Denise Lefroi, who on marriage took the name Rollin-Roth-Le Gentil, was born the same year as Maurice Blanchot. She met him at the end of 1941 through Georges Bataille, with whom she had been having a tumultuous affair for several years. She took part, in her strange, silent way, in the meetings on “inner experience” that saw Bataille’s friends gather in his apartment. After an initial period spent in Vézélay, she and Bataille separated in fall 1943. She grew close to Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, then to Blanchot.
Her relationship with Blanchot began around 1945 (at the earliest at the end of 1944, at the latest in spring 1946). It hardly had time to flourish: from the end of 1945, Blanchot most often remained in the south, and we have been told that Denise Rollin never went there.1 She herself left Paris for the Alps in the 1950s for the health of her then-adolescent son Jean. We can wonder whether two beings with such solitary temperaments ever had a chance of living together some day. Writing was Blanchot’s priority, and Jean occupied the entire attention of his mother, who was extremely possessive of him. Neither wished to live as a trio, but they may have discussed the possibility of marriage and children, despite everything. But probably this was even less likely than it was for Kafka (which also means that the discussions must have been even more lively). We can see what would concern Blanchot, notably in The Space of Literature, about the impossible link between passion and writing as it is suggested in Kafka’s Diaries and correspondence.
They seem to have exchanged a considerable number of letters; both were often to be found writing, in any case. Denise Rollin’s letters to Francine and Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange bear witness to their author’s striking personality and to her passion for Maurice Blanchot. Their strong, hot-tempered style, their barely punctuated phrasing, their impulsive immediacy, all give a voice to the mixture of tenderness and violence which made up Denise Rollin’s character, extremely tender in its attentiveness to the other, and extremely violent against everything that lay in the path of this responsibility.2
We can imagine their first meeting, how an invisible weight struck two such quiet creatures, who each reserved a similarly large and creative role in their lives for silence.3 Like Fardoulis and like Bataille, perhaps even more than them, Blanchot was struck by the reserved nature of this melancholically and taciturnly beautiful woman. Like Fardoulis and like Bataille, and even more than them (such is the law of community), Denise Rollin appreciated everything that was unsaid when this man was speaking. We can imagine another, later meeting, more secret than the first, similar to certain scenes in Death Sentence, and thus perhaps also similar to the one Bataille had experienced a few years previously, which he describes as follows:
Denise came into my room with the blind gentleness of destiny. One day, the woman whose existence touched me the most but whom I had no reason to meet was sitting in front of my table, forgetful of my presence as if we had been used to living with one another for a long time.
A month ago she came into my room, and no other woman would have been so silent, so beautiful, so silently inviolable as to come in: at least not without me suffering like a shining mirror that wished to be dulled.
He had no choice but to love “this heavy purity of Denise who was more beautiful than I could have dreamed,” “until I felt this malaise of the heart that gives one the chills of death.”4
Bataille would eventually tire of this increasingly capricious sovereignty. Denise Rollin would end up despising his exhibitionist, talkative intellectualism. She detested conversations that moved away from the nakedness of experience. “I do not and do not wish to understand anything about literary discussions,” she wrote in 1947, adding: “I find all ‘ideas’ unpleasant, only love counts.” She would always place the falsity of literature in opposition to the authenticity of “written notes,” which were “as beautiful as a storm.” She read books as if they were letters. On this point, her contestation of language was even more radical than those of Bataille or Blanchot. She only valued the “written notes” of Proust, Sade, or Kierkegaard, as well as Dostoevsky, of course.
It does not matter that Sade is known as an erotic writer, that Kierkegaard tried to find proof of God’s existence, these are only words and definitions, only the sensation of truth is important and exists, and it is perfectly incomprehensible to me.
This uncompromising purity, which she maintained up to her death, was in Denise Rollin’s eyes what Bataille would debase with betrayals of the body and of language. It is what Blanchot would represent, what he would align himself with.
Passion can only be reached in the void; in this void; in the absence of all shapes, in this absence which is ultimately absolute presence, a gaze that is unique and blind to external things, this absence of language and shapes, where no images remain, where ultimately everything is overtaken, erased, the void as the presence of Being through which passion has found a way to reach itself.
These lines written by Denise Rollin recall Blanchot’s article on Benjamin Constant for L’Arche of October 1946 (this was at the beginning of their relationship).5 It is rare to find in his critical work such lyrical pages on passion and on the paradox of a desire “which takes as its object its constitutive lack.” Blanchot sets this way of experiencing desire, that of Constant, in opposition to that of Proust:
Proust does not desire this absence as the motive of all communication, in the way that Constant does: he does not desire it at all, but it is absence that makes someone desirable to him, while making him suffer from not being able to attain it.6
We can imagine Blanchot to be closer to Constant here, in this radicality of the desire for absence. Let us at least imagine that a movement in him carries him toward this unbearable demand, which made absence, according to Denise Rollin, an “absolute presence,” or according to Bataille, “a heavy purity.” Blanchot writes:
We communicate fully with someone only by possessing not what they are but what separates us from them, their absence rather than their presence and, even better, the infinite movement to surpass this absence and cause it to be reborn.7
This frightening death sentence which was projected onto every relation of desire fascinated them, both him and her, although perhaps less repetitively or obsessively than it did Bataille. “Everything that is not a question of life and death must be forgotten, I can only experience things that are absolute,” Denise Rollin wrote in a letter. And this was a radical absolute: “my absolute is to be alone.”
Thus we can understand the paradox of a relationship that could not find completion. “I have been saying no to Maurice Blanchot for 14 years now, and yet he is the being who was ‘destined’ for me,” Denise Rollin wrote at the end of the 1950s. We must add that Blanchot just as much said no to her, and while there is no evidence that she was just as much destined for him, it is not unthinkable. In truth, this refusal was a singular way of affirming, creating, continuous creation. Blanchot would continue in this relationship during his Mediterranean sojourn and his creation of novels. The presence of Denise Rollin is palpable throughout Death Sentence and Blanchot would say that he wrote When the Time Comes for her. On her side, she too would live through letters and books, through books read as if they were letters, not under the illusions of hope or knowledge, but in the solitary passion of an inner gaze, of a way of overestimating “written notes,” sometimes incorporating them and sometimes managing not to. “Sometimes reading is like living together looking at the Other’s writing like looking at him, living with him having never left him, a fact beyond facts.” This “community of lovers” was already impossible and unavowable.
Denise Rollin came to name the absence she loved in Maurice Blanchot idiocy. No character more resembled Blanchot, she said again and again in her letters, than Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin.8 Indeed, the moral and physical portrait painted of the prince brings to mind numerous remarkable similarities to Blanchot. Attentive to the demands of all, so much so that he uncovers their most secret desires and suffering, Myshkin imposes with gentle authority the grace of often silent lucidity, which loosens its tongue only out of generosity or when carried away. It has often been said of Blanchot that his reserve of personal knowledge, this innocence that could also be a mode of address, gave rise to a mode of friendship that was never totally private and never totally public. What’s more, that Myshkin should have been initially conceived as a headstrong insurgent, a future Stavrogin, and that in the writing of the novel he should have become the opposite, is not without recalling part of Blanchot’s development; thus the figure of the gift becomes ethically and esthetically necessary. Something like salvation comes about, and this grace was, as we have seen, the fruit of a long itinerary, as can only be confirmed by “the instant of my death.” Indeed, Myshkin is precisely the one who brutally narrates the story of the man condemned to death who is pardoned at the final moment, which was also the story of Dostoevsky and of Blanchot. Ultimately, the single prince declares that he is unable to marry due to his illness: he spends several years in a sanatorium. But he likes women, asks the most beautiful ones in the novel to marry him, fails in each case and yet tries to love both of them, together, somehow already dreaming of a community of lovers. This anti-Catholic ecce homo presents its hero as a unique or first man, but fails in its attempts at salvation: such is the nobility of its “idiocy,” in a world clearly living through a “time of distress.” Such is the sovereign simplicity of generosity.
Denise Rollin wrote that “for me no ‘grandeur’ exists unless it is accompanied by great ‘humility.’ ” “M.B. is the ‘humblest’ being I know, he strongly resembles the prince in Dostoevsky’s Idiot (which is to say that he resembles what has been translated as the ‘idiot’) he is utterly unaware of what he is.” She eroticized this lack of awareness, this absence to himself, which she perceived in his very presence, in his correspondence, and ultimately in the universe of his novels. This absence, this capacity for effacement or for being no one was what she found so fulfilling. She idealized this ability to “carry the suffering of the world within him,” to be “the only being who helps you without asking for reciprocation, perhaps because he really has managed to become no one.” The events of the end of the war had taken him to such a point, and brought him closer avant la lettre to Robert Antelme’s infinite attentiveness to the other; Denise Rollin attributed this experience to that of a God, a God who has experienced death.9 She idealized him because she wanted to move closer to him, and she sometimes stated as much with unthinking strength and beauty: “I can be as if I were no one”; “I can feel the life of another as if my own life were dead”; “putting oneself in the other’s place does not mean seeing the other as an object, but being the other.” “If I knew how to write I would say things with ‘I’ because in truth I think without ‘I.’ There is no ‘I’ because there is ‘you.’ ” She idealized him because she would have liked to write him, to write without being aware of doing it, avowing that she did not know she was doing it, she continued to write to him as the invisible partner of her relationship. She idealized him, and she told him, she told them, she told everyone, moving from one ideal to another, that he was only a child, that his way of being absent was that of a child; this allowed her once more to displace this absence and to make it present. “For me a being’s superiority is determined by what he retains of his childhood. . . . All Dostoevsky’s characters are children, their childhood is intact in them.”
For Denise Rollin, Blanchot’s absence was that of Prince Myshkin, that of strangeness and silence, from which he emerged in moments of grace that, without ever giving warning, illuminated and possessed one.10
Come forward sun, toward me, who am most solitary of all. You have come. We have been friends since the beginning: we share sorrow, fright, and reason-unreason; we even share the sun. We do not speak to one another because we are too knowledgeable: we remain silent, we smile to one another, and thus knowledge is passed between us . . . The boundless, endless Yes is shared between us.
Blanchot translated these lines and sent them to Denise Rollin.11