And so Blanchot experienced the political events of 1958 in Paris.
Dionys Mascolo and Jean Schuster responded to the generals’ insurrection in Algiers on May 13, and to the Fourth Republic’s call of distress to De Gaulle, with a manifesto that was made public on May 17 and that took note of the demystification underway: “nothing equivocal remains about De Gaulle.” It called for the people to act, for a general strike, for the formation of committees to fight against fascism. Such were the preludes for the project named Le 14 Juillet that took shape in the following weeks.1
The friends of the Rue Saint-Benoît group, which met in the apartment Marguerite Duras had been living in since the war, and centered on her, Dionys Mascolo, and Robert Antelme, would play a major role in Blanchot’s political undertakings from 1958 onward. These included Edgar Morin, Maurice Nadeau, Claude Roy, and Elio and Ginetta Vittorini, as well as Monique Régnier, Robert Antelme’s partner. At the end of the war or shortly after, some belonged to the communist party and were expelled from it because they were anti-Stalinist (or anticonformist, the freedom of their lifestyle having a bad reputation in the Communist Party). “The place where we live together is a place permanently open to friends, a glass house, like the one Breton dreamed of,” in Mascolo’s words. Through community links, the feeling of responding to the same demand—a refusal not infatuated by communist or existentialist post-war ideas of treason—Breton brought the surrealist group closer to the group in the Rue Saint-Benoît in the 1950s. This was the moment of the first postcommunist militant stirrings, notably the Committee of 1955, which also included Bataille and Des Forêts. What Mascolo would name “communism of thought” and with Hölderlin was “the life of the mind [esprit] between friends,” was indeed already at work in this communist-leaning communal space: “for our part, we were already living as if after the revolution, and in a sense we had got a head start over it.”2
With De Gaulle taking power, the group stayed together after the disbanding of the 1955 Committee against the Continuation of the war in North Africa (meanwhile, the Committee of Revolutionary Intellectuals had failed). In May Mascolo and Schuster, from the Surrealist group, decided to found Le 14 Juillet. The journal’s title, as well as those of the first editorial and of Mascolo’s first text, indicate clearly enough what type of engagement this was: it proposed a faithfulness to the revolution, a return to the resistance which had been hijacked by Gaullists and Stalinists, an unconditional refusal of providential power. Fear of fascism, hatred of personal power, refusal of the “supreme savior,” insurrection against the Petainism threatening the French people: all of these motivated Mascolo and Schuster to call for new links to be created between intellectuals and the working class in order to prepare for “the revolutionary task.” For this first edition, published on July 14 itself, they gathered together no fewer than nineteen texts, including pieces by Antelme, Breton, Duras, Duvignaud, Des Forêts, Lefort, Morin, Nadeau, Parain, Péret, Pouillon, and Vittorini.
On his return to political events, Blanchot would later write that:
There is, finally, for the person whose vocation is to remain in retreat, far from the world (in that place where speech is the guardian of silence), the pressing necessity to expose himself to the “risks of public life” by discovering a responsibility for someone who, apparently, means nothing to him, and by joining in the shouting and the clamor, when, on behalf of that which is closest, he has to give up the sole demand that is properly his own: that of the unknown, of strangeness and of distance.3
The word “finally” signals both that he had been released from a longstanding stance, and that his thinking was now open to the future. It is a fact: Blanchot’s critical writing had been growing more and more political since the Liberation, although without specific outlets (without reproducing a borrowed, more or less appropriate rhetoric). In doing so, it reflected on itself, on its own origin and possibility. He now gave himself to this other vocation, but did so in the name of the demand that he only renounced in order to accomplish; this other vocation, other appeal or other voice was that of “shouting and clamor,” was carried out in the name of an Other that escaped comprehension as soon as it was identified, in the name of the anonymous and the rumble of its presence.
The first “other” in whose name Blanchot “opened up” had a name: Dionys Mascolo. Mascolo has stated how dazzled he was, a few days after the first issue of Le 14 Juillet appeared, to receive the following short note from Blanchot: “I want you to know that I am in agreement with you. I accept neither the past nor the present.”4 He perhaps did not suspect how far these few words also concerned the past and the present of the person who had written them. Mascolo would later annotate the letter with the words “great joy”; this was an overwhelmingly positive piece of news, “more than if a whole crowd had joined the movement.”5 This great joy also speaks volumes about what Blanchot’s status as an intellectual must have been in 1958; but it responded to another sense of astonishment, which was no less striking. Blanchot would speak of it later in almost mystical terms: “It was political responsibility and exigency that somehow made me return and turn toward Dionys, who, I was certain of it (or felt it), would be my recourse. In receiving Le 14 Juillet, I hear its call and respond to it with resolute agreement.”6 Having recourse in this way to Mascolo, a go-between who became a friend, was all the more significant because it gave him access to Robert Antelme, whom Blanchot now met; and it brought him closer again to Emmanuel Levinas who now saw him as totally “judaized.”7
Blanchot was astonished for other reasons too. A few years earlier, he had written in detail on Mascolo’s book on communism, which accorded with his own political as well as philosophical and literary concerns. He even risked concluding that “one must go further than he does along the path set out by his thinking.”8 He knew of Mascolo’s interest in Marx, but also in Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and what linked them even more was their thinking of what linked these figures. In July 1958, the similarities or convergences of his thought with those of Mascolo, Antelme, or Des Forêts could not have failed to strike him when he read their articles.9 His attentiveness to Des Forêts’s writing, with his denunciation of the nihilist and tendentious political rhetoric that abused language and betrayed thought; the interruption of reason announced by Antelme, who even with his principles being radically put to the test “says that everything is always possible but that today nothing is possible”; his appreciation of the silence heard in the cries of the May 28 demonstration (“just and fraternal, not aggressive, not cruel, aware”); all of these culminated in “Unconditional Refusal,” the title of Mascolo’s article which Blanchot would adopt for his own in the journal’s second issue. Omitting the adjective, he named it “Le Refusal”—the unconditional or absolute nature of this concept is nonetheless clear thanks to the definite article and the first lines of the text.10 The twin nature of these titles indicates well enough how Blanchot saw his return to politics. This was a return in the sense of the politics being drawn up at the time by Robert Antelme, in a tone that was at once Hegelian, post-Hegelian, and marked by the thinking of The Human Race: “The story of each individual is written by his limitless need for recognition; friendship designates this infinite capacity for recognition.” The demand for the independence of Algeria was made in the name of his principle.
Blanchot was not content with demonstrating that he was in agreement. A few days after his first letter, he wrote a second one, accompanied by “Refusal”—for publication. Stripped of three short sentences, the letter itself was also published as an introduction to the text. Mascolo, who must have again been “dazzled,” telephoned Blanchot. They met, drew up shared plans, wrote to one another. Blanchot joined the group in the Rue Saint-Benoît; soon he would be helping to edit the journal.
“Refusal” was the first text after the editorial of the second issue, which appeared on October 25, a month after a “special communication” that, following a remarkable line of reasoning, declared “De Gaulle’s government illegal and Charles de Gaulle an intruder,” as well as refusing in advance to recognize the results of a referendum in which nearly 80 percent of the French population would approve the new Constitution, and calling for “the union of free thinkers to put UNCIVIC-MINDEDNESS [incivisme] on the agenda” and “the spreading of the spirit of insubordination.” With its letter of introduction and an image by Daumier, Blanchot’s text took up a whole page. It was, however, fairly short, and Mascolo’s typographical largesse in relation to it showed how much store he put in opening this new issue with this strong, authoritative, radical stance that was so foreign to individual debates on which strategies to adopt, how Marxist and Leninist strategies were to be adapted, or detailed commentary on the rebellion in Algeria. Blanchot’s task in his piece was to justify his return. “Something has happened,” he wrote in the letter; “a rupture has occurred,” responds the text; De Gaulle had returned to power, “this time carried not on the shoulders of the Resistance, but of mercenaries,” he added in a note when the text was republished in Friendship, thirteen years later.11 It was important for Blanchot to distinguish refusal from any appearance of nihilism, and he shows that this “certain, unshakable, rigorous No,” this “absolute, categorical” refusal, is open to the future, its power (and its difficulty) lying in what “henceforth each of our assertions should confirm.” Blanchot thus distinguishes refusal from nihilism, following Robert Antelme, in the spirit of The Human Race and more explicitly of the text he published in the first issue, defining refusal as a “movement without contempt, without exaltation, and anonymous, as far as possible, for the power to refuse cannot come from us, nor in our name alone, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.”12
Exaltation and contempt: precisely what had characterized his previous refusals. Distinguishing refusal from nihilism can also be seen as a way of reclaiming language from the other extreme, from the far right that had been his home in the 1930s, to the very word “refusal.” Down to the very word, and to the word alone, if indeed we accept that at that time Blanchot had been overburdened with rhetoric and did not put in place any thinking as such, and that all of his efforts since that time had consisted in abdicating (atoning for) this language with thought, in order to manifest a refusal that was now capable of receiving not the modesty of ideas and the rigor of speech, but what his conclusion to this 1958 text calls the “rigor of thought and the modesty of expression.”13
The third issue of Le 14 Juillet was set for December, at the height of the election campaign and as De Gaulle was about to be inaugurated as president of the Republic. Fearing imminent censorship and dismayed at the passivity of French intellectuals, the editors decided to produce a questionnaire aimed at the latter. Signed by Blanchot, Breton, Mascolo, and Schuster, it was made public on April 10, 1959, and sent to a hundred writers; the twenty-eight responses would be published in what would be the journal’s last issue, sarcastically brought out on June 18.14
There were some problems in preparing this issue. The correspondence between Blanchot and Mascolo shows that vague ideas of abandoning the journal had already been raised. The feeling of isolation seemed to play a considerable role; it depressed Dionys Mascolo who, reading a letter in a bistro on the Avenue du Maine, scribbled these words on the back of the envelope: “I am henceforth as if on a voyage, a solitary voyage (this explains my carelessness).” It affected Blanchot less, who saw the failure of the movement as the confirmation of the reasons that had given rise to it, and thus as one more reason to continue it by other means. It is thus remarkable that Blanchot’s return to politics was neither vain nor ephemeral; on the contrary, he was totally oriented toward the future and the possibility of building that future. He would also be behind the thinking on the group’s various methods of intervention: the questionnaire of 1959, the Declaration of 1960, the project for an International Review. Each failure was immediately seized upon as the means of coming up with a new intervention. Each new intervention attempted to get intellectuals on board, with a violence thought necessary to get them out of their reserve, to leave a mark on public debate and to redefine a link with the working classes that had grown stale. Interrupting intellectuals’ isolation (their withdrawal, entrenchment, self-sufficiency, self-importance), taking them away from their own glory in order to get them to speak in the name of the anonymous, breaking the “essential perversion” with which they acquiesced in advance to the perversion of politicians (with all their attraction glory, their providential certainty); such were the difficult tasks that needed to be taken on. Thus Blanchot continued thinking, even on the political scene, that it was necessary to efface oneself in order to think, to withdraw—like Luria’s God—in order to create.
The questionnaire was put together primarily in February. The list of addressees and the five questions formulated by Mascolo and Schuster were put to Blanchot, then to Breton. Blanchot suggested a few names and changed the text in a number of places. Notably, he insisted on a term in the first question, the word “ensemble”: “What happened on May 13, 1958, and what has happened since constitute an ensemble whose importance seems to us to have been generally underestimated.” It was indeed as an ensemble, as a total and pseudo-sovereign action, that De Gaulle’s seizure of power was to be understood, though without being reduced to a single dimension, whether economic, colonial, national, military, or psychic. Blanchot’s remark, which was developed at length, in fact constituted the premises of his own response, which he developed in his article in the third issue, “The Essential Perversion.”
Blanchot, then, had taken a key role at the journal. Following the responses to the questionnaire, the final issue contained only three texts: those by the two editors-in-chief, and “The Essential Perversion.” From a strictly personal point of view, the text responds to the first article given to the NNRF six years earlier, “The Essential Solitude.” The link is not only a superficial one. For while Blanchot conceives of political action in the light of a discretion that links the author back to his or her initial anonymity, to “the essential solitude,” thus recalling that the theory of effacement stemmed from a reading of historical rather than aesthetic sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology—those conceptualizing the definition and ultimately the annulling of the worker by the work—it must be noted that the “essential perversion” describes exactly the opposite situation. This is to say that historical agents glorify themselves through their works and project their being, providentially, beyond themselves, a being that is completed in history and that itself completes history. The resolute man who is without myths (a rather tragic man, Mascolo would say) is set in opposition to the man who allows for a belief in the resurgence of myths (in their epic form). The providential man is therefore above all he who perverts sacred values. And yet the essence of perversion is not to be found in this alone: just as Blanchot in his January 1953 essay distinguishes the “essential solitude” and “solitude in the world,” here it is important to him to distinguish a form of perversion that is more perverse, more insidious, precisely the one that perverts solitude, donning a mask in order to project the image of a magician, a sovereign, an aesthete. “The main feature remains the transformation of political power into a power of salvation.”15 This is the first thing he seeks to demonstrate, the one that proves the raison d’être of the journal and the questionnaire: denouncing the power that makes use of the fascination of the sacred for reductive purposes, such as salvation or the nation. But the essential point is the huge difference between dictatorship and this false sacralization. Blanchot is all the keener on making this distinction since he is convinced that his views on dictatorship, which he had been repeating since March 1955 and his article “Death of the Last Writer,” are correct (this thinking was often repeated, often word for word, in his correspondence with Mascolo).16 De Gaulle was not a dictator, because he did not act.
The omnipotence that fell to this man alone from the beginning was quite extraordinary; everyone wondered: what won’t he do with it? But one had to notice with surprise (and cowardly relief) that he wasn’t doing anything with it. . . . Hence the following situation gradually became clear: De Gaulle can do everything but, in particular, he can do nothing. He is omnipotent, but the respect that he has for this omnipotence (the feeling of being the whole of France, the sense not only of representing her, but of making her legible and distantly present in her timeless reality) forbids him from using it for any determinate political decision. Thus even if he had political ideas, he could not apply them. . . . We are far from a simple and profane dictatorship. Dictators are constantly parading; they do not speak, they bawl. . . . De Gaulle appears, but only out of duty. Even when he appears, it is as if he were foreign to his appearance. He is withdrawn into himself. He speaks, but secretly.17
The article repeats that De Gaulle “is not a man of action.” This “bizarre passivity” proper to him parodies the “essential solitude,” just as his vanity parodies sovereignty.18 De Gaulle parodies withdrawal, solitude, invisibility, writing. Blanchot does not attribute De Gaulle’s lack of activity to a respect for the rules of democracy: instead, it is said to be the mask for underhand activity, that which—while dictatorship always has a “human” face, which does not worry writers because it leaves their thinking intact—here invisibly corrodes, surreptitiously paralyzes the capacity for reflection, refusal, and insubordination. He does not act, but he allows others to act. This reflection, which was complete by spring 1959, would be richly explored over the next ten years. Following Blanchot, Francis Marmande would say it forcefully: Gaullism was constructed “from hatred for thought.”19 Hatred always pretends to be close to what it hates, even if it knows it has no hope of even identifying it.
Blanchot, and with him Le 14 Juillet, was mounting an essential defense of thought. Mascolo’s joy and astonishment were also linked to his suspicion (or certainty) that thought would now provide a basis for insubordination. Blanchot’s sense of wonder also led to the certainty (or the suspicion) that insubordination would now provide a basis for thought. This exchange of authority or this sharing, in which atonement could be forgotten thanks to an activity that needed no explicit avowals, led to a mutual recognition, a coming-together that defined friendship and politics as the search for a community link (in Antelme’s words: infinite recognition). This friendship (this politics) had a name, which Mascolo and Schuster had emphasized in their appeal of September 1958: uncivicmindedness, civil disobedience as a form of citizenship. This spirit of insubordination, which would preside over the Declaration of 1960, was paradoxically attached to the law of the Republic, an ephemeral but necessary transgression that regularly reforged the community link, and that only remained true if it could be based on essential principles: “respect for the living and the dead, hospitality, the inviolability of the human being, the inalienability of truth.”20
Blanchot had already been adopting these positions “at the very last” (à toute extrémité) for several years in the NNRF. There, they were linked to the aesthetics of philosophical or literary commentary and had not yet broken out into contemporary events. His involvement with Le 14 Juillet did not go unnoticed. It earned him a closely argued rebuttal from Mauriac in L’Express. He received troubled letters from Paulhan, a fierce opponent of decolonization and public admirer of how le général was able to embody the nation—he defended De Gaulle in Le Figaro. In June 1959, when Blanchot probably gave “The Essential Perversion” to Paulhan to read, it was confirmed that the two men were now incompatible. It even seems that they did not see each other again. Blanchot would continue to contribute to the NNRF, but less frequently. Other concerns, notably that of collective writing, moved him away from a friend who wrote to him at this time to say that it was enough, if one wished to lose sight of truth, “to group together in an attempt to think it.”21
Friendships were being broken and formed, lost and found. Char approved of “The Essential Perversion,” on which he wrote a magnificent text in 1964, published in Recherche de la base et du sommet.
Politically, Maurice Blanchot can only go from one disappointment to another, which is to say from one courage to another, for he does not have the forgetful mobility of most great contemporary writers. Blanchot is fixed at the depth that distress determines, which is also electrified but not knocked by revolt, the only depth that will count when everything is dust or ashes, taking its cold value, in a new present, from the past alone.22
The prose poem also reveals to what extent Blanchot’s literary work and political courage are linked. They commit him to the future; they open up unsuspected spaces; they offer to time true seasons and inexhaustible plenty. They prepare one for a “true eternal theater,” with the challenge proper to hypnosis, to terror and to cunning; with their ability to inspire confidence in “supreme slowness”: the profound rhythm of friendship’s knowledge, toward the action in which it is always more rapidly engaged.
When Blanchot saw the complete final issue of Le 14 Juillet when it appeared in the summer, his remark to Mascolo brooked no argument: The journal’s lack of success and the awkward responses given by writers showed that a new era for the intellectual had begun.