In the 1970s the gap grew more palpable between, on the one hand, a critical thought that was becoming a thing of the past, increasingly recognized as the thought of the postwar era and even the twentieth century, abundantly evident in print and radio literary journalism, both at home and abroad, and used in university commentaries (for there was barely any contemporary writer on whom Blanchot had not written a few lines); and, on the other hand, the fragmentary work of this period that was difficult to digest, less and less analyzed, and sometimes even downplayed. There was already a desire to summarize his work even as it was still unfolding and metamorphosing with each new text. For the first time, one and then several more works dedicated to Blanchot appeared; even in this decade they would outnumber the works by the author himself. As each of his books came out, and as each gained more admiration than the last, there were those ready to defend him in the press (André Dalmas in Le Monde, Maurice Nadeau in the Quinzaine Littéraire, and even—despite some reticence—Claude Mauriac in Le Figaro). It was a curious situation that his detractors, for whom the task of criticism was limited to clarity, reproached him for his difficulty, while this same difficulty earned the praise of others, for whom it proved that he refused to make concessions to the vulgarizing tendencies of the times, that his thought was strongly unique. On the publication of The Step Not Beyond, Nadeau underscored how challenging it was for criticism to provide any commentary on it: “To describe or to restate, yes, to make oneself the more or less faithful echo. But it is impossible, even with great efforts, to do better than this. Let us therefore quite simply listen.” With these words he closed a note introducing a parallel publication: Two pages of the Quinzaine reproduced various fragments from the book.1
The importance of his work only seemed to be recognized when no commentary was provided. University-style approaches were rare; critical essays were not always critical, strictly speaking.2 There seemed to be unanimous agreement: “It is as if Blanchot wrote from a point of view that presupposed—without revealing it—a rigorous mode of textual analysis that is still to be invented.”
Would it be possible to write on Blanchot without affectation, which is to say without fear? Without such trembling, such preliminaries, such guarantees, such anxious questions over the possibility, pertinence, or irreverence of a reading—without all this excessive, misguided critical gesticulation, which makes reading into a fetishist ritual of transgression? . . . The fascination that these texts exert easily forces reading to become a mimetic parade sent mad by the withdrawal of any “model.”3
Reinforced by the reception of books by Bernard Noël, Roger Laporte, and Pierre Madaule in 1973, the idea of work made sacred—under the paradoxical protection of the Author as an absent God—began to spread in public:
Thus Maurice Blanchot’s readers appear to belong to a sort of secret community. They are unaware of one another but the presence of the author of The Most High within them unites them. They officiate in solitude and in anguish, but are fortified by the solitude and anguish of their peers. They address this maître who has no power or knowledge, who does nothing but produce a strength that forces one to imitate him.
Jean Frémon wrote this in La Quinzaine.4 The hour of the myth—“a living myth”—had arrived.5
This hour was not without misunderstandings; it even increased them. In 1972 Roger Laporte formed a project for a book uniting accounts of reading Blanchot by himself, Pierre Madaule, and Bernard Noël. In “By an Obscure Hand” Noël recounts how he was overwhelmed by reading Death Sentence on a train from which he suddenly had an almost unmanageable desire to throw himself: “What would our relation to books be, if reading violated our bodies?” In “A Passion,” Laporte examines his inability to write on Blanchot and speaks of the influence on his own itinerary in writing of work that he had been reading since 1944. He formulates various realizations about the narrative work and situates Blanchot’s conceptual reflections in relation to Levinas and Derrida. Last, Pierre Madaule, in a book that would eventually appear separately from the two other accounts, recounts how his reading of Death Sentence is interchangeable with his life. However real it might have been, such a dramatization of reading (the reading of a silent, invisible, withdrawn author and the reading of work on which only one other book had been published at this stage) provoked widespread incomprehension, and contributed to or even created—if it did not already exist—the myth of the Great Absent Author taken to be sacred, even the myth of an idolatry of the Void.
Perhaps these accounts lacked the nakedness that had marked the experiences of their authors. Their books had followed in others’ footsteps. Of the Two Readings of Maurice Blanchot, only Bernard Noël’s would be reprinted (in 1980); it was probably the denser, briefer, tighter of the two. Roger Laporte would refuse to allow “A Passion” to be reprinted: “I so detested that text, I was ashamed of it,” he would write in 1994 upon publishing a completely new version of it, taking the public reception of the first version badly (it has been seen as blind idolatry) and fearing that the awkwardness of certain remarks might have hurt Blanchot, “my friend of friends.”6 Pierre Madaule would displace into his fiction his fascination for the figure of Veronica, whom he sees as key to the secret of Death Sentence. This displacement reminds us once again that writers repay their debts to Blanchot through misunderstandings that are much less patent in creative work than in simple homages. Perhaps Benoît Jacquot’s first film, an experimental adaptation of chapter 10 of Thomas the Obscure (the death of Anne), fails due to its inability to decide between homage and creation; it is based on a reading by Michael Lonsdale and consists of sixty-five mostly fixed shots, showing a garden, a villa, furniture and objects, sometimes a woman’s body—not without eroticism and a mawkish relation with death—and representations of illness, medicine, suffering. The fifty-eighth shot focuses on a typed text and declares the filmmaker’s desire: to see “cinema as the unique ability to grasp death at work.”7
The richest readings of Blanchot’s work continued to flow, if not from cinema, then from the area of creative work, writing, and thought—these readings were not afraid of remaining close to the new, fragmentary, invented forms he was using. Such an understanding led Edmond Jabès, with whom Blanchot had been corresponding regularly for several years, to name an important section in the first volume of his Book of Margins after an expression in The Step Not Beyond, which is recalled at the end of the work: “it goes its way.” Consisting of various poetic fragments, the text “The Unconditional” addresses both mankind (present as subtitle in the French version) and its “infinite, unconditional” absence, or rather the work: “Writing unconditions.” It also addresses what links the two authors: “Silence too links us. . . . The tearing-apart of thought on the limits of the unthinkable links us. . . . Centuries of unquiet and the small glimmer on which our male energies converge—dissidence—link us.”8 In a different way of accompanying or taking part in the continuation of their shared thinking, Emmanuel Levinas conversed with André Dalmas on the philosophy of Blanchot’s writing, wrote several pages on The Madness of the Day for an issue of Change, and the same year gathered together the four texts he had published on his friend in a volume called On Maurice Blanchot. Between 1976 and 1979, Jacques Derrida also produced many texts, international lectures, and seminars on Blanchot, thus contributing to the recognition of the oeuvre abroad.9
With the interventions of Derrida and Levinas, academic recognition also increased. As early as 1971, Levinas had recognized the first book to appear on Blanchot’s work, Maurice Blanchot and the Question of Writing by Françoise Collin.10 The book is above all an invitation to situate in the history of philosophy various notions that Blanchot had worked on: the subject, the gaze, alterity, the body, illness, sexuality, the law, the imaginary, the negative; and to emphasize the originality of the concepts he had elaborated in a spirit of “resistance to totality and to the system,” an originality that was guaranteed by the close interrelationship between his thinking and his fiction. The book emphasizes this questioning’s constant—albeit sometimes distant—relation to the reflection of Emmanuel Levinas. Presented on the flyleaf as a homage to the two friends together, the book was criticized, sometimes even violently, as Blanchotiste or imitative; the same attacks would be made—with varying degrees of justification—against the university works that would follow in its footsteps, all of which were situated in proximity to thinkers who themselves owed much to Blanchot (and to whom he also owed much).11 For instance, Daniel Wilhelm’s 1974 thesis was linked to Barthes, Genette, and Foucault;12 Evelyne Londyn’s of 1976, which attempted to show the fantastical nature of the narrative work, relied on Todorov’s work; the following year, Georges Préli’s book The Force of the Outside bore the influence of Deleuze and Guattari; last, there was Claude Lévesque’s work on Nietzsche, Freud, Blanchot, and Derrida, The Strangeness of the Text.13
With its absence of commentaries, imitative reproductions, unreflective quarrels, baseless miscomprehensions, creative research, faithful admiration, and the works of thought that accompanied it, the reception of Blanchot’s work was perhaps more diverse than that of any other major body of work of its time, of any time. However, it always lacked free discussion unhindered by creative ambitions or by complacent reiterations of the “themes” at its heart. Such a discussion might identify where research could begin, bracketing the traps of circular language, signaling its debts to various tempos or models of reflection. The void created by this lack of responsibility, which is generally that of academic discourse, inevitably increased the impatience of commentators who, without always knowing what irritated them about Blanchot (or those whom they saw as his adoring disciples) and without always trying to think about this, hastened to mock the formation of a myth of divine, esoteric, oracular, disembodied speech. Henri Meschonnic was the only one in this period to undertake this task critically, in a long article in Les Cahiers du Chemin.14 He raises questions about “the ‘magic’ exercised [by Blanchot] over young writers,” adding that “what is at stake is not unimportant. We cannot dismiss it out of hand. We must clarify what is implied by certain literary practices and by their historicity.” With less goodwill, he also writes “ ‘to what point . . .’ ‘toward what . . .’ ‘and yet how can we avoid . . .’ let us bid farewell to all that.” After recognizing that Blanchot is rigorous to an extreme and very rare degree, Meschonnic denounces his inadequacies, the contradictions or half-pursued thoughts of
the conception of language that is at work in Blanchot and which shows that it governs a conception of literature as well as all the relations between living and writing, life and death, the individual and the social; in so doing, it produces a circularity which is the greatest temptation and in which, paradoxically, what is most difficult leads to what is most facile, characterizing a mode of literature that has grown more widespread.
He is referring to the dramatizations and contrary readings of Mallarmé, to the bypassing of contemporary linguistic theories, to the mythology of absence, to the discreet neonominalism, to the infinitely metaphorical instrumentalization of death as paradigm. “The language of myth and of experience has placed esthetics and politics within an unlocatable poetics”—and therefore within something that cannot be reproduced without falling into sterile imitation. Meschonnic therefore sees in Blanchot a desire for a single language for thought and a complacency regarding the painfully immanent view that writing is impossible, even when one is writing. He misrecognizes the work of the neuter, which he sees as part of the allegorical creation of narrative simulacra, and as drowned out by the unnuanced identification of the unconditional state of writing with Jewishness. In all of this, Meschonnic ignores the way this thinking, which he encloses within the hypothesis of self-mythologizing circularity and within that of a verbal and ideological fascination in which truth remains hidden away, had in fact developed over many decades. “Blanchot’s experience and thinking bear witness to a crisis in the Hegelian dialectic and, implicitly, in Marxism. The only possible development was revealed to be Nietzsche. The only possible outlet was myth”: such is the conclusion. It is trapped within both phenomenology and theology, and the misunderstandings of Blanchot’s nihilism that were already apparent twenty years earlier are still present. Respected but rejected by the thinker it attacked, Meschonnic’s argument would remain unanswered (unlike various future misinterpretations).
In 1976, two years after this article by Meschonnic and ten years after the special issue of Critique, the journal Gramma dedicated two consecutive issues (including one double issue) to Blanchot. This is a different approach, emphasizing its Lacanian or Derridean ties and the question of identity, with the aim of provoking critical debate over Blanchot’s work. The editors’ opening statement sets out a clear desire to make a clean break:
Some have thought it best to follow Maurice Blanchot in his path of effacement: they have done little but fall into the trap of fascination. It is necessary—as this issue shows—to take the opposite approach and to have no qualms: to write Blanchot into the history that surrounds him and which he somehow troubles or corrupts.15
The fact that most of the major specialists of the time are not part of the issue signals this desire to renew the discourse; Françoise Collin provides a text very different to her book of 1971. The operation—the word is not misplaced—was a large one: more than one hundred pages by Derrida, two previously unpublished texts by Bataille, the most complete bibliography ever published, three recent letters by Blanchot, two attributions of texts from Committee and, for the first time, the reprinting of some political articles from the 1930s preceded by “Topography-Itinerary of a (Counter)Revolution,” a long and precise study by Michael Holland and Patrick Rousseau lacking any moralizing misappropriation and concerned only with analysis and truth. The two issues did not pass without notice. Le Monde briefly declared that: “The journal Gramma has published the second installment of the ensemble entitled ‘Reading Blanchot.’ It includes political texts from the 1930s by Maurice Blanchot and articles by Christian Limousin, Françoise Collin, and Alain Coulange.” No other information was provided and, publicly, no debate ensued.
Although the publication was politically discreet, it still voiced strong critical reservations. Numerous elements of what looked like a dossier could no longer be ignored. Literary society was doubtless aware that before the war Blanchot had belonged to circles on the far right; and yet no public revelation had filtered through. It was the historians who had little by little raised this question: in 1962, in his vast work on Action Française, Eugen Weber had briefly mentioned Blanchot’s contributions to L’Insurgé; in 1969, most notably, Loubet del Bayle had begun more specific investigations into Blanchot’s role in The Nonconformists of the 1930s. But readers had had to wait until 1976 to read the beginnings of an analysis of the author’s “transformation of convictions.” What is even more astonishing is that the same year, introducing the Blanchot special issue of the North American journal Sub-stance, referring to the Gramma dossier and therefore in full awareness of the existence of the 1930s articles (which were also mentioned in the bibliography that he put together), Steven Ungar not only did not address the political question at all, but he also linked—in a flagrant anachronism—Blanchot’s work of the 1930s with that of Bataille, Klossowski, and Leiris.16
Similar gestures, barely concealed in their increasing hostility, would for many years refuse to engage either with Blanchot’s political past or with his contemporary thinking. In April 1979, clearly regretting his enthusiasm of the 1960s, Tzvetan Todorov masked his first political attacks on Blanchot with the veil of a supposedly hermeneutic approach, which might appear to follow Meschonnic’s line of thinking; it was called “Reflection on Literature in Contemporary France.”17 After this ambitious title, Todorov immediately clarified that his interest lay in only two of the main critical thinkers: Barthes and Blanchot. His analysis is initially detailed before becoming allusive and misleading on its final page (certain texts are ignored, citations are truncated or decontextualized); hot-temperedly and without rigor, he sets about denouncing a double mystification that he attributes to Blanchot. He denies the clear legacy of romanticism in the latter’s work, condemning fusionalism and stating that it is necessary to recognize “the otherness of the other”; he can thus critique a cultural “egocentrism” (an ethnocentrism) said to be at the heart of the critical work due to the attention it allegedly pays to thinking similar to its own.
These pages are inhabited by sameness as Western European consciousness has constructed it over nearly two hundred years. And for us Blanchot’s work no longer provides the diagnostic of a literature and a culture, but instead seems to be a symptom of it: it is like the things that it describes, and there is no place within it for what is foreign to it.
This attack on the critical work in the name of a political principle, which was new and totally unfounded, would prefigure others in the decades to come. For his enemies, collapsing the entirety of Blanchot’s thought into the ideology of the 1930s was the best way to avoid any true debate about the work, given that this work could then be swiftly denounced for its supposed historical closure and for its so-called nihilistic, outdated literary influence.