Blanchot was still present in Paris on March 5, 1944, when the famous “Discussion on Sin” took place in Marcel Moré’s luxurious apartment on the banks of the Seine, gathering around Bataille figures such as Adamov, Camus, Gandillac, Leiris, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Paulhan, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, various Jesuit fathers including the future cardinal Daniélou, and Klossowski—then a seminarist—in his cassock.1
Many were leaving Paris in this period: a very ill Bataille left in April for Samois, near Fontainebleau, and at the end of the month, Prévost was sent to Morocco (he recalls a final lunch with Blanchot and Lignac).2 In May, Paulhan went underground, having been denounced by Élise Jouhandeau, and the same month, Blanchot left for Quain. He would spend a long summer there, only returning to Neuilly at the end of November, once France had been liberated.
For Quain and the surrounding region, it was a tragic summer. The German army intervened on several occasions; half the houses in Devrouze were burned down; ten men were shot dead. A memorial at a small crossroads in the hamlet, almost facing Blanchot’s house, is a reminder of how intense the fighting was, notably in August, when half a dozen were killed in three weeks.
As we knew without really knowing it (Nadeau and Prévost had reported more or less laconic revelations, and The Madness of the Day alludes to it), as we have known (almost) openly since 1994, since he recounted the event himself; Blanchot was almost executed in Quain in June 1944.3 Perhaps it happened on June 29, the date of the only fighting with the German army in June; perhaps it happened a few days earlier, for on June 29 the Journal des Débats published an astonishing article named “On the Different Ways of Dying.”4 “Death has the effect of changing us into pure objects. A man we are looking at is already partly abandoned by life. For a moment, he is the prisoner of the eyes that capture him.” Death definitively hands us over to others, “we exist only through our relation to others,” Blanchot writes in the wake of Sartre, whom he cites: “Death is the triumph over us of others’ point of view: it transforms life into destiny.”
We can reconstruct the narrative of what happened from a letter to Prévost of November 30, as well as from statements by Roger Laporte and Dionys Mascolo, to whom Blanchot told the story.5
One day in June, then, in the context of other reprisals, a German officer comes to the Château accompanied by at least a dozen soldiers.6 He claims that Blanchot has been writing for underground newspapers, shoves him, puts him up against the wall, with the soldiers brandishing their machine guns at him, while he has the house searched. He is probably the person who seizes several manuscripts (perhaps a first version of Death Sentence). Down below, who exactly is lined up alongside Blanchot, facing the firing squad? There are two divergent versions of the tale. The published récit mentions his aunt, his mother, his sister, and his sister-in-law; the letter to Prévost states that one of his brothers was there (probably René). Meanwhile, due to a diversionary intervention by members of the Resistance, the officer is called to the front line, which is reasonably far away, outside the village. At this point the soldiers reveal their identity: They are Russian and belong to the Vlasov Division, which is fighting for the Reich. They are satisfied with their plunder of cash and valuable objects and, clearly happy and willing to be merciful, they spare the lives of Blanchot and his brother, who, according to the letter to Prévost, hurry into the woods they have known since childhood in order to avoid the returning German officer. Perhaps instead Blanchot simply takes his chance when the soldiers’ attention is diverted, slipping away from the corner of the wall, discreetly escaping: “I made myself absent”, he told Mascolo. All around, farms are burning; the Château is spared thanks to its noble appearance. Thus by chance, by pure improbability, Blanchot finds himself at liberty and escapes death. He will not be a target in August’s actions. In the mean time, in July, Malraux will live through a similar episode.7 We might well think that the author of L’espoir is quoted at the end of The Instant of My Death in the name of this shared relation to (mis) fortune.
The event sweeps over the author and his family like an explosion. It is not death’s first appearance in Blanchot’s life, nor probably its most spectacular one, nor the one that marked him the most. It is probably because this is “the encounter of death with death” that it matters.8 For this is certainly death’s most historical, surprising, accidental, instantaneous appearance. Is it this, is it this eternal return of death that Bataille comments on almost immediately, at the beginning of Sur Nietzsche? Nothing could be less certain.9 We can however at least imagine how fascinated Bataille must have been by Blanchot undergoing such an episode, such anguish-inducing happenstance, revealing how precarious the subject is and granting it to lawless chance:
The return strips all motivation from the instant, frees life of any goal and in this way above all others, ruins it. The return is the dramatic mode and the mask of the entire man: it is the desert of a man for whom henceforth each instant is without motivation.
Fifty years later, Blanchot would write that after the shouting, brutality, robbery, destruction, and death, “all that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance.”10
A nomad wandering from demourance to demourance, Blanchot perhaps then discovers, violently and through writing, that it is impossible to die.11 He says as much in The Madness of the Day: “At that point I stopped being insane.”12
Commenting the following year on The Hunter Gracchus, the very person who had been chased into the forest, chased out of both life and death, would write the following: “We do not die, that is the truth, but it means that we do not live either; we are dead while we are alive, we are essentially survivors.”13 Writing remains: “writing in order to be able to die,” writing to reach the level of one’s own death and, as Kafka says, writing to “be able to die happy.” Writing the second version of Thomas the Obscure, The Most High, and Death Sentence, all in just three years, represented so many renewed engagements with death. In this way death is placed centrally once more, and stared in the face: literature is the right to death. This would also lead to Lautréamont and Sade, to Maldoror with his head beneath the blade of the guillotine three times, to “the definitive impossibility of having done with it.” In 1949, as if he were relieved, Blanchot is able to write in The Madness of the Day: “That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure.” Death can become levity. Life can become tranquil hedonism: “I am happy about what has been, I am pleased by what is, and what is to come suits me well enough.”14 As a subject all the happier for being rendered absent, he reaches “the stability—the positivity—of the world posited before all theses, a rest behind all agitation and all desire and which bears, encompasses, or comprehends all absurdity.”15 This incredible reserve is Blanchot’s strength. It allows others to relate to themselves without him—or through him. It does not work like any divine force, though it does have the effect of grace. It allows for his uneasy friendship, which is endlessly careful, attentive, and so much in solidarity that it suffers on others’ behalf. There is no “I” to be well, “I” exists alongside others and from that moment enters into the suffering of the world. Constantly forgotten in the name of the other, his being-himself never risks becoming contentment. Suffering for the other and with the other gives him a feeling of invulnerability. It seems to rise to the level of every avowal. Everything is ready for a face-to-face confrontation with the Law; everything is ready for another encounter to come about: that of Robert Antelme.
Everything is indeed ready, up to and including sheer historical fortune. Blanchot is saved by Soviet soldiers, having spent years denouncing their homeland as the main danger, albeit one hidden behind Germany. He is saved from the firing squad at the final moment, just as Dostoevsky—to whom he was so close—had been by the Emperor’s mercy; he is perhaps saved thanks to his aristocratic bearing, similarly to the unjust favoritism given in Tolstoy to prince Andrew, who is treated before the other wounded men;16 he is perhaps saved because of his writer’s aristocracy (according to another version of the story, he was told to make himself scarce after being asked his profession); he, the future friend of Robert Antelme, is already the Russian who smokes the last cigarette of The Human Race in an act of calming companionship. All that remains for him to do, in the intensity of silent communication, is to invent the type of approach, the type of listening that are those of friendship and that consist, before speech or chatter, in this murmuring of language at the origin of writing, and that consists in marrying the other in her language. This is how the narrator of Death Sentence will put it, as he communicates with N., his Slavic friend, through inebriation, irresponsibility, and lightness regained.17