As a lead editor of the Journal des Débats and Aux Écoutes, a writer of editorials specializing in foreign policy, someone with nationalist ideals, a staunch spiritualist, in the 1930s Maurice Blanchot seems to have had a single goal: restoring the glory of French culture, which in his eyes had grown corrupt, had perhaps even disappeared. He joined the young dissident milieus of the Maurrassian far right, becoming one of its most prominent and influential members. Having initially been motivated by Catholic, traditionalist reasons directly related to his family upbringing, he adopted positions that were more and more radical, privileging antidemocratic, antiparliamentary, and anticapitalist rhetoric, occasionally of limitless violence, under the tutelage and influence of Thierry Maulnier. But he was also the friend of Emmanuel Levinas, and he lived in close relation to nationalist Jews like Paul Lévy. He shared their struggle against the resistible rise of Hitler, denouncing at a very early stage the first work camps, state totalitarianism, anti-intellectualism, warlike morality, and the mythology of organic community, all of which were prevailing across the Rhine. He quickly grasped Hitler’s threat to the Europe of nations, but his fervent anticommunism forced him to adopt strategically dubious and even—as he would later recognize—irresponsible positions in diplomatic and military terms. He sought out all ways of preserving peace and deplored the successive climb-downs by international organizations and national governments, inviting a humanity “always driven by the candid and boastful nobility of a better future” not to forget “the laws governing its difficult condition.”1 Over the years, the increasing speed and pressure of events exploded the fragile cohesion of activism on the far right. This made Blanchot choose between the two groups that he frequented. He refused to spend further time in the company of certain anti-Semitic, fascist, radicalized, and protocollaborationist circles, such as those of Brasillach and Rebatet, and even distanced himself from Maxence and Maulnier.2
The recent history of pan-Germanism had led to the emergence of Germanophobia, but Blanchot did not hate French identity, even in its fragmented state, enough to go over to the enemy; admiration for the nobility of thought, and the inner exile of writing in its confrontation with death, remained the object of his deepest desires. The volatility of his journalism perhaps stemmed from the fact that unity was impossible, something he might have become aware of at the end of the 1930s, at a time when personally dramatic events came to represent something like a way of experiencing the irreparable march of history. The abandonment of false alliances, which had become so common in a decade excelling in blindness, bore a paradoxical mark: He stopped producing signed articles. These would have committed Blanchot’s name too far—except in one case when it was necessary to protect the all too easily decipherable name of a friend, who would otherwise have been threatened with death (in 1940, with the onset of German occupation, Blanchot managed Paul Lévy’s newspaper).
Striving for recognition, occasionally deluded by its own contradictions, separating its ideas the better to relate them to the precise place and time in which they were expressed, the narrative in which he was engaged forbid itself any theoretical evolution. A rhetoric of imitation held sway, as he first adopted then rejected borrowed ideologies, all in the absence of a published book—an absence that further confirmed the vanity of the past. Blanchot would not attribute the value of real thought to the ideas he expressed journalistically during the 1930s. He did not gather them, reflect upon them, or prolong them in a book. Unlike his father figures (Barrès, Massis, Maurras) or brother figures (Fabrègues, Maxence, Maulnier—who from 1932 to 1939 published ten works), he therefore did not lay claim to any theoretical authority in this period. This does not remove the slightest degree of responsibility, but it does make possible the emergence of a wholly other, conflicting movement of thought.3
This failing of thought (défaut de pensée) led him close to “the capital error,” anti-Semitism, the memory of which would later cause Blanchot to declare that imperative weighing on all thought was to “think and act in such a way that Auschwitz may never be repeated.”4 This is our invitation to consider what made possible such a “transformation of convictions,” such an evolution for this man, such a future for this body of work.5 It is an invitation to question what his early writings drew on: inherited convictions, ideological parasitism, or stubborn strategy? We must also question the status of this speech, between the usual overemphasis of the press and publishing prewar, the pamphlet tradition and the common themes of far-right rhetoric, and the singular eloquence of a never-failing rhythm and confidence.6 Caught up with all these considerations are one man’s ethical and political choices, the responsibility for his public interventions, for his commitments and “unreasoned attractions,” as well as the conditions that made it possible for him to flee from this original moment, thus marking the beginning of his thought.7 The way in which writing—let us already say: the space of literature—would set aside such a subject tells us a great deal about the very different depth and kinds of companionship it imposes (a companionship bound to the private and historical workings of death). Little by little, this thinking of writing will become the subject’s true site of recognition. Of course, this took place over and against the contradictory, past and passing, adherence to a community that subjugated all ideals to purity of blood, to the rules of order, to the great work of death—and of fear. But above all it was under the sign of infinite responsibility for the other (the wholly other) that “the acts of the day” and the “the pure (nocturnal) product of doing nothing” would henceforth, via “the twists and turns of a very long journey,” become manifest.8