During the years when the “southern récits” were written, Blanchot’s critical activity decreased as a result of illness and what he described as his loss of interest in commentary. The origin of this disenchantment is itself the subject of fictional writing: the origin and the creation of the oeuvre, which weakens critical discourse by taking that discourse’s object for its own.
In quantitative terms, Blanchot rarely contributed to journals during this period. Only one article appeared in 1949; in 1950, no substantial critical text came out before October. Beginning that month, he published in four of the next five issues of Critique, with texts on Thomas Mann and Hölderlin (each opening its issue), and a double article on Malraux’s Le musée imaginaire. In spring 1951, the Cahiers de la Pléiade published “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” which would be appended to The Space of Literature. Then, again, there was nothing, at least not until March 1952.
Meanwhile, Blanchot had been contributing sporadically to the weekly paper L’Observateur Politique, Économique et Littéraire. Founded by Roger Stéphane in April 1950, this predecessor of the Nouvel Observateur was linked to Les Temps Modernes, where Stéphane, who had joined the journal in 1948, quickly took on an important editing role. Blanchot contributed seven articles between May and August, more or less regularly every other week: these were full-page literary columns, and alternated with pieces by Léon Pierre-Quint. The articles addressed Mann, Goethe, Lowry, Parain and the Russian nihilists, Cayrol, Hölderlin, and Adamov. This brief journalistic column would be Blanchot’s last.
The small number of texts published tells us nothing about the amount of original material published, however. The article on Thomas Mann that appeared in Critique in fall 1950 repeats the one from L’Observateur almost word for word (although it also added considerable material). The reflection on the image undertaken in various passages of the Malraux article prefigures “The Two Versions of the Imaginary.” But what may look like Blanchot cutting corners in fact indicates how insistent and firm his thinking was becoming. This is the period when the first major ideas appear, circulating from one text to another: the neuter (still in adjectival form), the outside, the “faceless someone,” “the absence of time.” These ideas are established within recurrent, deconstructed concepts and themes, pushed as far as they will go, to the limits of what paradox can make them signify, sometimes so much so that their everyday meaning gets lost: the image, the work, the Open (das Offene), the initial, solitude, silence. The critical texts do not so much offer commentary on the books they take for their object as lean on them in order to exceed the reflection carried out there, putting this excess toward a personal quest, toward the creation of the work. This can be seen particularly in two articles: one on Malraux, where Blanchot feigns a student /teacher relationship (“as Malraux says,” “as Malraux has taught us”) in order to underline the meaning and the authority of what he himself is trying to demonstrate (he concedes as much: “perhaps we are going a little further than Malraux’s formulations would allow”);1 and the Critique text on Hölderlin, presented in the journal as a review of Jaspers’s book on Strindberg and Van Gogh but that in fact moves away from the philosopher’s thinking to confront it with Hölderlin’s life and poetry.2 Blanchot is one of the few who can allow himself the luxury of deviating from the genre of the review, and later he would use this authority, notably in his pieces for the NNRF, to bypass the need to refer to recently published books (and indeed to do without Gaston Gallimard’s judgment—finding Blanchot’s articles austere and incomprehensible, he allegedly wanted to drop them as early as the first year of the relaunched journal).3
This period of infrequent criticism was when Blanchot constructed his own theory. By historically questioning the status of the modern work of art and by denying the sacred value of antiquity and the aestheticizing idealization of classicism, Blanchot opposed Malraux’s humanism with what had by then been his view for almost ten years: an art reduced to being “nothing but its passionate contestation,” “the refusal of the world and the affirmation of solitude,” divine dissimulation.4 In the same article, he calls into question the belief in the mimetic status of the image, a belief that he paints as narrow-minded and comforting. Beginning with a meditation on dead bodies, he moves toward another “version of the imaginary”: “One must wait for the cadaverous appearance, the idealization by death and the eternalization of the end for a being to take on the great beauty that is its own resemblance, the truth of itself in a reflection.” Blanchot adds that in portraits “the face is not there, it is absent, it appears only from the absence that is precisely resemblance, and this absence is also the form that time seizes upon when the world moves away and when there remains of it only this gap and this distance.”5
This was the end of 1950. The following spring saw the simultaneous publication of When the Time Comes—which opened with the captivating apparition of Judith’s face, steeped in the divine nature of its resemblance to itself and made absent by the projection of a gaze that sets it apart—and of the article in the Cahiers de la Pléiade in which Blanchot completes this theory of the image: “In the rare instances when a living person shows similitude with himself, he only seems to us more remote, closer to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself and like his own ghost already: he seems to return no longer having anything but a life in echo.”6
In this way, J.’s dying face, the deathly masks of Death Sentence, Anne’s abandoned body, Judith’s surprising, frightening face, the impersonal face of The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, all speak to the same experience of the image in question. This experience, having begun with the récits for which it provides an initial appearance (an inaugural or central scene, even if a disarticulated one, always needing to be caught up with and then moved beyond), is prolonged in the critical texts that offer a detour to the turn of the screw carried out by the fiction. The better-known, better-selling critical works would mask the récits. This redoubled masking would form the basis of much of the criticism leveled at Blanchot about his theoretical justification for hiding his own image. Above all, this criticism stems from a blindingly impoverished way of conceiving time, which, preferring linear time to the unfolding, complicated, cyclical time of the récit, deprives itself of its own absence, its own personal shadows, making abusive use of too much clarity.
This means surely that the imaginary museum, that of our time, has imposed itself upon the space of literature that attempted to open it up to itself. The article on the psychology of art ends by casting a decisive light on the contradiction Malraux falls into by limiting himself to a view of art based on consciousness and control, refusing to recognize that a child’s drawing or the narration of a dream can have aesthetic qualities. “This may be,” Blanchot comments, “but then one must give up the Museum,” for the Psychologie d’art also states that the Museum can rule de facto on the artistic value of an object. If the space of the work is imaginary, it is not because it allows one to “negate nothingness” and to construct a counterdestiny, but rather because “the image . . . is also the gaze of nothingness upon us.”7 According to Blanchot, the space of the imaginary is not one to which presence can be transferred with any guaranteed result, but instead one of deracination from presence, the courage of absence, prophecies without future, visions without object.
Not to be afraid of fear, to open up to “madness par excellence”: this is where Blanchot’s récits and commentaries come together. Perhaps because he had experienced it several times, a proof—if ever there were one—of his unshakeable confidence in life, Blanchot believes in the existence of Ariadne’s thread, of Orpheus’s incantations. Being lost is never a state entirely outside comprehension. It demands a “tense awareness.”8 Instead of the different theories on Hölderlin, which see the rupture of madness as essentially motivating his poetry, Blanchot prefers “the simplest words, those of the carpenter Zimmer”: “if he has gone crazy, it is from being so learned.” Because poetry preexists madness and continues to exist in it, Blanchot insists on “the continuity of Hölderlin’s destiny, the movement that raises him to an always-clearer consciousness.” He believes that these different fates are continuous with one another even before one or the other is present, and he believes that these personal movements are persistent, that they prune away any false modes of refusal, any illusory solitudes, since they are created by the grace of encounter, and in turn create true thinking. To some extent, they are his fate too. Encounters with the gods can have a sense only if they are proffered onward, if they offer “the tranquil light of community.”9 If thought turns to the community, it does so because it is so solitary.
Critical solitude, too, finds meaning in being shared. Blanchot does not let go of the question of community. He does not yet know when or how he will respond to the way literary experience tears him away from the present, a response that would come in the shape of more violent, insubordinate, and trenchant public intervention. He probably does not even know whether this event would come to pass. But he continues to refuse “illusory communities.” The challenge of the death camps to thought is taken up silently, discreetly, in a muffled way. In July 1950, Blanchot re-viewed Jean Cayrol’s book, Lazare parmi nous. The article in question, in L’Observateur, mainly praises the Russian nihilists, who had been among the first to undergo the humiliation of deportation. Blanchot had not yet thought through how exceptional Auschwitz was. For him, the pain of the camps stands in a general way for the previous century of history. “Who would dare to compare such equally extreme ordeals?” he writes.10 However, he would soon find himself thinking about what made them different. For it was probably during this year that he became aware of Robert Antelme’s book The Human Race, in a reissue by Robert Marin rarely mentioned today.