“How will we manage to disappear?” Standing in the way are books, and books written by others. In the absence of collective writing and despite the impossibility of forming a school, Blanchot’s thinking—beyond the influence that it was broadly exerting at this time—was beginning to give rise to new modes of thought. At first unaware of one another, little by little these modes of thought would cross-pollinate, creating the spaces necessary to further the thinking that had been given over to them. In the 1970s, conscious of this transfer of authority, the voice of Maurice Blanchot changed and pushed toward a new phase of withdrawal.
The singular quality of this recognition began in the 1960s and persists today. “No writer is more underrated, and yet none has been so carefully read over the last 25 years by a large number of writers,” Dionys Mascolo observed in 1966. He attributed this lack of public awareness to Blanchot’s work’s endless demand for knowledge, which nonetheless opens onto acceptance of the impossible and attentiveness to nonknowledge. Unlike Sartre or Camus, whose agitations concern the realm of what is immediately possible, and who demand answers, Blanchot like Bataille denies himself “any possibility of acting quickly on the minds of others.”1 The radical, extreme elements of their approaches need to be read, ingested, digested, meditated upon. They cannot rely on writing alone. The young writers of the 1950s who had been touched by this ultimate avowal, this authority of friendship, would take up the task of making it known, of communicating it.
In 1959, Maurice Blanchot met Roger Laporte. Five years earlier, this young writer had sent him his first book, Souvenir de Reims, and an exchange of letters had begun (despite the imperfections of this text).2 In 1957, it was Blanchot’s turn to send a book: The Last Man, and the following year, Laporte wrote Le Partenaire, which Blanchot recommended to Maurice Nadeau. When the two writers met, one was writing Awaiting Oblivion, the other La Veille. Three or four years later, both books would cause a stir. Written in the neuter, under the watch of an impersonal authority traversing and constituting the subject of writing even as it irremediably and irrevocably opposes it, Laporte’s narrative is the most Blanchotian and the most sovereign of all those that would be placed under the nameless sign of Blanchot. It is at once the most faithful and the most independent of them. Michel Foucault immediately wrote a prominent article on it in the NRF; a new friendship was born.
Laporte and Foucault shared a huge admiration for Blanchot, and both would voice it endlessly. The two men were around the same age.3 Like Laporte, Foucault read Blanchot at the end of the 1950s. This reading produced a radical break: It moved him definitively away from university institutions, above all from their language and discourse. Blanchot led Foucault to Bataille, who led him to Nietzsche; alongside Artaud and Klossowski, these would be the tutelary figures of the thinking that the young philosopher would elaborate. Foucault gives them a revolutionary place in the history of thought—in the history of the way thought itself has been conceived. In these figures, he sees a new break from Western culture, he sees “extreme forms of language” that represent “the summits of thought.” In Blanchot, he glimpses “a philosophy of nonpositive affirmation,” an untiring, limitless contestation of ontology, which sees marginality as able to speak directly about being. This forces the subject toward what lies outside its thought, a thought in which Foucault sees—through neutral writing, whose madness he notes, as Levinas had done—“the narrative of imminence and withdrawal, of danger and of promise.” He sees in it the appearance of the very language of thought, something capable of breaking the order of Western philosophical discourse by opening a “space indefinitely explored,” in which the impurity of speech endlessly gestures toward silence. Foucault produces many statements of support and praise around 1963 and 1964, in articles on Bataille, Laporte, and Klossowski that are still read today.4 These articles express endless gratitude, for which there was now an extra reason. For in 1961, Caillois had given Blanchot the manuscript of History of Madness, still in thesis form. When the book was published, he was one of the few to state how new and important it was—in fact, he was the only one (alongside Roland Barthes), something that would leave Foucault with feelings of both amazement and bitterness, as he would often recall.
In an interview with Raymond Bellour in 1967, Foucault would even go so far as to recognize that the figure who had initiated “the thought of the outside” was the most sovereign of all authorities: “it is Blanchot,” he stated, “who has made possible all discourse on literature.”5 This is an unprecedented claim, which shakes the foundations of criticism, and makes Blanchot into the transcendental thinker of literature, he who defines the a priori conditions of his own practice and thought. It makes Blanchot the equivalent and the other of Hegel; for Foucault, the philosopher of the end of history and the writer of the indefinite neutralization of the end share the ability truly to bring to life Plato and Rameau’s Nephew on the one hand and Hölderlin, Kafka, or Mallarmé on the other.6 It is as if the third party gave the work its accessibility, and authors their authority, which suggests—in Blanchot’s case—that he only abdicates his own authority in order to give it to the other, to the name of the other, in the free and infinite play of writing.
Despite these statements on the importance he gave to Blanchot, Foucault would always think that, “more from shyness than from ingratitude,” he had not repaid the recognition and knowledge given to him by this thinker.7 Thus, when in 1965 Jean Piel asked him and Roger Laporte to prepare an issue of Critique in homage to Blanchot, Foucault was swift to agree and to take the project forward, despite the risk of failure.8 At the time, few authors had tried to write on Blanchot, and contributors would prove difficult to find. Neither was the editorial conception of the issue guaranteed to succeed, even if it did follow an issue in homage to Georges Bataille, for at the time Critique had only very rarely published issues dedicated to a single topic or author. However, the issue would be one of the journal’s finest. It was praised by Mascolo in La Quinzaine Littéraire, by Jacques Réda in Les Cahiers du Sud, by Tzvetan Todorov in Le Nouvel Observateur, and brought together contributions by Jean Starobinski, Paul de Man, Emmanuel Levinas.9 It opens with a poem by René Char which is followed by a outstanding critical study by Georges Poulet, “Maurice Blanchot, Critic and Novelist,” one of the first to emphasize the unbreakable link between the two genres within the work and to show that this link was nonetheless dissolved by the creation of a language that “slithers in reptilian fashion.”10 The issue’s contributors are in unanimous agreement: They protest the scandalous lack of studies addressing Blanchot’s work, perhaps due to the “both tranquil and unstoppable energy” with which it constantly goes beyond itself and deprives criticism of tools, and therefore also due to the authority and fascination it exerts,11 perhaps even due to the risks it takes in addressing experiences on the limits of what can be communicated, thus depriving interpretation of certainty.12 They try to show that in constantly working with ambiguity and the unsayable, in the bosom of the obscurity that he had the rare courage to inhabit, this author nonetheless is still “the clearest of all.”13 They often attempt to shatter images that prevent approaches to the work, for instance that—already a common one—of its sadness and despair. On the contrary, in his essay in the middle of the issue, Foucault underscores Blanchot’s serenity in expelling the subject from the neutral arena of language (in this gesture language opens on to the distance where the experience of thought is formed, an experience that is constant even in interruption). On the contrary, also, Foucault underscores how strong this “thought of the outside” is, which not only bears witness to its origins (Sade, “the rendering-naked of desire in the infinite murmuring of discourse,” Hölderlin, “the discovery of the turning-aside of the gods in a fissure in language as it is abandoned”), but through which Blanchot’s work takes itself as its own object. This takes place before the imaginary and reason are dissociated from one another, through the figures of attraction (madness, radicality, obsession, endlessness, oblivion), which are necessarily brought together with those of negligence (which was also absolute, indifferent, incalculable). And ultimately, Foucault underscores how the law becomes the only thing that can present the neuter’s nihilist threat, how the relationship with the companion becomes the only compromise—albeit an invisible one—with death.14 Bringing this strength to light, at the very moment when Blanchot had just published the entretien on fatigue (which a few years later would open The Infinite Conversation) allows Foucault’s thinking to end on a note of gratitude, in a rapport that rises above distress, in the only movement able to access the outside: that of friendship.
This first collective publication in homage to Blanchot was a turning point in the critical reception of his work. It led to the first university theses and prefigured the first books, which would appear between five and eight years later. Françoise Collin, who in 1971 became the first author to publish a book on Blanchot, already featured in the issue of Critique. Bernard Noël and Roger Laporte, whose text closes the issue, would publish theirs in 1973. From the more scholarly approach of Collin or Wilhelm to the readerly experience of Laporte, Noël, or Madaule, the variety of the first books dedicated to Blanchot can already be glimpsed in June 1966. No writer would fail to avow their fidelity, humility, and weakness: the “absence of book” that traverses them speaks volumes to the strength of this work’s resistance to all forms of cognitive reductionism (which it denounces), as well as to the fact that even leading figures had been in two minds over whether to propose it as an exception in the intellectual landscape. Blanchot’s paradoxical position, on the margins of literature, served him badly in terms of institutional recognition. The opposition to charisma represented by his invisibility in public and his dazzling language led those faithful to him to share a blind fascination. The resulting cultishness provoked as much idolatry as it did disdain for that idolatry, surrounding the work with chatter to which it remained indifferent but which did not allow it to be received in the most “neutral” way possible. Paradoxically, at first it was the success of this singular body of work that condemned it to have only a discreet public presence. Erasing the limitations of speech, being receptive to its mad, anonymous rustling, writing its movement which—whether in récit, fragment, or essay—dispossesses the subject in the name of the other, and thereby traces the truth of this dispossession: all of this spoke most immediately to those who practiced it: writers and artists. It illuminated what made their existence possible. It seemed to allow their consciousness, the consciousness of their unconscious, the archaeology of their creative power, to shine forth. Progressively, an author had effaced himself and a work had unworked itself, had always more assuredly, always more madly, withdrawn interpretation from his criticism and fictionality from his fiction, in order that others might be able to continue writing themselves, but he still held them due to this very fact, due to this demand to carry on.
Many authors would see Blanchot’s literature as the labyrinthine description of the creative processes that were both most proper or improper to them—both their own, and ones that exceeded their control. Foucault put it as follows in 1967: Blanchot establishes “between the author and the work a mode of relation that had remained unsuspected.”15 For certain artists, when the question was raised of writing or filming something on the very possibility of this relation, Blanchot’s name would represent the obvious authority. He marks the paradoxically “biographical” itinerary of Roger Laporte deeply. He exercises an ever-greater influence on Marguerite Duras’s syntactical fragmentation and on her method of autobiographical exposition. He is a major reference in Jean-Luc Godard’s self-portrait.16 He represents the guarantee of refusal, the vigilance of the outside, the uncompromising speech that consists in a demanding relation to the wholly other. His effacement offers no model, his creativity exposes the very conditions of the creative demand, and his thinking gives a clear narrative of the possibilities of thought. It is probably in this sense that, on being asked about the time “proper” to literature, literature’s own, Roland Barthes—whom it is difficult to suspect of getting swept up in a mythology—would situate Blanchot “in the realm of what cannot be equaled, imitated, or applied.”17 He is irreproducible, and yet at the source of all possibility of reproduction.
Having interrupted his critical work in the mid-1960s, and only reviving it sporadically afterward, Blanchot would remain silent in the debates opposing traditional criticism and nouvelle critique. He himself would never adopt the lexicon of structural or functional analysis.18 While some of the thinkers close to him adopt its methods, in Foucault’s case this always goes hand in hand with an absolute vigilance that consists of thinking the subject through its margins, and in Barthes’s case these new methods would always be subtly undermined. For both these thinkers, the domain of scientific enquiry remains useful, while authority always flows from the one discourse that makes the others possible—and this discourse is Blanchot’s. Criticism and Truth, which Barthes published in 1966 as a response to the accusations of “new pretense” by the Sorbonne professor Raymond Picard, is full of references to Blanchot, who is thus pushed center stage in the polemic (a striking fact, given his attempts to remain absent from it).19
After the failure of the International Review, Barthes moved closer to Sollers and to Tel Quel: he must have overcome his great wariness of this group which he had regarded as too “literary.”20 But Blanchot remained, both for Barthes and for the telquelliens who since the early days had been asking him for a text (without success), a major reference point. Sollers cited him regularly, especially in a foundational 1965 article “The Novel and the Experience of Limits,” stressing the revolutionary implications of Blanchot’s research and thereby acknowledging his debt to him.21 Genette does not discuss him directly; he simply cites him as the main authority.22 In France, Blanchot often passed, without wanting the title, for “the master of the new criticism.”23 In following years, in Italy, his name alongside those of Bataille and Klossowski, was at stake in vigorous attacks against the faith in structuralism as a science.24 Blanchot’s fame was now international; this was particularly the case in Germany, where the 1962 translation of The Book to Come, under the title Der Gesang der Sirenen had gained enormous coverage across the press. Nowhere, however, were his ideas truly discussed: generally they were either ignored, or adopted wholesale.
This other type of authority—which Blanchot would never worry about, not from disdain but from indifference, because it did not flow from friendship—was perhaps due to the double reach of his work, literary and philosophical, work that dissuaded even leading thinkers from ever engaging in any real examination or commentary. Foucault would state that he “considered the literary and philosophical work [of Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski] to be much more important than what he himself [could] produce,” and that he felt extremely shy in relation to their achievements.25 For Deleuze, Blanchot’s influence would act in a subterranean, restless, and untiring way, without ever being openly declared or remarked upon; he barely cites the work in question.26 Figures such as Levinas and Bataille had their entire personal intimacy with Blanchot behind them when they spoke about him. Over the following decade, only one philosopher would break the silence: Jacques Derrida. Like Foucault and Laporte, Derrida—born in 1930—began reading Blanchot in the late 1940s. Having discovered his work thanks to Sartre’s article on Aminadab, he felt shaken by the grace of a language irreducible to any historically recognizable literary or philosophical discourse. Blanchot’s authority over Derrida would mark even the syntax of their shared research, in the latter’s extreme prudence over the meaning of particular signs, of particular words or phrases, the constant vigilance regarding the grammatical power and the contextual reach of given propositions, the irreducibly repeated statements that this incredulity is part of how creativity operates, the opening of all concepts to the spread of their possibilities, the regular return—despite the knottiness of the impossible—to truth. All of this finds its place in the decentered writing of this unfolding thought.
Beginning in 1962, Derrida had published a book and several articles, which were widely noticed. In December 1965, a text in Critique, “Writing avant la lettre,” laid the foundations of the Grammatology, which was still to come. “La parole soufflée,” published in Tel Quel in winter of the same year, opens with an extended reading of Blanchot’s texts on Artaud and Hölderlin. During this time, the two thinkers had begun to appreciate one another’s work—to put it mildly. Blanchot had been reading Derrida since “Force and Signification,” which appeared in Critique in June 1963. When he wrote to him after the publication of “Violence and Metaphysics,” a long essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas published in 1964 in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, he made clear his joy, his recognition; he wanted to follow the developments of a thinking that, after the death of Bataille and the failure of the International Review, brought him the support of a new friendship. In this early correspondence, he drew a lengthy parallel between his own questioning—both in writing and in theory (“Speaking is not Seeing”)—of the optical metaphor which ruled over so much thinking, and Derrida’s critique of the photological model of Western epistemology. When Blanchot read in Derrida that “the force of the work, the force of genius, the force, too of that which engenders in general is precisely that which resists geometrical metaphorization and is the proper object of literary criticism,” how could he not have focused on a striking closeness of thought, which meant that he only had to substitute the word “force” for the word “neuter” in order to wholly identify with the statement?27
In 1967, Derrida published three books denouncing the theological and philosophical predominance given to the representation of speech (as the possibility of speech) rather than to writing. This “post-Heideggerian” gesture of an unprecedented ontological opening would in its turn exercise such authority over Blanchot that he would correct, as if commanded by these three books, all of the articles contained in The Infinite Conversation, inserting inverted commas around some concepts, or even replacing them with their antonyms, in order more strongly to defer or differ them, setting them at a distance from any effect of presence or of immediacy.28 Thus it was not in the nouvelle critique, but in the thought of Foucault, Derrida (then also of Jean-Luc Nancy) that Blanchot would recognize (and he would say: happily, and not without grace) the true debate with thought that he had inscribed in his books: thought’s dissemination, its worklessness, its disappearance.