved, given that the event had taken place.” The Unavowable Community, 31. This is why in the bulletin of the Committee there is almost no discussion of the actual content of the students’ and workers’ demands. Nothing concerning the specificities of the possible is essential without the movement of the impossible.
24. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Derrida, May 19, 1968. In parallel with this, Blanchot developed several of the terms in this line of thought in “Exemplary Acts.”
25. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 31.
26. Maurice Blanchot, “Tracts, Posters, Bulletins” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 95.
27. Ibid.
28. Maurice Blanchot, “The Possible Characteristics” (1968), in Political Writings, 85–86.
29. Those cited were: Guevara, Trotsky, Orwell, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rosa Luxembourg, and Hölderlin, and (twice each) Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
30. Eighteen texts are by Blanchot, seven by Mascolo (but they were longer, and the number of pages provided by each figure is almost equal, with roughly a dozen pages each), four by Bellefroid, one by Schuster, and one by Rochefort.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “Political Death” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 89–90. These violent attacks on General De Gaulle have much to do with the contemporary one by Sartre: “The old man saw red, and said to his supporters: “ENOUGH MESSING AROUND, NOW YOU CAN HIT THEM”” in Le Nouvel Observateur (June 19, 1968), 27. Such attacks were not new for Blanchot, nor were they foreign to the caustic humor he always used against De Gaulle. For instance, once when seeing him on television putting on a nuclear protection suit before inspecting a submarine: “no doubt about it, he always finds ways to surprise us,” he said to Louis-René des Forêts, with whom he was watching the program.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “For a Long Time, Brutality” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 94.
33. Maurice Blanchot, “Clandestine Resistance out in the Open” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 103.
34. Maurice Blanchot, “For Comrade Castro” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 100. Whence the following peroration or call to reengagement, to vigor: “Comrade Castro, do not dig your own grave, and if you are so tempted, let yourself slip into it from the natural exhaustion of power. Let us write on the walls of Havana, as was magnificently written on the walls of Prague: LENIN WAKE UP!” Ibid., 102.
35. Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,” 99.
36. See the letter on this topic from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, dating from late 1968 and published first anonymously in an issue of Les Lettres Nouvelles (June–July 1969): 184–185, then attributed to Blanchot in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 359–360; also collected in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 315–317.
37. The gap between the positions of Christiane Rochefort and Jean Schuster on Castro’s condemnation of the Prague movement, which is clear in the issue of Committee, bears witness both to what remained of a relation of nonrelation and to the fact that it probably no longer existed for the other participants.
38. However, in the same period (October–November 1968), against a backdrop of an unquenchable demand, Blanchot was still taking part in some discussions with students about the creation of the “experimental university” of Vincennes.
39. In April 1969, the adolescent nephew of Dionys Mascolo died.
40. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Derrida, May 13, 1969.
57. LIFE OUTSIDE: THE STEP NOT BEYOND, A JOURNAL WRITTEN IN THE NEUTER (1969–1973)
1. [In French, pas can indicate negation, but it can also be a noun referring to a step or pace (or steps or paces). The English title given to Blanchot’s work deals with this ambiguity by translating the term twice: The Step Not Beyond could equally (though less polysemically) have been called The Step Beyond or The Not Beyond. The book itself also contains further play involving passion, passivity, patience, and so on. —Trans.]
2. Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book” (1969), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 435.
3. Ibid., 426, 431. “The Absence of the Book” was the text that he gave to Louis-René des Forêts for L’Ephémère in spring 1969, which was included at the last moment in The Infinite Conversation. The book appeared in fall 1969.
4. Ibid., 464, 435.
5. Two in 1969, two in 1970, three in 1971, two in 1972, one in 1973. In 1970 he also published a letter to Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier, in which he apologizes for providing only a few thoughts, instead of a true article, for the special issue that Topique was dedicating to Charles Fourier. In doing so he lays down the model for a long series of letters that would bear witness to his weariness with critical writing, to the fact that he would protect his health, to his attempts to sidestep the pressing demands coming at him from all sides, and ultimately to his attentiveness not to let down those demands that seemed to him to have some interest and to which, previously, he would have responded fully.
6. Let us recall the following words from the last lines of the first version of Death Sentence: “These pages can end here, and nothing that follows what I have just written will make me add anything to it or take anything away from it. This remains, this will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and he would be my victim. In the darkness, he would see me: my word would be his silence, and he would think he was holding sway over the world, but that sovereignty would still be mine, his nothingness mine, and he too would know that there is no end for a man who wants to end alone.” In The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 187. On the removal of the two final paragraphs of Death Sentence, and the shock that it produced, see the book by Pierre Madaule, Une tâche sérieuse? (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
7. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 18. We should also note the reprinting of Le ressassement éternel as Vicious Circles in 1970 by Gordon & Breach.
8. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 33. References in this chapter are henceforth to this translated work, unless stated otherwise.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “The Ease of Dying” (May 1969), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 149–168.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “A Note on Transgression,” in ibid., 187.
11. Blanchot had already given expression to this demand for discontinuity in the second part of an essay of 1960, not included in any book, “Reprises”; in it, the aphorism is distinguished from the maxim in the same way that here, the fragment is distinguished from both these forms; in NRF 93 (September 1960): 479–483.
12. Blanchot saw a similar questioning of the “masterful language” of the philosopher, preferring to it the withdrawal of a “pure-impure speech,” which he saw in the “philosophical discourse” (the scare quotes are Blanchot’s) of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; “Le discours philosophique” (1971), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 332–337.
13. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 7.
14. “If, coming here, you were to find this little room—which was perhaps not so little, due to the three steps that made it possible to go down toward the part where he waited for him, murmuring in the corner” (18); “He lived there, the house was being reconstructed around him, I saw him behind the window, waiting without hearing me, exhausting the overfullness of our words by waiting” (72); “he must have noticed the room that was suddenly immense, surrounded by books, as if to accentuate the emptiness of the space” (79).
15. [While often the French banlieue is a deprived area not translatable by “suburbs,” in this case the area Blanchot lived in is in fact suburban in the American sense. —Trans.]
16. In November 1973, on reading The Step Not Beyond, Georges Perros wrote coldly to Michel Butor: “Stuck my nose into the latest Blanchot. Death is at hand. It would appear that Gallimard is slipping him a few banknotes so that he can survive”; Michel Butor and Georges Perros, Correspondance, 1955–1978 (Nantes: Joseph K., 1996), 709.
17. “I am on the side of weakness” (Bram Van Velde, cited by Daniel Dobbels, “Du côté de la faiblesse,” text relating to the exhibition “L’oeuvre—le sacré” at Villa du Parc, Annemasse, Atelier Cantoisel, Joigny, 1991.
18. This was also one of the effects of fragmentary writing: “As if the invisible were secretly distributed, without the distribution of points of visibility taking any part, therefore not in the intimacy of a design, but too much outside, in a place beyond Being of which Being bore no trace” (94).
19. The journal of dying is capable of everything, except its initial penchant for self-portraiture (in the reflection in the mirror, dying condemns one to “the shimmering of an absence of face,” 94). For the return of any interest in oneself would only be bearable in the weakening of attentiveness and the powerlessness of speech to which death’s imminence condemns one (at such times, it is the most common interest). But such an interest also condemns all words to be erased, and its calmness can cause pain to one’s friends (137).
20. This inability of speech was echoed in an article of 1971: “(these dead who are there, and who in their own way speak, speaking, in all of our vain words, against us),” in “Une nouvelle raison?” (1971), in La condition critique, 325–332.
21. This response dating from between 1969 and 1971 was not first published in French, but is collected in Friendship under the title “War and Literature,” 109–110. It contains the first mention of the “holocaust of the Jews” as “an absolute.” It also evokes the “dark radiance” of the books on the camps, and in closing it mentions the one book among them that was said to be “the simplest, the purest, and the closest to this absolute that it makes us remember: Robert Antelme’s Human Race.”
22. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Emmanuel Levinas (1969), published by the latter in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (1977; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 115–116. The citations in the remainder of this paragraph are taken from this letter; some translations have been modified. Blanchot would express himself in exactly the same terms in 1986, in a text given to Maurice Nadeau; “Do Not Forget!” (1986), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 34–37. See also Levinas’s interviews in La Vie Protestante of May 10, 1974, “L’autre est d’abord un visage” (7) and in the Journal des Communautés in May 1980: “Quand Sartre découvre l’histoire sainte,” collected in Les imprévus de l’histoire (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 158.
23. Roger Laporte indicates the etymological sense in which Blanchot used the word “absolute”: “The Latin absolvere means to detach, untie, disengage. An absolute event is one where the chain is broken,” in “Tout doit s’effacer. Tout s’effacera,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 20; also collected in Études (Paris: POL, 1990), 53–62.
24. “A line has been drawn”: this was the expression used by Blanchot in a letter of February or March 1969 to Dionys Mascolo.
25. This irritation is clear in his correspondence, but also through many public allusions to it: see the beginning of the article dedicated to Brice Parain, “Une nouvelle raison?” (325), or the end of the homage to Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “this posthumous use of a thinking that is no longer defended, that on the contrary is delivered unto others, to their quarrelling, to the intrigues of the comedy of intellectuals, of vanity, prestige or influence,” in “Le discours philosophique” (1971), in ibid. (337). This criticism is repeated in similar terms in The Step Not Beyond: “as if the anonymous, a shadow whose light would be unaware that it shines only in order to project precisely this shadow, arranged the whole comedy of glories, powers, and sanctities in order to move closer to us, signaling to us across signification, and precisely where all signs would be lacking” (37).
26. On this point see The Step Not Beyond, 115–116.
27. In the conclusion of the homage to Merleau-Ponty, he put it as follows: “At least when a philosopher or a writer falls silent, we learn from his silence not to appropriate for ourselves what he was in order to serve our own ends, but to disappropriate ourselves from ourselves and to share with him inhuman muteness.” La condition critique, 337. Mascolo’s declaration, “Contre l’exploitation dont sont l’objet les noms d’Antonin Artaud, de Georges Bataille et d’André Breton,” was published in La Quinzaine Littéraire in March 1971. It was also signed by Robert Antelme and by Michel Leiris.
28. It was a question of taking commentary beyond the illumination of meaning, even polysemic meaning: Blanchot returns to this in The Step Not Beyond (50–51). But he had been calling for the “ruination of commentaries, from the coarsest to the subtlest (commentaries that are in fact necessary in order to be refuted)” since Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 111.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “The Last to Speak” (1972), in A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 57.
30. The editorial committee for L’Ephémère also included Yves Bonnefoy, Paul Celan, André du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin, and Michel Leiris (Gaëton Picon had been a founding member, but left after May ’68). The writers (or poets) that it brought together did not include any not dear to Blanchot. He regretted the closure of this journal, which allowed him to contribute freely with a few texts, now that he was no longer writing regularly for the NRF. Over the coming years, Le Nouveau Commerce would sometimes occupy this role.
31. The article on Klossowski was published in 1970, and beyond the book that he had just published (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 1969), a more general homage to Nietzsche was the subject of the first extract of The Step Not Beyond to be published. As for Henri Michaux, beyond the great admiration that Blanchot had for him, he had been particularly receptive to the poet’s text published following Celan’s death; “Sur le chemin de la vie, Paul Celan . . .” (1970), L’Ephémère 17 (Spring–Summer 1971): 116–117. It could be said that this dedication remained secret for a long time: it only appeared on the text’s second publication, in 1984, following Michaux’s death.
58. FRIENDSHIP IN DISASTER: DISTANCE, DISAPPEARANCE (1974–1978)
1. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Derrida, January 7, 1975.
2. Letter from Denise Rollin to Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, not dated, 1975 or 1976. This letter belongs to a series that bears witness to significant tension between the two correspondents. Fardoulis-Lagrange had asked Denise Rollin to pass to Blanchot his latest manuscript, L’observance du même, but he allowed his reader no more than a week before demanding that it be returned (he was in a hurry to find a publisher). Denise Rollin took issue with this wrongheaded haste, which lacked sensitivity and respect. When Fardoulis declared his astonishment that Blanchot had found some passages fascinating, she responded that “if MB writes ‘fascinating pages,’ it is true, profound, and just, he never says words that do not count, unlike all of those chatterboxes who trade in power.” Blanchot had been able to read only part of the manuscript, which he thought very uneven.
3. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, October 22, 1974, published in Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 34.
4. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 46. He also writes: “Death suddenly powerless, if friendship is the response that one can hear and make heard only by dying ceaselessly,” 29.
59. THE LAST BOOK: THE WRITING OF THE DISASTER (1974–1980)
1. See The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 20. Unless otherwise stated, references in this chapter are to this translated work.
2. On this presumption Blanchot wrote that it is not only the Cartesian “I think therefore I am,” but also the affirmations by Nietzsche and Foucault—“God is dead,” “mankind is dead”—that resonate. He adds that they were perhaps “only the symptom of a language still too powerful, too sovereign as it were, which thus gives up speaking poorly, in vain and forgetfully, gives up failure, indigence, the extinction of the breath. And these are the sole marks of poetry” (92). These words were first published in “La poésie, Mesdames, Messieurs,” Givre 2–3 (1977): 177.
3. Blanchot selects the word disaster for all of these reasons concerning language. The disaster allows the “discourse on patience” to come to it: this was the title of the first ensemble of fragments published, in Le Nouveau Commerce in 1975, and which would be collected in the first fifty pages of the book. Mascolo underscores that the word “disaster” had appeared for the first time in Committee; see À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 408. Indeed, in that context the disaster as a “change of star [astre]” underlines what Blanchot had named the departure “from historical space” (The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 269) and the demand made by a communism that he was soon to declare unavowable. We should also recall the “After the Disaster” column that was probably begun by Blanchot at the Journal des Débats in July 1940, and that for him had the same sense of a historical rupture. After the war, poetry too would be charged with this sense: “Poetry . . . is the realm of disaster,” he wrote in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 263. We can also pick up another occur-rence, concerning A Throw of the Dice, which speaks to a failure of ontology, the strength for rupture of “the general rule which gives chance the status of law” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 232. And while in The Step Not Beyond the “immobile disaster that lets everything remain” (trans. Lycette Nelson [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], 120) takes on a more overtly personal turn (it designates the implacable return and something like the law of anguish), we know how much with Blanchot this personal discourse is linked to history.
4. “To write is perhaps to bring to the surface something like absent meaning, to welcome the passive pressure which is not yet what we call thought, for it is already the disastrous ruin of thought. Thought’s patience. Between the disaster and the other there would be the contact, the disjunction of absent meaning—friendship” (41).
5. It is not that the disaster is the absolute: rather, it faces it: “Unless it be the case that knowledge—because it is not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously—carries us, carries us off, deports us (whom it smites and nonetheless leaves untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly” (3).
6. This was the case from the outset, when the book itself had perhaps not yet been formally conceived. The first fragments to appear accompany or extend reflections on other works: the first, in Change, fitted into a homage to Jabès; those of “Discours sur la patience” (Discourse on Patience) had the subtitle “(in the margins of the books of Emmanuel Levinas)”; “A Child Is Being Killed” overtly reiterates the title of Serge Leclaire’s work On tue un enfant, which Blanchot saluted even as he kept his distance from it: “using (perhaps falsifying),” he warned, “the impressive remarks of Serge Leclaire” (67).
7. Mascolo would speak of the Blanchot of The Writing of the Disaster in terms of a “revolt against concepts, a struggle with them, which must at all costs be stripped of their unbearable power to exclude” in “Parler de Blanchot” (1981), in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 409.
8. Something that Robert Antelme would be the first to recognize: “The most withdrawn life, the thinking the closest to that of others, the least turned toward itself, the self always as the self plus the other,” or: “The movement of recognizing the other, the infinite other, the nature of this thought is—its servitude: never abandoning the human race. This thinking is a thinking accompanied, it bears the shadow of the other, it would be the silence, the ‘mute speech’ of the reader” in “Sur L’écriture du désastre de Maurice Blanchot,” in Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 67–68.
9. “Since the gift is not the power of any freedom, or the sublime act of a free subject, there would be no gift at all if not the gift of what one does not have, under duress and beyond duress, in answer to the entreaty which strips and flays me and destroys my ability to answer, outside the world, where there is nothing save the attraction and the pressure of the other: the gift of the disaster” (49).
10. [Leclaire’s work is named On tue un enfant: Un essai sur le narcissisme primaire et la pulsion de mort, and its English translation is A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive, trans. Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). —Trans.]
11. Regarding “A Child Is Being Killed,” see The Writing of the Disaster, 65–72. The first version of the text reads as follows: “companion, but of no one, whom we seek to particularize [by incarnating it] as an absence.” The words in square brackets disappear in the book version: they tend toward not making lack into a fictitious body; the few other modifications also create a similar effect, making the reflections more intensely impersonal, in such a way as to discourage any possibility of the subsequent “scene” being interpreted biographically: an interpretation that Blanchot dismisses as “relatively undemanding,” and according to which “a disappointed subject, or one uncertain of his identity, [would] be affirmed in being annulled” (125). See in parallel the rereading of the myth of Narcissus proposed by Blanchot (125–128, 134–135).
12. An echo of this is also present in a citation of Schelling taken from Heidegger: “Only he who one day has abandoned everything and has been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has capsized and who sees himself alone with the infinite, has come to the very bottom of himself and recognized all the profundity of life. This is a great step which Plato compared to death” (99).
13. Here, too, there was an event experienced through the other and kept discreet. In 1997 Jean Rollin would reveal the following episode, which deeply marked his mother after she experienced it as a child: “when she was very small in the countryside, the playmate that she adored had choked to death”; “the atrocious death, the swollen tongue protruding from her friend’s mouth, traumatized Denise for ever.” In Dialogues sans fin (Trellières: Miran-dole, 1998), 30. Blanchot who shared this anguish once wrote to Denise Rollin: “I am thinking about the little girl who was your companion, in life and in death. Each of us lives with a dead infant who is perhaps silence within us. Let me accompany you silently in this silence” (31).
14. Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion” (1980), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 152.
15. In 1972, Robert Paxton published Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York: Knopf), which was a precursor to further-reaching debates over French anti-Semitism during the Second World War.
16. “Why can we not bear, we do we not desire that which is without end?” Blanchot asks of Christianity, of Hegelianism, of all knowledge, of “political reason” (143).
17. “The unexpected quality of the resurrection of Israel, this promise suddenly extended beyond the realm of the possible, marks how strange the contemporary world is, and how overwhelming it is that we [on] have not been able to welcome it as we would welcome a peerless event whose sole witnesses (near or far) we were. What’s more, it has troubled our consciousness as temporal men, revealing to us that there is something about life to which we do not match up, which we cannot master, and which delivers us to an infinitely responsible relation which makes demands upon us all the more, given that we are unable to respond to it”; Maurice Blanchot, letter of February 11, 1980, to the editors of Exercices de la patience, collected in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 367–368. “Come what may, I am with Israel. I am with Israel when Israel is suffering. I am with Israel when Israel suffers for causing suffering,” Blanchot would even write in a short text printed and widely distributed by a monthly magazine on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the Israeli state; “What is closest to me . . .” (1988), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 39. Salomon Malka published these lines, stating erroneously that this was “the first time that Blanchot has made a public statement about Israel.” But the laconic and brutal nature of the statement in its publication context could lead to misunderstandings. By “Israel,” Blanchot of course means an element within the people (the element that was, he wrote, “on the side of Peres,” the leader of the Labor Party), or even the element that was its conscience, which is to say Israel strictly speaking or the name Israel.
60. FORMING THE MYTH: READINGS AND NONREADINGS (1969–1979)
1. Maurice Nadeau, “A l’écoute de Maurice Blanchot,” La Quinzaine Littéraire 173 (October 16, 1973): 3.
2. Apart from special issues of Gramma in France and of Sub-stance in the United States, over the whole decade only one article in Les Cahiers du Chemin, one in Poétique, and two in Littérature appeared.
3. Jeffrey Mehlman, “Orphée scripteur,” Poétique, 20 (November 1974): 458. The passage is not included in Mehlman’s own translation “Orpheus Writing: Blanchot, Rilke, Derrida,” Structuralist Review 1 (Spring 1978): 42–75. Michel Pierssens, “Cris et chuchotements,” Critique 367 (December 1977): 1,146.
4. Jean Frémon, “Lire Maurice Blanchot,” La Quinzaine Littéraire 166 (June 16, 1973): 3.
5. Jude Stéfan in Dialogue des figures (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1988), 73.
6. Roger Laporte, “Une passion (nouvelle version),” in A l’extrême pointe (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 34.
7. Maurice Blanchot did not wish to see the film. He asked his brother René, Monique and Robert Antelme, and Louis-René des Forêts to attend the first private projection (spring 1971), which they did. Their judgments were harsh; they made no secret of this to Benoît Jacquot. The film was discreetly shown on television and overall was badly received.
8. Edmond Jabès, “The Unconditional (Maurice Blanchot).” In a later text, “The Unconditional II (Maurice Blanchot),” Jabès would again evoke the “unconditional retreat of the word” into the strangeness of writing: the place where “God dies into God”; The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 193. Judaism would clearly be one of the decisive links between Blanchot and Jabès; indeed, it was concerning the latter that Blanchot first made the connection between the errancy and exile of the Jewish people and those of the writer—their shared lack of conditions; “Traces” (May 1964), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 217–227.
9. Some of them, initially given to the journals Gramma (1976), Glyph (1980), and Nuova Corrente (1981) and to a North American edited volume called Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), would be collected in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986); others are still unpublished.
10. Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture. Since then this work has been reprinted by Gallimard in the “Tel” collection (1986). For Levinas’s view of it, see Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 45–46.
11. For criticism of Collin, see Jacques Bersani, “Blanchot l’obscur,” in Le Monde des Livres (August 20, 1971). He accuses Collin, drawing on comparisons to do so, of “plagiarism, pastiche or paraphrase” and recalls the scruples stated by Blanchot himself at the beginning of a text on Georges Bataille: “The commentator is not being faithful when he faithfully reproduces” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 203.
12. Daniel Wilhelm, Maurice Blanchot: La voix narrative (Paris: UGE, 1974). See also “Hors de prix,” a review of The Step Not Beyond published in Critique 329 (1974) and reprinted as the first text in Pierre Klossowski: Le corps impie (Paris: UGE, 1979), 9–38.
13. Georges Préli, La force du dehors—extériorité, limite et non-pouvoir à partir de Maurice Blanchot (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Encres, 1977), published in the “Recherches” series directed by Félix Guattari. Blanchot would refer to Préli’s work in The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 32. Claude Lévesque, L’Étrangeté du texte: Essais sur Nietzsche, Freud, Blanchot et Derrida (Paris : U.G.E., 1978).
14. Henri Meschonnic, “Maurice Blanchot ou l’écriture hors langage,” Les Cahiers du Chemin 20 (January 15, 1974): 79–117.
15. “Notice” by the editors (Alain Coulange, Christian Limousin, Patrick Rousseau), Gramma 3–4 (1976): 4. See also the “Propositions” in the same issue, 11–18.
16. Steven Ungar, “Introduction: Flying White,” Sub-Stance 14 (1976): 4.
17. Tzvetan Todorov, “La réflexion sur la littérature dans la France contemporaine,” Poétique 38 (April 1979): 131–148.
61. MAKING THE SECRET UNCOMFORTABLE: BLANCHOT’S READABILITY AND VISIBILITY (1979–1997)
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 47.
2. He wrote to Christian Limousin in this sense, as the latter was preparing the issue of Gramma: “I believe that [the issue] should be conceived in the greatest spirit of freedom in relation to me; this work must not appear to be guaranteed, certified, or prepared in collaboration with an author”; letter of February 13, 1975, in Gramma 3–4 (1976): 5. And he wrote again, three months later: “this freedom matters to me above all”; letter of May 4, 1975, ibid., 6. These letters are collected and translated in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 16–18.
3. This game of meaning, in its precision, attracted even those closest to him: “How many nuances within white! From the glacial white of mountain peaks to the warm white of the paper reserved for his name”; Edmond Jabès in “The Unconditional (Maurice Blanchot),” in The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 96.
4. Manuals and dictionaries of literature speak of him with the utmost seriousness in terms of “the granitic heights of his thought,” of “reptilian phrases,” of an author who has often been turned into “a high priest of the white page”; André Clavel and Michel P. Schmitt, “Blanchot,” in Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française, ed. Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, Alain Rey (Paris: Bordas, 1987), 1:284–285.
5. Jude Stéfan relates that a manual of twentieth-century literature released by the Magnard publishing house had even “mistakenly indicated that he died in 1980”; “M.B.” in Limon 1 (November 1987): 10.
6. See Jean-Paul Curnier, “Esthétique de l’événement,” Lignes 29 (October 1996): 106–121.
7. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (New York: Verso, 1990), 83–84, emphasis added.
8. Let us recall Leiris who, of course with less inflexibility, also detested having his photograph published or his interviews recorded: “One likes to see the author in flesh and blood instead of really being interested in what he has written. . . . One can just about imagine that a day will come when art will only be an irritating mediator, a screen placed between the idol and the audience. Or if art still exists, one can imagine it being reduced to the art of introducing oneself”; note of October 27, 1966, in Michel Leiris, Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 617–618.
9. Jean-Louis Ézine, “Peut-on être Blanchot?” Les Nouvelles Littéraires (October 16, 1980): 3; Jude Stéfan, Dialogues avec la soeur (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1987), 18; Georges Perros, Papiers collés (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 3:18–19.
10. Philippe Mesnard, “Une visite,” postscript to Maurice Blanchot, le sujet de l’engagement (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996).
11. Maurice Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation, 422. The drawing by Ylipe accompanied a text by Maurice Nadeau on Awaiting Oblivion; “Un jeu torturant,” L’Express (May 17, 1962). The white square was surrounded by a text by Jean-Pierre Thibaudat on Juliet, Laporte, and Noël; “Les enfants de Blanchot,” Libération (August 30, 1979), 9.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “A Letter to Blandine Jeanson,” trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 33.
13. Anonymous, “Auteurs cachés,” Lire 117 (June 1985): 46.
14. Jean-Marc Parisis, “Blanchot et ses voisins,” Le Nouvel Observateur (March 20, 1987), 103.
15. François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas (1987; Paris: La Manufacture, 1992) (the new edition of 1992 no longer featured the dossier of photographs); Pierre-André Boutang, Emmanuel Levinas, an “Océaniques” program produced by La Sept, first broadcast on October 17, 1988.
16. Maurice Blanchot, “From Taine to M. Pesquidoux,” in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 204.
17. Georges Bataille, La limite de l’utile, in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 7:245.
18. “No one is ever anything but the copy of a copy,” adds Roland Barthes in a work that owes much to Blanchot’s thinking of the image; Camera Lucida (1980), trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 102.
19. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Sur le désoeuvrement: L’image dans l’écrire selon Blanchot,” Littérature 94 (May 1994): 113–124.
20. On what Blanchot himself says about the image, see notably “The Two Version of the Imaginary” (1951), in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 254–263; and “The Laughter of the Gods” (1965), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 169–182.
21. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, Ill.: Marlboro/Northwestern, 1998), 3.
22. Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Paris: M. Nadeau, 1987), 28.
23. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 76.
24. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 55, 69.
25. Maurice Blanchot, “Inspiration, Lack of Inspiration” (1953), in The Space of Literature, 187; “Friendship” (1962), in Friendship, 291.
26. Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New Press, 1994), 53.
27. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 69.
28. In terms of Villemaine, having obtained if not consent then at least the absence of any opposition (“I do not wish to be the guardian of “my” works, and even less their owner,” Blanchot wrote to him, adding: “What no longer belongs to me does not belong to anyone else, either”—letter of October 19, 1986), he worked with Gisèle Renard to stage Death Sentence in 1987, basing himself on the récit of that name and on Thomas the Obscure. On this production—which led him to think about the possibility of a new mode of communication in the theatre, based on the works of Celan, Jabès, Kafka, Artaud or Giacometti—see “De l’écrit à la parole,” a roundtable chaired by Jacques Munier and featuring Maurice Attais, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Théâtre/Public 79 (January–February 1988): 36–41; as well as Pierre-Antoine Villemaine, “Le temps d’une représentation,” Écritures contemporaines et théâtralité (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1990), 63–70; and “Un éclair qui se prolonge,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 86–90. In 1995, Micheline Welter also staged Thomas the Obscure; see René Solis, “Pari difficile aux Bernardines,” Libération (February 9, 1995), 32.
29. Daniel Dobbels, “Présentation,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 11.
30. [A selection of the proceedings of the London conference appeared in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996). —Trans.]
31. Special issues of reviews have appeared regularly: Exercices de la Patience in 1981, L’Esprit Créateur in 1984, Nuova Corrente in 1985, then Lignes and Ralentir Travaux. Many theses have been written in France and abroad (especially in the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands), where they have often addressed Blanchot’s relation to other writers (listed at random: Baudelaire, Beckett, Derrida, Gordimer, Heidegger, Lispector, Saussure, Shakespeare). They have been slightly slow in filtering through to publication: none was published in the 1980s, but those by Brian T. Fitch (1992), Anne-Lise Schulte-Nordholt (1995), and Chantal Michel (1997) did appear, and were exclusively dedicated to Blanchot. Last, in 1997, the first accessible work aimed at students was published by Laure Himy.
32. Tzvetan Todorov himself declared that: “I shall therefore take on the thankless task of the boor and try to translate into my own words this speech that says nothing”; this role did in fact seem to fit so nicely with such a “translation” that it can be seen as being as boorish as it had—with ironic intentions—described itself, and is unable to take off this mask; “Les critiques-écrivains,” in Critique de la critique (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 67.
33. [This is a French translation of a work of the previous year, Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). —Trans.]
34. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche (Paris: Seuil, 1983; new ed. Brussels: Complexe, 1988), 257.
35. Philippe Mesnard, Maurice Blanchot: Le sujet de l’engagement (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 83. This is “a test case,” he states, relating to what he calls “The Blanchot File,” xviii.
36. For instance, it is frightening that Philippe Mesnard is able to state that between a 1936 article for Combat and the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination, “fundamentally, few elements differ,” just as there is something frightening in the repeated judgment in his book regarding Bataille’s alleged “superfascism.”
62. WITH THIS BREAK IN HISTORY STUCK IN ONE’S THROAT: THE UNAVOWABLE COMMUNITY (1982–1983)
1. Maurice Blanchot in The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 23. Unless indicated otherwise, references in this chapter are henceforth to this translated work.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “La maladie de la mort (éthique et amour),” Le Nouveau Commerce 55 (Spring 1983): 46.
3. This phrase recalls Judith’s cry to Claudia in When the Time Comes: “Nescio vos,” translated exactly by Blanchot as “I don’t know who you are” (60).
4. This allows us to emphasize once again everything that separates him from Sartre, for instance the priority of the ethical demand (18), or conception of society’s relation to community and to communism (7).
5. In this there is an echo of what Duras said about Bataille’s narrative: “Edwarda will remain sufficiently unintelligible over several centuries that whole theologies will grow up around it”; in “À propos de Georges Bataille” (1958) in Outside (Paris: Albin Michel: 1981), 34.
6. Blanchot, “La maladie de la mort,” 31.
7. See the collected works Rejouer le politique (Paris: Galilée, 1981) and Le retrait du politique (Paris: Galilée, 1983); the amalgamated English version is Retreating the Political, trans. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997).
8. See Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 26 n., and Leslie Hill’s analysis in Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 197–198.
9. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 31. Beyond his in-depth meditation on the entirety of Blanchot’s work, Nancy was the first to recognize how important the texts published in Committee were. It could be said without great risk that his thinking and even the title of his article flows from the rupture in the following phrase, which he cites, from “Communism without Heirs” (1968): “Communism: what excludes (and is excluded from) any already constituted community” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 93.
10. He refers to several articles in The Infinite Conversation (7), twice cites The Step Not Beyond (9, 10), and tacitly borrows from various fragments of The Writing of the Disaster (15–16); see The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 49–50, 89–90, 108–111.
11. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Compagnie de Blanchot,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 77.
12. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 3. This is taken up in different terms by Blanchot: “the isolated being is the individual, and the individual is only an abstraction, existence as it is represented by the weak-minded concept of everyday liberalism.” (18)
13. Ibid., 30.
14. Marguerite Duras in The Malady of Death, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 55.
15. Sarah Kofman in Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 70.
16. Duras, The Malady of Death, 1. This mistake was noticed by Francis Marmande in “Le mot de passe,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 108. Strangely, the citation is correct in the version published in Le Nouveau Commerce. Whatever the source of the eventual slippage, the conditional clearly sits uneasily with Blanchot’s reading (“there remains this statement (it is true in the conditional),” 37).
17. Maurice Blanchot in “The Narrative Voice (the “It,” the Neutral)” (1964), in The Infinite Conversation, 462. See also Marguerite Duras, La vie matérielle (Paris: POL, 1987), 36.
18. Blanchot, “The Narrative Voice.” [“The one”—celle—can refer to either a woman or an impersonal feminine noun such as la pensée, “thought.” The square brackets are Bident’s. —Trans.]
19. Ibid.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “Destroy” (1970), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 113–116.
21. “A reader (but am I?),” he wrote at the beginning of the article in Le Nouveau Commerce (31). And in the book: “I am no longer speaking exactly, as I should, of Marguerite Duras’s text,” (50) recognizing an element of betrayal in what he was writing.
22. Published twenty years after Awaiting Oblivion, The Malady of Death is strangely close to it and seems to describe the same situation: “She was seated, motionless, at the table; lying next to him on the bed; sometimes standing next to the door and in that case coming from very far away. This is how he had seen her the first time. Standing, having come in without saying a word and not even looking around . . . he ought to have immediately felt like an intruder in this room.” Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 29. The main difference is the man’s intimate knowledge of women’s bodes (“between him and every feminine figure a long familiarity that made him close to each of them,” ibid.). In this récit, Blanchot had perhaps written the impossible dialogue that is lacking at the end of The Malady of Death: “ ‘You, too, forgot me’—‘Perhaps, but in forgetting you, I reached an ability to forget you that far exceeds my understanding and that links me, well beyond me, to what I forget. It is almost too much for one person.’—‘You are not alone.’—‘Yes, I am not the only one who forgets, if I forget’ ” (78). But beyond the analogy between the narrative situations, the use of voices whose dialogue punctuates Awaiting Oblivion would enter Duras’s fiction from the 1960s and especially the 1970s, seeming to guide her practice of effacing genres (and even of the materiality of the signifier: “text theater film” would be her subtitle for India Song). These voices are placeholders for absence, the place of a third presence in which pleasure is always experienced through loss and death.
23. See Marguerite Duras, “Dans les jardins d’Israël il ne fait jamais nuit” (1985), reprinted in Les yeux verts, new ed. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma: 1987), 228–248, at 231–233; “Les hommes,” in La vie matérielle, 38: “People, from Peter Handke to Maurice Blanchot, thought that it was directed against men in their relations with women.”
24. See notably Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Paris: M. Nadeau, 1987), 39–43, where Mascolo opposes the hypothesis that friendship is an exclusively male construct.
25. Many descriptions or allusions confirm this. Stein is the narrative’s discreet authority, the one who utters decisive words, to whom others look, and who even sees things on behalf of others; Destroy, She Said, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 28, 31. He walks “with his long indefatigable stride” (11), even at night, when he goes down to the park, an exalted victim of insomnia (13). He is a writer or “in the process of becoming one,” and it has “always been like that.” This can be seen in “the way [he] keep[s] asking questions. Questions that get [him] nowhere” (10). As if ironically, a character in the narrative mistakenly names him Blum (p. 77). Blum: the missing link in the metonymy leading from Blanchot to Stein. This is a Judaized Blanchot, turning his back on the insults of the past. Duras would even say that Stein is the key element of the book: “First there was no Stein, but then when he arrived then the book also arrived.” She added, surprisingly contradicting the narrative itself, that “Stein, for his part, does not make love”; in Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier, Les parleuses (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 47.
26. Maurice Blanchot, “Destroy” (Spring 1970), in Friendship, 114. Blanchot would therefore see the characters as gods, “new gods, free of all divinity” (115), whom he describes as he did those in Awaiting Oblivion.
27. Ibid., 116.
63. EVEN A FEW STEPS TAKE TIME: LITERATURE AND WITNESSING (1983–1997)
1. On October 13, 1992, Blanchot wrote to Dionys Mascolo that “political and social difficulties torment me as passionately as before.”
2. Jacques Derrida relates that in 1995 he humorously referred to his health as “his strong nature.”
3. Roger Laporte, Entre deux mondes (Montpellier: Gris Banal, 1988), 55.
4. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 9.
5. This nephew is said to have planned to open up the house in Quain to create a museum in honor of his uncle.
6. Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier à parler (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1984); Maurice Blanchot and Joë Bousquet, Maurice Blanchot/Joë Bousquet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987). Strangely, the latter’s table of contents and the copyright information give conflicting information. In fact, although it was included in Faux pas in 1943, Blanchot’s article had not been published in the Journal des Débats.
7. Blanchot had written an article on the art of the book, including sections on the relation of illustration and text: “The Book” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 29–35.
8. The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). It is edited and introduced by Michael Holland and includes translations by Susan Hanson, Michael Holland, Roland-François Lack, Ian Maclachlan, Ann Smock, Chris Stevens, and Michael Syrotinski.
9. Maurice Blanchot in “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 494–495.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Reducers” (1965), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 64.
11. Maurice Blanchot in Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, 226.
12. Maurice Blanchot in For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 142.
13. “Encounters” (1984), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 27–28.
14. Maurice Blanchot/Joë Bousquet, 17.
15. It would recall Blanchot’s response to Catherine David’s questions about commitment; “Refuse the established order” (1981); trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 20–22.
16. The Blanchot Reader, 207.
17. [Blanchot refers to “the air of the time” in a short text accompanying the first appearance of “Intellectuals under Scrutiny” and reproduced in Les intellectuels en question: Ébauche d’une réflexion (Tours: Farrago, 2000), 60. The text, which does not feature in The Blanchot Reader, reads as follows: “These notes were not initially intended for publication. Prompted by the air of the time, by Bredin’s book, by the republication of Social Criticism, by Glucksmann’s recent book—which I most often feel in agreement with, even as I wonder how such an important personal conviction can be imposed on or even proposed to others, or to everybody—; these notes developed beyond what I intended, even without me being able to reach the end of my path. Pierre Nora has persuaded me that they might be able to help the ‘permanent debate’ which is the journal’s raison d’être. I therefore offer them up in their inadequacy, convinced as I am only of the certainty that I must have expressed at the end, under the sign of René Char.” —Trans.]
18. The Blanchot Reader, 208, 224.
19. Ibid., 225, 207.
20. Ibid., 210.
21. Ibid., 223.
22. Ibid., 213, 225.
23. “The fact that Céline was a writer in the grip of delirium does not make him uncongenial to me, but this delirium found expression in anti-Semitism; delirium here is no excuse; all anti-Semitism is basically a delirium, and even if it is delirious, anti-Semitism remains the capital offense”: in a letter of 1966 to Raymond Bellour in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 15–16.
24. The Blanchot Reader, 223.
25. Ibid., 226.
26. Ibid., 226, 208.
27. Maurice Blanchot in “Our Clandestine Companion” (1980), in Political Writings, 145.
28. Ibid., 152.
29. Ibid. Blanchot would ask, in parenthesis, of Emmanuel Levinas: “(what have I not borrowed from him)” in “Writing devoted to silence” (1989), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 40.
30. Notably Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (1987), trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and his “Transcendence Ends in Politics” (1981), trans. Peter Caws in Social Research 49, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 405–440. Blanchot cites the latter in Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984).
31. Maurice Blanchot, “Thinking the Apocalypse” (1988), in Political Writings, 123.
32. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 82; “Do not forget!” (1986), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 34–37; “Writing devoted to silence” (1989) in ibid., 39–41.
33. Blanchot, “Do not forget” (1988 letter to Salomon Malka), in Political Writings, 124–129.
34. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 143.
35. Maurice Blanchot, “Peace, peace to the far and to the near” (1985), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 28–33. Blanchot had already sketched out in his May 1981 response to Catherine David what can be named as such a “Judaism of thought,” something applied to the place left empty by the writer, in which his real sense of engagement would be found. He would return to it in an article dedicated to the figure of Moses as a writer: “Thanks (be given) to Jacques Derrida” (1990), trans. Leslie Hill in The Blanchot Reader, 317–323. [“The heaviest blessing” (Le bienfait le plus lourd) seems to have been the title given to an extract of this same text published in Le Nouvel Observateur. —Trans.]
36. Maurice Blanchot, letter of September 15, 1989, in Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adventures on the Freedom Road, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Harvill, 1995), 318. See also the way in which the name of Jabès is used rhythmically, three times, at the end of “Writing devoted to silence” (1989) in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 39–41.
37. “Rumor has it that in 1986 Blanchot wrote a seven-page text on the early (‘nighttime’) texts for inclusion in a forthcoming study by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.” Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 164.
38. [The letter has since been published, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, lettre-récit (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 47–62. —Trans.]
39. Leslie Hill, “Introduction” in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), 9, 20.
40. Letter of December 24, 1992, from Maurice Blanchot to Roger Laporte, in ibid., 209.
41. Maurice Blanchot, “Our Responsibility” (1986), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 37–38. Dominique Lecoq chairs the association of “The Friends of Georges Bataille,” to whose oversight committee Blanchot belonged.
42. Similarly, in a note in Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him the same year, he wrote: “disciplines go back to prehistoric times when, for example, a bear was transformed, through successful training, into what would later be a watchdog or courageous policeman.” In Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 87.
43. Maurice Blanchot, “I think it is better for a writer . . .” (1991), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 42. Blanchot’s regular signing of petitions should also be noted: for instance, for an international Parliament of writers in 1993, for the legal recognition of homosexual couples in 1996, for civil disobedience against the Debré law on immigration in 1997 (this last movement openly echoed the Manifesto of the 121). His presence and intransigence stood firm, even if fitfully, against the banalization of politics that was underway. For instance, at the end of 1996 Blanchot learned that his publisher of nearly thirteen years, Bruno Roy, with whom he had published six books, had recently brought out a work by Alain de Benoist, a theorist of the far right, editor of the review Krisis, leader of GRECE (Group for Research and Study of European Civilization), and fellow traveler of the National Front. His reaction was immediate. Blanchot informed those close to him that he was withdrawing his books from Fata Morgana; Jacques Dupin, Louis-René des Forêts, Roger Laporte, and Gerald Macé decided to do the same. On September 2, he wrote a letter to Bruno Roy explaining his departure from the publishing house: “at least for as long as you retain him in your catalogue and on sale.” This ultimatum was met by Roy with a threat approaching blackmail: He recalled Blanchot’s political texts of the 1930s, a threat that left the latter totally indifferent. Blanchot’s letter and an extract from Bruno Roy’s were published by Maurice Nadeau in La Quinzaine Littéraire of November 1. The dailies, weeklies, and journals took hold of this new “affair,” most often with the bad faith and ignorance that might be imagined.
44. Maurice Blanchot, “We work in the dark” (1983), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 25–27.
45. Maurice Blanchot, “The question is certainly a traditional one” (1985), trans. Michael Holland in ibid., 28.
46. Blanchot, “I think it is better for a writer,” 42; “Allow me to reply briefly,” 43.
47. Maurice Blanchot, “Who?” in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 58–60.
48. See, for instance, the response to Claire Nouvet for the special issue of Yale French Studies on “Literature and the Ethical Question”: “Dear Madam, excuse me for responding to you by letter. Reading the one you sent me . . . I became afraid and almost without hope. ‘Again, again,’ I said to myself. It is not that I claim to have exhausted an inexhaustible subject, but on the contrary that such a subject was returning to me precisely because it is so uncompromising. Even the word ‘literature’ is suddenly alien to me.” “Enigma,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 5. On the frequent use of “again, again” to signal fright in the “literature” of Blanchot, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 192, 264–265.
49. Maurice Blanchot, “The Inquisition destroyed the Catholic religion . . .” (1993), Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 43.
50. Blanchot, Foucault—Blanchot, 70. He would himself evoke “the insufficiency of commentary” in a text on Louis-René des Forêts; A Voice from Elsewhere, 14.
51. Maurice Blanchot, “Oh All to End” (1990), in The Blanchot Reader, 635. He thus began this article by signaling his mistrust of words, just as he did with his article on Derrida: “After such a long silence (perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years) I shall begin to write again, not on Derrida (how pretentious!), but with his help, and convinced that I shall betray him immediately” in “Thanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derrida” (1990), trans. Leslie Hill in The Blanchot Reader, 317.
52. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, 28.
53. Blanchot, Foucault—Blanchot, 108, 81.
54. Maurice Blanchot, “L’Excès-Usine ou l’infini morcelé,” Libération (February 24, 1987), 35.
55. Maurice Blanchot, “The Ascendant Word, or Are We Still Worthy of Poetry?” (1984), in Political Writings, 160, 157.
56. Maurice Blanchot in “Thanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derrida” (1990), in The Blanchot Reader, 322.
57. Maurice Blanchot, “Oh All to End” (1990), in ibid., 635–637.
58. Maurice Blanchot, “The Ascendant Word” (1984), in Political Writings, 154.
59. Blanchot, A Voice From Elsewhere, 7.
60. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 72; A Voice From Elsewhere, 28.
61. This is what Blanchot says of the “biography” of Roger Laporte, who “supposed (whence the ordeal) that his life only began with writing, meaning that this writing could not be anything anterior or exterior that it would be necessary to write”; Maurice Blanchot, “Ces quelques lignes ne sont qu’une annonce . . . ,” in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 426–430.
62. Maurice Blanchot in A Voice from Elsewhere, 6, 13. It is easy to understand Blanchot’s anger in 1992 when a reprint of Thomas the Obscure in the “L’Imaginaire” series included without his agreement two pages of straightforwardly biographical information (some of which was wrong). Such (anonymous) pages negated the narrative to follow: they negated nothing less than their essence, their poetry, their writing.
63. Foucault—Blanchot, 103–104.
64. Daniel Dobbels in Robert Antelme, Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 77.
65. Maurice Blanchot, “Avec Dionys Mascolo,” Lignes 33 (March 1998). With the sinister affair that set Levinas’s two children against one another after his death, Blanchot would also think it necessary to publicly mark his presence by writing a letter supporting Michaël Levinas; see the article by Nicholas Weill in Le Monde (June 22–23, 1997), 25.
66. Three years later, on September 22, 1997, for Maurice Blanchot’s ninetieth birthday, Didier Cahen and Michel Deguy brought together, in the Maison des Écrivains in Paris, around twenty people who were close either to the man or his work. It is a strange thing to celebrate the birthday of someone who is not there. There were several readings: those from The Madness of the Day by Jacques Dupin, and from Friendship by Louis-René des Forêts, did bear witness to a presence, a voice, a smile, a trace of happiness.
67. Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3.
68. Ibid., 11.
69. Jacques Derrida in The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 77. “Fiction and Testimony” is Derrida’s subtitle, and he reads Blanchot’s narrative as a knot formed by the relation of the two. We are indebted to his analyses, which just like the narrative on which they provide a commentary, mark an epoch. They do so as this narrative and for this narrative: published with Fata Morgana in 1994 (two years before the affair that would set Blanchot against Bruno Roy), The Instant of My Death was reproduced in its entirety in Derrida’s book. Blanchot would also thank his friend for having helped—as it were—“get it across” to Galilée.
70. Blanchot in The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 7.
71. In Quain, the family is said to have possessed a saber from the Napoleonic era that had belonged to ancestors who were soldiers of the first Empire.
72. Marguerite was the only other witness of the events, except for his sister-in-law Anna, the wife of René, who was probably also there.
AMOR: BLANCHOT SINCE 2003, BY JOHN MCKEANE
1. Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (1980; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 71.
2. Maurice Blanchot in “The Madness of the Day,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1998), 191.
3. Daniel Dobbels, “Le grand récit du corps,” in the Blanchot dossier in Magazine Littéraire 424 (October 2003), 45. My translation, as are those that follow, unless indicated otherwise.
4. Jacques Derrida, “À Maurice Blanchot,” in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 323–332. For obvious reasons, the text on Blanchot did not feature in the earlier, English version of this work, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See also Derrida’s more developed text “Maurice Blanchot est mort,” in Parages, 2nd ed. (1986; Paris: Galilée, 2003), 267–300. Previously, Derrida had published the first edition of Parages, a collection of texts on Blanchot (and particularly on The Madness of the Day); and, focusing on The Instant of My Death, available in Blanchot /Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
5. Christophe Bident in Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques (Tours and Paris: Farrago/Scheer, 2003), 61–63. I wish to thank Christophe for his collaboration on the translation as well as his comments on this text.
6. See the anonymously authored obituary in the London Times (February 26, 2003). In parallel to this and to Derrida’s Demeure, a further work functions as bio/thanatography with regards to Blanchot: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Ending and Unending Agony, trans. Hannes Opelz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). It is constructed around two key Blanchot texts, The Instant of My Death and “A Primal Scene?”
7. This point was made by Leslie Hill in “Maurice Blanchot has died . . .” in Nowhere Without No: in Memory of Maurice Blanchot, ed. by Kevin Hart (Sydney: Vagabond and Stray Dog, 2003), 20–22.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 320.
9. In the years preceding his death in 2003, Blanchot published nothing. In late 2002, however, he did sign the petition against the Iraq war—this despite its slogan, “Not in my name,” being in direct opposition to his activism of anonymity in the 1960s.
10. The thesis can be consulted in the Blanchot archival holdings at Harvard University (MS Fr 662, box 12).
11. There are localized issues of vocabulary: where there was no clear reason (beyond exoticization, something of which French studies in English is sometimes guilty) to keep a term in French, I have translated it: thus il y a has become there is. For Blanchot’s commonly used term l’exigence, I felt that exigency added an unnecessary layer of distance, and therefore used demand.
12. Maurice Blanchot in “The Essential Solitude” (1953), collected in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 23.
13. Ibid., 258.
14. Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.
15. “Icon” is from Greek eikein, to be similar/to be like.
16. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 254, 262.
17. Ibid., 255.
18. See also “The Image” in “The Essential Solitude,” in ibid., 32–33. For critical discussions, see Ian Maclachlan, “Blanchot and the Romantic Imagination,” in Blanchot Romantique, ed. John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 155–172; and Sergey Zenkin, “Maurice Blanchot et l’image visuelle,” in Blanchot dans son siècle (Lyon: Paragon, 2009), 214–227.
19. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 256.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 259.
22. See “Orpheus’s Gaze” in ibid., and, for Lazarus, see The Work of Fire, 327; “Reading” in The Space of Literature; Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1988), 38; and Blanchot’s response to Jean Cayrol’s Pour un romanesque lazaréen, “Les justes” in L’Observateur 15 (July 20, 1950): 17. Jean-Luc Nancy writes on “Blanchot’s Resurrection,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (2005; New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 89–97.
23. Full publication details for works cited in this section are available in this volume’s bibliography.
24. On the latest acquisition, see http://blogs.harvard.edu/houghtonmodern/2015/10/01/maurice-blanchot-papers-acquired-by-harvard. On the other, see my “Change in the Archive: Blanchot’s L’entretien infini,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies 50, no. 1 (2014): 69–81; and Kevin Hart, “Une réduction infinite,” Cahier de l’Herne: Blanchot (2014): 323–328.
25. Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
26. Michael Holland, “État présent: Maurice Blanchot,” French Studies 58, no. 4 (October 2004), 533–538.
27. Monique Antelme, Gisèle Berkman, Christophe Bident, et al., eds., Blanchot dans son siècle (Lyon: Paragon, 2009); Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); McKeane and Opelz, Blanchot Romantique; Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (London: Continuum, 2012); Leslie Hill, Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).
28. Kevin Hart, ed., Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), and Christopher Langlois (ed.), Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
29. Éric Hoppenot and Alain Milon, Maurice Blanchot et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris-Ouest, 2010); Éric Hoppenot, ed., L’oeuvre du féminin dans l’écriture de Maurice Blanchot (Grignan: Complicités, 2004); Éric Hoppenot and Alain Milon, Emmanuel Levinas-Maurice Blanchot, penser la différence (Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris-Ouest, 2007). Links to a further three collective volumes from this period can be found on the web-site Maurice Blanchot et ses contemporains.
30. See Gramma 3–4 and 5 (1976); Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997).
31. Maurice Blanchot, letter of December 24, 1992, to Roger Laporte in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, 209.
32. Edited by David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). This volume appeared after the main body of this afterword was written. Uhrig also writes that “around sixty articles of literary journalism [of the 1930s] are being reserved for publication in a separate volume” (9).
33. Michel Surya, L’autre Blanchot: L’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 2015); Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désavouée (Paris: Galilée, 2014), trans. Philip Armstrong as The Disavowed Community (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Henri de Monvallier and Nicolas Rousseau, Blanchot l’obscur: ou la déraison littéraire (Paris: Autrement, 2015).
34. The early Blanchot is attacked for having been “the friend, the collaborator of overt anti-Semites” (20). Surya writes of a “French fascism to which Blanchot was as close as it is possible to be, being close to some of its major representatives” (97). Regarding the later period, the attack focuses on a misjudged statement on Judaism, not directly concerning Blanchot, and made by Dionys Mascolo (122).
35. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Ending and Unending Agony, trans. Hannes Opelz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1. The scare quotes accompanying “break” are Lacoue-Labarthe’s.
36. See Michael Holland, “D’un retour au tournant” (2009), in Avant dire: Essais sur Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2015).
37. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Roger Laporte of December 22, 1984, in Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 61.
38. Surya’s book is divided into three “sequences,” the first addressing the 1930s, the second 1958–1968, and the third the period following 1968.