A little over a year after having published The Last Man, Maurice Blanchot met Robert Antelme.1
Perhaps their paths had already crossed in the corridors at Gallimard, as had been the case with Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo. Probably Blanchot had already discussed the author of The Human Race with Louis-René des Forêts, whom he met in 1953 on the panels of various prizes, or with Georges Bataille, who was linked to the Rue Saint-Benoît group in 1955, with the formation of the Comité d’Action Contre la Poursuite de la Guerre en Afrique du Nord (Committee for Action against the Continuation of the War in North Africa). But the events of the spring and summer of 1958 took place before Blanchot met in person the man whose book he had read almost ten years previously.
He had read his work, liked it, been so impressed by it that he remained silent and wrote The Last Man before speaking to him. When they did finally meet, there was little risk: Their friendship was already certain.2
It was a strange encounter: a man possessed of a rare authority, one acquired through the grace, the strength, and the gentleness of a sovereign narrative; an authority that was not to be atoned for, and yet that had given him no renown. And another man, responsible for a past no longer spoken about, and recognized as the leading figure of French critical intelligence. Robert Antelme alone, probably, could disregard the writer’s status, reminding him of his responsibility and giving him his own grace, as if it shone through from one to the other. In any case, he did not need to do so (and would not have done so). When they met, this grace had already made its appearance.
This grace ruled out any possible reappearance of nihilism, freed up an infinite attentiveness to the other, gave back the possibility of public action and closeness to the community. It led Blanchot to what the word “Judaism,” from Strasbourg on, had meant for him (or perhaps it facilitated his access to this).3 It led to a careful vigilance.
As early as 1945, although he was saved only in June, Antelme wrote several articles taking positions on the war, on prisoners, on the concentration camps. In 1947 the first edition of The Human Race appeared, with a publishing house that he had founded. He joined the Communist Party in 1946, was excluded from it in 1950, and cofounded the Comité d’Action in 1955. During this time, despite the confirmation in his written work that he had changed course, despite his various displays of solidarity, despite the formation of a thinking capable of relating to real experience, Blanchot had not yet performed any public action nor adopted any position regarding contemporary affairs. The potential authority of his refusal was entirely theoretical. Only privately did he avow his disenchantment, his disgust, his feeling of being politically fragmented. Antelme, for his part, felt entitled to take a range of actions due to perhaps the most legitimate principle that history could produce: “Anything that resembles, even vaguely, what we saw there literally destroys us.”4 This was the case with Stalinism and with the war in Algeria, neither of which he could condone, and against which he was already rebelling.
The authority that a book such as The Writing of the Disaster would give Blanchot would only have meaning and possibility because they were given to him by Levinas and Antelme. And the authority that his new political refusals would give him would consist solely in the grace of having been by Antelme’s side, with a sense of duty and nobility similar to those this friend had already explored: “To the madness of vengeance, to secret abstention, to the cowardliness of those who were unharmed, we say: no.”5 Perhaps Blanchot only came across this sentence after meeting Antelme, whose few articles were little known at the time. But its meaning is everywhere in The Human Race, as well as in what Blanchot knew about its author from his friends. For Antelme was precisely the person who had been able to carry out this prodigious about-face: no longer leaving things at “secret abstentions, the cowardliness of those who were unharmed.” He alone could teach Blanchot how much he had become his own prisoner, prisoner of his past, of his judgments. In the same article, Antelme had written that the prisoner is “a sacred being because he is a being surrendered, who has lost any chance he once had.” Antelme was precisely he who brought deliverance, not removing the burden or providing salvation, but giving Blanchot the strength to carry it. After the interruption of thought, after writing The Last Man, the 14 Juillet project came at the right moment to force Blanchot to return to the contemporary. Without falling into the spectacle of public statements, he took seriously the responsibility of showing—initially to itself—how necessary his trenchant stance, his refusal, his presence was. Antelme’s authority echoed within Blanchot as a demand that was at once terrifying and pacifying: to act thus was the only way to relive the past totally.
Antelme therefore allowed another link to death, to dying, to be made (“humanity as a whole was called upon to die through the ordeal suffered by some of its members,” Blanchot would write).6 The fact that this new friendship was founded on this link, in a space that was foreign both to vengeance and forgiveness, via an immediate gift, is what gives it its grace. In Daniel Dobbels’s words,
This grace was weightless, it left no impression on whoever experienced it; it opened this “miraculously most neutral space” where differences of thought, of rhythm, of times recognize what they share that is unique, irreducible, held in common. This grace was the unshakeable awareness that a link exceeds or precedes all judgment, one so just that it was like the need or desire for justice that shines through all speech.7
Such is the grace that came down to Maurice Blanchot at this time, shining through speech.
This grace did not arrive thanks to any supernatural force, however. Blanchot had travelled a long way, as his récits show. This space of literature is the site of the recognition they gained. All of his friends bear witness to this: Maurice Nadeau said that Antelme was a “character of Blanchot’s,” and perhaps we can take this to mean not that Antelme could have featured in Blanchot’s fiction, but that Blanchot was the figure made possible by his own fiction. He was a character-version of Antelme in the sense that his fiction had created his persona. Effaced even in their first meeting, these characters produced two silent, accepting presences who were similarly convinced of the necessity of refusal and commitment (and a particular type of commitment). In this light, what Marguerite Duras said of Robert Antelme becomes a portrait of Blanchot too: “He did not speak and yet he spoke. He offered no advice, and yet nothing could be done without consulting him. He was intelligence itself and yet he hated the discourse of intelligence.” And this: “I am unable to name this: perhaps it is grace.”8
Robert Antelme’s role in the return of Blanchot’s narrative oeuvre to silence was probably not a small one. The Last Man, “their” most fully shared récit, was also almost the last. Awaiting Oblivion oscillates between being narrative and fragmentation. The encounter with the pure song of the sirens was abandoned. Nadeau even states that for Blanchot, Antelme always represented the refusal to write; he was the author of only one narrative. Michel Surya recalls this forcefully: “Because literature could not live up more than once to what he wanted it to say. The Human Race belongs to literature in a way that condemns literature. Which is to say that it is happy to leave literature to those who have nothing else.”9
And for his friend, it was as if Blanchot were the only writer, as Antelme said himself: “If I wrote something . . . it could only be something that resembled the récits of Maurice Blanchot.”10 Neither wrote any further; no more récits. For Blanchot, the misfortune of thought still had to be thought through, the interruption of speech still had to be written: ever-renewed loyalty had to be commented upon, in the movement of refusal and the presence of friendship.11