The meeting of Bataille and Blanchot would go on to be widely recognized, whether by friends, readers, those close to them, or their opponents, as the necessary encounter of two shared modes of thinking, of two lives put at stake through thought (and writing), of two experiences that engaged with all facets of being, including its uncertainties, its conversions, its unlimited openings. We can imagine that from the time they first saw and listened to one another, there was an immediate, almost instinctive sensation of recognition, with a slow-burning but intense effect; we can imagine how each paid attention to the quiet voice of the other, to the other’s fascinating, imposing, and mysterious presence, to his slow and precise way of speaking which was always searching for something, to the constant risks and the ability to grip any audience ready to share these risks, even if doing so meant moving toward death. It is no surprise that Blanchot puts it best when he writes of Bataille: “Here is the first gift that this true speech gave us: speaking is our fortune, our chance, and to speak is to go in search of chance, the chance of a relation ‘immediately’ without measure.” And regarding the two of them, he spoke of
a silent appeal to attentiveness so as to confront the risk of a speech spoken in common, also an accord with this reserve that alone allows one to say everything, and, finally, an allusion to a movement toward the unknown to which, almost immediately, two persons together who are bound by something essential are as though obliged to bear witness.1
Bataille would suggest the same thing regarding Blanchot: “he never failed to live up to the feeling of discretion that means that when I am with him I thirst for silence.”2 They would always refer to this complicit reserve, only shedding light on their friendship with great caution. While they would often see each other (almost daily, at the beginning), while they would write to each other a lot, while they would always pay great attention to the other’s health and life, this would remain hidden, withdrawn from the gaze of others. This pact—private, cherished, as if eternally cherished—is suggested by many expressions but notably by the following, written by Blanchot to Bataille (who was clearly exhausted): “Be sure that my thoughts are close to your own, in the common awaiting that it seems to me we have always shared, since we have known each other.”3
Each one embodied what was latent in the other, doing so as a secret, silent, and veiled tendency. Blanchot was something like Bataille’s passivity (his peaceable, withdrawn, reserved side), and Bataille something like Blanchot’s passion (his inner violence, his mental disorder). These asymmetrical crossings or bodily inversions (these bodies of the converted, likewise said to be “superior” or priestly, which were intimidating and absent in turn, these torn-apart bodies, these paradoxical bodies) were overlaid by certain mutable passions—for example, that for Denise Rollin—as in a Dostoevsky novel.
It was the end of 1940, “precisely at the end of that sinister year.”4 Pierre Prévost, who had been close to Bataille since 1937, introduced him to Maurice Blanchot.5
At the time Bataille was known, much discussed and argued over, but had not yet written many books. He was living through a particularly difficult period. He had lost Colette Peignot (Laure) in 1938, had undergone the violent breakup of the Collège de Sociologie and then the start of the war; all of this had provoked a frenetic aversion to satisfaction, causing him to write—a notable exception in his lifetime—a journal that was shockingly denuded (“a brothel is my true church, the only one unquenching enough,” he wrote on September 8, 1939).6 More than ever, eroticism imposed itself on him like a crucifixion. Whether this eroticism was “the edge of the abyss,” whether this edge was “the breaking point, where everything is let go, where death is anticipated,” or whether this abyss was “the ground of the possible,” this ecstasy-inducing wound had to convey its ardor to Blanchot’s own wound.7 These two strong yet sickly bodies were getting to know one another, two bodies able to draw immense energy from their weakness, able to exhaust themselves on the brink of asphyxia.8 Bataille recounted that, on October 16, 1939, a few months before they met,
I had to stop writing. I went over, as I often do, to sit in front of an open window. As soon as I sat down I fell into a sort of ecstasy. This time I no longer doubted . . . that such a state was more intense than erotic pleasure. I see nothing: that is neither visible nor palpable. That makes you sad and heavy-hearted at not dying. . . . What is there is wholly fitting to the experience of fright.9
Facing the sky, experienced in the neuter, this abyssal and solitary experience replays Blanchot’s “primal scene,” Thomas’s infinite metamorphosis. A few weeks previously, Bataille had written:
With sharpened serenity, before the black starry sky, before the hillside and the black trees, I have found what makes my heart into embers covered with ash, but burning within: the feeling of a presence that was irreducible to any and all notionality, this sort of thundering silence to which ecstasy leads us. I become an immense flight from myself, as if my life were running like slow rivers across the ink of the sky. At this moment I am no longer myself, but what has issued from me reaches and encloses in its embrace a limitless presence, itself similar to the loss of myself: what is no longer either me or the other, but a profound kiss in which the lips’ edges melt away, becomes linked to this ecstasy which is just as dark and just as non-foreign to the universe as the course of the earth across the sky’s abyss.10
The infinite improbability of birth gives way to the vertigo of atheological mysticism. Together, Bataille and Blanchot will enrich their critical readings of Christianity, mysticism, and also phenomenology, to which they had been introduced in different ways. One of the main axes of Le coupable sets the utilitarian God of Christian eschatology in opposition to Pascal’s or Kierkegaard’s God, in whom Bataille sooner sees an absence. In this point of NOTHING, of “the fear of NOTHING” resonating in an empty world, of “the fear reached only by the limitlessness of thought,” the two writers converge.11 They communicate thanks to a relation with death that reduces being to a horrifying Nothing. Bataille’s belief that communication between beings passes over an annihilating abyss, that the other is this very abyss, that in Christian terms this communication takes on the figure of sin or, in inverse form, that of the sacred, and that the subject’s experience (whether the lack at the heart of plenty or the evil lurking within laughter) is able to open out infinitely within this communication; all these are things that can only be attractive to Blanchot, he who is a reader of Heidegger, is close to Levinas, is the author of Thomas the Obscure. The opening onto Nothing—onto the figuration of the there is provided by this communication—secretly and almost innocently binds the two friends together via the intermediary of a third party, in a new form of grace. It must be said, we must go this far: for Blanchot, Bataille will be the other great friendship of his life (“he who was, with Emmanuel Levinas, my closest friend”)—and it is remarkable that this friendship should appear at the very moment when Levinas had just disappeared, having been taken prisoner by the German army, in whose captivity he would remain for the rest of the war.12 Things were similar for Bataille for whom Blanchot, together with, but differently to, Leiris or Masson, would be “the one who will accompany him beyond / life, himself without life, capable of free / friendship, detached from all ties.”13
While the experience of death knits together communitarian ecstasy,14 it seals the friendship of Bataille and Blanchot in a “piece of eternity too large for the eyes of men.”15 Both had lived through extreme experiences in relation to death: their own deaths, “primal scenes” so close to them, and the deaths of those close to them, which were also—albeit in a different way—their own. Living up to these deaths, placing or displacing in them the sovereignty of writing would be what was at stake in Death Sentence, and in Bataille’s recognition of it as one of the extreme works of literature.
We must also understand everything that had separated them up to that point, from the parts of the country they came from to their fathers and families, from their temperaments to their studies, from their more or less well-ordered, well-conceived, well-explored vocations to their political, aesthetic, or literary convictions. While they might have read some of the same authors (one thinks of Dostoevsky, Lautréamont, or Pascal, as well as of their mistrust of Surrealism), their approaches were divergent (for instance over Nietzsche or German philosophy in general). To use shorthand, the authors from Gide to Maurras that were important in the youth of one did not always have a major influence on that of the other. Although their desires for recognition were expressed, abandoned, challenged, and displaced in different ways, what was really at odds were the ways in which they participated in shared or collective enterprises—from the journalist to the activist, from the newspaper editor to the director of a luxury journal, from a withdrawal into solitude to the mysteries of a secret society. They even had different ways of being elegant. The possibility of this encounter and of “admiration and agreement” therefore forces us to ask what at this time Blanchot thought of eroticism and the sacred, two issues at the heart of Bataille’s thinking and life. Eroticism certainly did not have the charge or the frequency for Blanchot that it did for his friend, but its discreet presence could have its striking moments. As for the hypermoral and atheological positions adopted by Bataille (the opening of God to evil, to obscenity, to absence), at the end of 1940 Blanchot was ready to entertain them. By fall 1941 he was ready to read Madame Edwarda, to be “shocked into silence” by it, and to “suggest [to Bataille] that such an encounter was ample for [his] life, just as having written it must have been sufficient for [Bataille’s].”16 Perhaps it was even Blanchot who pushed furthest this divinization of eroticism according to his logic of absence, effacing all excesses of figuration from his fiction in order to comment on its incommunicability and its distance. Blanchot therefore presented at least this point of difference: Eroticism cannot have provided for him any momentary appeasement of solitude, of the pain inflicted by a knowledge of one’s limitations.
The differences between them were important, and often counted in Bataille’s favor: He was the more experienced, more diverse thinker who had already produced publications, he was politically lucid and inflexible and had become familiar with public confrontations through polemical exchanges with Breton, by editing journals and running the Collège de Sociologie. But the withdrawal, the uncertainty, the feeling of failure, the absolute lack that were Blanchot’s, exacting themselves in the extreme courtesy and infinite attentiveness to the other that they shared, also meant that Bataille shared in the joyous feeling that a book, a summa, an authority was necessary (and all the more necessary when lucidly critiqued). Once they had met, Bataille and Blanchot began to publish their works generously and regularly, and they knew the same absence of self, the same absence of books, the same destitution, the same lack of satisfaction. Bataille, too lacking in hope and too sovereign to act as a brother (even if he was the same age as Blanchot’s sister), but without being old enough or dominant enough to act as a father, offered Blanchot—at thirty-three years of age—a new model of friendship and community, outside the Judaic tutoiement, and outside the body of the nation. What forty years later Jean-Luc Nancy would name “the inoperative community” might have been born at this moment, in the absolute despair of that historical present, in the necessity of thinking a form of community beyond all finitude, beyond what can be communicated, beyond nothingness.17
With them, what came into being was perhaps a new chapter of history, of life, of the thinking of friendship. Of course, this was a friendship reserved for two people and kept at a distance even from others close to them; but it was not a friendship founded on any mourning to come, or any celebration, because in a sense these two living beings were already dead, dead to death, dead to one another. If “it is even through the possibility of loving the dead that a certain loving [aimance] comes to be decided,” then this incommensurability was the condition necessary in order to exist: the loved one was, or had to be, “soulless.”18 Blanchot would write that “in truth, it is as if man had at his disposal a capacity to die that far surpasses what is necessary for him to enter into death.” This difference in capacity and energy, which draws on dying as a process, was made available to and expended for the friend. There could therefore be no completion of mourning, no funeral oration. The postmortem homage (which it would fall to Blanchot to give) would be anything but a living invocation of the dead man; instead it would attest to the presence near death of the still-living partner. In other words, this was the presence of a person dead and alive, alive and dead—in speech, at the edges of speech, on the cusp of silence. Friendship was no longer the path to wisdom, but the site of nonknowledge.
Friendship? “Friendship begins prior to friendship,” Derrida would write.19 We must try to deconstruct this movement in light of the supposed first encounter between Bataille and Blanchot, when each was able to love the other for the share of death within him, the share, in the gaze or beyond the gaze, of someone who had seen death (Laure, the death sentence), who had discovered what an inalienable gift it presents, who had known “the disaster . . . without which there is no friendship, the disaster at the heart of friendship.”20 Both knew Aristotle’s phrase “O my friends, there is no friend,” both knew that there are no friends because death, the impossible, prevents it. But they also knew that all possible friendship, at the limit of the possible, transcends friendship, just as all possible literature is beyond literature. “Friendship: friendship for the unknown without friends,” Blanchot would say.21 This was an immediate friendship for what was unknown in the other, for the part of the other that is invisible to all, visible to no other friend, but known by this new friend, this friend beyond friends. This was a friendship for the other’s dying, for the other’s writing, and it provided the ability to replace the other, to give oneself to the other; it is the salvation, relief, accompaniment of thought. This marginal friendship also gave rise to a political affirmation. Over and against those who think of death as a founding event in the community, the death of each person created within each person the community of those who have no community, a community beyond all community.
This was a community in search of itself: it put itself to work, and to the test, with one or two groups of Bataille and Blanchot’s friends.
Bataille, Prévost, and the contestatory group from Jeune France (Blanchot, Lignac, Petitot, sometimes Ollivier) met regularly at first in a small restaurant in the Rue de Ponthieu, or in the offices on the Rue Jean-Mermoz. Then, from fall 1941 to March 1943, the meetings took place in the apartment of Bataille’s partner Denise Rollin at 3 Rue de Lille, once or twice a month (except for an interruption of several months in 1942). A second group also formed, containing Queneau, Leiris, Fardoulis-Lagrange, and perhaps also Limbour. Bataille and Blanchot were the only two to be part of both groups . . . except for Denise Rollin, whom Blanchot met at this time and who was a silent figure, even more silent than he was.22 “This woman, of enigmatic appearance, did not speak, barely responded to being greeted, disliked people smiling at her child, and listened mutely to our long conversations,” Prévost would write.23 Blanchot’s silence weighed on the debates, a “silence that in theory meant his perception was enhanced, but which in reality was sometimes interrupted to allow him to support Bataille’s choices,” Fardoulis-Lagrange would say.24 However, Bataille and Blanchot were almost the only ones who spoke, without any hierarchy between them, even if beyond the frequent coincidences in their thinking Blanchot had several “ways of withdrawing” (in Louis Olliver’s words) when he thought that Bataille was overdramatizing.
Bataille would read aloud and provide commentary on Inner Experience, which he was writing at the time. These meetings were important for him, especially so due to Blanchot’s involvement. He would leave traces of this in his work, both in the book published in 1943 and elsewhere too. The heart of “inner experience” is attributed to a phrase uttered by Blanchot: Bataille attributes to it nothing less than “the Galilean significance of a reversal in the exercise of thought,” capable of “replacing at once the Church tradition and philosophy.” This historic phrase is only a few words long: “inner experience itself is authority (but all authority is expiated).” Bataille receives these words as a shock: They neutralize the anguish into which he has been plunged by “inner experience” lived as a “voyage to the end of the possible,” without the security of an external authority, be it religious, mystical, philosophical, or literary. “This response immediately calmed me, barely leaving me (like a scar slowly closing over a wound) any residue of anguish.” It allows all knowledge to be refused and contested (“the principle of contestation is one that Blanchot insists on, as if on a foundation”). Bataille thus places under Blanchot’s authority the experience that he has felt for such a long time: that of the impossible lying beyond authorities in history, mysticism (Eckhart, Angelo di Foligno), philosophy (Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche), or literature (Proust). Thomas the Obscure, which he quotes twice, seems to him to be the only other book “where the questions of the new theology, even if they remain hidden within it, are truly insistent.”25
We can only be struck by the way what is most proper to Bataille is constantly, exclusively and glorifyingly attributed to Blanchot. Perhaps he sees him first of all as a literary authority (he would often quote Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab); perhaps also as an authority of experience (of the encounter with death, in which Blanchot had advanced “more nakedly,” “to the ends of the possible”); or perhaps it is even a case of stating that this excess can only be recognized together, in a community founded on the element of friendship that cannot be experienced, namely the effacement and explosion of the individual as he sinks into the difficulty of dying.26 This brings with it a complicit and almost anonymous dramatization; Blanchot will later admit to Dionys Mascolo that “I have always thought that it was ‘dramatic’ for Inner Experience to evoke in this unprepared and unjustified way these unwritten thoughts, suddenly transcribing them, thoughts that despite the name given remain incognito.”27
After all, the “revelation” of these principles had already been put forth in Bataille’s texts.28 The instant calm that he felt can also be read as an obscure feeling of triumph (the unconscious return and confirmation of a previous finding) and of recognition (in which a community of thought was acknowledged). Throughout all the years to come, it will often seem that not a single lexical choice, not a single movement of thought by one of these two figures would take place without the vigilance and friendship of the other. It goes far beyond any simple influence. And perhaps even beyond any real presence, too. Blanchot’s presence is clear in Bataille’s statements on the impersonal (language as if borrowed), on death (as if a natural leaning), in the intensified paradoxes (even for key statements), in the sparseness of his articles (especially on literature), in the impossible tendency toward systematization (even if this was a systematization attempted via fragmentary jolts).29 Bataille’s presence can be seen in the sparseness of Blanchot’s récits (we know how struck Blanchot was by Madame Edwarda, “only a few pages,” a “unique work, beyond all literature,” a “sort of absolute”), in the growing insistency of the fragmentary (even and especially after Bataille’s death), in the radicalized encounter with the excess (the nudity) of experience, in the formulation of dialectical thinking (from the “dialectic of forms” in Documents, which was so strongly linked to the obscure powers of seduction, and from Kojevian negativity, to Blanchot’s discourses on art, on “literature and the right to death,” or on poetry as an “image of language”).30 These presences do not prevent the thinking of each man from retaining its singular nature, and indeed probably allow them to become more pronounced and dramaturgical (in their excess, in their paradoxes), but which, between the two oeuvres, set obstacles in the way of any possible speech. Bataille and Blanchot would each write several articles on the other; but Blanchot would not contribute to the 1958 issue of La Ciguë that paid homage to Bataille, and Bataille abandoned the project of a book on Blanchot that he had often imagined.31 Their writing would only truly meet up in death: the ultimate, ecstatic desire of the dying man to “be present at the death of thought” extends an invitation that would be taken up by The Step Not Beyond, the first fragmentary book and one produced as if from beyond the grave: “Death, thought, so close to one another that thinking, we die, even if in dying we excuse ourselves from thinking: every thought would be mortal; every thought, the last thought.”32
Just as Levinas’s presence marks the oeuvre from the outset and as it is written continues to insist and bear upon it with the demands of the other, of infinite tutoiement, and of a first, strangely inassimilable man named Thomas (a memory of unavowable mistakes); so that of Bataille will demarcate the itinerary followed, providing its access to nakedness, opening out its language, hobbling its stride, being as it is the permanent presence of the end, of the last man. We must note that once Bataille had died, Blanchot never published another récit (at least no récit in the exacerbated form of a language infinitely extended).
Toward the end of 1942, probably on his return from Panilleuse in the Eure départment in Normandy where he had written Le Mort, Bataille drew up the project for a ‘Socratic college.’ This was a way of formalizing the meetings that had already been taking place “for some months now.” Torn between the awareness of incommunicability and the desire to communicate, Bataille was attempting to truly lay bare the life of the mind. He did so without thinking of any publication or propaganda, even as he planned a series of presentations aimed at making speech less flighty and less open to chance.
I suggest that we draw up a body of scholastic data concerning inner experience. . . . Only thoughts reduced to a clear format—the one most bare of poetic artifice—can truly engage with consciousness and link experiences that would previously have been called mystical to the unveiling of their inner workings. These thoughts cannot be the work of a single person but must result from a joint effort linked to the sharing of profound experience, and at the same time to its stimulation.33
Bataille left Paris for Vézélay at the end of March 1943. The Collège Socratique had not come to fruition. “The last gasp of a communitarian experience incapable of being realized,” it “could only fail,” Blanchot would write (he seems to have taken his leave several times himself).34 However, we must point out what the encounter between Bataille and Blanchot would lead to in the community of thinkers and writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Their excessive advances into the experience of the impossible, into the thinking of the unthinkable; the question of whether it can be transmitted via the radical contestation of language; the power of literature, a literature “beyond all literature” to “name the ineffable—and the unspeakable—and, in naming them, to reach what is most out of reach”: “this spectral swarming that is proper to it, which is its life in hell or rather the life of death within it”;35 all of these hitherto unexplored avenues would open up possibilities for thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze and would be heard echoing through the poetry of Char and Michaux.