1. [Throughout, the term récits will be retained in French. The alternative translation narratives does not allow for the important distinction between récits and novels made by Blanchot. Also, I have usually translated l’attention (often used by Bident) with “attentiveness,” its literal quality underlining the importance of this notion for Blanchot. —Trans.]
2. [Blanchot was still alive when this text was written and published. He died in 2003. —Trans.]
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3.
2. The surname Blanchot, whose emptiness and whiteness would be commented on at length, is a derivative of the name Blanc (White), which is common in the South of France. It can also sometimes mean “white woollen fabric.”
3. Half a century later, Élise would end her days at her goddaughter’s house.
4. Isidore and Edmond Blanchot’s younger sister, Marthe, born in 1866, had married a man named Jules Thevenot. She would die in 1922.
5. Interview given by Marguerite Blanchot to Philippe Merley, Le Courrier de Saône-et-Loire, July 27, 1979.
6. A great composer and organist, both as a theorist and a practitioner, Marcel Dupré, who was internationally recognized, would teach at the Conservatory in Paris beginning in 1926, eventually becoming its director. In 1936, the great organ of Saint-Sulpice was placed in his care. He died in Meudon in 1971.
7. Jean Suquet remembers a German teacher at the lycée in Châteauroux at the beginning of the Second World War. Wearing a long black cape, he looked like the ghost of some German Romantic. The schoolchildren called George Blanchot “the corpse.”
8. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, 5. [The French noun demeure used by Blanchot means “dwelling,” but it also suggests a conjugation of the verb demeurer (to remain) and of the verb mourir (to die; e.g., il meurt). The old French demourance is related to the sense of dwelling but recalls mourir even more strongly. Bident uses demeure regularly throughout the work. —Trans.]
9. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 72.
10. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet” (VI, December 23, 1903), in Sonnets to Orpheus with Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Cohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), 191.
11. Louis-René des Forêts, Ostinato, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002), 5, 123. There is no childhood to be rediscovered: “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will”—Charles Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 2010), 11. Instead, we can see it as both a privilege and a letdown, a continual source or resource for the imaginary and the neuter. Blanchot uses quite extraordinary language, in a letter to Dionys Mascolo, to describe “impersonal misfortune [malheur]”: “close to the feeling of personal misfortune one would feel in seeing a child throwing itself under the wheels of a car one was driving” (August 7, 1961).
12. Maurice Blanchot, “The ‘Sacred’ Speech of Hölderlin” (1946), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 117.
13. Georges Bataille, “Celestial Bodies” (1938), trans. Annette Michelson, October 36 (1986): 78.
14. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, 9.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” (1952), in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 59; “The Very Last Word” (1968), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 280.
1. Two children resulted from this marriage, the only two grandchildren of Alexandrine and Isidore.
2. Philippe Merley, presentation of the interview given by Marguerite Blanchot in the Courrier de Sâone-et-Loire.
3. Her cars were also a subject of conversation: a gray traction avant before the war, a Citroën 2CV after it. People in Chalon said she had a rather eccentric way of driving.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Le Docteur Faustus” (1950), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 168–171.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Turn of the Screw” (1954), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 259 n.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Story and Scandal” (1956), in ibid., 190.
3. Dionys Mascolo would invoke “Maurice Blanchot’s grilled steak,” a special diet reserved for him when staying at the Rue Saint-Benoît and ordered for him by Marguerite Duras. Georges Bataille makes an allusion to this in a letter to Mascolo: “I am myself in a bad way, and the diet that suits Maurice Blanchot will apparently be suitable for me too.” In Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 577–578. Louis Olliver, who often ate lunch with Blanchot in 1940–42, confirms that the latter ate little, although without following any particular dietary regime.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Sleep, Night,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 265.
5. “My existence is surprisingly solid; even fatal diseases find me too tough. I’m sorry, but I must bury a few others before I bury myself,” in Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 9.
6. An expression used in a letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, July 10, 1972.
7. Interview in François Poiré, Emmanuel Levinas, 2d ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 60.
8. Michel Butor in Didier Cahen and Jean-Claude Loiseau, “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” a France-Culture radio show first broadcast on September 17, 1994.
9. [The affair concerning the rightist author Benoist is discussed in a note in the final chapter. —Trans.]
10. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, undated, 1960s.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.
12. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 85. In “My Properties,” Henri Michaux writes: “At the stake where he finds himself, the atheist cannot believe in God. His health would not allow him to. / But all this is neither determining nor clear for well people. Everything suits these crass individuals, as it suits those with strong stomachs.” La nuit remue (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 19; emphasis added. The atheist is the writer who writes “for reasons of hygiene,” “for [his] health.” “Doubtless one writes for nothing else,” Michaux warned.
13. “I am forced to wait, without knowing how and when the waiting will end, a waiting which is surveyed here in the most affectionate and discreet way. It is as if, all of a sudden, all I have written has caught up with me and, to tell the truth, I have borne it badly. More simply, let us say what Robert once said: that illness and life are one and the same and that doctors can only give us provisional assistance in giving one the appearance of the other” (letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, July 18, 1965). This was a constant in Blanchot’s life: his extreme—and understandable—mistrust of doctors, which would often lead him to consult several rather than just one, and on which the récit that is The Madness of the Day is more than eloquent. Nonetheless, he was extremely affectionate toward the staff dispensing care.
14. Maurice Nadeau, “Maurice Blanchot” in Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 70.
15. Louis-René des Forêts in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot.”
16. Marie-Anne Lescourret in Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 64, 68.
17. Pierre Monnier, À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 205–206.
18. From a study by his son, Jean-Luc Maxence, L’ombre d’un père (Paris: Hallier, 1978), 127.
19. Dominique Aury, “Propos,” L’Infini, 55 (Autumn 1996): 21.
20. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 244. Roger Laporte described Blanchot’s voice as slightly lilting; for Michaël Levinas, it was unique and “very French,” belonging to a time that no longer existed; for him it has always evoked passages from Couperin’s Tombeau.
21. Georges Bataille, L’être indifférencié n’est rien, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 3:369 and 559. The second verse of the poem recalls the world of Thomas the Obscure, which is often quoted by Bataille.
22. Roger Laporte, “Un sourire mozartien,” Ralentir travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 75.
23. Marguerite Duras, Écrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 45. “I have known great writers, they were never able to speak about it [where writing came from]—I knew intimately Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille,” she writes elsewhere. “They were never able to, they never spoke about it”: Marguerite Duras, Le monde extérieur, in Outside (Paris: POL, 1993), 2:24–25.
24. [“Muffle” recalls the verb feutrer, a cognate of which is evidently chosen (and italicized) by Bident due to its association with the previous use of le feutre, a fedora hat. —Trans.]
1. Blanchot himself, in a letter he has made available, suggests the date of 1923. This date is nonetheless not certain, although it is the most probable.
2. For more details on the Strasbourg context and on meeting Levinas, we refer the reader to Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), especially the first chapter.
3. Henri Carteron had died in 1929 at the age of thirty-seven.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Do Not Forget” (1988), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 124–129, at 124.
5. See Jacques Derrida, “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” radio program.
1. Jacques Derrida, Adieu—to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8.
2. Emmanuel Levinas in François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 59–60.
3. Maurice Blanchot, letter of February 11, 1980, cited in Exercices de la Patience 1 (1980): 67.
4. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Pierre Prévost of November 16, 1987.
5. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 143.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Do Not Forget” (1988), in ibid., 124.
7. Several accounts confirm that Emmanuel Levinas never considered his friend an anti-Semite. He saw Blanchot’s monarchism as a curiosity, barely compatible with the rest of his personality, although a thinkable incompatibility.
8. [Aristide Briand (1862–1932) was a seven-time prime minister of France and joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. —Trans.]
9. Emmanuel Levinas, “Comme un consentement à l’horrible,” Le Nouvel Observateur (January 22, 1988), 82.
10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 47.
1. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 38.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Thinking the Apocalypse” (1987), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 123.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion” (1980), in ibid., 144.
4. Here and for the quotation above, Emmanuel Levinas’s words are taken from François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 61–62.
5. Emmanuel Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 12. On the relations between Heidegger, Husserl, and Blanchot, see the articles by Francis Wybrands and Alain David in Exercices de la patience 2 (Winter 1981): 79–87, 131–138. The less well-known influence of Bergson (1927 Nobel prize winner) on the development of Levinas and Blanchot (via a writer like Massis) is found in a certain approach to time (“the infinite in us,” Levinas would say); to duration (understood as pure and creative, i.e., when intuition completes the mind’s movements); to substance and to Being, or even to a critique of language that “lets be lost the mobility of consciousness, the dream of inner life, all that has its source and reality in duration,” thus leading to a theory of symbolism that nonetheless retains the abysses of Mallarmé’s poetry; see Maurice Blanchot, “Bergson et le symbolisme” (1942), partly reprinted as “Bergson and Symbolism” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 112–115.
6. Emmanuel Levinas, “Intentionality and Metaphysics,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith, 2nd ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 190.
7. Husserl’s sometime assistant Eugen Fink would speak of a “nonknowl-edge of the Being of beings” characterizing astonishment in its “horrifying” (entsetzend) essence; see the French translation, De la phénoménologie (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 203. The fate awaiting such words in Blanchot is well known; he was first able to read Fink’s work in 1939 in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie under the title “Le problème de la phénoménologie d’Edmond Husserl.”
8. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 63–64; Ethics and Infinity, 48.
9. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 63.
10. Ibid., 61; preface to second edition of De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 10–11, not included in Existence and Existents; Ethics and Infinity, 48.
11. Françoise Collin, “La peur,” in Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1991), 351.
1. Blanchot would return at length to skepticism in numerous fragments of The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
2. [The “two hundred families” refers to criticism from the Left of the influence of the two hundred biggest shareholders of the Banque de France, who exercised disproportionate influence on it. —Trans.]
3. Pierre Monnier, À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 206. According to Xavier de Lignac, Blanchot earned 12,000 francs a month at the Journal des Débats—perhaps an exaggerated figure. According to another account, each month Blanchot earned 900 francs each month at the Journal, and later 300 at L’Insurgé.
4. For relevant background, see in particular Jean Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années trentes: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Seuil, 1969); and Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violence: Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite, des années trentes aux retombées de la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Les français et le couronnement,” L’Insurgé 19 (May 19, 1937): 4.
6. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 242.
7. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 211. Maurice Barrès: The adolescent who read this author must have noticed that he had the same first name and the same initials.
8. According to Jean Rollin, Denise Rollin used to say that Maurice Blanchot had been seduced by Maurras’s personality, more than he had been convinced by his ideology. We can have doubts about this, even if the first part of the statement should not be excluded. Similarly, the far-reaching influence of Barrès on Blanchot should not be excluded, with its egotism, the importance of the terroir, love for one’s humiliated neighbor, a nationalism with roots.
9. Lucien Rebatet, Les décombres (Paris: Denoël, 1942), 127.
10. Étienne de Montety, Thierry Maulnier (Paris: Juillard, 1994), 181.
11. Thierry Maulnier, La crise est dans l’homme (Paris: Librairie de la Revue Française, 1932), 240.
12. Pierre Boutang does this in the interview related by Bernard-Henri Lévy in Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Harvill, 1995), 153 (“it is beyond question that Maurrassian ideas acted as a barrier,” “preventing excesses” that could have led to fascism).
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Mahatma Gandhi” (July 1931), trans. Franson Manjali in consultation with Michael Holland in Journal for Cultural Research 16, no. 4 (2012): 366–370. Thirteen years later, Blanchot’s position on Gandhi would remain unchanged: see “Le pèlerinage aux sources,” Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 536–540.
2. Blanchot, “Mahatma Gandhi,” 366.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, 367.
5. Ibid. [Rendering the French spirituel and esprit poses difficulties: “spiritual” and “spirit,” while they do align well with philosophical and religious traditions, also lose the connection to what in everyday English and in philosophy is identified as “(the) mind.” —Trans.]
6. Ibid., 368.
7. Ibid., 369.
8. G. K. Chesterton cited in ibid., 370.
9. Ibid., 369–370.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Le monde sans âme” (August 25, 1932), in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 74–88, at 75. (Here and elsewhere, references to this volume relate to the pages in the untranslated French edition.) Several months later, on March 21, 1933, in the Journal des Débats, Blanchot would return to the work by Daniel-Rops and notably to its follow-up, Les années tournantes, this time in an article containing little reserve; see “Les années tournantes,” in Chroniques politiques, 93–96.
2. Georges Bataille, “Materialism” and “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 15–16 and 45–52.
3. Blanchot, “Le monde sans âme,” 87.
4. Ibid., 81.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Le marxisme contre la revolution” (April 25, 1933), in Chroniques politiques, 100–113.
6. Ibid., 105.
7. Ibid., 108.
8. Ibid., 110.
9. Ibid., 111.
10. Ibid., 112.
11. Ibid.
12. The journal would publish with “great joy,” in its seventh issue, a telegram from the count and countess of Paris expressing thanks for the good wishes that had been published by the journal on the occasion of their recent marriage.
13. Maurice Blanchot, “Nouvelle querelle des anciens et des modernes” (April–May 1932), in Chroniques politiques, 47–54, at 54.
14. [Bident is referring to the slogan used under Vichy: “work, family, nation.” —Trans.]
15. Blanchot, “Morale et politique” (May 1933), in Chroniques politiques, 126–133.
16. Ibid., 130.
17. Ibid., 129.
18. Ibid., 127.
19. Ibid., 133.
1. This may not have been Blanchot’s first contribution to a daily newspaper. We have not been able to verify reports that he worked for La Nouvelliste de Lyon, one of the newspapers that covered the whole of France while retaining the name of a town or a region. None of its articles were signed, and nowhere is a list given of the editorial teams.
2. An article of August 18, 1931, bears the initials M.B. The next one, signed M.Bl. and attributable to Blanchot without too much doubt, is dated May 2, 1932. Two publicity announcements for the Journal des Débats in sympathetic journals list the paper’s contributors, helping us to confirm Blanchot’s role and his importance. One—in Réaction in April 1932—gives his name, unlike the second, from the last issue of the Cahiers Mensuels (July 1931). Finally, Emmanuel Levinas attributes to Blanchot the anonymous editorial of March 9, 1932: “Mr. Briand” (who had just died). The philosopher quotes from memory thus: “Each time he spoke he created a law, each time he acted he failed”: see Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 112. The words actually written by Blanchot were even harsher: “Each time he spoke he always triumphed, his actions were always failures” in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 44. In the article Blanchot provided a remarkable portrait of the “shared solitude” of Briand (44).
3. After the First World War he moved to the Revue de Paris, then to Figaro, as well as being the literary critic for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and from 1930 being a member of the Académie Française, where he was influential. Chaumeix (1874–1955) was later accused by the collaborationist and pro-Nazi weekly paper L’Appel of having treated Maurice Blanchot as a “negro”; “Videz Thomas,” L’Appel (May 28, 1942), 4.
4. He probably authored an article in the Journal des Débats of August 18, 1931, entitled “Comment s’emparer du pouvoir?” in which the technique of coups d’état is analyzed; it is collected in Chroniques politiques des années trente, 36–39. He argued for the relevance to the revolution of Daniel-Rops’s work, Les années tournantes, in an eponymous article in the Journal des Débats of March 21, 1933; Chroniques politiques, 93–96. Daniel-Rops himself often contributed to the newspaper, thus ensuring that Ordre Nouveau was represented there.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Un discours logique,” as “Avant Genève—M. de Neurath expose les principes de la politique allemande—Un discours logique,” in Chroniques politiques, 324–327.
6. Blanchot would return to the nature and necessity of the call for force in L’Insurgé, 10 (March 1937): 5, in terms of the work by Alphonse Séché, Réflexions sur la force. “That force should demand to be rehabilitated” is strange but necessary in terms of history, he wrote. “The moment a regime starts discrediting violence and recommending incapacity is also the moment when the society that accepts this becomes incapable and loses the will to do what is required for power.” However, Blanchot criticized the more outrageous and fascistic aspects of a rehabilitation of force that “even Nietzsche would not accept,” thus demonstrating a right-leaning but not extreme reading of the philosopher who wrote on the will to power.
7. Maurice Blanchot, “Les communistes, gardiens de la culture,” Journal des Débats (March 25, 1933); Chroniques politiques, 97–99. The two following citations are from pages 98 and 99.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Le rajeunissement de la politique,” Journal des Débats (May 2, 1932); Chroniques politiques, 56.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Au Congrès pour l’éducation nouvelle,” Journal des Débats (June 23, 1932), and Chroniques politiques, 61; “L’histoire désarmée,” Journal des Débats (July 21, 1932), and Chroniques politiques, 68.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “La doctrine catholique et les relations internationales,” Journal des Débats (May 9, 1932), and Chroniques politiques, 59.
11. The library collection is incomplete (85 issues of at least 130). I have therefore been unable to read all Blanchot’s articles for Rempart, while still having read enough (60) to be able to discern his political and ideological positions in 1933. In the remainder of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses provide page-references to the Chroniques politiques.
12. Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans, 1927–1937 (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 257–258.
13. One of the early, biographical fragments of The Step (Not) Beyond can be read in this way. See Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 2.
14. Le Rempart, issue 50.
15. Maxence, Histoire de dix ans. Maxence is not completely wrong to discuss the “singular lucidity” of the era: “We were able to see the significance of everyday events. We underlined this popular movement, this movement of revolt that eventually would lead to the February events. . . . And Le Rempart was doubtless the only newspaper which, at the time, took up a position that was at once antiparliamentarian and anticapitalist.” On Paul Lévy’s friendship with Georges Mandel, see Bertrand Favreau, Georges Mandel ou la passion de la République (Paris: Fayard, 1996), notably 69, 80, 269–270.
16. [Although it seems clear that salut here bears a meaning distinct from “salvation,” several alternatives remain. It could be translated as “safety,” “security,” or “well-being.” I have chosen the first of these here in order to align with something that was doubtless in Blanchot’s mind: the postrevolutionary Comité de Salut Publique to which Robespierre belonged, and which is commonly translated as the “committee of public safety.” In a related (non-theological) register, a variant of the verb “to save” has been used in some cases. —Trans.]
17. Maurice Blanchot, reader’s notes on L’école du renégat by Jean Fontenoy in L’Insurgé 30 (August 4, 1937): 5.
18. Blanchot would long remain close to Paul Lévy as a faithful friend, even to the point of seconding him in a duel. The affair is recounted in Aux Écoutes 1024 (January 1, 1938): 17. At the end of December 1937, Lévy learned from the press that he had been “violently offended” by Albert Naud in the high court in Paris. He straightaway sent two witnesses, Henri Israel and Maurice Blanchot, to demand “a formal apology or the chance to defend his honor by arms.” According to the statement by Israel and Blanchot, as it is reported in Aux Écoutes, Albert Naud hid from them. On December 30, they drew up a legal claim against Naud following his lack of action. Paul Lévy excused himself to his friends thus: “Mr. Naud insults people and then runs away. Please excuse me for having disturbed you on account of this coward.” We can note here that a certain confrontation with death is always present for Blanchot. We can also see the kind of aristocratic world, with its absolute and outmoded forms of dignity, to which he belonged.
19. In parallel to Le Rempart, Paul Lévy had launched a “great illustrated newspaper,” Aujourd’hui, containing four full pages of photographic reproductions, which probably folded in 1934. A number of the editorial team from Le Rempart could be found there; the two newspapers even had the same headquarters at 17 Rue d’Anjou. It seems that unlike Maxence or Maulnier, Blanchot did not put his name to any article for this paper. This allows us to reasonably suppose that a large part of his activity was now dedicated to Aux Écoutes.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “La fin du 6 février,” Combat (February 1936), and Chroniques politiques, 364.
21. Paul Lévy, “La révolution nationale,” Aujourd’hui 259 (February 8, 1934): 3.
22. Maurice Blanchot, note to “Nietzsche, Today,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 448–449.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Seán Hand, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 62–71.
24. This is the title of one of the two articles, “Le dérèglement de la diplomatie française,” La Revue du Vingtième Siècle (May–June 1935); see Chroniques politiques, 355–362.
1. Jeannine Verdès-Leroux usefully underlines the radicalization of tone that took place between Réaction and Combat and how it can be understood in terms of the demands of the era and the pressure of history. She also shows how the vehement “juvenile and tragic” indignation of Blanchot and Maulnier differed from the vulgar extremism of a figure such as Brasillach. She quite rightly discusses their “national-revolutionary” mindset, which was separate from the fascist grouping that fell out with Combat in 1937, and that a few years later would become involved in collaboration. Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violences: Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite, des années trentes aux retombées de la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 70–73.
2. It is nonetheless important to point out that the contributors’ positions differed from one another: from the Maurrassian orthodoxy of Gaxotte, who above all was concerned to keep France’s borders and therefore also its culture intact, to Fabrègues’s confused timidity on the subject of Nazism, or Maulnier’s fairly unequivocal condemnation of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies (which were said to be unacceptable from a humanitarian point of view, but also because they prevented “the Jewish problem” from being posed).
3. Keeping his paradigms coherent, eight months later Brasillach would write an article named “The Machine for Kicking Asses” before quitting a journal that for him had become “absurd”; Robert Brasillach, letter to Jacques Brousse, February 12, 1940, cited by Verdès-Leroux, Refus et violences, 71.
4. [The meaning of Marchenoir is unclear. It does not seem to be a typo for marché noir (black market), since this would have been noticed from one issue to another, though it could be a deliberate play on that expression (though one whose meaning is unclear). It may refer to a small village of the same name in central France (although it is not clear why it would). —Trans.]
5. Maurice Blanchot, “La fin du 6 Février” (February 2, 1936), in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 363. In the remainder of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses provide page references to the Chroniques politiques.
6. Later, Blanchot would see the invasion of the Rhineland as the crux of the Second World War. March 1936 already equaled September 1938: Munich.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Le terrorisme, méthode de salut public” (July 7, 1936) in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 379. In the remainder of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses provide page references to the Chroniques politiques.
2. Maximilien de Robespierre, extracts from speeches of July 15, 1791, and February 5, 1794 (17 pluviôse year II).
3. Maurice Blanchot, “La grande passion des Modérés,” Chroniques politiques, 383–387.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Réquisitoire contre la France,” in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 393–395. [In the rest of this chapter, the numbers in parentheses are the page references for Chroniques politiques. —Trans.]
2. On L’Insurgé, see notably Etienne de Montety, Thierry Maulnier (Paris: Juillard, 1994), 126–136; Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 65; Eugen Weber, L’Action française (1962; reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1985), 585–562. According to Pierre Monnier, who was an associate of Deloncle and contributed to L’Insurgé, Blanchot knew Deloncle; he had at least made “approaches,” but he never carried out any activities for La Cagoule, and neither did Maxence or Maulnier; Pierre Monnier, À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 193.
3. The text is included in Chroniques politiques, 413–414.
4. Was he even the editor-in-chief? Pierre Prévost suggests that he was; see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 546.
5. Pierre Viénot was undersecretary of state at the Foreign Ministry in Blum’s government.
6. Like Action Française, Blanchot spoke of Blum in the feminine.
7. In fact, given the venue in which Blanchot was publishing, this diplomacy was nonetheless situated in relation to Maulnier’s thinking of “national revolution.” It was therefore positioned in relation to a particular theory—albeit one lacking any practical consequences.
8. Should we read this date as symbolizing that this break was made in the name of the Republic? Should it be linked to the recent fall of Blum’s government? These readings are both tempting and unlikely. As we shall see, other events had a role to play.
9. Letter from Thierry Maulnier to Charles Maurras, July 23, 1937, quoted by Etienne de Montety in Thierry Maulnier, 135. According to a brief anonymous article in the collaborationist weekly paper L’Appel on May 28, 1942, it was Blanchot who “sank [L’Insurgé] together with the aforementioned Thalagrand [Thierry Maulnier].”
10. Blanchot would write to Diane Rubenstein on this point: “I remember that, being totally opposed to Brasillach, who had been utterly won over by fascism and anti-Semitism, I had stipulated as a condition for my collaborating on the journal that he would not be involved with it”; letter of August 20, 1983, in Diane Rubenstein, What’s Left? (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 187. This condition was granted only with difficulty. Relations with Maulnier at the time were fraught. Blanchot would later say that his texts were sometimes altered at Combat and L’Insurgé without his view being sought. They were thought to be too anti-Nazi or not anti-Semitic enough. He demanded corrections, which he did not receive; he then brought his participation to an end.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “On demande des dissidents,” Chroniques politiques, 474–478.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Hommage à Claude Séverac,” Aux Écoutes 997 (June 26, 1937): 11.
2. “The only date of which I am sure is the 13th October, Wednesday 13th October”; Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, trans. Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1999), 129–187, at 133. For our reconstruction of the chronology, all subsequent quotations are taken from the first part of the narrative and indeed from the first fifteen pages.
3. Blanchot, Death Sentence, 173.
4. The narrator of Death Sentence spends several weeks in an establishment being treated for “illness of the lungs”; ibid., 160. We can also think of the sanatorium in The Last Man, and of the descriptions in The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 7, 11–12.
5. Blanchot, Death Sentence, 163.
6. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 6.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “M. Briand” (March 9, 1932), in Chroniques politiques des années trente: 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 46. This editorial is not signed, but it is attributed to Blanchot by Emmanuel Levinas.
2. The advent of Hitler was “for us and above all for the Jews the interregnum when all rights, all recourse ceased, when friendship became uncertain and the silence of the highest spiritual authorities left us without guarantee, not only threatened but anxious about not responding as one should to the silent call of others”; Maurice Blanchot in “Do Not Forget” (1988), in Political Writings: 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 127. Such incompatibilities were opening up an ever-larger fissure in his thinking. At the time, he remained silent on the attitude of Catholic and Jewish authorities. He would later say that this objectively undeniable lack of engagement was in line with the wish most shared by the Jews that he knew: “The most commonly shared view was: let us not exaggerate anything, we must be prudent, reserved, warn the Jews about the consequences of any action”; Maurice Blanchot, letter to Roger Laporte, December 9, 1984, cited in Leslie Hill, “Introduction,” in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York: Routledge, 1996), 9.
3. We can therefore better understand what, beyond the absence of any partisan or institutional involvement with fascist parties, distinguished his position from that of Heidegger. Blanchot did not have Being and Time behind him, but rather Thomas the Obscure ahead of him, a work whose form he was searching for, slowly and with difficulty. He had not developed any thinking that he could put forth as his own because neither he nor anyone else recognized any theoretical authority in his writing, and because in parallel fashion he was struggling to assume a literary authority that was as yet unknown to everyone. He accused Heidegger on the contrary of compromising his language and his thinking: Heidegger’s main “political” text of 1933 “put in Hitler’s service the very language and the very writing through which, at a great moment in the history of thought, we had been invited to participate in the questioning designated as the most lofty—that which would come to us from Being and from Time”; in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 451. See also Jean-Michel Rabaté’s “Le scandale de l’après-coup,” Critique 594 (November 1996): 921–922: “There was nothing comparable to Heidegger’s attitude here . . .”
4. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Raymond Bellour in Cahiers de l’Herne: Henri Michaux (Paris: L’Herne, 1966), 88; Maurice Blanchot, “Intellectuals Under Scrutiny” (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 223.
5. “The story of the transformation of convictions! In the whole realm of literature there is no other story of such thrilling interest!” Lev Shestov cited in Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 504, 506.
6. “Is it simply an accident, for example, that Blanchot distanced himself from the far right and from journalism at the same time? Ought one not ask whether the message is to some degree determined by the medium? Could one not say that an entire sector of French literary production became simultaneously fascist and journalistic? That the temptations of fascism had a lot to do with journalistic exaggeration?” Denis Hollier, “Fahrenheit 452 (Below Zero),” Critique 594 (November 1996): 934.
7. Beyond the stakes in politics, economics, social questions, or war, Georges Bataille recognized the power of fascism, as early as 1933, in what he named this power of “irrational attraction” in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” trans. Carl R. Lovitt, New German Critique 16 (Winter, 1979): 64–87; see also “Le fascisme en France,” ibid., 2:205–213).
8. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 2.
1. We know how highly Maulnier—a personality who at the time was clearly much better known—thought of Blanchot. Their postwar relations were more distant but still continued, probably until the end of the 1950s. See also Pierre Monnier’s remarks in À l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (In the Shadow of the Great and Spineless) (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 192.
2. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 244.
3. Monnier, A l’ombre des grandes têtes molles, 223–224.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1999), 490–491.
5. There is also a 1973 text that addresses Valéry, “La comédie d’avoir de l’ordre.” The beginning of the article suggests what attracted the young reader of the 1920s: the “pressure of the morning mind which demanded—to the point of suffering, or exaltation—that [Valéry] think quickly, too quickly, that he think everything and also what is beyond everything.” We can also infer what gradually distanced this young reader: the tendency toward academic stiffness in the organization of thought, the search for and publication of the “System,” the desire to insert the slightest morning jotting into it, to use even what was unusable, to erase nothing. See La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident, 339–342 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
6. Maurice Blanchot, “De la révolution à la littérature,” L’Insurgé 1 (January 13, 1937): 3.
7. Maurice Blanchot, review of La dentelle du Rempart by Charles Maurras, L’Insurgé, 7 (February 24, 1937): 5. Along with Denis de Rougemont, Maurras was the only author to whom Blanchot dedicated two columns over the ten months (the other appeared on July 28, 1937).
8. Bl. (Maurice Blanchot), review of Médée by Léon Daudet, Aux Écoutes 895 (July 13, 1935): 30.
9. We know of the existence of a letter from Drieu to Blanchot, dated March 28, 1937, which is to say a good month before the appearance of the article on Rêveuse bourgeoisie in L’Insurgé. This letter is referred to by Pierre Andreu and Frédéric Grover in Drieu La Rochelle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1989). Blanchot himself confirms that he met Drieu on this occasion in For Friendship (1993) in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul, 135–136 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
10. Maurice Blanchot, review of Alain, Souvenirs de guerre, L’Insurgé 24 (June 23, 1937): 5.
11. Bl. (Maurice Blanchot), review of Maeterlinck, Avant le grand silence, Aux Écoutes, 864 (February 8, 1934): 35.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “La culture française vue par un allemande,” La Revue Française 10 (March 27, 1932): 363–365.
13. Today, who knows Georges Reyer, Guy Mazeline, Hubert Chatelion, Jean Guirec, Jolan Foldes? Who still reads Louise Hervieu, Thyde Monnier, or even Charles Plisnier (the Goncourt Prize winner in 1937)? These are only a few of the now obscure names to whom Blanchot dedicates texts as long as those treating Virginia Woolf or Thomas Mann.
14. Maurice Blanchot, review of André Rousseaux, Âmes et visages du vingtième siècle, La Revue Universelle 18 (December 15, 1932): 742–745.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Les communistes, gardiens de la culture” (25 March 1933), in Chroniques politiques, 97.
16. Maurice Blanchot, review of Daniel-Rops, Deux hommes en moi, La Revue Universelle 21 (February 1931): 367–368.
17. Maurice Blanchot, review of Penser avec les mains by Denis de Rougemont, L’Insurgé 3 (January 27, 1937): 5.
18. See notably the end of the reading of Ramuz, Le garçon savoyard: “This is also what makes admirable language such a gift in this writer who, today, through the rigor of his refusals, the purity of his innovations and through his heightened awareness most makes us think of what could be, in the novel, the work of a new Mallarmé.” L’Insurgé 37 (September 22, 1937): 6.
19. Maurice Blanchot, review of Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, L’Insurgé 33 (August 25, 1937): 4; of Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, L’Insurgé 14 (April 14, 1937): 5; of Woolf, The Waves, in “Time and the Novel” (1937) in Faux Pas, trans Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 248–251.
20. Maurice Blanchot, review of Martin du Gard, L’Eté 1914, L’Insurgé 4 (February 3, 1937): 5. Eight years was also the interval separating the beginning and the publication of Thomas the Obscure, another work constructed in silence.
21. Maurice Blanchot, review of Mauriac, Journal, L’Insurgé 20 (May 26, 1937): 5.
22. Blanchot, review of Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Blanchot already addressed the “impure elements of biography” and “the abolition of the writer” on December 15, 1932, in a reading of André Rousseaux, Âmes et visages du vingtième siècle. It is therefore one of his few points of convergence with the Surrealists. In the Journal des Débats, he railed against the false science of surveys, most of all surveys sent out in search of literary anecdotes, “the wish to know others’ secrets,” the search for intimacy and “scandalous anecdotes”; “Les faux-semblants du savoir” (February 27, 1933), 1. However, in June 1939 in a reading of Haeden’s work on Nerval, he rehabilitated—already in Bataillean mode—Nerval’s attempt “to give existence the necessity, the rigor, and the quality of absoluteness that befit the work of art” in “Un essai sur Gérard de Nerval,” Journal des Débats (June 22, 1939), 2.
23. Maurice Blanchot, “Les écrivains et la politique” (July 27, 1932), in Chroniques politiques, 73.
24. Maurice Blanchot, review of Denis de Rougemont, Penser avec les mains.
25. Maurice Blanchot, “De la révolution à la littérature.”
26. Blanchot distinguished between “allegory, the poison which condemns all symbolism to the most certain death” and the symbol, “the burning center of a dialectics that devours what it completes until it has brought forth from the enigma itself the light of clarity” in a reading of Claudel, Les aventures de Sophie, L’Insurgé 25 (June 30, 1937): 5.
27. Maurice Blanchot, review of Chardonne, Romanesques, L’Insurgé 9 (March 10, 1937): 6.
28. Maurice Blanchot, “Time and the Novel,” reading of Mann, Joseph and His Brothers.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Interior Monologue” (1937), in Faux Pas, 244–247.
30. Maurice Blanchot, review of Bernanos, Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, L’Insurgé 23 (June 16, 1937): 5.
31. Maurice Blanchot, review of Daniel-Rops, Ce qui meurt et ce qui naît, L’Insurgé 12 (March 31, 1937): 5; Maurice Blanchot, review of Mazeline, Bêtafeu, L’Insurgé 11 (March 24, 1937): 5.
32. Maurice Blanchot, review of Petit, Un homme veut rester vivant, L’Insurgé 18 (May 12, 1937): 5.
33. Maurice Blanchot, review of Rougemont, Journal d’un intellectuel au chômage, L’Insurgé 32 (August 18, 1937): 4.
34. Maurice Blanchot, “Interior Monologue.”
35. Maurice Blanchot, “The Beginnings of a Novel” (1938), in The Blanchot Reader, 33–34. For their part, Maxence and Brasillach railed against Sartre: see Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 237–238. Sartre had not yet made public any political commitment, although he was close to Paul Nizan, who was a member of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, he had already come out against Mauriac’s Catholic, academic, and conventionally moralistic literature.
36. Maurice Blanchot, “François Mauriac et ceux qui étaient perdus,” La Revue Française 26 (June 28, 1931): 610–611.
37. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 9.
1. Pierre Prévost recounts that Pelorson introduced Blanchot to him as follows: “He was so acutely demanding that he had destroyed his manuscripts several times.” In Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 86.
2. This is if we believe Pierre Monnier, who depicts Blanchot’s editorial activities at L’Insurgé thus: “We knew that he was writing his first book. Kléber Haedens had seen extracts from it, and told me that Thomas the Obscure would be a masterpiece. Guy Richelet and I, a little intimidated, used to watch Blanchot and admire him.” Monnier, A l’ombre des grandes têtes molles (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987), 205–206. His supposed correspondence with Drieu was that of two novelists discussing the preoccupations and certainties of their creative processes. This rare passage speaks to this correspondence: “What we need, I believe,” wrote Drieu, “is for all our characters to be within the very movement of our most quotidian and our most profound reflexes, that they should be tied to our difficulties in living. They are the temperature charts of our two or three illnesses—and also of our recoveries” (letter of March 28, 1937). Finally, Georges Bataille would later confirm (around 1954) that “novels and tales of an excessively strange character” existed before 1940, in “Maurice Blanchot . . . ,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 218.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in Vicious Circles: Two Fictions and “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 64.
4. Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste, trans. Jackson Matthews (London: Peter Owen, 1951), 4–5.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” 64.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “The Idyll,” in Vicious Circles, 5.
7. “At a time when you are already beginning to worry about middle age, do you know what it is like to find a young woman who has more gaiety and freshness than all the others?’ Ibid., 7. This presence of parental figures is all the more worthy of attention for being very rare in Blanchot’s narratives, except for The Most High, where the father figure is absent and replaced by a hated stepfather.
8. “The Idyll,” 4.
9. “The burning of libraries will always be the calamity that foretells the death of the mind,” Blanchot would write in “The Book” in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 29. “The Last Word” opens with the disappearance of the library and closes with the tower in flames.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” 65. “These innocent texts in which echoed the murderous omens of times to come,” he would also write. Ibid., 64. It is possible to be struck in a similar way on reading poems by Robert Antelme written prior to his arrest, but which according to Daniel Dobbels provide “an unexpected form of premonition”; see Robert Antelme, Textes inédits (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 52–57.
11. See in particular “L’Allemagne nouvelle ou le triomphe de la Prusse,” Le Rempart 17 (May 8, 1933): 2.
12. For some time yet, Blanchot would continue to live this life of a journalist of the far right, which he was nonetheless beginning to disdain. He would later recognize the same paradoxical fate at work in Tocqueville: “Yet he devotes himself to this [political] life that he does not like and that is beneath him. He sacrifices his projects as a historian to it. He allows it to jeopardize his health. In order to live it, he gives up being fully what he ought to be.” In “Tocqueville’s Recollections” (1943), in A World in Ruins, 61.
13. Blanchot, “The Last Word,” in Vicious Circles, 39. Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from the three texts collected in Vicious Circles.
14. [Le mot can be translated both as word and as saying (as in a bon mot). —Trans.]
15. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 57.
16. Ibid., 83.
1. Perhaps it is this indulgence that he is commenting on obliquely, in a 1947 article on Julien Gracq’s “magical world,” when he underlines that it might so happen that a writer could “desire to be weighty. It is perhaps necessary for him to move forward along a path that he blocks to the precise degree that he clears it” (such a way of moving forward describes that of Thomas, and even more that of Thomas in Aminadab). The abundance of adjectives clouds one’s vision and places events at a remove. “Grève désolée, obscur malaise” (1947), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 95–100. Nonetheless, we must add that from the outset Blanchot fights against this tendency, and that it is less the abundance of adjectives than the abundance of “movements” that characterizes the precision of his prose.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Lautréamont,” Revue Française des Idées et des Oeuvres 1 (April 1940): 67–72. This article was republished, with a few modifications, in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 172–176. The expression “the cancer of the French novel,” for instance, does not feature in this later version.
3. Although mentioned in the apostolic lists, Thomas or Didymus (twin) only appears in the New Testament in the gospel of John. Arrogant and unbelieving, trusting touch more than sight, he would also be the only apostle to recognize Christ’s divine nature, calling him “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). In the Oxyrynchus papyrus, discovered in the third century, the Lord says to Thomas: “whoever listens to these words shall not taste death.” In the Acts of Thomas, a Syriac text also of the third century, Thomas who in the dividing-up of the world had received India is killed with spears; but even once dead, his body continues to perform miracles. In the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal book once again of the third century (and discovered in 1947), Thomas’s full name is Didymus Jude Thomas, the “twin brother” of the Lord. He would be the only one to respond correctly when Christ asks what he looks like—the answer is that he is Ungraspable, Unknowable. He is the only one who knows the secret words of Revelation.
4. Letter from Hegel to Niethammer, quoted by Jacques Derrida in Glas, II (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1981), 247.
5. Daniel Wilhem, Maurice Blanchot: La voix narrative (Paris: UGE, 1974), 276; Pierre Klossowski: Le corps impie (Paris: UGE, 1979), 228–229.
6. Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 39.
7. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1.
8. This is the paradox of Gracchus, which repeatedly appears in Blanchot’s fictional and critical work. From the 1930s, through the character of Thomas, and from the first texts on Kafka: “We do not die, it is true, but because of that we do not live either; we are dead while we are alive, we are essentially survivors”; Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka” (1945), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 8, or on Lautréamont: Maldoror’s “definitive impossibility of having done with things”; Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 106.
9. [For the remainder of this chapter, references in parentheses refer to the first version of Thomas the Obscure (reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 2005), which is untranslated. —Trans.]
10. Drawing notably on the scene of being devoured by the rat (which Lacan would address), Frédéric Nef reads not the impossibility of contact (“fear before the threat of a mortal contact”) but the presence in this literary experience “of fascination as a way of living through the phantasm”; “Le piège,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 71–88. There is indeed no need to prove that the novel is full of phantasmatic scenes or scenarios. The a priori concerns of any reading must surely be dialed down a notch by the idea that writing is the unfolding of such phantasms, their still-secret opening, that it investigates their movement even as it abstains from providing a single figure for it, and that is elaborated (whether through a phobic or joyful relationship to the same, through the immanence of the double, the transcendence of metamorphosis) as the unending analysis of an originary scene.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Roman et poésie” (1941), in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 43–48.
12. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 64.
13. René Char, “Even if . . . ,” in Poems of René Char, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Jonathan Griffin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 259.
The epigraph from James Joyce is cited by Maurice Blanchot in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 609.
1. See Edmond Buchet, Les auteurs de ma vie ou ma vie d’éditeur (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1969), 65.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Lautréamont” (1940), in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 172–176.
3. From 1938 to 1940, Blanchot did not put his name to any texts of a political nature. But he was responsible for numerous editorials in the Journal des Débats, which we can identify stylistically. They regularly denounced Germanic nihilism and particularly Hitler’s totalitarianism.
4. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle on May 3, 1940, in Journal 1939–1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 180.
5. If we are to believe Death Sentence, 1940 was a year of pain. In any case, what Blanchot’s narrative states regarding his shock corroborates the accounts we have heard. See The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 131.
6. When exactly? It is not impossible that Blanchot could have written until mid-October the daily “Letter from Clermont” on the front page of the Journal des Débats. The author of this column did not forgo praising, at first moderately and then clearly under external pressure, the regime and the figure of Marshal Pétain. Brought to heel from the outset—as sometimes he contradicted his own writing from the previous day—for a certain period this author set out to justify each government measure historically and ideologically.
7. Another question must be asked: to when is the religious “transformation of convictions,” the abandonment of faith, to be dated? Did it not give rise to a more radical rupture? Had it already taken place around 1937 or 1938? Was there, would there ever be anything like Pascal’s night, but in inverse form? Can we not see this night, charged with the return of the “primal scene,” in the dedication to Lignac? Did the death sentence, providing the unbearable image of a corpse left to rot, “remove this man’s faith” like the Holbein painting that so astonished Prince Myshkin?
8. “Private assistance for the middle class continues to fulfill a task in which it cannot be replaced. It alone reaches the social categories that official aid cannot, because the poverty they suffer is a hidden poverty. It has its own methods, tried and tested through long experience. It intervenes when necessary and its intervention is like the concern of a friend,” in M. Bl., “Une oeuvre à sauver,” Journal des Débats (June 5, 1941), 1. This text is not included in Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
9. Paul Lévy, Journal d’un exilé (Paris: Grasset, 1949), 29–30.
10. See Emmanuel Levinas in François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 59; Maire-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 121–122, 138; Maurice Blanchot, “Do Not Forget” (1988), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 124; and a reader’s letter in Le Monde signed Simone Hansel, née Levinas, “J’ai lu votre article . . .” (December 1–2, 1996), 10.
11. See also Roger Laporte, Maurice Blanchot: L’ancien, l’effroyablement ancien (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), 56. Claude Roy even places Blanchot, as early as the war, among former right-wing extremists now “close to the Communist Party,” in Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 200.
12. Quain was in the so-called free zone, around 25 miles (40 km) to the west of the demarcation line and around 60 miles (100 km) from the Swiss border.
13. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals Under Scrutiny (1984) in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 222.
14. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 148.
1. Regarding Jeune France, the reader is referred to Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987); Pierre Schaeffer, Les antennes de Jéricho (Paris: Stock, 1978); Véronique Chabrol, “Jeune France: Une expérience de recherche et de décentralisation culturelle” (PhD thesis, Université de Paris, Institut d’Etudes Théâtrales, Bibliothèque Gaston-Baty, June 1974). (Véronique Chabrol is Paul Flamand’s daughter.) See also Serge Added’s book on Le théâtre dans les années Vichy (Paris: Ramsay, 1992). We owe a lot to interviews with Jean Bazaine, Louis Ollivier, and above all Xavier de Lignac, who lent us precious archives. The chapter that Marc Fumaroli dedicates to Jeune France in L’etat culturel: Une religion moderne (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992) ascribes too much importance to the ideological and strategic role played by Mounier (for whom Jeune France was a “working tool” whose “soul” was provided by the team from Esprit). Fumaroli does not mention the existence of a faction that was radically opposed to that of Flamand or Schaeffer, namely that of Lignac and Blanchot, who, as we shall see, would provoke the breakup of Jeune France in 1942.
2. The publisher Edmond Buchet confirms this, but in different terms: “A few days ago, Maurice Blanchot took me to an exhibition of young painters that he is praising. I was not able to hide my disappointment from him. How could a mind as sharp as his be duped by such mediocrity? It is true that he is literary above all else”; note of December 5, 1942, in Les auteurs de ma vie ou ma vie d’éditeur (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1969), 91–92. This taste was not new. In the 1930s, he was interested in surrealism. Pierre Roy, the only contemporary painter mentioned in the first version of Thomas the Obscure (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 205, alongside Da Vinci and Titian, belonged to this movement. He is known for his trompe-l’oeil pictures.
3. Blanchot would admit: “The situation was too ambiguous. Jeune France, which had been founded by unknown musicians who would later become famous, was subsidized by Vichy, and our naïve project to use this association against Vichy . . . failed because of this contradiction,” in For Friendship (1993) in Political Writings, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 135.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Play of Thought,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 212–213. Another singular similarity is demonstrated by the 1944 portrait of Bataille by Henri-François Rey, which seems to retain only those characteristics which could also be attributed to Blanchot: “a very handsome face, a quiet voice, a very abstract way of moving in space, both absent and present at the very same time. . . . He was the most fascinating man I have ever met, who had his mysteries, his ambiguities and his contradictions. I have never seen or experienced the existence of a being who unceasingly pursued the same quest, that for the absolute, which so much sheer passion, so much suffering and unhappiness, so many hopes and doubts” in Le Magazine Littéraire 44 (January 1979): 58.
2. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 104.
3. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, May 9 (1961?), quoted in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 594.
4. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals Under Scrutiny (1984) in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 226. Bataille presents the encounter as follows: “At the end of 1940, he met Maurice Blanchot, to whom he soon became linked through admiration and agreement.” In “Notice autobiographique,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 7:462. Everything or almost everything it is possible to say about the relationship between Blanchot and Bataille has been said in Michel Surya’s biography, to which we refer the reader: Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002).
5. We can note that due to their multiple acquaintances, Bataille and Blanchot could have met earlier. Drieu frequented the Collège de Sociologie; Denis de Rougement spoke there. Pelorson edited a journal, Volontés, to which Queneau was a regular contributor. Denis Hollier also remarks, “Curiously, the first time the names of Blanchot and Bataille were associated was in 1938, without either of them knowing about it, in Commune, the communist publication whose press review was written by Sadoul. Sadoul took apart in a very insulting way the dossier by the Collège de Sociologie from the July 1938 Nouvelle Revue Française, before moving—without a pause—on to a detailed denunciation of a long Blanchot article from Combat, the far-right newspaper of the era.” Denis Hollier, in Art Press 204 (July–August 1995): 47–48.
6. Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 10.
7. Ibid., 97.
8. Bataille met Blanchot at the end of 1940. He contracted pulmonary tuberculosis in 1942. Later, in 1955, he was doomed by cerebral arteriosclerosis: he would suffer more and more intensely over the final seven years of his life.
9. Bataille, Guilty, 28. [In this and the following quotation, the switching between tenses is Bataille’s own. —Trans.]
10. Ibid., 15.
11. Ibid., 4. Blanchot would return to this phrase in the homage paid to Bataille after his death in Critique. This fear is clearly what enabled their immediate understanding. It is a shared, physical, concrete, oral fear; it is the fear to which their dialogue leads them, not a dialogue of construction, confrontation, or contestation, but a movement at once resolute and uncertain, a cavernous and spoken word, “a neutral, infinite, powerless speech, where the limitlessness of thought . . . is at stake,” “it is thought itself that is put at stake by calling upon us to sustain, and in the direction of the unknown, the limitlessness of this play.” Thus “between two men speaking, bound by what is essential, the nonfamiliar intimacy of thought establishes a boundless distance and proximity. . . . Relations that are strange, privileged, sometimes exclusive, and that can only with difficulty withstand being shared with others; relations of invisibility in full light that are guaranteed by nothing and which, when they have endured over a lifetime, represent the unforeseeable chance, the unique chance in view of which they were risked.” The Infinite Conversation, 215–217.
12. Bataille himself would underline how close the three men’s thinking was: “Levinas’s thinking . . . did not seem to me to differ from that of Blanchot or from my own.” “L’existentialisme au primat de l’économie” (1947), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 9:293. Even before the war, Levinas must have read passages of Thomas the Obscure and must have recognized in it what he and Blanchot had lived through and thought together in Strasbourg, which he named the there is; between the submission and publication of the book, Bataille must also have read it and have seen in it the demand of experience (he quotes a long section of the second chapter in Inner Experience). After the Liberation, Levinas published Existence and Existents, in which he refers to the same chapter, which he sees as an admirable description of the there is; trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 63. For Bataille, the word “description” “is not wholly just: Levinas describes and Blanchot somehow cries the there is. . . . Levinas describes as an object, through a formal generalization (in other words through discourse) what, in Blanchot’s literary text, is the pure cry of an existence.” “L’existentialisme au primat de l’économie,” 292–294. In this article, Bataille calls into question whether discourse can be external to experience, in Levinas as in all existentialists and in almost all philosophers. Nonetheless, he recognizes that Levinas “retains to some degree the quality of a cry in his writing.” Finally, we can recall the “incident” whereby Heidegger, referring to the person he thought to be “the best French mind” confused Bataille and Blanchot; see Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 582.
13. Bataille’s expression quoted by Blanchot in the epigraph to Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
14. “Now, ‘the basis of communication’ is not necessarily speech, or even the silence that is its foundation and punctuation, but exposure to death, no longer my own exposure, but someone else’s, whose living and closest presence is already eternal and unbearable absence, an absence that the work of deepest mourning does not diminish. And it is in life itself that the absence of someone else has to be met; it is with that absence . . . that friendship is brought into play and lost at each moment, a relation without relation or without relation other than the incommensurable.” The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 25. “The community of friendship, with Blanchot, would no more be founded on this specular similarity, but on the necessary, definitive dissimilitude into which its death causes me to enter.” Michel Surya, “Les hommes mortels et l’amitié,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 69.
15. The metaphor is Blake’s in The Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Bataille would also say that “one must be a god in order to die.” Inner Experience, 75.
16. Blanchot believes, and there seems to be no doubt about this, that he was “one of the first” to read Madame Edwarda, a récit written by Bataille in September–October 1941.
17. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). “I have seen too many things and I have suffered too much to bother myself with what does not cause major problems for our everyday understanding. I no longer know—or no longer am —anything but an unlimited force of negation that divinizes everything I have not emptied of meaning. And to divinize for me also means to ‘empty of meaning.’ It is difficult to imagine how silent I have become, so much so that I tell myself that any word would break if it touched me (it would either fall apart or become so comical that the sentence could only finish with an outburst of laughter). As for the rest: I am walking oddly, as gaily as ever and if I slip, I hold the rope of silence.” Letter of February 3, 1942, from Georges Bataille to André Masson in Choix de lettres, 179.
18. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), 10.
19. “Aimer avant d’être aimé,” ibid., 291.
20. Ibid., 296. “These two are not in solidarity with one another (solidaires); they are solitary (solitaires), but they ally themselves in silence within the necessity of keeping silent together—each, however, in his own corner.” Ibid., 54–55.
21. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 24.
22. This exception of belonging to two groups, alongside Bataille, recalls the similar case of Breton in the Marat and Sade groups of Contre-Attaque. Authority and recognition had their obligations.
23. Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 102.
24. Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, “Le Collège socratique,” unpublished text of May 27, 1987, read at the Collège de Philosophie.
25. Bataille, Inner Experience, 14, 104, 19. In a letter of January 31, 1962, to Jérôme Lindon, he wrote: “I shall then declare that the impossible is literature, and that one cannot grasp the meaning of literature without seeing this. But above all, philosophy is the meaning of the impossible, though philosophy insofar as it is the impossible ceases to have anything in common with the dominant formal philosophy. In this sense, the impossible is better stated by Blanchot and me. Blanchot has written on Sade. Myself.” Choix de lettres, 582.
26. What Bataille states about his and Blanchot’s positions regarding a book by Alexandre Marc, in 1946, nicely reflects what could be said about all their positions: “You know what Blanchot thinks: I would gladly think it too, if I did not see that it risks being impossible. But above all I fundamentally think what Blanchot thinks.” Choix de lettres, 283.
27. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, September 1966.
28. Michel Surya has found in “La folie de Nietzsche,” a 1939 text, this phrase by Bataille: “the very love of life and of fate means that from the outset he himself commits the crime of authority which he would atone for [expiera].” Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 317.
29. Whether these statements were “philosophical” or literary, they addressed as in Blanchot’s writing the essence of the récit, of its power and its readability: “My récit does not live up to what one expects of a récit,” says Charles C.; “If I say what is essential about it, if I allow it to be understood, if I speak about it—it is ultimately only in order to leave it all the more in shadow” in L’Abbé C. in Oeuvres complètes, 3:338–339. This recalls the moments in which the reader is addressed (in the epigraph and the final note) in The Most High or in Death Sentence, which were both published two years later.
30. See the text of Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe (Paris: Macula, 1995), notably 216–252.
31. In a letter to the Gallimard publishing house of December 29, 1948, Bataille announced the existence of a book named Maurice Blanchot and Existentialism. Subsequent projects tended to take the form of long chapters as part of larger ensembles rather than that of books. In March 1950, Bataille wrote to Queneau in order to inform him of a vast project named The Atheo-logical Summa, including republished and new texts. In it, Maurice Blanchot appeared after History of a Secret Society, in the second part of the Summa named Friendship. In 1958, in an overarching plan for Pure Happiness, he intended to add Alleluiah and The Narratives of Maurice Blanchot to Guilty, in the same section of the Summa; see Oeuvres complètes, 6:361–364; 7:610; 12:645. Blanchot was something like the impossible authority of the Summa. Instead of remarking on this, Bataille would eventually settle on . . . an epigraph. Oeuvres complètes, 8:582.
32. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1.
33. Georges Bataille, “Collège socratique,” in Oeuvres complètes, 6:279–291.
34. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 18.
35. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998); Georges Bataille, “Maurice Blanchot . . . ,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 220.
1. [Chroniques can be translated as either “chronicles” or “column.” In this chapter I have largely chosen the former in order to align with the recent, multivolume translation of these texts. —Trans.]
2. Blanchot’s column, which became shorter in 1944 because of difficulties in paper supply that forced the newspaper to reduce its length, stopped in the penultimate issue of August 17. The newspaper had become more and more favorable to Pétain and to Hitler. In June 1944, it did not run headlines on the “Anglo-American” landings (i.e., foreign, enemy landings) or on the actions of “the ex-General de Gaulle,” instead choosing to focus its coverage on the reactions of Marshal Pétain and Prime Minister Laval. The accounts given of the operations were favorable to the Nazi troops. The newspaper definitively ceased publication in the midst of the fighting for the liberation of Paris.
3. “The habitual critic is a sovereign who avoids immolation, claiming to exercise authority without atoning for it [l’expier] and to be the ruler of a kingdom over which he rules without danger. There is no more poorer sovereign than this, and none who—because he has not refused to be something—is in fact closer to being nothing.” Maurice Blanchot, “Le mystère de la critique” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 533–536.
4. Blanchot asked himself this question apropos of a novel by Raymond Dumay, L’herbe pousse dans la prairie, which he addressed in one of his first articles: “Whence then does the pleasure it provides originate? Quite clearly, from the hum of idleness and musing, the murmur of lazy absent-mindedness that rises faintly from the meadows, woods, and water.” In Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 25. In one way or another, this type of reading must also have been imposed on Blanchot: by the editors of the newspaper, by the need to make concessions to his readers, by the dizzying lack of awareness, by the wish for respite, for humor, or for freshness.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “Charles Cros” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, 618–622.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Tales and Stories” (1942), in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 32.
7. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 408.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Fils de personne” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, 660–663.
9. It would be interesting to read more precisely into the respective influence of these authors in the forming of Blanchot’s judgment. The genesis of Blanchot’s readings is still to be established, notably these 1930s readings, which come into the open at this stage. It is often (too often) said that he had read everything. He did read an enormous amount, and not only Kafka or Mallarmé; no one has yet determined how influential the silenced voices of Giraudoux or Valéry were for him (whether he admired or rejected them). Such a reading would perhaps allow Blanchot to be seen, as if in a mirror, as a critical memory of the century’s literary history.
10. In Faux pas, the superlatives on Péguy disappear, either because the article in question was not collected (as with “Chronicle of Intellectual Life II” (1941), now available in Into Disaster, 18–22), or because less extreme expressions are used: “overbrimming purity and ripe inspiration, of which there is no greater example” becomes “a kind of pure tranquility and the calm concern of his salvation,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 282. Regarding Claudel, “what is divine in his own mind” became “what is ‘divine’ in his own mind” (ibid., 295), the inverted commas setting the lyrical judgment at a distance and likening it to a metaphor that can be found in Bataille. Numerous references to the thought and the work of Giraudoux disappear from the articles in Faux Pas; see also the articles from which the quotations in the text are taken: “The Art of Montesquieu” (1941), in Into Disaster, 34–39; “The Man in a Hurry,” ibid., 119–124; “Charles-Louis Philippe” (17 February 1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 45.
11. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 55.
12. [In the English version of Faux pas, the chapter entitled “Le jeune roman” is rendered as “The New Novel.” —Trans.]
13. Maurice Blanchot, “Chronicle of Intellectual Life 1” (1941), in Into Disaster, 8–12; “The Writers’ Silence” (1941), ibid., 13–17.
14. Blanchot would take sides just as openly in an article of September 1941 against the theater policy of Vichy and Jeune France, which was said to be “a dangerous temptation, aimed at luring the artist away from his essential vocation” and distorting the theatrical act, reducing it in a crude and artificial way to what appeared to be “an unrivaled means of creating unity” in “Theater and the Public” (1941), in Into Disaster, 82–87, at 87.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “The Search for Tradition” (1941), in Into Disaster, 41–45, at 45.
16. Maurice Blanchot, “The Writer and the Public” (1941), ibid., 107–112.
17. Maurice Blanchot, “The New Novel” (1941), in Faux Pas, 183–186; see also “The Enigma of the Novel” (1942), ibid., 187–191, and ”The Angel of the Bizarre” (1941), ibid., 222–226.
18. Maurice Blanchot, “Mythological Novels” (1942), ibid., 196.
19. Maurice Blanchot, “The Angel of the Bizarre,” in ibid., 224.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “The Misfortunes of Duranty” (1942), in Desperate Clarity, 84.
21. Jean Paulhan, The Flower of Tarbes or, Terror in Literature, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 91–92.
22. Ibid., 24.
23. The opening of Laurent Jenny’s book La terreur et les signes is thus very Blanchotian: “The space of expression, which cannot be reconciled with itself, is the space of terror.” La terreur et les signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 11. In the period in question, this irreconcilability denotes the impossible for Bataille and Blanchot. The subsequent inevitability of Terror and its status as “a regulated violence” (20) are the starting points for the movement that directed Blanchot toward language; he would submit it once again to an infinite contestation, whose various critical movements bear the names of Mallarmé, Sade, and Lautréamont.
24. Maurice Blanchot, “How Is Literature Possible?” (1941), in Faux Pas, 76–84.
25. We must also note the role played by Brice Parain, who provides an intermediate point between Paulhan and Mallarmé. “As Brice Parain writes in a remarkable formulation about invention in language, it is not the object that gives the sign its meaning, but the sign that imposes on us the necessity of finding an object for its meaning” in “Studies on Language” (1943), ibid., 87. This justifies anew the law of inner necessity and opens the path to the conception of language autonomously creating a universe. Parain, Mallarmé, and Valéry allow Blanchot to recognize the specificity of poetic language: “to communicate silence through words and to express freedom through rules,” “to be evoked as having been destroyed by the circumstances which make it what it is”; ibid., 90. Blanchot would often cite—either directly or allusively—an expression by Valéry which must have been the object of debate between him and Bataille: “poetry is the attempt . . . to reconstitute via the means of articulated language these things or this thing which cries, tears, embraces, sighs obscurely try to express.”
26. Maurice Blanchot, “The Secret of Melville” (1941), ibid., 240.
27. Maurice Blanchot, “Is Mallarmé’s Poetry Obscure?” (1942), ibid., 109.
28. 28 Maurice Blanchot, “After Rimbaud” (1943), ibid., 145.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “De Jean-Paul à Giraudoux” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, 548–552. See also “The Pure Novel” (1943), in A World in Ruins, 262–268.
30. Maurice Blanchot, “Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel” (1943), in Faux Pas, 165–171. “We dream of a writer, a symbol of purity and pride, who would be for the novel what Mallarmé was for poetry, and we glimpse the work that this poet wanted to make into an equivalent of the absolute. But how are we to feed such a dream?” In “The New Novel,” 186. Blanchot dreamed that he was this impossible writer.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “On Hindu Thought” (1942), ibid., 36.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on the New Poetry” (1942), ibid., 128–131.
33. Maurice Blanchot, “Master Eckhart” (1942), ibid., 23–27; “On the Subject of The Fruits of the Earth” (1942), ibid., 296–300; “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), ibid., 53–58. In the same period, in two articles of late November and early December, the first two references to the myth of Orpheus in Blanchot’s critical work can be found. It was also at the end of 1942 that the military and political situation became clearer: the Allies landed in Algeria on November 8, the Germans invaded the free zone on November 11.
34. Maurice Blanchot, “On the Subject of Fruits of the Earth,” 296–297. What Blanchot says about the essay, beginning with Montaigne (an essayist who did not shy away from self-portraiture), can be applied to any of his pieces: “the essay is above all the effort of a mind that goes from personal secrets to thoughts, from the concrete to the abstract, and that offers itself as an example in order to go beyond itself. The essay is an endeavor that is focused less on the subject it is concerned with, Corneille or his style, than on the author who is in search of himself through writing it, and wants to discover himself there in the most general form possible. It is an experience during which, sometimes indirectly, the writer does not only become involved, but opens himself up to dispute, presents himself as a problem, leads his ideas to a point where he is rejected by them, derives from his personal ordeals a meaning that is acceptable to everyone, in short, makes himself the hero of an adventures whose significance lies beyond him.” In “Mediterranean Inspirations” (1941), in Into Disaster, 88–93, at 89. Writing is thus a continuation of inner experience (it will have been noted that the same language is at work), where the writer only locates the other and himself in order to lose himself and to give himself over to the others, the readers, the invisible partners of the written work.
35. For example, a passage on landscapes and beings in Bosco seems to be a description of Thomas the Obscure: “It seems that a mysterious hand has withdrawn from the trees, the houses and the marshes the physical appearance that they usually take on for us, and instead reveals them as they really are, sites of pure mind [esprit], fields where light itself can be perceived, regions that are bizarrely conscious of the gaze that contemplates them and of the thought that penetrates them. There, [mankind] compares itself to emptiness, to absence, to the perpetual exhaustion that is its ultimate fate. Without rest, without consolation, it detaches itself from all that appears. It goes to the most intimate part of itself, having no object save waiting and only finding in this waiting the expression of a frivolous fatedness.” In “Birth of a Myth,” in Faux Pas, 195; the article was written in June 1941. Again regarding Bosco, the following sentences evoke Aminadab, which was being finished at the time: “We have abandoned the universe of abstract forms where we truly seem to touch the order of profound things. However, we are not in the mystery of the banal world, since the reality we enter remains distant and extraordinary” (194), and this: The beings who come and go “seek the unique image of which they are a distant reflection. They try to rediscover the radiant meaning that is their true life through a rigorous series of experiences,” 195. This research is mentioned only in order to then say immediately that Bosco has not succeeded in it, thus raising the possibility of another novel. And as early as May 1941, we read this which evokes the narrator of The Most High: “A yearning for prison, a familiarity with solitude, an unease when confronted with anonymous crowds, a need to live a dutiful life as if one were above the world: these are all products of the anxiety in which everyone has lived and sometimes continues to live” in “Chronicle of Intellectual Life II” (1941), in Into Disaster, 22.
36. Maurice Blanchot, “The Silence of Mallarmé” (1942), in Faux Pas, 99–102.
37. Maurice Blanchot, “Goethe and Eckermann” (1941), ibid., 270. In the name of such demands, Blanchot showed his anger at a biography of Rimbaud by Pierre Arnoult, inventing scenes “to make him come alive,” distorting the poems, amalgamating them into the overall story, etc.; “Après Rimbaud” in Journal des Débats (September 15, 1943), 2, in a passage not retained in Faux pas.
38. Maurice Blanchot, “Molière” (1942), in Faux Pas, 259.
39. Maurice Blanchot, “An Edition of Flowers of Evil” (1942), ibid., 157.
40. Maurice Blanchot, “The Silence of Mallarmé” (1942), ibid., 101.
1. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 136. The printer’s achevé d’imprimer (completion of print) date for the first edition of Thomas l’obscur is given as September 5, 1941.
2. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Claude Roy of November 9, 1941; letter 207 in Jean Paulhan, Choix de lettres, II: Traité des jours sombres (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 248. It was not Brasillach but probably Rebatet who reviewed the novel in Je Suis Partout: “Mr. Blanchot, who was editor-in-chief on behalf of the Jew Lévy, has made his debut in what he calls the novel, just as he previously made his debut in what he must have called a political newspaper. He brings to the task the same sort of bad faith. Indeed, in the same way that he refused to see reality in order to align himself with his employers’ ethics, so he refuses to know what the art of narrating and the art of writing are about. If the reader does not give up before the end, prodigiously bored by this shapeless little book, he will have time to notice the faded influences upon it: here is some lymphatic Giraudoux, here is some bland Surrealism, here is some Rilke without poetry. These are all colorless larvae crawling through a sort of humid fog, around a Thomas who would have appeared boring twenty years ago, and who today adds to his other graces that of being as out-of-date as the Jewish art to which he lays claim. In a period where there is a crisis in the availability of paper, the publication of Thomas the Obscure is an affront to common sense as well as to art. It is a superb monument of pretentious imbecility—R.” In Je Suis Partout 534 (October 18, 1941): 8.
3. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Roger Caillois, number 102, December 25, 1941, in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Roger Caillois, 1934–1967 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 147.
4. Letter from Monique Saint-Hélier to Jean Paulhan, number 49, 3 March 1942, in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 120–122.
5. Albert Camus, Carnets (1942), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 6:221–222.
6. Thierry Mauliner, review of Thomas the Obscure in L’Action Française (January 28, 1942), 3. See also “Quelques romans,” La Revue Universelle 30 (March 25, 1942): 464–467.
7. Marcel Arland, “Chronique des romans,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 335 (January 1, 1942): 94.
8. August Rivet, review of Thomas the Obscure in Confluences 7 (January 1942): 103–104.
9. Jean Mousset, “Un roman de M. Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur,” Journal des Débats 30 (October 1941): 2–3.
1. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Drieu La Rochelle (January 1942); letter number 219 in Jean Paulhan, Choix de lettres, II: Traité des jours sombres (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 263.
2. Georges Bataille, notes on “La religion surréaliste,” in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard), 7:610. Thierry Maulnier’s brilliant article also insisted on the tragedy of knowledge staged by the novel, this new mythical search for the Golden Fleece or Grail; review of Aminadab in L’Action Française (November 26, 1942), 3.
3. Albert Camus, Carnets (1942), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 6:222.
4. Ultimately, this is what Sartre could not stand, writing as he did in 1943 in the Cahiers du Sud two powerful articles against Bataille and Blanchot: “Un nouveau mystique” and “Aminadab ou du fantastique considéré comme un langage,” collected in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Beyond Bataille’s influence, on which he says nothing, he criticizes the “extraordinary resemblance [of Aminadab] to the novels of Kafka.” Blanchot is thus said to have established a “cliché of the fantastic ‘à la Kafka.’ ” The two criticisms rely heavily on each other: Although they seem to address fairly different literary questions, they end up denouncing the two books’ archaicism, artificiality, and mystification. Regarding Blanchot, Sartre is not wholly wrong in underlining the similarity with Kafka; but the reflex of attributing the narrative to a “world turned upside down” reduces and constrains the reading to nothing more than an imitation of every reading of Kafka. After the war, Maurice Nadeau would say both how exact and how limited Sartre’s criticism was: “He placed himself as a ‘consciousness’ before another consciousness: that of the novelist.” Le roman français depuis la guerre, new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 75. Sartre’s positioning makes him both closed to Blanchot and Bataille’s work and mockingly heretical toward them. He sets in opposition transcendence and immanence, limits his interest to the reader’s relation to the character (an upside-down character who in an upside-down world could only appear the right way up), criticizes Blanchot for not having chosen between identifying with or distancing himself from Thomas, and carries out a literary investigation that does not fully suit his aims. In all of these ways, Sartre closes down his reading of the narrative at the point where it begins to be interesting: the reversals in the status of the body and in the interpretative positions.
We must also recall that Sartre’s critical intervention was part of his strategy of eliminating potential rivals on the intellectual scene; see Anna Boschetti, Sartre et ‘Les Temps Modernes’: Une entreprise intellectuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 18–19, 53, 176–177, which interestingly outlines his strategies, despite making multiple mistakes of judgment regarding authors. In this light, it is necessary to consider the following points:
Blanchot was the first to publicly express a “judgment” on Sartre in Aux écoutes, and the mixture of negatives and positives in this judgment was returned to him with an additional touch of irony and severity, sometimes even word for word (the alignment with the fantastic replaced that with the mythical; the overreliance on Heidegger became an overreliance on Kafka; where the undertaking had been called “imperfect,” the mode of writing was now “uncertain”; whereas one writer had been said to lack rigor and to conform to the “usages” of “habitual psychology,” the other “only had to find his own style” in order not to remain limited to “some banal ideas on human life”). Sartre replied by taking things apart more violently and a little less briefly; at the beginning—with a touch that only appeared to be anodyne—he recalled Blanchot’s Maurrasian origins (this was 1943). At the end of his article, and more seriously because it was not without slander, he began the much later tradition of forced readings of Blanchot’s narratives in light of his extreme right-wing activities by evoking his “transcendence tainted with Maurrassism.” Leiris would tell Sartre how harsh this was (as he would confide in a letter to Bataille on July 6, 1943).
In May 1941, Blanchot produced another unfavorable judgment on Sartre’s novel writing by placing it, alongside Bernanos and Drieu, among the disappointments of the French novel, which was said to be too conventional in its desire for change. “They have used up as much energy trying to conform to novelistic habits as they would have creating new ones. They have done violence to themselves and, having desired much less than they could have accomplished, they have ended up exchanging themselves for more modest authors.” “Le Jeune roman,” Journal des Débats (May 14, 1941), 3. The whole passage can be found in “The New Novel” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 186, but lacking the direct references to the names of the authors discussed. We should add that in the meantime, Sartre had published his article.
Blanchot, like Bataille, would always see Sartre as too moderate, and even in the largely laudatory article on The Flies in July 1943 would conclude on the mediocrity of the world of the gods as depicted by Sartre; in “The Myth of Orestes,” in Faux Pas, 63–64. Moreover, Blanchot confesses to Bataille by letter that this praise was strategic in the first instance, a reply to the generally “discouraging” criticism that had greeted the play: “I therefore decided to discuss it while silencing my reservations.” We can imagine that there must have been many of the latter.
In October 1945, Blanchot gave a very positive view of Nausea (see “The Novels of Sartre,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995], 196), just as he would in July 1946 on the entirety of Sartre’s novels (see “Translated from . . .” in ibid., 187). But in March 1947 his piece in L’Arche on the Baudelaire book, which followed Bataille’s piece in Critique (January–February), and then at the end of the year several passages in “Literature and the Right to Death,” would be extremely harsh. Sartre would nonetheless publish a Blanchot text on Sade in Les Temps Modernes in October 1947.
Blanchot refused the existential, secretly nihilist, and paradoxically cathartic goals (finalité) of Sartre’s criticism. Thus in October 1953 he would be fairly reticent regarding Saint Genet (see “Where Now? Who Now?” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 210–217), in which Sartre cited him as a Mallarmean advocate for Being’s unavoidable reduction to nothingness in language. Something of the two men’s lack of understanding can be found here, just as it can in the gap between their positions on the “act” or the “versions” of the imaginary.
5. Aminadab is also the name of two biblical characters with minor roles. One is Aaron’s father-in-law (Exodus 6:23), and the other belongs to David’s line (Luke 3:33). He is also a demon discussed by the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross. As the shadowy, voiceless, and faceless guardian of subterranean spaces, the character in Blanchot’s narrative appears only in the course of a single conversation at the end of the narrative: Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab, trans. Jeff Fort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 145. We can also add that in Arabic Adab refers to a discursive and humorous literary genre, which grew with the expansion of the Islamic empire and evokes the diversity of peoples and culture. Last, Michael Holland looks at the importance of a Nathaniel Hawthorne tale, The Birth-Mark, in which a character named Aminadab appears in “La marque de naissance” (1998), in Avant-dire: Essais sur Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2015), 381–386.
6. Joë Bousquet, “Maurice Blanchot,” collected in Maurice Blanchot/Joë Bousquet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), 47.
7. This quotation and the one that closes the paragraph in the main text are taken from several passages in Guilty in which Bataille refers to the ending of Aminadab: Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 216 n., 71–72, 221 n., 126. He would also quote the novel in the epigraph to The History of Eroticism: “Soon we’ll be united for good. I’ll lie down and take you in my arms. I’ll roll with you in the midst of great secrets. We’ll lose ourselves, and find ourselves again. Nothing will come between us any more. How unfortunate that you won’t be present for this happiness!” Aminadab, quoted in The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 13. We can see all that proved attractive to Bataille here, between death and jouissance, immanence and transcendence. What is more, he was not the only one to be marked by this ending: Michel Leiris was too—he wrote about it in a letter of July 6, 1943. Where Bataille saw “feverish humor,” Leiris read “sinister joking,” which recalled “the gaiety of Socrates as he lay dying.”
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Encountering the Imaginary” (July 1954), in The Book to Come, 9–10.
9. Blanchot, Aminadab, 68. Thus, once again, Thomas is unable to name the beings and things that surround him; he is constantly on the lookout for signs. He does not know whether a person he encounters should be addressed as a staff member (ibid., 71, 143), he hears “poorly” the answers he is given (a paucity of meaning: what does “free” mean, he asks himself, when I am told that I am free even though I am being chained up? [24]). Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from Aminadab unless otherwise stated.
10. This “syntactical torsion and twisting” is the object of Derrida’s analyses in “Pas,” in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 33. Derrida was probably the first to be so attentive to Blanchot’s syntax, notably to the paradoxical links of the “without” and the “pas” that place the sign beyond the reach of “the logic of identity, even of the dialectics of contradiction.” This is to say that the narrative sign is never fully present or on display; it is not given over to reading as such, but always spliced with its own negation, for instance being suspended because it is logically incompatible with neighboring signs or because the fact of being uttered makes it virtual. This is another trace of the provocative aspect of l’écriture, which disallows any reading seeking to memorize the entire narrative, and which a fortiori blocks any representation through the imaginary. [Pas can mean “not,” “step,” “nots,” “steps.” —Trans.]
11. Bousquet, “Maurice Blanchot,” 48.
12. Ibid., 35.
13. The expression is Rilke’s concerning El Greco’s saints, which he calls “giant plants” that “flower at the highest point” and “open themselves to storms of visions.”
14. Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, trans. Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 261–339, at 315.
1. See Maurice Blanchot, “The Ease of Dying” (1969), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 149.
2. Claude Roy, Moi je (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 312–314.
3. José-Flore Tappy, “Présentation,” in Jean Paulhan and Monique Saint-Hélier, Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 21.
4. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 135.
5. Cupid, the lover of this mortal woman whom some believe to be more beautiful than Venus, visits her nightly, on condition that she always refuse to see him; he leaves as soon as day comes.
6. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Monique Saint-Hélier, no. 11 (November 22, 1941) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 47–48. Paulhan adds: “You will think that these articles pay me a lot of compliments. They do not; in fact, there is above all (I believe) a tragic tone that gives me confidence.” Paulhan would not always appreciate this “tragic tone.” For example he would write to Maurice-Jean Lefebvre on April 15, 1948: “There is a certain je ne sais quoi that I find revolting in Blanchot’s philosophy (a sort of pessimism). But it would be a hellishly long task to explain why.” Letter 32 in Jean Paulhan, Choix de lettres, III, 1946–1968: Le don des langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 60.
7. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Jean Prévost, no. 209 November 22, 1941) in Choix de lettres, II: Traité des jours sombres (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 252–253. See also the letter to Henri Pourrat, no. 210 (November 24, 1941), ibid., 253–254.
8. The Flowers of Tarbes and Blanchot’s articles were bound to interest Ponge, both because of his friends and especially for literary reasons. Was Paulhan trying to retain his influence over the poet? “I am irritated at not having the three articles from Débats (!) on the Fleurs, which I am told are greatly superior to the Fleurs,” were his words to Ponge, who replied happily: “[Blanchot] is quivering before what you have discovered (in your prudent but inexorable way). Ultimately, he is placing you where I want you to be placed (as a new Copernicus, if you allow me to say so).” Letters 257 and 258 in Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge, Correspondance 1923–1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 1:263–264.
9. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Francis Ponge, no. 260 (January 29, 1942), ibid., 268.
10. Letter from Jean Paulhan to André Dhôtel, no. 216 (January 10, 1942) in Choix de lettres, II, 259.
11. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Monique Saint-Hélier, no. 24 (December 22, 1941) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier, 67.
12. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Drieu La Rochelle, no. 219 (January 1942) in Choix de lettres, II, 262.
13. Paul Léautaud, Journal littéraire, III (février 1940–février 1956) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 596–597. At the end of August, Léautaud relates a meeting with the head of production at the NRF: “Mr. Blanchot? That (ça) no longer exists,” he was told by Festy, for whom Blanchot had only replaced Drieu “for a short time.” Ibid., 687–688.
14. Letters from Jean Paulhan to Drieu La Rochelle, nos. 239 and 240 (June 9 and 10, 1942), in Choix de lettres, II, 280. On this whole episode, see also Pierre Andreu and Frédéric Glover, Drieu La Rochelle (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1989), 489–492; Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship, 135–136.
15. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Monique Saint-Hélier, no. 75 (June 25, 1942) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Monique Saint-Hélier, 169.
16. See Pascal Fouché, L’édition française sous l’Occupation (Paris: Bibliothèque de littérature contemporaine de l’Université Paris-VII, 1987), 280; Jeffrey Mehlman, Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 116–117.
17. Maurice Blanchot, “The Writer and the Public” (1941), in Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 107–112.
18. Montherlant and Goethe, cited in ibid., 111.
19. Maurice Blanchot, “On Insolence Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1942) in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 306–309.
20. Montherlant cited in ibid., 308–309.
21. Ibid., 309.
22. Maurice Blanchot, “A User’s Guide to Montherlant” (1942) in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 114–121.
23. Maurice Blanchot, “From the Middle Ages to Symbolism” (1942), ibid., 15–20, at 16.
24. Ibid., 17.
25. Ibid., 18.
26. Ibid., 19–20.
27. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature” (1942), in Faux Pas, 91–95.
28. Ibid., 91ff. The article nonetheless still contains some strange populist and demagogic moments: “what is furthest from Montaigne and Marivaux is the well-read Frenchman, but what is closest is the Gascon wine-grower or the Parisian milliner.” Faux Pas, 95. We might think of this as some kind of humor, but a few years previously Blanchot made similar statements much more seriously (or perhaps ironically).
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Machiavelli” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 99.
30. Maurice Blanchot, “French Suite” (1943), ibid., 141–147.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “The Myth of Orestes” (1943), in Faux Pas, 64.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “Considerations on the Hero” (1942), in Desperate Clarity, 122–129.
1. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 136.
2. Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 100.
3. See Pierre Assouline, Gaston Gallimard (Paris: Balland, 1984), 351.
4. See ibid., p. 328; Blanchot, For Friendship, 134–136.
5. On 30 August 1943, Dionys Mascolo wrote to Marguerite Antelme (later Marguerite Duras), on the Control Committee: “the text of ‘DIGRESSIONS’ agreed in May (no. 18159) will appear under the title ‘FAUX PAS’ ”; letter in Marguerite Duras, Romans, cinéma, théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 16.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “France and Contemporary Civilization” (1941), in Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 29.
7. Maurice Blanchot, “Realism’s Chances” (1942), in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 88.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “A World in Ruins” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 287–290.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “How Is Literature Possible?” (1941), in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 83.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “On Hindu Thought” (1942), ibid., p. 35.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “L’expérience magique d’Henri Michaux” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires, pp. 663–67.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “From Anguish to Language,” in Faux Pas, 2.
13. Ibid., 3–6.
14. There is little of note in the reception of Faux pas. There was little chance of the major players, who were already familiar with the quality of the articles, expressing their views on a collection of this kind. The few articles that did appear often took issue with the conception of language and literature that Blanchot was developing, but nonetheless recognized his as “the only original and profound criticism” in the French press (Anglès, in Confluences), and saw this author as “nonetheless the best of our young critics” (Blanzat, in Poésie 44). This praise came from the Resistance press.
1. See Georges Bataille, “Discussion sur le péché,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 6:315–359; Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 111–115.
2. Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille, 115.
3. Maurice Nadeau, “Maurice Blanchot,” in Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 71; Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille, 116; Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 6.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Des diverses façons de mourir” (1944), in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des Débats: Avril 1941–août 1944, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 632–636.
5. The letter to Prévost, a written source and the closest to the event, seems the trustworthiest. It places the firing squad in June. June 29 is the most likely date according to local memories of the fighting. But there may not have been any direct battles the day Blanchot was placed before a firing squad. Ultimately, June 20 seems to be the most likely date. Derrida mentions a letter written by Blanchot on July 20, 1994, described as being fifty years to the day after the event; Demeure in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 52. There seems to be little doubt that Blanchot’s memory was mistaken by one month, and yet perhaps the day is correct. This would allow us to explain the content of the article published in the Journal des Débats on June 29.
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 2.
7. André Malraux, Antimémoires (Paris: Gallimard: 1967), chapter 6, esp. 217–218).
8. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 5.
9. Bataille finished this book in August 1944; it would therefore presuppose that Blanchot had told him of the event by letter, which he did rarely at the time, there being multiple obstacles to delivery. We read the sentence quoted, from Sur Nietzsche in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 6: 23, as a chance echo of the astonishing proximity of these two friends’ “experiences,” and of their similarities in written expression.
10. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 11.
11. [Blanchot, in The Instant of My Death, and Derrida, in his response to it in Demeure, insist upon the term demeure: meaning dwelling, but recalling demeurer (to remain), and of course meure, the third-person singular subjunctive of the verb mourir (whence the term demourance in Bident’s text). —Trans.]
12. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 6.
13. Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka” (1945), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 8.
14. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 5, 6.
15. Emmanuel Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 60–61.
16. Blanchot recalls this almost offhandedly in an article of July 1946; see The Work of Fire, 183.
17. Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 173–174.
1. Maurice Blanchot, Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 223).
2. See Vercours, Cent ans d’histoire en France, III (Paris: Plon, 1984), 53–54.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “L’énigme de la critique” (1946), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 53–56.
4. Blanchot published an extract from The Most High in the third issue of Cahiers de la Table Ronde, in July 1945. However, he would keep his distance from the later journal of the same name, founded in 1948 by Mauriac, published by Plon and coedited by Maulnier, which quickly adopted a reactionary line.
5. At this time Blanchot’s political positions were in agreement with those of Bataille. Only the awareness of past responsibility seemed to constrain him to silence on contemporary matters. This much is suggested by a parenthesis in a letter from Bataille of late April 1946: telling Prévost to allow Blanchot free reign regarding the choice of subjects he wrote on in Critique, he added: “(perhaps it is also necessary to be attentive to the unfortunate question of politics)” in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 209–291 (and 316, note 1); Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 133, 135.
6. Ibid., 117.
7. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 136–137.
8. “Is not the most singular thing in the case of Maurice Blanchot that as a withdrawal—a paradoxical withdrawal—from the absence that is attributed to him, people are generally unaware that all his life he bore witness to an intense public presence. . . . There is no movement in Blanchot allowing us to claim that he withdrew from the world that is not accompanied by an inverse and often simultaneous movement linking him to it all the more firmly; which is to say, all the more politically” Michel Surya, “Présentation du projet de revue internationale,” Lignes, 11 (September 1990): 161.
9. In 1945, Blanchot was still part of the panel for the Prix de la Pléiade. In November, he volunteered his services for the Prix des Critiques, which had been founded by the Pavois publishing house. He thus joined Arland and Paulhan; Nadeau, Bataille, and Maulnier would also later participate. This panel would award the prize to Romain Gary, Albert Camus, and Françoise Sagan (against the latter, Blanchot voted for André Dhôtel). Char and Prévert refused the prize, which would eventually come under the influence of Paulhan and Gallimard. It continued to be awarded until the 1970s, gradually falling into distaff (quenouille), as Maurice Nadeau put it (the members stopped meeting). Blanchot seems to have remained until the end (he was still present in 1970 when the prize was awarded to Jabès).
In 1947, he was also part of the first panel of the Prix Sainte-Beuve, with Queneau, Nadeau, Aron, Fouchet, Buchet, and Paulhan. This was meant to be a sort of alternative prize: Edmond Buchet reported that its purpose was “to select each year a novel or a work of criticism that had not been considered by the numerous prizes, which are generally badly awarded”; Les auteurs de ma vie ou ma vie d’éditeur (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2001), 139. Later, at the end of the 1950s, he would refuse, as did Beckett, to sit on another jury, which had been dreamed up by Nadeau and Pingaud, intending to use the springtime to evaluate books that had been overlooked by the end-of-year prizes. He would refuse humorously, telling Nadeau that the prize would only succeed if it were awarded by members of the Académie Française. Nonetheless he did take part in the first Prix de Mai, in 1957, although not without hesitations, and he remained uncertain about its long-term prospects; see the article that he gave to L’Express, “Is Something Happening?” (1957), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 12–14. In fact, two letters from Bernard Pingaud confirm that it was Blanchot’s doing that on March 6, 1961, the Prix de Mai fell on its own sword, calling into question less the prize itself than “the very notion of prizes.” We know how much Blanchot would approve of Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize three years later.
10. This paper was Paysage Dimanche, a weekly, Sunday publication founded in June 1945, which would exist under various titles for just over three years. Opening with a text by Jules Romains, “Démocratie et grandeur,” its aim was to restore the faith and pride in the nation necessary for all democracies. The cultural dimension had an important role (three pages of six), and the other material addressed political and economic current affairs. The books column was initially written alternately by Marcel Arland and Henri Thomas. For several months, between October and December 1945, Blanchot replaced Thomas; in November, Arland stopped his contributions, leaving his place for Roger Giron. Lacking any coherent aesthetic line, Paysage Dimanche had room for both the most modern and the most conventional viewpoints. Blanchot would publish seven texts with this paper, on Giraudoux, Sartre (a twin article to the contemporaneous one for L’Arche), Dhôtel, Du Bos, Melville, and Malraux (the latter was reprinted with hardly any variations in The Work of Fire, and contemporaneous to the one given to Actualité).
11. See Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 364–367; Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 243, 251, 256.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “Days of Hope by André Malraux” (1946), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 5–11. Blanchot himself had insisted that Bataille allow an article on Malraux to be included: “I really find it impossible that we discuss neither Malraux nor the question of communism,” he had written to him on May 8, 1945.
1. Sometimes he would not see his friends for a year (he wrote as much to Bataille, sometimes complaining about it in a very moving way).
2. Leiris and Merleau-Ponty were Blanchot’s main supporters with regard to Sartre.
3. On Critique, see Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 119–149; Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 368–375.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Surrealism” (1945) in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 85. References in brackets in this chapter are henceforth to this work.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Quelques réflexions sur le surréalisme,” L’Arche 8 (August 1945): 93–104; “Reflections on Surrealism.”
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Du merveilleux” (1947), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 128–129.
4. Blanchot, “Reflections on Surrealism.” The article on René Char published in October 1946 addressed the relation of literature and politics in the same terms. “The struggle of the partisan in the world” belongs to poetry, which “puts us in contact with all that is sovereignty in the world.” This sovereignty places us on the path to “Terror” since poetry “is itself in everything, the presence of everything, the search for totality”: “it alone has the ability and the right to speak of everything, to speak everything” (105–106). It is also in this text that Blanchot first uses the term “community” in the sense he will later give to it, drawing on both presence within a struggle, and the distance of an interruption: in the sense of uncommitment in the mode of commitment.
5. Although Blanchot was now closer to Sartre regarding politics stricto sensu, he would not hesitate to affirm this particular understanding of commitment. And it was precisely during an analysis of “Sartre’s novels” that he would cite, not by accident, this passage from the Paths of Freedom in which the character Mathieu reflects his own image back at him: “you have spent 35 years cleansing yourself and the result is emptiness. You are a strange body . . . you live in the air, you have cut your bourgeois attachments, you have no tie to the proletariat, you float, you are an abstract, an absentee” (204). Blanchot wrote the article for the October 1945 issue of L’Arche; he had just turned thirty-eight. Of course, the portrait captured in this citation does not correspond exactly to Blanchot’s reality; it nevertheless remains suggestive: it is doubly sarcastic, first toward Sartre (Blanchot using his fiction as a mirror) and second toward Blanchot himself (because he was anything but a floating body, but far sooner a cumbersome, withdrawn body). The citation is therefore significant in terms of his critical, public, and resolute commitment as early as the summer of 1945.
6. “It is quite clear that reality does not exist in order to provide a guarantee for extravagance, but that it exists because it is the very site of the unreal which endlessly interrupts it, tears it apart, which is its deepest manifestation and guarantee”; Maurice Blanchot, “Du merveilleux” (1947), 119.
7. Ibid., 115–129. Blanchot would later abandon the term “fantastic” when referring to this sovereignty of the invisible, of inner experience. He would replace it with the “imaginary,” an imaginary infinitely open to the subterranean figure of the unimaginable. For instance, in 1947 he wrote: “Unreality begins with the whole. The realm of the imaginary is not a strange region situated beyond the world, it is the world itself, but the world as entire, manifold, the world as a whole” (316).
8. See “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, 341–344. It must be added that the privileging of the ambiguity of literature is not without relation to the debate with Sartre. The notion is already present in “From Anguish to Language,” notably regarding Kafka; here it comes to the fore. In Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 9–11. It can be found twice in the critical articles of The Work of Fire: apropos of Baudelaire (“we can think along with Sartre that . . . poetic creation is pure only in the equivocal,” 141) and of Sartre himself (“the novel has its own moral, which is ambiguity and equivocation,” 207); the first version in L’Arche 10 (October 1945): 134, evoked Sartre’s respect for “the statute of bad faith which is the moral [of the novel].” Ambiguity also plays against Sartre’s concept of bad faith; this informs the strategy of the article “The Novel Is a Work of Bad Faith” (April 1947), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 61–73. It turns that concept’s immorality and its relative indifference to ethics back on themselves and, agreeing with the thinking of Bataille and Levinas, transcends it in poetic (semiological), aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
9. This approach was all the more influential given that it was repeated almost forty years later and in the same terms: see “After the Fact” in Vicious Circles, followed by “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 59–60. On Blanchot’s relation to the Hegel of Kojève (whose work appeared in 1947), and on the influence of this strand on Lacan, see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 192–194 and 272–273.
10. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 73, 55. This lecture was first given in November 1935 in Freiburg, before being updated and given again in 1936 in Zurich, and then divided into three lectures at the end of the same year in Frankfurt.
11. Ibid., 45–46.
12. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” in Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 71.
13. See Maurice Blanchot, “From Lautréamont to Miller” (1946), in The Work of Fire, 174–175. On what this lack means for his differences with Heidegger, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (New York: Routledge, 1997), 77–91.
14. See notably the openings of “Reading Kafka” (1945), in The Work of Fire, 1, or of “Gide and the Literature of Experience” (1947), ibid., 212.
15. The organization of the texts in The Work of Fire, which does not separate them into groups, responds to this notion: the chapters on the relation between literature and the secret or silence are followed by several on poetic language (from Char to Lautréamont), then by others on the experience of the prose writer. On the whole, there are few alterations from previous versions. Some of them are important, however: a full study of them is still to be carried out. Mostly it is simply a question of style: simplifying syntax, removing passive forms, overloaded adverbs, and peremptory formulations (for example the frequent “it is clear that”). Sometimes the changes make the thinking seem more swift, the contradictions more vertiginous and the statements more effective. The corrections aim to produce spontaneity on the basis of complete control (notably in the case of “Reading Kafka,” which becomes prodigiously jubilant in the collected version). The collection’s title is linked to Bataille. It can be found in his writing, in a manuscript for The History of Eroticism, contemporaneous with Blanchot’s publication: “the accursed share must be sacrificed, it must be that given unto the work of fire” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 8:553; passage not included in The Accursed Share, vols. 2 or 3. The Work of Fire replaced the title originally planned, which in the first edition of The Most High (1948) the publisher announced as being soon to appear: Between Day and Night (Entre chiens et loups). While Blanchot chose the Bataille citation over the one from Hölderlin, he nonetheless used the famous extract by the German poet as the epigraph to the book, and would cite it on two further occasions, in the articles on Paulhan and on Hölderlin himself: “It behooves morals / To speak with restraint of the gods. / If, between day and night [entre chien et loup], / One time a truth should appear to you, / In a triple metamorphosis transcribe it; / Though always unexpressed, as it is, / O innocent, so it must remain” (xi).
16. See Blanchot’s very fine reading of Nietzsche’s confrontation with the thought of God, which, touching on Bataille’s reading of the Incarnated, rejoins the infinite movement of “inner experience”; “On Nietzsche’s Side” in The Work of Fire, 291–297.
17. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, January 12, 1971.
18. “Each time that the “is” or the “it is” takes form in this text, it does so in order to withdraw from the logic of identity, even from the dialectics of contradiction,” Derrida writes in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 32. This is the injunction of come, the imperative of the pas (the step and the not). The event is that which happens endlessly. The coming of the wholly other prevents any full manifestation of essence. This leads to the interplay between without (sans) and not (pas) in the texts, which “disarticulates any logic of identity or of contradiction” (ibid., 46), and which therefore disarticulates dialectics as well as the récit, “in which the presence of the present is paralyzed” (74).
19. See Michel Surya, “Pour une matériologie sadienne,” preface to D.A.F. de Sade, Français encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 21.
20. See Maurice Blanchot, “The ‘Sacred’ Speech of Hölderlin” (1946), in The Work of Fire, 126.
21. Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 7–8. Blanchot called for the same respect to be given to Rimbaud (who had in him “something howling and ferocious that one finds again exactly in the Marquis de Sade” in “The Sleep of Rimbaud” (1947) in The Work of Fire, 158.
22. Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, 14.
23. Ibid., 41.
24. Ibid., 153. Bataille would state as early as spring 1949, announcing in Critique the publication of Lautréamont and Sade, that Sade’s thinking pushes that of Blanchot to the point of completion, and likewise Blanchot’s thought completes that of Sade; see The Accursed Share, vols. II and III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991), 174–175. He would remain impressed by Blanchot’s work on Sade, sometimes citing entire pages from it.
25. Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, 69.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 117.
28. Ibid., 145.
29. Ibid., 143.
30. Ibid., 94, 109, 105, 117.
31. Ibid., 153–154.
1. The surnames in The Most High are strangely rare and sometimes hard to understand. Most of them, even those of secondary characters or those only mentioned once, are formed of four or five letters. Sorge, the name of the narrator, means “care” in German and is a fundamental notion in Heidegger’s philosophy. It is also the name of a German expressionist dramaturge who died at twenty-four, who was strongly influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche, and whose hero, Unruh, is searching for the new man and seems ready to bear the entire weight of the world on his shoulders (“Unruh” means disquiet, agitation, and even riot or revolution; see The Young Man, a work published posthumously in 1925). Dorte evokes death (la mort). Bouxx evokes the English word books; Sorge even tells him: “you are a book” (Maurice Blanchot, The Most High, trans. Allan Stoekl [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], 48); or the mouth (bouche) if the x is pronounced as in Basque. Blanchot feigns astonishment over the strangeness of the name in a letter to his Japanese translator: see Exercices de la patience 2 (Winter 1981): 107. Bouxx might also recall the name of a person and a building in Beausoleil, Roux (pronounced “Rouks”), which was inscribed on a building that must have faced the villa Margot where Blanchot stayed; he cannot have missed the fact that the name is immediately followed by a stylized letter, probably a V which, the way it is written, gives the strange feeling of reading: “Rouxx” . . .
2. Blanchot, The Most High, 1. Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from this text unless otherwise stated.
3. There is something of Myshkin in Sorge, and also something of Dostoevsky’s chatty characters, who agitate for evil, in Bouxx.
4. Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab, trans. Jeff Fort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 6.
5. Let us recall that there are two tombs, probably both empty, in the garden of the house in Quain. There are no surnames among the inscriptions on the family tomb in the church cemetery at Devrouze. Yet we know that the body of Blanchot’s father was taken there after being exhumed from the cemetery in Chalon at an unknown time.
The scene of the grave’s desecration is overtly Bataillean. We can think of what Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange says about it: to desecrate a grave, “the last site of desecration,” is “to give more room to absence.” In G.B. ou un ami présomptueux (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1969), 92.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Musil II” (March 1958), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 148.
7. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 13.
8. [Bident’s phrase is a play on the last line of The Madness of the Day (18), which reads, “No. No récits, never again.” —Trans.]
9. This was underlined by Levinas: “the face, behind the countenance it gives itself, is like the exposure of a being to death, it is the defenselessness, the nudity, and the poverty of those who are always the others. It is also the command to take others into one’s charge, to not leave them alone; in this the word of God is heard. If you understand the face as the photographer’s object, then of course you are dealing with an object like any other. But if you meet the face, then the responsibility lies in this strangeness and poverty of the others. The face offers itself to your mercy and obliges you.” François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas, 2nd ed. (1987; reprint, Besançon: La Manufacture, 1992), 83.
10. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 15, 16. [“Elle” referring to the law should be rendered as “it”—however, here it is clear that, as elsewhere, Blanchot is playing with the idea of female personalization. —Trans.]
1. When he was in Paris, Blanchot regularly went to the Rue Vaugirard, where Denise Rollin lived. A child at the time (he had just turned five at the Liberation), Jean Rollin remembers a very kind, humorous man who was also ill and extremely weak. You had to be quiet when he came. Jean Rollin also reports an anecdote: The concierge, an old, difficult woman, did not look favorably on this man who regularly visited a woman living alone with her child. Every time, she would open the door as he arrived and would ask him where he was going. Blanchot would reply with unfailing politeness and go up to the sixth floor. Every time Denise Rollin would get angry at this inconvenience.
2. She would remain close to Michel and Francine Fardoulis-Lagrange, to whom she would write regularly. This correspondence is of value, and we thank especially Francine Fardoulis-Lagrange for having made it available to us. Unfortunately it is neither dated nor catalogued: the extracts cited therefore usually lack references.
3. We are drawing on Michel Surya’s interviews with Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange and Laurence Bataille; Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2002), 281. We can read Fardoulis on Rollin’s silent nature: “she was the woman who incarnated silence. She metaphorically recorded ideas. . . . We were astonished by the echoes they had produced in her.” And Bataille stated: “I have never felt, except with Laure, such easy purity, such silent simplicity”; “such a fragile illusion would dissipate over the slightest thing, at the slightest relaxation of inattention.” In Carnets pour Le Coupable in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 5:509.
4. Ibid., 521, 515, 524.
5. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), esp. 232–237.
6. Ibid., 237.
7. Ibid., 235.
8. Not only is there no doubt that Denise Rollin knew the book and the character, but they were also popular at the time: on June 7, 1946, Georges Lampin’s film showcasing Gérard Philipe came to cinemas. The character Myshkin and notably his Pascalian skillfulness (everything that brings Blanchot into proximity with Pascal is important) are discussed in an article by Georges Philippenko, “La sainteté impossible,” Le Nouveau Receuil 37 (December 1995): 88–98.
9. “His experience is certainly the most atrocious, the most inhumane that it is possible to undergo, for me it is the experience of God, you must feel what I am trying to say because it absolutely cannot be explained in the meaning of words it is absurd, but it is true.”
“I use the word ‘God’ after the sense of Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ ” (Letter from Denise Rollin).
10. Blanchot’s relative silence on Dostoevsky is remarkable. Also remarkable are the final pages of ‘On Nietzsche’s Side’ (1945/6) in The Work of Fire, 285–286, which first appeared in L’Arche in December 1945. Blanchot was reviewing a critical work by Father De Lubac containing several studies, including one on Dostoevsky, “the most remarkable thing,” he states, but still without spending more than a few lines on it, is that “the characters are always different to what they are, and when they are relatively simple, they share with each other and receive from other characters reflections that make them invisible” (298). And when he cites Myshkin, it is in order to underline his ambiguity as an expression of anguish: “Raskolnikov, Kirilov, Stavrogin, Prince Myshkin answer, in the dramatic richness of their story, to an emptiness without history, to something frozen that the burning of their passions makes unbearable” (ibid.). The récits of the 1950s will evoke this burning cold of passion.
11. Maurice Blanchot and Denise Rollin would continue to correspond until the latter’s death. Perhaps ultimately they spent more time corresponding than in one another’s company. But this takes nothing away from the intensity of their encounters and their love. Indeed it adds a great deal to their stories of solitude, to the sensation of having been burnt that marks their readings, of Dostoevsky for Denise Rollin, of Kafka for Maurice Blanchot. After the article on Constant came “L’échec de Milena” (November 1954), another great critical text in which Blanchot addressed passion, and which would remain almost secret, kept out of The Book to Come, The Infinite Conversation and even of Friendship, only being republished after Denise Rollin’s death in De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). Although he did not see them as a model, Blanchot approached Kafka’s loves in light of the tragic, uncertain, and hasty manner in which he lived through his own. “His relations with the young woman are first and foremost established on the level of written notes,” he wrote in “The Very Last Word” (May 1968), thus using an expression fetishized by Denise Rollin apropos of Felice. In Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 273; CB’s emphasis. As with Kafka, and in proximity to Bataille, it is certain that other women featured in Blanchot’s life, just as the need for discretion imposed by the passing of time is also certain.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Inquisition Destroyed the Catholic Religion . . .” trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 43.
2. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Pierre Prévost, October 15, 1947.
3. Maurice Blanchot in A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 5.
4. Pierre Fedida in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” France-Culture radio show broadcast on September 17, 1994.
5. The theoretical importance Blanchot gave to the distinction between novel and récit is well known: “the récit begins where the novel does not go.” In “Encountering the Imaginary” (July 1954), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 6; see also “Autobiographical Narratives” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 223–229, an article originally published on October 13, 1943, a highly important date in Death Sentence.
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 15.
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 11. All future references in this chapter are to this translated version, unless otherwise indicated.
2. Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 139, 150.
3. “Whoever has seen the madness of the day is unable to tell the tale of having done so, for he will have lost the thread of the story, the ability to set the negative to work, to leave an impression on the ordeals undergone, to lay out any figures,” Emmanuel Tibloux writes in his fine study “Dérives du génitif,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 119–121. The narrator plunges into the madness of the essence of light, which is still brimming with the dawn that contains and fills everything, refusing to be sublated; Hegel named it “the holocaust of being-for-itself.” Having been plunged into mud by the doctors, the narrator rediscovers the fire of the earth and remains insensible to the development of light (which produces light thanks to pacification).
This point of visibility, beyond (or before) Hegel, also breaks with all technological thought, any dialectical interrogation, any “Platonism.” This is what Sarah Kofman implies in stating that the expression that both opens and closes the récit, “I am not learned; I am not ignorant,” describes the Eros of the Banquet. She concludes her book Comment s’en sortir (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) with long citations of The Madness of the Day, the same passages that Tibloux would analyze. How to get out (s’en sortir)? How, without getting out (sans sortir)? Only a few autobiographical notes are added to the “aporia” that closes the book without providing closure. What kind of autobiographical narrative is possible? It is well known that this will also be the question asked by Kofman’s Smothered Words (1987), trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998). What then remains is nothing but to inscribe death (la disparition) in writing, if “the work which is its drifting from the outset gives up on making an work, indicating only the space in which resounds, for all and for each, and thus for nobody, the always-yet-to-come words of worklessness.” Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 46. From this point of view too, The Madness of the Day is indeed the rupture inaugurating Blanchot’s final récits.
4. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 9.
5. The link established between power and the récit, a theme shared by The Most High, will leave its mark on the 1950s generation of readers, among them Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
1. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (1950 version), trans. Robert Lamberton (1973; Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 1. On the relation between the two versions, Blanchot wrote as follows to Bataille as early as January 1948: “In recent days I have been working on a different version of Thomas the Obscure. It is different insofar as it reduces the first version by two thirds. And yet it is a true book and not just sections of a book; I can even say that this project is not dictated by circumstances or by the vanities of publishing, but that I have often thought of it, having always wanted to see through the thickness of my first books—like the very small and very far-away image of the outside can be seen in opera glasses—the very small and very far-away book which seemed to be their kernel.” See also what Jean Starobinski writes about the imaginary demand of disappearance (la disparition); “Thomas l’obscur, premier chapitre,” Critique 229 (June 1966): 502.
2. This question of the relation of parts to the whole as part of a mobile search for a center would frequently guide Blanchot’s criticism. It is not surprising to find it resurfacing regarding his own fiction given that it had been one of his interests for some time. Examples can be found as early as 1941, at the start of a chapter in Faux pas on Bosco (192); or in “Paradoxes on the novel,” December 30 the same year: “What can best reveal the validity of a novel . . . is thus a particular orientation, a mysterious magnetization, the rotation of all the elements of the work around an invisible and constantly mobile center.” He then lists the questions that must be asked of the most remarkable works: “What did the book want? Did it want it completely? Where is it headed in that secret state of supreme tension that is its true soul and its primary reason for existing?” In Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 135. [Gallimard reissued the first version of Thomas l’obscur in 2005. —Trans.]
3. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988).
4. Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, 83, 76.
5. Ibid., 96, 98, 91, 93.
1. Georges Bataille, fragment of an autobiographical note, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 6:486.
2. Georges Bataille, Foreword (1957) to Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Mathews (New York: Penguin, 2001), 127.
3. Bernard Noël’s intuition concerning the link between the deaths of J. and Laure is therefore not without foundation, despite what he modestly claims. He himself condemns it as a protective “antifiction,” and he does so in the unconscious humility of not claiming to enter into the friendship that is at stake in the case of Bataille. This leaves wide open the possibility of sinking into, or being sunk by, this récit; “D’une main obscure,” in Roger Laporte and Bernard Noël, Deux lectures de Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973), 25. Let us recall that in February 1956 Blanchot would evoke Laure by name in an article on Michel Leiris; “Battle with the Angel” (1956), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 139.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and Literature” (1949) in The Work of Fire, Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 21.
5. Let us remember that in one of Blanchot’s earliest critical texts the expression “death sentence” (l’arrêt de mort) referred to the effacement of the author. It was also the title of a novel by Vicki Baum translated into French in 1933, prefaced by Ramon Fernandez, and announced in large type against a pink background in an advertisement in La Revue du Siècle, in May 1933, an issue containing a contribution by Blanchot. Such are the reasons why Blanchot probably must have known about this title, even though it belonged to an insignificant novel with no other link to his own text. Finally, the expression can be found in the second epistle to the Corinthians: “Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death”: 1 Corinthians 9 (the French version reads “arrêt de mort”). Here it is a form of recognition preceding divine reassurance.
6. Claude Rabant, “Cette mort dure encore . . .” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 25.
7. [Bident’s first two examples are taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia and Dostoevsky’s Idiot. —Trans.]
8. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 18.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Death Sentence,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 177–178.
1. On the relationship between Gallimard and Minuit, see Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942–1955, le devoir d’insoumission (Paris: IMEC, 1994), esp. 420–422.
2. These assertions were made by Henri Hell at the start of his article “À propos des romans de Maurice Blanchot,” La Table Ronde 12 (December 1948): 2051. Another critic, Gabriel Venaissin, thought Thomas the Obscure too simplistic, with its rhetoric “that anyone can reproduce, once they know the rules of the game” in “Le suicide du roman,” La Vie intellectuelle 44 (April 1951): 152.
3. Blanchot? Nothing more than an “alchemist who will doubtless one day notice that to get water, it is best to turn on the kitchen tap. And that in order to say: “it’s nice weather,” the best way of proceeding is to say: “it’s nice weather”,” J.P.—Jean Paulhac?—reader’s notes on Death Sentence in Cahiers du Monde Nouveau 5 (May 1949): 125. As for the far right, it continued to settle scores with the writer who had betrayed it; see Pierre Boutang, “A propos du Très-Haut de Maurice Blanchot,” Aspects de la France et du Monde 22 (December 9, 1948): 3–4.
4. Luc Decaunes, review of Death Sentence in Cahiers du Sud 291 (second semester 1948): 377–378.
5. Pierre Klossowski, “On Maurice Blanchot,” in Such a Deathly Desire, trans. Russell Ford (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 89 n.
1. To this should be added the 1951 publication by Minuit of “The Idyll” and “The Last Word” under the title Le ressassement éternel.
2. In this vein, he wrote to Bataille: “I have been here for about a month, in a fairly hidden spot in the countryside, in a solitary house, and myself alone. Your thought is thus doubly present for me” (no date).
3. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille (June 9, 1958 or 1959), in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 589.
4. René Char, “The Fatal Partner,” in The Word as Archipelago, trans. by Robert Baker (Richmond, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2012), 69. Blanchot was already the author of two articles on Char: one appeared in Critique in October 1946, the other in the NNRF in April 1953. In a letter to Bataille, Char states: “I believe Blanchot to be indispensable to the field in which he works, as you are indispensable to yours. An entire, major region of mankind today depends on you”; letter of December 7, 1946, cited in Bataille, Choix de lettres, 402.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Three Metamorphoses,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), 55.
6. Char, “The Fatal Partner,” 69.
1. Georges Bataille, “Maurice Blanchot . . . ,” Gramma 3–4 (1976): 221. In an article of 1955, Blanchot referred to the way a fictional récit can give a better account than a journal of the author’s most personal experience, and therefore has an autobiographical content; this article referred to Hope, Nausea, and Nadja. “Sur le journal intime,” Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 28 (April 1955): 683–684. He removed the three paragraphs making this claim when he included the article in The Book to Come.
2. Marguerite Duras, Écrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 13. An incidental remark: we know that for several years, before the revolution of 1979, the village of Neauphle was where Ayatollah Khomeini lived. When Blanchot would “invite” his successor to Èze, perhaps some memory of Khomeini’s stay was in his mind.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude” (April 1953) in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 19–34. Citations in the rest of the chapter are taken from this article.
4. “The Essential Solitude” was the first article in which, with an almost prophetic density, the notion of “neuter” appeared. This adjective, however, had not yet been turned into noun form.
5. A similar approach, although more justified this time, would be used in the article on “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” with the abrupt, unexpected appearance of the theme of magic during a reflection on the image (see The Space of Literature, 262); the first version of the text dates from 1951, but this passage comes at the end of the much longer development which only appears in the new, book version). The link between children and the universe of the fantastic and more particularly to magic is a frequent one in Blanchot (it is explicitly addressed by a citation from Kafka in “L’échec de Milena” (November 1954), in De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 162.
6. This expression can also be found in Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985): “[It] touches me with its gaze,” 73.
1. Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 57. Citations in the rest of this chapter are taken from this text unless otherwise stated.
2. Denise Rollin had several friendships with women; it is difficult to rule out love. For example, she was strongly linked to a singer from Lorraine, Marianne Oswald, to whom the character of Claudia seems to owe a great deal (her singing, her language, but also her temperament). Denise Rollin’s husband, whom she left for Georges Bataille, was named Claude.
3. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 31. See also “The Essential Solitude and Solitude in the World,” in ibid., 253.
4. “Things happened to me, to me and to the story, events that were more and more curtailed (in the sense that, just as I had become no one or almost no one, the traits of my character weakened, the world was readily merging with its limit), but this sort of unraveling of time disclosed above all the exorbitant pressure of ‘Something is happening,’ a possessive immensity that could only curtail or suspend the natural progress of the story” (63–64). We can compare this to “the absence of time” from “The Essential Solitude.”
5. In When the Time Comes there are even some precise references to places and events which allow us to think that the apartment in the récit is in Paris, and more precisely in front of the synagogue on the Rue de la Victoire (no. 44), which suffered an arson attack on the night of October 2–3, 1941. The fire is referred to on several occasions in When the Time Comes, and information on it can be found in Michael R. Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (1973; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). The quarter around the Opera is always the one mentioned in Blanchot’s récits featuring Paris.
6. Dionys Mascolo would say that he was: “incomparably attentive to the smallest things, the least abstract of men” in “Parler de Blanchot” (1981), in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 441.
7. This is a recurrent motif in the reading proposed by Bataille: “no novel describes happiness more,” in “Silence et littérature” (1952), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 12:174. The commentaries on When the Time Comes and The Last Man published by Bataille in Critique in 1952 and 1957 are both intensely visual. Both begin by evoking apparently arbitrary images: a scene from H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man, or photographs published by the journal Life on the origin of the world. Both constantly set aside the normal visibility of these images in order to see in them what Bataille calls “apparent otherness”: something dazzling, invisible, for Bataille “the gaze on (the gaze open to) death” in “Ce monde où nous mourons” (1957), Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 12:460.
8. We also find this in The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me and again in When the Time Comes, 15.
9. “Dance, then, lay in an arc between two deaths,” Doris Humphrey, cited at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Doris-Humphrey (consulted July 8, 2016).
10. “Yet I have met beings who have never said to life, ‘Quiet!’ who have never said to death, ‘Go away!’ Almost always women, beautiful creatures” in The Madness of the Day, 7.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “On Nietzsche’s Side” (1945–1946) in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 298. Blanchot cites this phrase again in The Space of Literature, with the same meaning, but in a different translation: “Die at the given time,” 116.
1. Maurice Blanchot, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 329. Citations in this chapter are taken from this text unless otherwise stated.
2. Maurice Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 5.
3. “It seemed that only the presence of someone could transform [the silence of the room] into true solitude” (286). Only this could transform it into an “essential solitude.”
4. Just as Death Sentence cites Vicky Baum and a biblical formulation, just as When the Time Comes and The Last Man allude to Nietzsche, the title of this récit is taken from a Rilke passage also cited in The Space of Literature: “O seek to understand that he must disappear! / Even if the anguish of it dismay him. / While his word extends this world, / Already he is beyond, where you may not accompany him . . . / And he obeys by going beyond”; Maurice Blanchot, “Rilke and Death’s Demand” (1953) in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 156. Rilke is announcing Orpheus in this figure, who here becomes the partner of the writer-narrator.
5. “ ‘I have been doing a lot of thinking lately. I have the impression that you used to remain more hidden. You were perhaps something extraordinary, but I lived with the extraordinary without being disturbed by it, without seeing it and without knowing it.’ ‘Do you miss those days?’ ‘No, I do not miss them’ ” (300).
6. “I wish (for example) for a psychoanalyst to whom the disaster would beckon [ferait signe],” Blanchot would write in The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 9. Pierre Fedida underscores this: “Language is the true interlocutor of such speech. Language as it exists in this form of the silent other who is listening. Might language be the reverse-side of speech? . . . It is not certain that psychoanalysts have wholly comprehended what Blanchot has said.” In “Blanchot pose cette question de la mémoire,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 67.
7. Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 71.
8. “I was surprised that I was now very near the windows and yet felt that I was still in the middle of the room” (276).
9. “He turned to the window and, without pausing on me, stared rapidly, with an intense but rapid gaze, at the whole expanse and depth of the room” (275). “The figure was over there, I saw it motionless, it seemed to me that it was almost turned away, and I had the feeling that at the moment my eyes were fixed on it, it was preparing to climb the last steps and disappear. . . . It was nevertheless stopped and suspended under my gaze, as though the fact that my gaze was riveted to it had, in fact, riveted it to that point” (289). The bay window and the staircase are also the sites where specters appear in The Turn of the Screw, a récit that Blanchot discussed in 1954 in an article for the NNRF, in a way strangely resembling the analogy that he himself drew between his critical essays and his récits (and his life): “The ambiguity of the story is explained not just by the abnormal sensitivity of the governess but also because this governess is the narrator. She not only sees ghosts, which perhaps haunt the children, it is she who also talks about them, drawing them into the indistinct space of the narration”; “The Turn of the Screw” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 130. Blanchot adds that the subject of the récit, like that of James’s Notebooks, is indeed the turn of the screw, “the pressure to which he submits the work,” “the pressure of the narration itself.” Ibid., 133.
10. “Someone who has disappeared completely is suddenly there, in front of you, behind a pane of glass, becoming the most powerful figure.” Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 161.
11. “What had been there was frightening [effrayant], was what I could not associate with [frayer] and, in this shift, it seemed to me that I myself could no longer associate with anyone, not even with myself” (294). Etymologically, effrayer comes from the Vulgar Latin exfridare, literally “expel from peace,” and frayer from fricare, “to rub.”
12. It is also found in The Space of Literature, in a form using the informal “you,” as part of an imaginary inner dialogue attributed to Kafka, and to all authors: “Are you writing? Yes? Might you be writing?” in “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” (1952) in The Space of Literature, 57.