Blanchot was always secretive and secluded. Early in his life, illness forced him to spend long and frequent periods in isolation: the “primal scene” made him almost a stranger to his family; his writing at night remained unknown to the journalists and activists he frequented in the 1930s; in the Rue de Lille or Rue Saint-Benoît he most often remained silent; and in Èze or later in the suburbs of Paris, he lived a withdrawn life. For him, care and patience were necessary for truth, authority, the kind words that could appear—which could then be decisive, creative, mysterious, revelatory of their improper secrets, even if it meant making the perfection of his silence uncomfortable. Sometimes almost a society figure, at times suddenly called upon to show his presence and at others annulled by anonymous crowds, he often thought face-to-face meetings were important, speaking little about others or the past, paying exhaustive attention to the friend before him and the secret that this other held. His ability to withstand resolute solitude can sometimes seem astonishing, but this is to forget that he was neither the only author nor the only human being to have confronted the void, the intensity, the fragmentation, the strength, and the duration of this solitude; and that the body of the most forgotten writer is also—even in its secret folds and its open flesh—the most exposed. His solitude was uncompromising partly because he maintained intimate relationships through the love of thought (the récits state this clearly enough). This was an exemplary position, and one that was not without obstacles or scandals; it was a fragile, defenseless position that over the years became such a familiar one that the slightest encroachment on silence could easily disrupt it, or undermine it through powerlessness, refusal, and anger—sometimes even through writing.
Maurice Blanchot’s refusals of requests for interviews and photographs, his refusals of the pressure exerted in the attempt to get him to recognize his early political standpoints, were never the unshakeable prohibition that is often attributed to him in an ignorant and facile manner. While, especially from the 1970s on, outrageous failures of discretion would occasionally catch him, proving costly and sometimes hurting him deeply, ultimately he would always recognize the freedom of the other—even if it was ill-intentioned—and in this he would remain faithful to the demand of his thinking. His pain and anger would most often remain private, with the exception of the greatest source of his intransigence: “that utter-burn where all history took fire.”1 Whenever anything resembling anti-Semitism arose, it would provoke firm and prompt reactions, in public. For the rest, his indifference concerning the reception of his work did not stem from any affected disdain but from a reciprocal concern, between the forgotten author and the ephemeral reader, for freedom.2 After all, he had written long ago that the work belongs only to the future, which is to say to the spacing-out, effacement, and anonymity of time.
If the mystery and the myth had by now taken shape, this was perhaps due to the dazzling nature of the work, perhaps to the chance that made its author an effaced and discreet being who placed the guarantee of discretion in literature, or last perhaps to the obligation to protect his necessary fragility felt by those close to him. It must be admitted that this concern for reservedness sometimes led to extreme forms of meticulousness, even fetishistic obsession and unreal excess. The attempts to make Blanchot sacred and profane thus shared a sort of strategic alliance, some critics even occupying both camps in turn, which had the effect of creating an edict of obscurity and inviolability around a work that could be accessed only by the initiated. This meant only that Blanchot would be all the more the victim of his reputation, of his unbearably poetic renown. Indeed, how could fate have been kinder to his critics than by making possible all the barbs concerning the blancheur (whiteness) of he who was effaced?3 Lacking any reality beyond its own sonorities, any body beyond work that was more and more distanced, any life except the disembodied sadness attributed to his thinking by inattentive readings blind to their own secret, the blancheur of Blanchot provided fodder for a certain type of criticism, but for a short time only. Such criticism, having yielded the first readings of his work as a succession of mystical revelations, would soon find other metaphors for him: for instance, a hermit, a ghost, or a block of granite.4 And even in literary circles he is sometimes, with ignorant or calculated violence, forgotten. When Marguerite Duras at the height of her fame in the 1980s and 1990s eventually agreed to do television interviews, she thought it necessary to maliciously recall that yes, Blanchot was still alive.5 Up in arms against the pretense that Sartre was the greatest writer of the century, she placed all the weight of her fame behind the view that only two writers in the century had ever really written: Bataille and Blanchot.
Even before it had been thought through ethically, in terms of infinite responsibility, in the name of the other, authorial effacement had become caught up in the politico-social game of spectacle and secret (at least for the commonplace, mystified observer). It had become something like the cultural double, the imitation of that game. In Blanchot’s old age, withholding his presence was a strange way of falling into the trap of frenetic public demand, which makes the author into the only image and guarantor of the work. “Communication of the incommunicable” has become the new watchword of the cultural sector and, beyond it, of the political and mediatized world that has taken the place of social relation. All breaches, crises, the entire power of rupture are immediately neutralized by this. The incommunicable, the absolute, the unsayable, the impossible, the neuter, death, dying: so many words that die as soon as they are placed in the language of this world, which has become one of “generalized aesthetics.”6 For instance, the order of commentary most often dictates reading (the consumption of reading) according to the mechanisms described by Guy Debord in terms of the military-industrial complex:
The reasonably well-known fact that all information on whoever is under observation may well be entirely imaginary, or seriously falsified, or very inadequately interpreted, complicates and undermines to a great degree the calculations of the inquisitors. For what is sufficient to condemn someone is far less sure when it comes to recognizing . . . him.7
Ultimately only the oeuvre can fight against what is thus produced all-too spontaneously—or perhaps only commentaries that accept that they must bear witness “to the absence of attestation,” outside the dialectic of retention or revelation which, dragging reception into a spiral of error, continues to falsify the rival, viral falsifications that the secret has already produced, the self-authorizing accounts of endless data.
The long end of the twentieth century—the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—had the greatest trouble imagining Blanchot. It grew more ignorant of him the more it searched, in the first instance, for nothing except concrete figuration; finding only an absence of images, it often then gave up on reading a language that everything about this period encouraged it to set aside.8 This period was exasperated, titillated, astonished by this language. “No one ever met him,” wrote Jean-Louis Ézine of Blanchot in 1980. “No photos, no interviews, no biography, nothing.” Jude Stéfan writes as follows: “Perros was once beside Bl. in the Rue Vavin and had a moment of fright in realizing, as the English say, that he had approached this living shadow whose stature towered over him!” And Georges Perros himself: “Tall, tall, so incredibly tall that the present eternity of his work makes no change on him, he was there. . . . It must therefore have been Blanchot’s hand that I shook.”9 The slightest sighting of the writer therefore seemed to make him into a figure similar to Proust’s Bergotte. In 1996, the showy narration of a failed “visit” to Blanchot (who had recently left hospital and was recovering) would further develop a particular hypothesis concerning him; the epilogue to a book presents the story of someone inheriting from the dying writer, from whom a few crumbs of speech were snatched against the odds, words that are cited without dignity (without dashes, full stops, capital letters) in a violently exhibited, deceptive suggestion of vulnerability.10
For a long time, Blanchot seemed to challenge the photographers and caricaturists of the literary press. Over so many years, attempts to sketch his likeness were very rare, and minimalist when they did come about: in 1962 in L’Express, a hand held a book in a beach scene; in 1979 in Libération, a square in the middle of the page was left blank, bearing as its only legend the name “MAURICE BLANCHOT” and a citation from The Infinite Conversation (“[a] gap in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing that was invisible”).11 In 1986, Blanchot refused to send a photograph to the Vu Agency, which was organizing an exhibition of seventy portraits of writers; he asked that instead of the photograph should appear his letter to the editor, Blandine Jeanson, in which he reiterated his concern to “appear as little as possible, not so as to privilege [his] books, but to avoid the presence of an author with a claim to an existence of his own.”12 The previous year, however, Bernard Pivot’s magazine Lire had published for the first time a photograph of Blanchot, taken without his knowledge. In it, he was about to get into a Renault 5 in a parking lot, on the passenger side (which is referred to in French as la place du mort, the dead man’s seat, an occasion that was too tempting for a paparazzo).13 In 1987, organizing a special issue on “untamed authors” (Char, Gracq, Blanchot), Le Nouvel Observateur reprinted the photograph, this time accompanied by a “report” by a young journalist, Jean-Marc Parisis, who had spoken to the writer’s neighbors.14 It would appear again, ten years later, on the homepage of an Internet forum bearing Blanchot’s name.
The “scoop” was all over literary Paris. While they all condemned the methods used, the photograph itself divided Blanchot’s friends; many of them kept a copy and valued it highly. In 1987, for a book of interviews with François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas provided various photographs dating from his studies in Strasbourg, and featuring Maurice Blanchot. One of them shows the two friends, surrounded by three others including two elegant young women, visiting one of their university professors: in years to come it would often be reproduced in the press and even on television.15 In it we see Blanchot as a young well-dressed Maurrassian leaning on the hood of a luxury car, trying to seem more relaxed than he was, with a somewhat condescending look. It recalls the caricature dating from L’Insurgé that Etienne de Montety published in his biography of Thierry Maulnier in 1994.
“Throughout his life he never allowed his photograph to be published, and he rejected the most tentative overtures of modern publicity with icy politeness”: in 1942, Blanchot had written these lines about Taine.16 His resistance had been successful for more than forty-four years. It had given rise to all sorts of theories: for instance that it was exemplarily coherent with the theory of the author’s effacement, of course, but also that it was a refusal of all literary, worldly vanity and of romantic or surrealist self-satisfaction; that it showed disdain for photographers, that it was simply narcissistic, fetishizing and fearful, a way for Blanchot to protect himself against the resurrection of face being put to the instant of death, the death sentence (arrêt de mort). Does the question of invisibility not pose that of the secret? If to write, to publish is indeed also to deliver a face, a face facing the fixed moment or the instant of death, which sees death as imminent, on the face of the dying—or killing—other of the living being that bears it over an entire lifetime, then this being can only exist beside itself (in Bataille’s terms).17 If it can only give over its face, to whom is it to be given, and how? With what attentiveness? Creating what possibilities of incarnation or disincarnation? On the basis of what divided, dispossessed, disappropriated body? On what boundary of the unavowable? And above all: to whom, to what invisible partner? Perhaps this restless spacing is what displaces a récit of 1937 to 1948, one of 1944 to 1994 (not to mention “The Idyll,” “The Last Word” and, to think of his friend Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon where Blanchot’s name figures, written in 1935 and published in 1957). Perhaps there is an element of someone who finds his own face unbearable, haunted by the presence of a face from the past, like Veronica and the likeness, in the image of a face that Levinas resurrected after the fact, from the past. How can this face be offered further assistance? How can it hold in a different community—in another form or thinking of community? How can one avoid fearing an excess of light, of daylight, if it is true that my photograph only ever resembles other photographs and that this resemblance relates only to my civil or legal identity?18 To allow the face to be photographed, painted, sculpted would have been to claim an authority that it is not possible to atone for, and could probably not be envisaged for Blanchot (we know from Roger Laporte that he refused the idea of a portrait by Alberto Giacometti). Does Blanchot lack the friendship for sculptors, painters, and photographers necessary to give them such a task? Or rather, does he believe that friendship is incapable of this task, that friendship is to be found in accepting such a responsibility as a limit that cannot be transgressed? Or—last—does he wish to be other to himself, to take on the responsibility of being other, according to a demand proper to him, that of writing (to the point of silence), by which, by which alone, he shades in this too-pale face?
A snapshot, in the strong sense of a shot, a death sentence, the return of the event, of the event insofar as it is impossible, as a taking-charge of the event that is unimaginable and yet put into play in writing. With Blanchot, such an image achieves what Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier names his “disfiguring logic,” his “placing of language in worklessness.”19 Death is present for the image, at each step overtaking it, breaking it up, doing violence to it: its “pure abstract invisibility” gives the image a power that allows us to access “a different region where we are held by distance,” grasping us the better to release us, both from objects and from ourselves.20 “No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we would be choking over it,” in Robert Antelme’s account.21 How can one not be fearful in bearing witness to the extreme? How can one not immediately want to make the secret readable? How can writing bear witness to this, bear witness to the secret, to the unimaginable—to the biographical?
“Thought is incapable of writing its own history. Let it at least admit this, before consciously taking the risk of attempting to write it,” warns Dionys Mascolo in 1987, before recounting the friendship that linked him to Robert Antelme.22 This is a necessary risk, because making the secret uncomfortable does not mean accepting “the secret” (traps, prison, solitary confinement); instead, it demands attentive, prudent, and infinitely responsible speech. How can expression be given to the speech that is “beyond the living and the dead, testifying to the absence of testimony”?23 How, in Jacques Derrida’s words, “to testify where testimony remains impossible,” how “to give in the name of the other, to give to the name of the other . . . thus bringing responsibility unto itself”?24 How can the mythology of the secret be broken, when Blanchot himself had always known that “every-thing must become public,” that “the secret must be violated,” for “how vulgar it would be . . . to put forward confidences”? In such cases, how can this distance from the friend be maintained, “the pure interruption of Being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him (even to praise him), and that, far from preventing all communication, brings us together in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech”?25 How can the secret be allowed to meet itself, to give us the secret as secret, in the responsibility that consists of giving it over with all the violence of its uncertain opening?
How, except “in the name of the other”? When Georges Beauchamp and Dionys Mascolo saved Robert Antelme from death, taking him away from the camp at Dachau and returning to France, with a pause at Verdun where they took him into a restaurant where the prisoner’s frame (77 lbs/35 kilos) brought the entire room to attention and silence (“when he entered the mess all the officers stood up and saluted him”), this obscure choreography or luminous displacement, these questioning gazes, this form of attention in the face of near-death and of responsibility for death—all of these were given over to writing, because they were immediately given to a third party.26 When, in the Rue Saint-Benoît apartment where around forty people had gathered to debate the Manifesto, Maurice Blanchot suddenly and momentarily looked away to watch the child Jean Mascolo cross the room, Jean’s father Dionys noticed the gaze and thought that the scene constituted an event, something that would remain with him thirty-five years later as a precise, clear memory of Blanchot’s sensibility to “the grace of childhood.” This third-party gaze, this witness’s gaze, maintained to the point of exhaustion or indiscretion, necessarily sensitive to the slightest blinking of an eyelid—to the pain of withdrawal, to the rupture of history—represents something like the threshold of an ethics of witnessing. A witnessing of writing, of commentary, of the biographical. Far from any soothing principle or belief in charity, Blanchot gives himself and us the responsibility of thinking—living—this “responsibility for the other before the other.” “To give in the name of, to give to the name of, the other is what frees responsibility from knowledge—that is, what brings responsibility unto itself, if there ever is such a thing.”27
As the threshold for an ethics of witnessing and therefore of reception, this responsibility was unsurprisingly first taken up by writers, artists, and thinkers working creatively. Thus in the 1980s and 1990s it would find responses in the theatre with Pierre-Antoine Villemaine, in fiction with Pierre Madaule, in thought with Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Each year, the life of Blanchot is further elucidated by valuable, crisscrossing accounts given in statements, books, interviews, and articles by Duras, Laporte, Mascolo, Nadeau, Prévost, by the appearance of the first biographies of Bataille, Levinas and Maulnier, by the publication of the literary correspondence of the twentieth century.28 In particular, the work carried out by and in the vicinity of Michel Surya, Daniel Dobbels, and Francis Marmande at the journal Lignes, which has dedicated three issues to Blanchot, Antelme, and Mascolo, has allowed an essential relation between work and life to be conceived in a more immediate, insistent way. For instance, Daniel Dobbels introduces the double issue of 1990 on Blanchot (it contains critical studies extending the seminar organized by Laporte the previous year at the Collège Internationale de Philosophie, unpublished texts concerning the projects and correspondence associated with the International Review). He writes:
The movement and the meaning of this issue can be illuminated, beyond the restlessness that haunts them, as follows: to observe the transparency of daylight is to remain, unwithdrawn, in the course of things and to attempt to seize things “by the middle” as Deleuze would say (after Kafka).29
In different formats, a long radio program by France Culture, produced by Didier Cahen and broadcast in 1994, a conference in London the same year, and an issue of Ralentir Travaux in 1997, would respect the same “restlessness,” through similar convictions.30
There followed university theses (sometimes published) and special issues of reviews.31 These had the effect of more and more palpably fracturing the intellectual domain. Roger Laporte approached first Poétique and then L’Arc, proposing in vain that they dedicate issues to Blanchot. On behalf of the former, Genette responded that the editors had themselves had the same idea, but that it had been abandoned; and the second refused to consider an issue that would not feature the author’s photograph on its cover. Another dossier, conceived by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe for the Cahiers de l’Herne, remained broadly unfinished; it aimed to go beyond straightforward commentary and to appeal to writers who would contribute texts taking Blanchot as a starting-point, but most of the responses received were evasive, often based on feelings of intimidation. After seemingly endless delays, Didier Cahen’s project for a conference at Cerisy also fell by the wayside in 1996. At the heart of the tensions and disagreements from 1982 onward was the interpretation of political questions. This interpretation also had distorting effects due to its straightforward refusal to read, or due to its conjuring tricks presenting boorishness as a pseudo-hermeneutics.32 In its summer issue, Tel Quel had published an article by Jeffrey Mehlman denouncing what he named Blanchot’s right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism before the war and at least until 1942. Despite the presentation of some new information and a letter from Blanchot himself, the article contains far fewer revelations than it claims. It seems to be unaware of the issues of Gramma six years earlier. Above all, it is clear that it relies only on incomplete, partial, and often wrongheaded readings of the ideas and the texts. It inaugurates a mode of interpretation indexed on a memory of the political writings of the 1930s that is said to be at work in many ways in Blanchot’s later texts. A year later, in a note sent to the review that had meanwhile changed its name to L’Infini, Mehlman would cite the extremely rare instances of anti-Semitism from Combat as the heart of his argument, letting it be believed that all the 1930s texts were in a similar vein. Meanwhile, Mathieu Bénézet had published an energetic reply in La Quinzaine Littéraire taking aim at the editors of Tel Quel, displaying indignation at their silence over Blanchot that had lasted twenty years even though they had taken an ever-greater interest in the work of Céline, even his anti-Semitic texts. Claiming that he had been badly translated, Mehlman sent a list of errata to Tel Quel. He reestablished the precise version of his text—although it barely modified the positions adopted—when it was published in his 1984 book Legs de l’antisémitisme en France.33 The same year, Todorov returned to and expanded his 1979 article in a new work, Criticism of Criticism. In an essay on “Fascist Ideology in France,” the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell also attacked Blanchot, who he said gave “the perfect definition” of “the fascist mindset.”34 The positions of such players would only harden: in 1994, Mehlman gave an interview to Le Monde in which he ratifies Sternhell’s thesis and undertakes a reading of Death Sentence as the sacrificing of a “pure fascist ideology.” At the end of the same year, L’Infini published an article by Philippe Mesnard, a sort of preamble to his book Maurice Blanchot: The Subject of Engagement which would be published in 1996, alongside a new book by an American scholar, Steven Ungar, which aimed at an “articulation of the literary and the political in interwar France,” which it attempts to begin with the “case” of journalist Maurice Blanchot.35 Between 1995 and 1997 there were many frontal attacks in L’Infini and in Art Press, in books by Bernard-Henri Lévy and by Marcelin Pleynet, on Blanchot’s political extremism and on the mystification that his work allegedly represented. While Leslie Hill’s book Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (1997) at last looked at the question seriously and as a whole, it was not translated into French and therefore remained isolated. The Jewish intellectual community, for its part, paid little attention to these debates. It commented on and welcomed Blanchot more and more often: with Salomon Malka in L’Arche and Globe; Rachel Ertel in her book In Nobody’s Language on “Yiddish poetry of annihilation”; Sarah Kofman, who looked at what was shared by the texts of Antelme and Blanchot, seeing in the récits of Vicious Circles many figures for what happened in the camps; she read her father’s final hours of freedom—who was deported and died in Auschwitz—in the words and the thinking of the Disaster.
Thus, certain sections of the intellectual landscape took part in the vast denial and denigration of Blanchot’s importance. More or less explicitly, these moments often shared a suspicion that Blanchot was intensely adept in psychological “disguise”; numerous false connections in analyzing the political, intellectual, and journalistic situation of the 1930s; the view that right- and left-wing political extremism is one and the same;36 the accusation of thorough-going nihilism, and sometimes of persistent anti-Semitism; the—sometimes exclusive—emphasis on the ideological positions allegedly behind political and literary itineraries, which were distinguished only in order to be linked; the resulting superficial, mechanical periodization of the life of a man and of a body of work (from engagement to disengagement, from reengagement to silence); a functionalist conception of Blanchot’s literary criticism and even of his writing (which is placed in the service of his so-called identity quarrels and reduced to a process of purification or work of mourning, as if “history had been cleansed by literary language” and “the political digested by literature”); hermeneutic extrapolations (the illusions of allegorical commentaries or of “superposed readings”); the penalization of literature by which it was reduced to a political or legal rhetoric and treated like one language among others, as a minor phenomenon, denied the right to have any real implications for political, historical, or ethical thought; and ultimately the denial of politics, which are set aside from the philosophical implications at hand whenever they are present.
At a distance, a great distance from the comforting mediocrity of such thinking, at the same time as Mehlman was publishing (but was it in the same temporality?), Blanchot continued to think—through the notions of friendship and of community—the irrefutable and indissoluble link between the literary and the political, their possibility and necessity for the impossible, inscribing his life and the lives of those close to him into the unavowable and secret forms that he has passed on to his “invisible partners.”