Jacques Derrida puts it thus: “The friendship between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas was an instance of grace, a gift; it remains a blessing on our time.”1
A student in philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas arrived in Strasbourg in 1923. Born in Lithuania in January 1906 and Blanchot’s senior by slightly less than two years, he came from a wealthy family that experienced difficulties due to the war, the Soviet revolution, and exile. He was extremely cultivated, having received a broad Western, Russian, and Lithuanian-Jewish education. He came to Strasbourg for the “prestige of French,” the town itself being chosen only for its proximity, however relative.
Levinas dates his meeting with Blanchot to 1925 or 1926. He recounts it in these terms:
Straight away I got the feeling of an extreme intelligence, of a thinking setting itself up as an aristocracy; in political terms, he was very far away from me during that period, he was a monarchist, but very soon we had access to one another.
He sometimes mentions me in his books and elevates me greatly, in all senses of the term. I mean that I find myself highly elevated when in his interventions he comes close to me. On many points our thinking is in agreement. He has undergone a completely internal evolution in which there has never been the slightest concession, even in relation to himself. My impression is of a man without opportunism. . . . He would always choose the most unexpected and the noblest, the hardest path. This moral elevation, this deep-rooted aristocracy of thought is what counts most, it is what elevates. . . .
Very early on, he introduced me to Proust and Valéry: we did not, if I remember rightly, discuss surrealism much. Our conversations also revolved around his very early interest in these phenomenological things . . . where, in these very abstract notions, he saw unexpected lines of enquiry and where with him things took on new destinies. . . .
For me, it was as if he were the expression of French excellence: not so much due to ideas, but due to a certain possibility of saying things, very difficult to imitate and appearing as a lofty strength. Yes, it is still in terms of loftiness that I speak to you about him.2
It is clear that in speaking of their meeting and its immediacy, Levinas is careful to place the main forces that animated it within a certain perspective. We can read this as an aestheticizing, obliging way of downplaying the political violence of a friend who later would show such interest in Judaism and Jewishness. And we can also reread here, in parallel, the interest in integration, in elevating oneself socially and in being recognized culturally, of a Lithuanian Jew whose political moderation and Republican nationalism are well known. But to leave it at that would be to remain blind to the immediate desire for friendship, in spite of and in place of political opinions (which is to say: the positions adopted regarding cultural belonging and the space it required, the community it made possible). Everything about Blanchot was seductive, as soon as you met him, in spite of and in place of the silver pommel. Levinas demands that “the transformation of convictions” be thought of without any reference to compromise. Friendship alone can justify this absolute, can force us to glimpse the permanency that lies beyond change. Levinas sets up a paradoxical portrait of a Blanchot who was already wholly self-present in 1926, while also being completely still to come. Everything was indeed there already: the aristocracy, the loftiness, the gaze, the demand, the excess and the excellence, the ability to surprise (via little-trod paths, surprises, paradoxes). Levinas describes a Blanchot ignorant of himself, learning about himself, who would learn to recognize his aristocracy in forms different from the—imaginary—ones he inherited. The Blanchot of 1926 was a Blanchot without an oeuvre, but able to impress, elevate, agitate, be insubordinate: everything was already there, everything would find its way, but slowly, with difficulty, erratically. This slowness would respond to the demand not to judge, not to judge immediately, to know how not to be satisfied with immediate judgment, and to know how to move beyond one’s everyday life, one’s automatic opinion, one’s agitated blindness, to move beyond these by way of an unending quest which, confronting the real (thanks to the demand of friendship and the hard work of writing), would also eventually come into being. This quest allows one to approach being by way of thought, by way of a harsh apprenticeship in the most sovereign worldviews and their endless assimilations. When this apprenticeship is complete, when these worldviews have been fully absorbed and invested with a decisive experience, they can finally be critiqued and filtered by a now indefatigable personal approach, strengthened by this long faux pas, more assured due to its past mistakes and in tune with the events of current History. This approach is able to instantly interpret these events in absolute terms, in the radical way they appear or as mere insignificant blunders; it is able to question itself regarding the only point on which it is uncertain or undecided, namely interactions between this collective destiny and singular experiences of interiority (intersections which will be staged by récits such as Death Sentence). This approach would only find a niche for itself in the inimitability of the “French excellence” already mentioned: style, the precise rhythms of style, a capacity that Levinas recognized as belonging to the language in which he would write or inscribe his thought.
For his part, Blanchot would describe the meeting as follows: “I would like to say, quite simply, that meeting Emmanuel Levinas when I was a student at the University of Strasbourg was the happy encounter that illuminates what is darkest in a life.”3 Blanchot later used carefully chosen terms to reiterate how rare this illumination was in a letter to Pierre Prévost, evoking in Georges Bataille “he who, alongside Emmanuel Levinas, has been my closest friend.”4 He signaled it in the final lines of For Friendship: “Emmanuel Levinas, the only friend—ah, distant friend—whom I call tu and who calls me tu; that happened not because we were young but out of a deliberate decision, a pact that I hope never to breach.”5 And in a letter to Salomon Malka, made public by L’Arche, he refers to Levinas as
my oldest friend, the only one with whom I feel authorized to use the familiar address [le tutoiement]. . . . Did this meeting happen by chance? One could say so. But the friendship was not random or fortuitous. Something profound carried us toward one another. I won’t say that it was already Judaism that brought us together, but I would say that, besides his gaiety, it was his indefinably serious and beautiful way of envisaging life, a way of deeply examining it without the slightest pedantry.6
And yet, it was indeed Judaism that brought them together: even if Blanchot does not dare say so overtly, it was already in play. At least, a certain way of approaching Judaism was in play, a certain way that Blanchot would theorize, fragment, spread far and wide. In other words, this was already a certain relation to the other guided by the informal address [le tutoiement] (that of God to his creature), the freedom to act, the necessity of distancing, and a priority given to ethical thought above all others. Such are the stakes of what passed between Levinas and Blanchot even as early as their Strasbourg years, and while they must have felt it immediately, as they felt the glorious, silent reserve of their friendship (a glorious silence, no doubt, for it could only strengthen their friendship, make it exceptional, marvelous, and astonishing), they probably did not think it to be such until much later.
And even if Blanchot had only been a moderate nationalist in Strasbourg (we have no more exact information concerning his views or his persona), we would still have to consider that he was already the man who would soon call for violence against Léon Blum.7 Blanchot’s precise political positions in the 1930s will be detailed later. Let us suppose however that in Strasbourg they were the worst imaginable, if only in order to underline how friendship remained possible all the same, including all its variations from gaiety to seriousness, and to beauty as well. We must then turn to Levinas and recall his pacifist, pro-Briand views;8 his closely held convictions against violence; his familiarity, since childhood, with national and racial suffering (war, exile, revolution, ostracism, oppression, scorn); his feeling of freedom and release at living in France; his desire for integration, sometimes practiced with deferent attentiveness, always experienced as an institutional form of moral gratitude; his prudent silence over Heidegger’s commitment to the Nazis, of which he became aware very early, “perhaps even before 1933”;9 and above all his innate ideas (purity, nobility, moral grandeur, elitism, authority, severity), as he saw them incarnated in the France of the Revolution and the Enlightenment, the bourgeois France of the Third Republic, even in the Resistance and in the power of General De Gaulle, whom he would admire until the end. Finally we recall Levinas’s critical perception of ontology, a “philosophy of power” that “does not question the Same” and therefore is a “philosophy of injustice,” as in Hegel or Heidegger, which “subordinates the relation with Others to the relation with Being in general.” “Placing being before beings, ontology before metaphysics—is to place freedom (even that of theory) before justice. It is a movement within the Same before any obligation with regard to the Other.” This philosophy “inevitably leads” to tyranny based in “rootedness in the earth, in the adoration that men in slavery devote to their masters.”10 However it may have shifted in later years, this judgment recalls that ethical finality is what matters most to Levinas, and that it is what always mattered to him, even and especially when facing political decisions, which in fact must proceed from this ethical finality, no matter how insignificant it might seem in relation to other forms of community links. That Blanchot should have had, that he should already have had this initial concern for the Other is what made friendship possible, cheerful, and thinkable; he and Levinas named this concern dialogue, infinite conversation, and, as they regarded one another in gratitude, “without the slightest pedantry,” Judaism.