1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time” (1950), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 34, 18.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “Madness par excellence” (1951), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 113.
3. See Frédéric Badré, Paulhan le juste (Paris: Grasset, 1996), 294.
4. Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time,” 17, 24.
5. Ibid., 32. As if in echo to this, Blanchot would repeat and comment on these passages in “The Two Versions of the Imaginary”: “to resemble himself . . . is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn’t we say: the deceased person resembles who he was when he was alive? ‘Resembles himself ’ is, however, correct. ‘Himself ’ resembles the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone’s, draws toward the day.” In The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 257.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “The Two Versions of the Imaginary” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 258. The interrogative form of the phrase is dropped in the move from article to book.
7. Blanchot, “The Museum, Art and Time,” 39, 40.
8. This emerges from his readings of Hölderlin, Mann, or Lowry, whose novel “is at once marvelously lost and controlled in a sovereign way,” just as its hero is “awfully dominated, although master of himself until the end”; “Au-dessous du volcan” (1950), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 175–177.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Madness par excellence,” in The Blanchot Reader, 125, 125, 119, 115. However, in an article from January 1955, Blanchot would place more emphasis on the theory of a “turning point” in Hölderlin’s poetry (see The Space of Literature, 269–276). Michel Foucault would cast light on the paradoxical break in this discourse: the way that “the absolute of rupture” is found in the “inseparable unity” of madness and writing; “Le ‘non’ du père,” Critique 178 (March 1962), reprinted in Dits et écrits (Gallimard, 1994), 1:199–200. Jacques Derrida would also address it at the beginning of “La parole soufflée” (Winter 1965), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001), 212–245.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “Les justes” (1950), in La condition critique, 180. This might seem rather late for Blanchot’s first mention of the extermination camps. It does not mean that he had not felt a pain that he had preferred to keep secret, or that he was not asking questions that as yet had led nowhere. Bataille was the first to be made aware of this pain and this questioning: in a 1946 letter to Prévost, he cast doubt over whether Rousset’s Univers concentrationnaire could form the object of an article for Critique by Blanchot, “also, it is perhaps at the opposite pole to what Blanchot wishes to discuss” (May 7, 1946). In Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 318.
1. Only one of the constituent articles appeared in 1951. The first important text was published in March 1952. A fairly regular series of articles followed until June 1953. Two further ones would appear in November and December of that year, and a final one, much later, in January 1955.
2. Was it a sign of his glory? Blanchot’s research caused critics to think conservatively. In 1956, the jury of the Prix de la Critique was unanimous that they should not consider The Space of Literature, owing to their hesitations over whether it belonged to the genre of criticism.
3. “Introduction” to the first issue, signed NRF (January 1, 1953): 2–3.
4. Letter from Jean Paulhan to Roger Caillois, no. 178 (July 12, 1957) in Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Roger Caillois, 1934–1967 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 232.
5. Remark reported in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 79.
6. If we set aside Bataille’s two articles on the récits and Levinas’s on his critical thought, no major writer or philosopher wrote on Blanchot in the 1950s. Although these texts are no less remarkable for this reason, they were nonetheless written by his two best friends.
7. Kafka cited by Blanchot in “Kafka and the Work’s Demand” (March 1952), in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 64, 61.
8. “This way of reading—this presence to the work as a genesis—worsens, and thus produces the critical reading through which the reader, now the specialist, interrogates the work in order to know how it was made, asks it the secrets and the conditions of its creation, then examines it closely if it responds well to these conditions, etc. The reader, having become the specialist, becomes an author in reverse”; “Communication” (December 1953), in The Space of Literature, 203; this passage was added in the 1955 version.
9. Blanchot, “Kafka and the Work’s Demand,” 58–60.
10. Blanchot here cites Hegel as cited by Bataille (the article was originally published in Critique): life “does not fear surrendering to the devastation of death, but endures death, supports death, and persists in death”; “Death as Possibility” (November 1952) in The Space of Literature, 101.
11. [Le désoeuvrement is an important term in Blanchot’s writing. In normal French it means “idleness” or “unemployment.” But Blanchot uses it in close proximity to his notion of the work, l’oeuvre (itself always impossible and withdrawn), playing on its literal meaning, dés-oeuvrement being an “un-oeuvre-ing” or “un-working.” —Trans.]
12. “The ordeal which always destroys the work in advance and always restores in it the futile overabundance of worklessness”; “Mallarmé’s Experience” (July 1952), in The Space of Literature, 46. The work “is always in excess, it is the superfluous quality of what is always lacking, what we have called: the overabundance of refusal”; “Characteristics of the Work of Art” (1952), in ibid., 221–233, at 228; see also 215.
13. The editors of Les Temps Modernes placed the first installment of the article at the start of the May issue.
14. Maurice Blanchot, “On One Approach to Communism” (December 1953), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 93–96. What was described as only a “strange coincidence” in December 1953 became the “remarkable coincidence” in the version published in 1971.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Original Experience” (May–June 1952), in The Space of Literature, 228. The word “beginning” was underlined in the first version in Les Temps Modernes.
16. Ibid., 215. The words “the gift” were underlined in the first version.
17. Ibid., 246. In the book version, “present and visible” replace a more Bataillean vocabulary (the article used the words “impossible and sovereign”).
18. Ibid., 238.
19. The article from Les Temps Modernes closes with these words: “the poem is solitude’s poverty. This solitude is an understanding of the future, but a powerless understanding: prophetic isolation which, before time, forever announces the beginning” (“Literature and the Original Experience,” 247). A few years later, Blanchot would say strikingly that prophetic speech does not give the future, but takes away the present; The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79.
20. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 30; see also Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, in Foucault—Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 63–64.
21. René Char cited in “Literature and the Original Experience,” 214.
22. Maurice Blanchot, “The Beast of Lascaux,” trans. Leslie Hill, in Oxford Literary Review 22 (2000): 9–18, at 12–13.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, “Le regard du poète,” in Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 22–26. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate this process of reversal, this deconstruction; it begins by recalling the heritage of the 1936 lectures. In Blanchot, he writes, “the accent with which the word Being is offered is Heideggerian” (12).
24. Blanchot would return to this critique of Heideggerian thought as a “philosophy of rootedness” (and as the thought of a “slightly shameful Neuter”) in “L’étrange et l’étranger” (1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 278–288.
25. Emmanuel Levinas, “Le regard du poète,” 24.
26. Maurice Blanchot, “Où va la littérature?” NNRF 8 (August 1953): 303.
27. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 94, 220.
28. “Impatience is the failing of one who wants to escape the absence of time; patience is the ruse that seeks to master this absence of time by making it into a different time, measured otherwise. But true patience does not exclude impatience, it is intimacy with impatience, it is impatience suffered and endlessly endured”; Maurice Blanchot, “Orpheus’s Gaze” (June 1953), in The Space of Literature, 173.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Inspiration, Lack of Inspiration” (March 1953), in The Space of Literature, 187.
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Unless indicated otherwise, references in this chapter henceforth refer to this translated work.
2. “How can one speak of oneself?” The question was still a valid one, but it was no longer a major concern. Blanchot returned to this formulation in articles of February 1956 (on Michel Leiris; “Battle with the Angel” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 129) and June 1958 (“Rousseau” in The Book to Come, 45). See also the article on Hesse: “Not all his books are autobiographical, but almost all speak intimately about him”; “H.H.” (May 1956) in The Book to Come, 167; indeed, the elements shared by the Steppenwolf and Blanchot’s personality are not without interest. Last, some purely anecdotal allusions can be found. In the article on Caillois’s and Huizinga’s books on gambling, Blanchot evokes chance in games of luck. The example of roulette given is not accidental: “that 22 should be the number that emerges, I cannot expect this, it is the unexpected,” he writes with secret humor; “L’attrait, l’horreur du jeu” (May 1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 269–278. Choosing his birthday in a nod to chance is itself a game—or a way of believing in magic. It is sometimes said that Blanchot liked gambling (games of chance, casino games; he did live near Monte Carlo for many years). Could this explain the conclusion of the article on Caillois and Huizinga? “We will be better able to understand how gambling can lead to great passions and why the greatest passion is that of games of chance.” Ibid., 278.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Hell: 2” (May 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 181. This sentence, which offers a summary of the critical thought of the 1950s, nonetheless only appeared in 1969.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “The Fall: The Flight” (1956) in Friendship, 205.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Hoax” (1957), trans. Ann Smock, in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 157–166.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and Brod” (1954), in Friendship, 246.
7. The tone has significantly changed since the article from Faux pas, which concluded with the “divinity” of Claudel’s mind (288–295). The phrase cited here appears as such only in 1959, and in a note to the text (the number of the NNRF of 1955 was, it is true, a homage to Claudel).
8. See notably “A toute extrémité” (1955) in The Book to Come, 107–110. [This chapter title is translated as “At Every Extreme,” but might be better rendered “At the Very Last.” —Trans.]
9. Maurice Blanchot, “The Power and the Glory” (1958), in The Book to Come, esp. 245–246.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “L’étrange et l’étranger” (1958), in La condition critique, 279.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Nihilism: 2” (May 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, 177. The expression “movement of detour” was added in the 1969 version.
12. For example, Gaëtan Picon’s accusation that Blanchot was an “ontolo-gist of non-Being” is not far from suggesting as much. Even in recognizing that the experience of literature in his critical oeuvre has “the greatest authority,” Picon denounces its incomplete logic, the lack of a final stage where “negative transcendence” would open onto “living transcendence,” thus freeing art of its subordination to the void of nothingness; see “L’oeuvre critique de Maurice Blanchot II,” Critique 113 (October 1956): 845–854.
13. Maurice Blanchot, “The Terror of Identification” (1958), in Friendship, 216. The final words, on detour, are found in the book version only.
14. “Nihilism has become the commonplace of thought and of literature.” In “Reflections on Nihilism: 1” (August 1958), in The Infinite Conversation, 143.
15. References to Marxism become increasingly common in this period, as do signs of sympathy. For instance, Blanchot even sees the meeting of Breton and Trotsky as “an exalting sign”; “There could be no question of ending well,” in The Book to Come, 29. He translates The Man Without Qualities as “the man without particularities”: “is he not essentially the proletarian, if the proletariat, characterized by not-having, is directed only toward the suppression of any individual mode of being?” He thought it a shame that Musil had avoided this question; “Musil: 2” (March 1958), in The Book to Come, 260 n.
16. Thomas the Obscure (1950 version), trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 14.
17. The expression “always already” appeared in April 1953 in an article (“Rilke and Death’s Demand”) collected in The Space of Literature, 141; it is found four times between 1954 and 1958. It was used widely in the texts of the 1960s. It is well known how much it would influence Derrida’s thinking. On the “violent gap,” see “Man at Point Zero” (April 1956) in Friendship, 82.
18. See “Tragic Thought” (August 1956), in The Infinite Conversation, 96–105.
19. Maurice Blanchot, “The Speech of Analysis” (September 1956), in ibid., 455. Blanchot nonetheless adds that this situation is a fragile one, and always tends to be reappropriated by institutions.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “The Pain of Dialogue” (March 1956), in The Book to Come, 155. Blanchot evokes similar modern modes of interrupted dialogue regarding Malraux, James, Kafka, and Camus.
21. Maurice Blanchot, “The Book to Come: 2” (November 1957), in ibid., 233–244; “The Effect of Strangeness” (February 1957), in The Infinite Conversation, 360–367 (the two contemporary poets are only cited in the 1969 version).
22. Ibid., 363.
23. Maurice Blanchot, “Artaud” (November 1956), in The Book to Come, 34–40. In its review version, the text is preceded by a page that sets out in the form of four fragments the relations between suffering and thought. “Forgotten” in The Book to Come, this page is nonetheless not dissimilar to various passages in The Last Man.
24. Maurice Blanchot, “Museum Sickness” (April 1957), in Friendship, 48. This conception of the power to separate time was shared by Blanchot and Bataille; Sartre judged it to be illusory in “Un nouveau mystique.”
25. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Nihilism” (May 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, 149.
26. Ibid. When he reworked these pages written in summer 1958 for publication in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot set himself in clear opposition to Heidegger (see particularly the end of the footnote on 449–451). Among the Heideggerian strategies he rejected was the undeniable conflation of an implicit discourse (regarding the philosopher’s rejection of Nietzsche) with an explicit one (his commitment, the commitment of his discourse to Nazism).
27. It also came indirectly from Mr. Chouchani, the mad teacher-figure and nomad of thought from whom Levinas learned a lot about Jewish mysticism between 1945 and 1949. Blanchot did not meet him in person, but heard reports through his friend as well as through his brother René and his sister-in-law Anna, who also met Chouchani.
28. Maurice Blanchot, “Affirmation (Desire, Affliction)” (July–August 1957), in The Infinite Conversation, 106–122.
29. Ibid., 116–117.
30. Ibid., 119.
31. Stéphane Mallarmé in Selected Letters, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 77.
32. As early as April 1954, Blanchot develops a reflection on misfortune, with a veiled reference to the camps (“these overwhelming, so vast upheavals produced in our time”; in its original version it read “these overwhelming, so vast upheavals that our times have unveiled”). It would be interesting to compare this reflection with one by Robert Antelme, named “Pauvre-Prolétaire-Déporté” and published without fanfare in a Christian journal in 1948. Maurice Blanchot, “Reflections on Hell: 1” (April 1954), in The Infinite Conversation, 171–176, at 173; Robert Antelme, Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 25–32.
33. Maurice Blanchot in “Affirmation (Desire, Affliction)” (July–August 1957), in The Infinite Conversation, 120.
34. Ibid., 121, 122.
35. Ibid.
36. Maurice Blanchot in “The Great Hoax” (1957), in The Blanchot Reader, 166.
37. [This refers to an episode concerning “the Manifesto of the 121,” a petition against conscription for the Algerian war, which was signed by Sartre. De Gaulle, wary of the implications of arresting this leading writer, declared: “Voltaire must not be thrown in jail.” Of course, Voltaire was thrown in jail. —Trans.]
38. Maurice Blanchot, “Man at Point Zero” (April 1956), in Friendship, 82. In 1956, he had written, “perish in order to begin.”
39. Some of the pearls are as follows: “a fierce determination to perform intellectual gymnastics,” “a sort of swindle” (Claude Ernoult in Les Lettres nouvelles), “a sample of hardline obscurantism” in which he “persists in following his friend Bataille” (Ed Ewbank in La Lanterne). “Paradox can be positive, it spices things up, adds salt to the mixture. But Mr. Blanchot adds salt by the spoonful, by the ladleful, an avalanche of salt” (E.B. in La Libre Belgique). The Space of Literature was said to be “a curious, picturesque text, which could prove interesting to any reader who, wishing to win the Great Prize for Translation, might attempt to turn it into lucid and clear French” (anonymous reviewer in Phare Dimanche). The Last Man “beats all records for hermeticism in the genre of the novel” (Albert Loranquin in Le Bulletin des Lettres).
Fortunately, we find some more fortunate texts by Butor, Carrouges, Dalmas, Dufrenne, Pingaud, Poulet, or Rida, as well as a very good commentary by Jean Pfeiffer, “L’expérience de Maurice Blanchot,” Empédocle 11 (July–August 1950): 55–64.
40. Roger Judrin, review of The Last Man in NNRF 52 (April 1957): 725–726.
1. Printing was completed in January. Four excerpts appeared in Botteghe Oscure, the NNRF, and Monde nouveau between 1955 and January 1957. The “new version” that would appear in 1971, even though it would carry this description only from 1977 onward, seems only to have minor differences.
2. Maurice Blanchot, The Last Man, trans. by Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 18. References in the remainder of this chapter are to this work.
3. See Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 176–179, note. It must also be said that for Blanchot the Nietzschean “last man” is “he who does not want to be the last man”: “the man of the last rank, the man of permanence, of subsistence.” In The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 155.
4. See Franz Kafka, Journal (Paris: Grasset, 1954), 3.
5. “Like a wolf, he said” (3, 19). Let us recall that Blanchot published a double article on Hesse in May and June 1956, when he was likely to have been about to finish his récit.
6. Indeed, Michel Gauthier picked up a large number of similarities between the two fictions. See “La montagne magique” (Fall 1983), 16. We can also think of the links possible between Claudia in When the Time Comes and Clavdia Chauchat in The Magic Mountain.
7. In November 1956, Blanchot published an article on Artaud in the NNRF, which would be collected in The Book to Come—apart from four fragments which, in the third person and without ever naming Artaud, describe the relation he felt to suffering and to thought. Three months before the récit was published, the phrases were strikingly similar. For example: “For him, each thought was the greatest suffering, and not to think, the absence of thought, was the bare presence of suffering. It seems that he wished to encounter a small thought that, in giving some time to pain, would have allowed him to suffer it.” “Artaud,” Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 47 (November 1956): 873. And in The Last Man, the following words are spoken by the woman character: “When he thinks, he suffers, and when he doesn’t think, his suffering is naked. . . . He must be given a little thought that isn’t a thought of pain, a brief moment, I think that would be enough.” The narrator remarks, “So she tried to procure for him that little bit of time—that single moment that might allow him to recover the pain, to suffer it?” (51).
8. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 65–66.
9. “Her body seemed incredibly hard to me, more so than any truly hard thing could be. Scarcely had I even grazed her than she leaped up, crying out indistinct words which surely expressed an excruciating ignorance and rejection. I didn’t have time to study them, I wanted only to grab her again, and in fact, she immediately collapsed into my arms, everything in her that was hard melted, became soft, of a dreamlike fluidity, while she wept and wept” (47). This scene, which recalls J.’s collapse in Death Sentence, mixes together the motifs of jealousy, guilt, and incommunicability. Above all, it marks the absolute, intense, unbearable toughening imposed by entering alone the passive experience of dying.
10. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, première version, 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 191.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “At Every Extreme” (February 1955), in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 107. This article, like that of the following month, “Death of the Last Writer” (March 1955) in ibid., responds implicitly to a text by Cioran, “La fin du roman,” published in December 1953 in the NNRF, which only praised Blanchot as a novelist in order to paint him as a nihilist, although this was in fact to be reductive in relation to his thinking, which constantly condemned nihilism.
12. [À toute extremité means “at the last moment” or “at death’s door.” In the pages that follow, Bident plays on this sense of extremity, which, for Blanchot, links the thinking of death to extreme models of writing and thought. —Trans.]
13. Blanchot, “Artaud,” 40. We should also compare the two articles on Simone Weil and the thought of misfortune, of July and August 1957, to passages such as the following: “he had the weakness of an absolutely unfortunate man, and that measureless weakness struggled against the force of that measureless thought, that weakness always seemed to find that great thought insufficient, and it demanded this, that what had been thought in such a strong way should be thought again and re-thought on the level of extreme weakness” (16–17).
14. Georges Bataille, Manet, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 9:157.
15. See Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” in Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 71.
1. Blanchot succinctly describes the encounter in For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 137.
2. “Do we know when it begins? There is no friendship at first sight; instead, it develops little by little, in a slow labor of time. We were friends and we did not know it,” Blanchot writes as he begins a text dedicated to Mascolo; ibid., 134. These words also apply to Robert Antelme.
3. Mascolo said that he, Duras, Antelme, and a few others had been “Judaized” by the war.
4. Robert Antelme, “Vengeance?” (November 1945), collected in Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 17–24.
5. Ibid.
6. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 494.
7. Daniel Dobbels in Antelme, Textes inédits, 9.
8. Marguerite Duras in ibid., 252.
9. Michel Surya, “Une absence d’issue,” in ibid., 114–119.
10. Robert Antelme, “broadly” remembered by Dionys Mascolo in interview with Aliette Armel, Le Magazine Littéraire 278 (June 1990): 38.
11. This is what he wrote to his friend Georges Bataille: “That something which can be called misfortune, but which we must also leave nameless, can in a sense be shared; it is a mysterious, perhaps misleading, perhaps unsayably true thing”; letter of August 8, 1961, cited in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 592.
1. Maurice Blanchot, “On Jouhandeau’s Work,” in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 107–110, at 109. Parts of this article were included in “Chaminadour” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 227–233, but not these words on the mother.
2. Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 33.
3. Louis-René des Forêts in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” France-Culture radio show first broadcast on September 17, 1994. Were there no books or many books, then? With Blanchot, who sold many of his (too) numerous books, and who would say more than once that in order to stop writing it was necessary to write (too much), absence and presence always go in hand. [Des Forêts is referring to Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. —Trans.]
1. This manifesto was published as an annex to the complete reedition of the 14 Juillet journal in Lignes, in an unnumbered special edition of 1990.
2. For a more precise history of the Rue Saint-Benoît group, see Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire (Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 1987), and his interview with Aliette Armel in Le Magazine Littéraire 278 (June 1990): 36–40.
3. Maurice Blanchot, “Intellectuals under Scrutiny” (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 217. The conditions in which the Republic was trying to save itself recalled the summer of 1940 too closely for Blanchot not to emerge from his withdrawal.
4. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Dionys Mascolo, trans. Michael Holland in ibid., 107.
5. His joy was all the greater given that, the same day or very nearly, Mascolo received a letter from Bataille that was equally unexpected, but for different reasons; see Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 491; see also 481–483.
6. Maurice Blanchot in For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 137.
7. This sense of passage explains, it seems to us, the two moments of For Friendship that are indirectly quite “harsh” toward Mascolo. Having just discussed how their friendship began in 1958, Blanchot adds: “It was doubtless then that I met Robert Antelme,” For Friendship, 137. And concluding the book, which originated as a preface that Mascolo did not dare request from him (leaving Maurice Nadeau to pass on his request), he recognizes Emmanuel Levinas, “the only friend—ah, distant friend—whom I call tu and who calls me tu” (ibid., 143).
8. Maurice Blanchot in “On One Approach to Communism” (December 1953), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 97.
9. Robert Antelme, “Les principes à l’épreuve,” Le 14 Juillet 1:11–12; Dionys Mascolo, “Refus inconditionnel,” ibid., 19; Louis-René des Forêts, “Le droit à la vérité,” ibid., 20.
10. The similarity of the two titles is proof less of borrowing than of recognition. In fact, the word “refusal” belongs to the vocabulary of all Blanchot’s political periods. It came back into force in 1958, having also been used in “The Power and the Glory” (April) in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 249, and in “L’étrange et l’étranger”: “Literature, like thought, is nothing but the experience of itself and for itself: this experience of strangeness nonetheless only grasps or institutes the movement of refusal that tirelessly constitutes it and tirelessly fails to constitute it” in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 288.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Refusal” (October 1958), in Friendship, 112, 297.
12. Ibid., 7.
13. Let us recall the sentence with which Blanchot signed off, in December 1937, from his militancy on the far right: “The true communist dissident is he who leaves communism, not in order to move closer to capitalist beliefs, but in order to define the true conditions of the struggle against capitalism”; Combat 20:155. It defines rather well the situation of this new group of friends.
14. [June 18 was the date of De Gaulle’s famous radio broadcast in 1940. —Trans.]
15. Blanchot, “Refusal,” 10–11.
16. For example this phrase: “[the dictator] is the man of dictare, of imperious repetition, the one who, each time the danger of an unknown language appears, tries to struggle against it with the rigor of a commandment without rejoinder and without content,” in “Death of the Last Writer” (March 1955), in The Book to Come, 220. The phrase was repeated in a letter to Mascolo of November 29, 1958 (which is to say, when the article was being readied for republication in The Book to Come).
17. Maurice Blanchot “The Essential Perversion” (1958), in Political Writings, 10.
18. Ibid., 9.
19. “The prodigious hatred for reflection, the hatred focused on revenge against thought, are revealed in the reactions of the sheep [veaux] . . . those that De Gaulle delicately called sheep”; Francis Marmande, “Par haine de la pensée” (From Hatred for Thought) in the introduction to the republication of Le 14 Juillet 1:10. [De Gaulle’s term was veaux, the sense of which seems best rendered in English by reference to a different animal. —Trans.]
20. Etienne Balibar was the one who formulated or reformulated these principles, in circumstances analogous to those of 1959 or 1960, during the movement of winter 1997 against the Debré law on declaring foreigners’ periods of stay in France. At the height of the Algerian war, at the height of reactionary Gaullism or neo-Gaullism (mimicked by Debré), at the height of power’s arrogance (claiming for itself the right of surveillance, of casting suspicion, of potentially making guilty any citizen acting as host), a community of artists and intellectuals demonstrated its refusal of the law’s ignorance by using principles that are like the “higher laws of humanity”—the very same ones, if we read those listed by Balibar, backed by Robert Antelme; “État d’urgence démocratique,” Le Monde (February 19, 1997), 1, 13.
21. See Blanchot, Friendship, 149; Jean Paulhan, letters 162 and 163 in Choix des lettres, 1946–1968, Le don des langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 3:181–183.
22. René Char, “Note à propos d’une deuxième lecture de ‘La perversion essentielle’ dans “Le 14 Juillet 1959’ ” (1964), in Recherche de la base et du sommet (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 124–125.
1. This account is based primarily on four sources, the fullest and most reliable. They are: Dionys Mascolo’s personal archives (notably fourteen of the preparatory versions of the final text); “Le droit à l’insoumission: Le dossier des ‘121,’ ” in Cahiers Libres 14 (January 1961), including an interview given by Blanchot to Madeleine Chapsal for L’Express in fall 1960 but censured by the editors at the weekly paper; a section of Anne Cohen-Solal’s Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 694–717; and an MA thesis by Fabien Augier on the manifesto, from University Paris-VII in 1988: “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie.”
2. Maurice Blanchot et al., “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 15–17. In an unpublished text (from Dionys Mascolo’s archives and only referred to, to our knowledge, by Fabien Augier in “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie”), Blanchot qualified the political and military situation of France and Algeria precisely as “of a nihilist character.” This text dates from 1960, probably from the fall.
3. “The undersigned . . . declare:
—We respect the refusal to take arms against the Algerian people, and we judge this to be justified.
—We respect the conduct of the French citizens who consider it their duty to bring help and protection to the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people, and we judge this to be justified.
—The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes to ruining the colonial system in a decisive way, is the cause of all free men.” “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination,” Ibid., 16–17.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “First I would like to say . . . ,” in ibid., 33–34. This interview took place several months before the one between Georges Bataille and the same journalist, in February 1961 in Orléans. It is also significant that it was the only interview Blanchot ever gave, and that it was rejected by the editors of L’Express and not published.
5. Dionys Mascolo, “Aux heures d’un communisme de pensée,” in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 441. See also the interview with Aliette Armel, Le Magazine Littéraire 278 (June 1990): 39. Marguerite Duras, too, would state in 1985: “The Declaration on the right to insubordination did not order men to rebel against the state. It gave no orders. It did not and does not demand that the individual disobey the orders of the state. It teaches him that within him he has, both clearly and intelligibly, all the reasons needed to be insubordinate and also all those needed to not be so. . . . It places the men who are ‘called’ before their essential responsibility: their sovereignty”; she added that this was probably “an absolute text.’ ” In “Écrit pour tous les temps, tous les carêmes,” in Outside (Paris: POL, 1993), 2:79.
6. Claude Roy, Somme toute (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 285; Madeleine Chapsal, L’Express (October 6, 1960).
7. “The approach that led us to say these words together, in response to this question for our consciences, was no different to the approach that leads the solitary writer to speak—to write—on his own account. Or if you will, the thinking man here (by intervening in things) was only following his own thinking.” Mascolo, À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée, 441.
8. Unpublished text of fall 1960 from the archive of Dionys Mascolo; quoted in Augier, “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie.”
9. “Is it necessary to recall that fifteen years after the destruction of Hitler’s order, French militarism as a result of the demands of this war has managed to reinstate torture and to make it like an institution in Europe once again?” “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” 16. Blanchot was the one who came up with the definitive version of this phrase, adding notably the word “like.”
10. Unpublished text of fall 1960 from the archive of Dionys Mascolo; quoted in Augier, “La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie.”
11. “Anarchy lies in the fact of letting the army become a political power as well as in the fact that the current regime owes its rise to a military coup d’état that thereby sealed from the beginning the illegality of the imperious order that in its august manner it claims to represent and to impose upon us. Since May 1958 we have been in a situation of anarchy, this is the truth that everyone has vaguely grasped.” The army introduced the trap of dictatorship, which made the people the prisoners of their own children: “because their sons are participating in it—albeit automatically, by the automatism of military service—they can no longer recognize that this war is unjust, and they make themselves its accomplices.” Political Writings, 34, 35.
12. Among the 121 signatories, beyond the “main authors” of the text, were Adamov, Blin, Boulez, Damisch, Dort, Lefebvre, Lévy (Paul), Lindon, Losfeld, Malraux (Florence), Maspero, Masson, Monod (Théodore), Mounin, Pontalis, Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Signoret, Simon, Vercors, and Vernant.
13. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 137.
14. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, July 31, 1960. “If you wish, something will be done, and I shall stand close by you as you may desire, to help you, if I can. Beyond simple respect, of which it is ashamed, this is a type of necessity that can only be imposed through rare individuals such as yourself, I am sure of it.”
15. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo of August 8, 1960.
16. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo of July 22, 1960.
17. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Dupin, July 1960 (between the 23rd and the 26th).
18. Mascolo, À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée, 440; Maurice Blanchot, letter to Christian Limousin, July 28, 1975, trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 17.
19. Three periodicals with small readerships, sometimes quasi-clandestine ones, would publish the Manifesto in full: Témoignages et Documents, which published dossiers on the Algerian war, defined itself as a force of opposition and the site of freedom of expression and was seized on September 20 for having printed the piece; Vérité-Liberté, a review created in May 1960 by opponents of the war in Algeria, coming from Esprit as did Jean-Marie Domenach or from Les Temps Modernes as did Jean Pouillon, and whose editorial committee had roughly as many signatories as nonsignatories; and La Voie Communiste, which was Leninist, anti-Stalinist, and opposed to the Communist Party, placed the manifesto on the front page of its September issue. The September–October issue of Les Temps Modernes would appear with two blank pages and the list of 121 signatories, and it was also seized. The manifesto was reproduced in great numbers abroad (Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Colombia, the United States, and elsewhere).
20. Thierry Maulnier, editorial in Le Figaro (September 30, 1960).
21. Blanchot recounts the scene in For Friendship, 139. He had already alluded to it discreetly in “A Plural Speech” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 81.
22. Among the new signatories were Châtelet, Debord, Danièle Delorme, Bernard Frank, Limbour, Clara Malraux, Olliver, Madeleine Rebérioux, Sagan, Siné, Terzieff, Truffaut, Tzara, Vildrac, and Wahl.
23. The event is briefly described by Maurice Nadeau in Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 71.
24. Mascolo, À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée, 443.
1. Maurice Blanchot, letter of December 2, 1960 to Jean-Paul Sartre in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 37. The richest dossier on the International Review was published in number 11 of the journal Lignes in September 1990. It contains an ensemble of documents written by the editors in 1961 and many letters from between 1960 and 1965, which came from the archives of the Italian publishing house Einaudi (the Gulliver collection) and from those of the cantonal library in Lugano (Vittorini collection). In this issue the letters are arranged in chronological order.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Blanchot’s reservations regarding Sartre are well known. They did not prevent him from truly admiring the “generosity of spirit” that he saw, as it were, incarnated in him (“Sartre’s readiness to make affirmations makes many of his thoughts polemical ones, but it expresses his generosity of spirit, for if he offers up even his most instantaneous affirmations unhesitatingly, as if his whole life had always revolved around them,” he wrote in “L’étrange et l’étranger” (1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 278–288). Blanchot appealed to Sartre in the name of this generosity on the subject of the International Review.
5. Blanchot, Political Writings, 37.
6. Iris Murdoch, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Seaver, Carlos Fuentes, and Ernesto Sabato were the Review’s correspondents, although they (co)responded with varying levels of interest.
7. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, August 7, 1961.
8. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, without date (1960?), cited in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 593–594.
9. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, postscript, August 19, 1961.
10. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, August 8, 1961, cited in Bataille, Choix de lettres, 591–592.
11. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, May 16, 1962.
12. Blanchot, Political Writings, 56. Blanchot used exactly the same terms in a letter to Dionys Mascolo. The commentaries that follow cite the preparatory texts written by Blanchot and published in Political Writings, 56–69.
13. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, June 29, 1961.
14. Blanchot, Political Writings, 57, 59. The International Review would also be different to any other international review, such as Botteghe Oscure, the trilingual (English-French-Italian) review edited by Margeurite de Bassaiano, to which Blanchot, Bataille, and most of all René Char had contributed; these contributions bear witness to their longstanding interest in confronting texts, languages, and modes of knowledge.
15. Blanchot, Political Writings, 59.
16. Ibid., 56–57.
17. Maurice Blanchot, “Reading,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 197.
18. Blanchot, Political Writings, 57.
19. Maurice Blanchot, For Friendship (1993), in ibid., 140.
20. Maurice Nadeau, Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 71 (on the meeting with the publisher, see 460). In a letter of November 1962, a furious Blanchot would speak of Gallimard and its “ways of doing things which would be more suited to a lunatic asylum”; letter to Dionys Mascolo published in Lignes 11 (September 1990): 258. The negotiations bear witness to how publishers failed to understand the International Review, which aimed to end the territorial logic of the world of reviews.
21. Maurice Blanchot attended his funeral in Vézélay. Jacques Pimpaneau does not mention his presence, but Jean Piel confirms that he was there, alongside himself and Michel Leiris; see “Critique, l’histoire souterraine de l’intelligence contemporaine,” Libération (December 13–14, 1980), 20–21. Other, private accounts confirm Piel’s. Blanchot went to Vézélay with his sister-in-law. He took with him a wide wreath of flowers.
22. Letter from Elio Vittorini to Louis-René des Forêts, February 1963, in Lignes 11 (September 1990): 272.
23. Italo Calvino, article in Menabò quoted by Marina Galletti in “Le monstre souterrain,” in Georges Bataille après-tout (Georges Bataille After All), ed. Denis Hollier et al. (Paris: Belin, 1995), 251. Concerning collective and fragmentary writing, Vittorini let it be understood that only a centralized country such as France had the luxury of thinking the interruption of a relation which was not yet established between friends in a country whose geographical separation and linguistic difference (Blanchot himself remarked upon this) made it necessary to “hold the relation” before any other absolute. This was an interesting objection that applied above all to the Germans, now separated by a wall. However, it should have been one more reason to begin and then continue the Review, as it offered precisely something like the siteless site where the absolute could be related to the demand of thinking separation.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Friend,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961), 82.
25. Blanchot, Political Writings, 57, 61.
26. “The fragment linked to the mobility of seeking, of the traveling thought that fulfills itself in separate affirmations and demands this separation (Nietzsche)”; “Truth is nomadic,” the project stated, leaning on Nietzsche and Levinas against “Heideggerian paganism, the poetic paganism of rootedness”; Political Writings, 63, 64.
Another remark: This column would have been the best in which to address texts’ translatability. Blanchot had thought about this both explicitly (see “Course of Things” in Political Writings, 62) and in more general terms; “Translating” (September 1960) in Friendship, 57–61; and previously, “Translated from . . .” (July 1946), in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 176–190.
27. As early as the end of the 1950s, Blanchot had already suggested to Queneau to ask a foreign critic to write the chapter on French literature in the Pléiade Histoire des littératures.
28. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Dionys Mascolo, in Political Writings, 50.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “Berlin” in ibid., 73.
30. Ibid.
31. Missing in French until 1983, Blanchot having lost the original manuscript, The Name Berlin was republished in a bilingual edition by Merve Verlag in Berlin thanks to Hélène Jean and Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposal to “reconstitute a French text from the foreign versions,” with the author agreeing to “sign this text [as] his text” (see the preface by the translator-editors, 4). The first French edition was therefore fulfilled according to the law of the text and the spirit of the review. Once more, the authority of a “Blanchot text” goes beyond any singular attribution and lays claim to a communitarian essence.
32. René Char, “Maurice Blanchot, nous n’eussions aimé répondre . . . ,” in Le nu perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 57; in 1966 this poem opened the issue of Critique in homage to Blanchot.
1. A little less than a year before dying, Georges Bataille wrote the following to Dionys Mascolo: “I have written several times to Maurice Blanchot for whom my friendship counts more and more. His letters have counted a lot for me” (September 5, 1961) in Choix de lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 576.
2. Louis-René des Forêts, Poems of Samuel Wood, trans. Anthony Barnett (Lewes: Allardyce, 2011), 9. “An immense, infinite, irremediable catastrophe,” “the abyss, absolute disaster”; Maurice Blanchot, A Voice From Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 11.
3. Georges Bataille, Le coupable, translated as Guilty by Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011).
4. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, December 7, 1969.
5. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, August 8, 1961, cited in Bataille, Choix de lettres, 591–592.
6. We can also read the following, written barely a month after the previous letter cited: “It seems to me that, in these days of distress, therefore ordinary days, something has been given to both of us, to which we also have to respond together, as if we were both tasked, at the limits of our strength, with keeping silent watch over this relation with I know not what, and which is so lowly (perhaps physical, perhaps metaphysical, necessarily both one and the other)”; letter from Maurice Blanchot to Georges Bataille, September 2, 1961.
7. [Numantia was an ancient settlement in what is now Spain, famously besieged by troops of the Roman Empire. —Trans.]
8. He wrote as much to Dionys Mascolo: “Dionys, I would like to tell you that I do not think that friendship is a positive thing, I mean something like a value, but much more than that, something like a state, an identification of death and therefore a way of sharing it, of sharing questions. It is the most miraculously neutral site from which the constant unknown can be seen and felt, the site where what is most acute about difference is fully experienced—as it would be at ‘the end of history’—only in its opposite; the proximity of death”; letter of 1949 or 1950, cited in Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Paris: Nadeau, 1987), 23–24.
9. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, March 11, 1981.
10. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, November or December 1969, published in Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 33. Mascolo would speak of “the friendship of No” in “Sur les traces de Maurice Blanchot,” France-Culture radio show broadcast on September 17, 1994.
11. Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire, 52.
12. Letter from Mascolo to Blanchot, November or December 1969.
13. Perhaps we should see this movement beyond direct address as the meaning of the untranslatable words attributed to Aristotle: “O friends, there is no friend,” discussed by Jacques Derrida in Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997).
14. See Dionys Mascolo’s singular dream where Maurice Blanchot appears as an empty, continuous presence on the other end of the telephone line; in Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 34.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Friendship,” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 291.
1. At this start, the narrator warns us that this “is not a fiction, although he is unable to utter the word truth in connection with all of that. Something happened to him, and he can neither say that it is true, nor the contrary. Later, he thought that the event consisted in this way of being neither true nor false.” Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 4. In this chapter, references in brackets refer to this translation.
2. [Entretien in French sits somewhere between interview, dialogue, and conversation; I have therefore retained the French term. —Trans.]
3. Emmanuel Levinas in “The Servant and Her Master,” trans. Michael Holland, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 154.
4. The description of the woman entering the man’s room (29) recalls those in Death Sentence. The image of resurrection is evoked as a memory (“if I were to die, you would not fail to call me back to life,” 17). The “Come,” which is already present in The Most High (53, 55, 238) and also in Death Sentence, now punctuates the récit: it is the speech of awaiting and of the quest for oblivion.
5. Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1985), 47.
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Last Man, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 89.
7. There is something of Heraclitus in the aphoristic and paradoxical phrasing of certain fragments; in January 1960, Blanchot published a text on the philosopher in the NRF.
8. “While poetry is dispersion itself which, as such, finds its form, the work of the novel can also claim to be struggling against the spirit of dispersion and to be starting from that spirit”; reprinted in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 301–302.
9. René Char in Word as Archipelago, cited by Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 458.
10. [The French title, L’attente l’oubli, provides a starker juxtaposition (referred to above by Bident) than the English one Awaiting Oblivion, where the first word can be read as a noun, but more naturally functions as a verb. —Trans.]
11. “And he could see how much he had wanted to know” (6). “As if the proper dimension of pain were thought” (10). “Stagnant waiting, waiting that at first took itself as its object, complacent with itself and finally full of hatred for itself. Waiting, the calm anguish of waiting; waiting become the calm expanse where thought is present in waiting” (29).
12. “When I speak to you, it is as if the entire part of me that covers and protects me abandoned me and left me exposed and very vulnerable” (10), the woman tells the narrator.
13. “Lying down and showing herself through a passion to appear that turns her away from everything visible and invisible” (67).
14. “In proximity, touching not presence, but rather difference” (61).
15. See Maurice Blanchot, “Oh All to End” (1990) in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 299. Alongside Bataille, Blanchot had been the first to write on Beckett’s work; alongside Blanzat and Nadeau, he had tried in vain to give him the Prix des Critiques, in 1951. Suzanne Dumesnil states how important this recognition was for her husband: “to have been defended by a man such as Blanchot, that will have been the main thing for Beckett, whatever happens”; letter to Jérôme Lindon, May 25, 1951, archives of the Éditions de Minuit, quoted by Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942–1955 (Paris: IMEC, 1994), 378. Gilles Deleuze, for whom reading Beckett and Blanchot was decisive as early as the 1950s, is one of the few who have compared them, even if he did so fugitively: see notably “The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann in Sub-Stance 24, no. 3/78 (1995): 3–28. The way in which both writers constantly pursue an exhausting of literary speech calls for them to be brought together in greater depth. With infinite attentiveness, there is at work an awaiting ultimately without object except speech itself (a speech lived with or for the other, and beyond this, with the question of the possibility of companionship, of friendship), an interruption of thought, an exhaustion of bodies without cause, a constant dying of these bodies, a repetition carved out until it becomes a murmur, an insomnia, a certain community of thought and of writing.
16. Awaiting Oblivion could be for Blanchot what Phaedra was for Racine, at least according to what he himself had written about that play twenty years earlier: “Phaedra is there to remind us of the meaning of silence and to admit, at the same time as its own ruin, the effacement of the mind that has tried to use this meaning to understand night. Although she expires in an almost peaceful death because she surpasses the torments of ordinary misfortune, it is only natural that she seems to drag down with her the one who has touched the mystery of what cannot be unveiled, and whom henceforth cannot represent in the world anything more than its silent secrecy.” In Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 70.
1. The first article where the notion of the Neuter is substantivized is “L’étrange et l’étranger” (October 1958), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 278–288. [Le neutre can be rendered either as “the neuter” or as “the neutral.” I have usually (but not always) chosen the former, in line with Blanchot’s thinking of a relation of a third gender or kind (genre), and also to avoid the suggestion of neutrality in the sense of indifference. —Trans.]
2. Setting aside those written in 1968 for Committee, between 1959 and 1969 Blanchot wrote nearly seventy articles, the vast majority of them for the NRF; forty-four were collected in The Infinite Conversation and seventeen in Friendship. In both works they were placed alongside other, less numerous texts from the 1950s.
3. There are extremely notable similarities between the récit and two articles in particular: “Speaking Is Not Seeing” (July 1960), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 25–32; and the opening of “Forgetting, Unreason” (October 1961), ibid., 194–201.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “What Is the Purpose of Criticism?” (January–March 1959), in Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5. [This article, entitled in French “Qu’en est-il de la critique?” is better translated as “How Do Things Stand with Criticism?” since “purpose” is foreign to Blanchot’s understanding of criticism. —Trans.]
5. On the Neuter as “partner invisible,” see The Infinite Conversation, 460. The récit that opens the work also features the phrase “the neuter, the neuter, how strangely this sounds to me” (xxi), which is also found later, in an article of 1962, “The Relation of the Third Kind,” 71.
6. The final note of The Infinite Conversation underscores this: these “already posthumous” and “nearly anonymous” texts do not have any authority stemming from a single author; “belonging to everyone, even and always written not by a single person, but by several: all those to whom falls the task of maintaining and prolonging the demand to which I believe these texts, with a stubbornness that today astonishes me, have constantly attempted to respond even unto the absence of book that they designate in vain,” 435.
7. He had already written as much to Bataille, probably at the end of the 1950s: “I am wearied by this work which I find a burden, perhaps because I have not managed to make it essential” (the fact that others did find it essential means that Blanchot’s aim was really to say that he had not managed to make it so for himself). He also wrote as much to Sartre: “knowing the strong aversion that I have . . . to participating in the kind of literary reality that a review is . . . I would feel capable of overcoming this repulsion only if the project were strong enough to maintain and develop all the reasons that made me participate in the Declaration,” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 38. He also wrote to Vittorini, indicating an essential reason which is another proof of the immense renewal he was expecting from the International Review, whose failure confirmed that his judgment was correct: “All the journals are dying, the ‘journal’ genre is dying” (February 8, 1963) in Lignes 11 (September 1990): 277.
8. Maurice Blanchot citing René Char in “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral” (Summer 1963), in The Infinite Conversation, 302. Henceforth and unless otherwise stated, references in brackets refer to this volume.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Le bon usage de la science-fiction” (January 1959), in La condition critique, 289–298. There was another allusion to De Gaulle: “We are still living under a First Consul” (229).
10. Blanchot does not use the term “depoliticization” without precautions; he gives it scare quotes. For in the very use of the word there is a risk of nihilism.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Slow Obsequies” (August 1959), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 84–85. See also his refusal of Jaspers’s liberal anticommunism, “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing” (March 1964), in ibid., 101–108.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “The Indestructible. 1. Being Jewish” (August 1962), in ibid., 123. The citation is an addition of 1969.
13. Ibid., 124.
14. Maurice Blanchot, “Gog and Magog” (June 1959) in Friendship, 229.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” in The Infinite Conversation, 343; “Idle Speech” (1963) in Friendship, 125.
16. Blanchot, Friendship, 125; The Infinite Conversation, 437 n.
17. “In a simplification that is clearly misplaced, the entire history of philosophy can be seen as an effort either to acclimatize and domesticate the neuter by replacing it with the law of the impersonal and the reign of the universal, or to refuse it by affirming the ethical primacy of the Self-subject, the mystical aspiration to the singular Unique.” Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 299.
18. Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Reducers” (April 1965), in Friendship, 68.
19. Denouncing the power of criticism, notably in its journalistic and academic forms, therefore becomes often wisely and rationally, sometimes comically and meanly, vigorous: see, notably, “What Is the Purpose of Criticism?” (1959), in Lautréamont and Sade, 1–6; “Forgetting, Unreason” (October 1961), in The Infinite Conversation, 194–201; “The Great Reducers” (April 1965) in Friendship, 64–65. Let us recall that the climate in the 1960s was particularly lively, setting traditional and new critics against one another. Blanchot would not intervene directly in the debate; what’s more, he had little faith in the new disciplines’ purported scientific status (see his sarcasm over the “already outmoded distinctions” of the signifier and the signified, the only time these notions occur in his work [261]). However at the time he himself was using logical and geometrical models. He would still cite—confirming his positive view of them—Barthes, Damisch, Dort, Doubrovsky, Faye, Poulet, Marthe Robert, and Starobinski, as well as Lacan, of course, and philosophers such as Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault.
20. Blanchot hears this relation with the unknown in all “narrative voice,” just as he does in its backdrop and even in its possibility, the latter reflected by the contemporary récits that he would come to write on in the 1960s, including those by Marguerite Duras, Roger Laporte, and Louis-René des Forêts.
21. In Blanchot’s eyes, “the feeling of a distance never abolished, but on the contrary kept pure and preserved” is what characterizes Hebraic mysticism (Friendship, 231) and, beyond it, the entirety of Jewish experience. Not without the obvious influence of Levinas, the figure of the Jew now begins to give shape to the very existence of the “third relation” in Blanchot’s work: Judaism “exists in order that the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a just movement; it exists, through exile and through this initiative that exodus is, in order that the experience of strangeness may be affirmed near to us in an irreducible relation” (125). The essence of these affirmations could not be reduced to the political question of the Zionist state (Blanchot’s first public stance on this subject dates from this article; see the long note in “Being Jewish” in ibid., 447–448, lines that in 1962 were part of the main text, which they concluded). These affirmations are closer to the poetic demand that Blanchot would see as if embodied in the work of someone such as Jabès, by reflection on this kind of equivalence between condition, speech, and writing; “Traces” (May 1964), in Friendship, 223.
22. See also Maurice Blanchot, “Thought and the Exigency of Discontinuity” (9–10). The section from “but what does this mean?” to the end was added in 1969.
23. We could also say: in the interruption of any fusional link. For in posing the question of community by beginning with the hospitality of lovers (Klossowski), the same formulation, this difference aside, could be used. Roberte was “a great figure who will say nothing, and even when she lets herself be seen in the most provocative manner, will continue to belong to the sovereign invisibility of the sign”; in “The Laughter of the Gods” (July 1965), in Friendship, 174.
Here, in any case, the question of community arises—Blanchot would return to it. What influence can the thought of the Neuter have on that of community? The question is asked for the first time as follows: “if the question ‘who are others [autrui]?’ has no direct meaning, it is because it must be replaced by another: ‘how do things stand with human “community” when it has to respond to the strange relation between man and man that the experience of language allows one to sense: a relation without common measure, an exorbitant relation?’ ” (71).
24. See Maurice Blanchot, “On a Change of Epoch: The Exigency of Return” (April 1960), in ibid., 264–281 (the final part of the text published in 1969 had not appeared previously).
25. In Blanchot there seems to have been something like a wish to overturn the proposed structure that Genette was preparing at the time, according to which “narrative inserted into discourse becomes an element of discourse, while discourse inserted into narrative remains discourse”; “Frontières du récit,” Communications 8 (1966): 161. Here, the narrative voice sheds light on the backdrop against which speech is used; what is actually said remains subject to the law of a time that is other; discourse remains neutral.
26. This would mark a whole generation of writers and philosophers, beginning with the twin, “unrecognizable” authority of Deleuze and Guattari.
27. See notably the end, added in the book version, of the article “On a Change of Epoch,” in ibid., 271–281.
28. See “René Char and the Thought of the Neutral,” 298–306, and “The Fragment Word” (1964), in ibid., 307–313. See also the attention he gave to Heraclitus’s language; “Heraclitus” (January 1960), in ibid., 85–92.
29. Blanchot, “The Fragment Word,” 308, 310.
30. Ibid., 310.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “The Last Word” (May 1968), in Friendship, 266.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude” (January 1953), in The Space of Literature, 33.
33. This weakness grows more extreme, this ability to walk lessens further: “Taking three steps, stopping, falling.” The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 135.
34. Emmanuel Levinas in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), 76.
35. Moreover, the récit contains a fairly long passage describing the situation the author of the book it introduces finds himself it: “he has lost the ability to express himself in a continuous manner. . . . This makes him neither happy nor unhappy” (xxi).
36. [Disparaître has the double meaning of “to disappear” and “to die.” The voice that speaks in this dialogue plays on this double term, as Bident will regularly do in the remainder of the work. I have most often chosen “disappear” as the translation, but its usage in referring to a death, which is relatively common in French, is one to bear in mind. —Trans.]
1. Dionys Mascolo, “Hommage à Maurice Blanchot,” La Quinzaine Littéraire 12 (September 15, 1966), collected in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), pp. 205–10.
2. See Roger Laporte, “Un sourire mozartien,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 74.
3. Roger Laporte was born in 1925, Michel Foucault in 1926.
4. Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression” (1963), in Dits et écrits, 1954–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1:240; “Guetter le jour qui vient” (1963), in ibid., 267–268; “La prose d’Actéon” (1964), in ibid., 336. See also the later “De l’archéologie à la dynastique” (1973), in ibid., 2:412.
5. Michel Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’Histoire” (1967), in ibid., 1:593.
6. “If Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Kafka fully exist in the language that we speak, it is precisely thanks to Blanchot. He is therefore the Hegel of literature, but at the same time Hegel’s opposite.” Foucault then develops the opposition between a dialectical conception of the historical existence of works of art (which makes them available to the memory addressing and uniting them), and the free establishment of a relation without relation that exposes works of art to the exteriority that terrifies them and disperses them into the infinite neutrality of oblivion. See “Folie, littérature, société” (1970), in Dits et écrits, 2: 124.
7. We can read what he said about it to Watanabe in “La scène de la philosophie,” in ibid., 3:589. Here Foucault invokes his debt to Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski. But having been taken aback on several occasions by students’ ignorance even of Blanchot’s existence (this did not happen with Bataille or Klossowski), he emphasizes how much work of recognition still needed to be done in terms of the man and his work being known.
8. After Bataille’s death, Foucault had joined the editorial committee of Critique alongside Roland Barthes and Michel Deguy, here too taking up the invitation of Jean Piel, who had taken over the editorship.
9. Twenty years later, Todorov would show much less enthusiasm, accusing Foucault, Levinas, all the authors of the issue, with the exception of Poulet and de Man, of paraphrasing; “Les critiques-écrivains,” in Critique de la critique (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 66–67.
10. Georges Poulet, “Maurice Blanchot, critique et romancier,” Critique 229 (June 1966): 485–497. This text expands an article of fifteen years earlier in Yale French Studies 7 (Fall 1951): 77–81.
11. These are the remarks of Jean Starobinski, “Thomas l’obscur, chapitre premier,” Critique, 229 (June 1966): 506–507, 513.
12. A remark made by Emmanuel Levinas in a note at the beginning of his article, collected in Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 77–78.
13. See the opening of the article by Paul de Man, “La circularité de l’inteprétation dans l’oeuvre critique de Maurice Blanchot,” Critique 229 (June 1966): 547.
14. Michel Foucault, “The Thought from Outside,” trans. Brian Massumi in Foucault—Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 7–58.
15. Foucault, “Sur les façons d’écrire l’Histoire,” 593.
16. “With JLG/JLG, I wanted to make a film similar to the books I read as a teenager, those by Blanchot, by Bataille” Jean-Luc Godard in “Il est de règle de vouloir la mort de l’exception,” interview in the journal Théâtre de la Bastille 7 (September 1995): 28. Blanchot’s work always watches over Godard, being his “clandestine companion” (Godard cites the text of that name on Levinas in For Ever Mozart in 1996).
17. Roland Barthes, “On The Fashion System and the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 51. See also “Literature and Signification” (1963) in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 261–264.
18. He wrote hot-tempered outbursts such as the following: “You theoreticians, know that you are mortal, and that theory is already death in you,” in a fragment of The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 43. The accent here recalls Valéry’s famous phrase: “As for us, civilizations, we now know that we are mortal.” In another fragment, Blanchot stated that “theories are necessary (the theories of language, for example): necessary and useless. . . . We must pass by way of this knowledge and forget it”; ibid., 75–76. A little later still, evoking structuralism in Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, Blanchot would reduce the scope of his silence, not without malice: “I realize that until now I have never pronounced, either in approval or disapproval, the name of that ephemeral discipline, despite the friendship I bore certain of its adherents.” Foucault—Blanchot, 70.
19. Beyond the explicit references to Blanchot’s name and to his investigations of the absence of work or the essential solitude, the entire tone is imbued with the pages of The Space of Literature on reading; Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (1966; New York: Continuum, 2004), 38–40.
20. On the relation between Barthes and Tel Quel, see Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel (Paris: Seuil, 1995), notably 195–199.
21. Philippe Sollers, “Le roman et l’expérience des limites” (1965), in Logiques (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 226–249. Like in Criticism and Truth, the last pages of the article take up Blanchot’s theories about reading as developed in The Space of Literature. Furthermore, Philippe Forest shows how Sollers’s new novel Drame of the same year owes much to Blanchot’s conception of literature: see Histoire de Tel Quel, 233. Sollers’s Blanchot is therefore close to Foucault’s: he guarantees the awareness, in language itself, of what is radically external to language.
22. In the first volume of Figures, every sentence following a citation from Blanchot is interspersed with an “indeed” or an “evidently”; Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 1:61–63, 79.
23. A radio show by France-Culture on September 15, 1970, presented him in this way. The same year, Jean Pfeiffer prepared a show dedicated to Blanchot for Belgian Radio.
24. See Tito Perlini, “Maurice Blanchot: L’opera come presenza-assenza,” Nuova Corrente 45 (1968).
25. Michel Foucault, “La scène de la philosophie,” in Dits et écrits, 3.
26. Deleuze only ever cites Blanchot’s critical work, and often the same passages return multiple times. For example he uses Blanchot’s distinction between dying and death in his discussion of Freud’s theory of drives; in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New York: Continuum), 138–139; he returns to the same thinking for his analysis of “the event” in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (1969; New York: Continuum, 2001), 172–174. In the same works, Deleuze also addresses an “eternal scintillation,” in terms of the Blanchotian reading of the image and of “the absence of origin” (respectively 162–163, 318).
27. Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 20.
28. Roger Laporte has underscored this importance of Derrida and his authority on the very manuscript of The Infinite Conversation. Blanchot modified numerous passages of the articles collected in the volume after reading Writing and Difference, Voice and Phenomenon, and Of Grammatology in 1967. See Roger Laporte, À l’extrême pointe (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 40–42; see also Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 127–142. This preoccupation was taken up and—if you will—signed by multiple fragments of The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 10–12, 30–32.
1. It seems that Laporte did so without imagining what the consequences would be; for him, Beaufret’s comment had not seemed so serious as to prevent him from contributing to the volume.
2. There were also other less serious statements, slippages in the rhetoric of everyday conversation, hot-tempered Freudian slips. While Blanchot and Derrida agreed at the time—not without difficulty—to “attenuate” their seriousness (recognizing only that they could not take such statements as “a declaration of anti-Semitism”), these lapses in language nonetheless did not paint a favorable picture of a philosopher whose attitude, during the whole affair, remained unchanged. Although Beaufret agreed to explain himself regarding these remarks, whose context could attenuate their scope and their offhand nature, he never accepted that he had made the statements aimed at Emmanuel Levinas. We must also recall that following Beaufret’s death it was revealed that he had supported the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson.
3. The text was already almost written when Fédier had approached Derrida, because he was working on Heidegger at the time. It would be collected in Margins of Philosophy (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
4. They would not see each other again thereafter, but they would often write to and telephone each other.
5. Maurice Blanchot, “The Fragment Word” (1964) in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 307–313.
6. “For Emmanuel Levinas / with whom, for forty years, / I have been bound by a friendship / which is closer to me than myself: / in a relation of invisibility with Judaism.”
7. “At no moment did we cease to have full confidence in Roger Laporte, never having doubted either his good faith or his sense of truth.”
8. Maurice Blanchot had attended the defense and went to see Levinas three days later.
1. From the Nile, close to Aswan, he wrote to Mascolo: “Everything is different, but does one ever forget? Yes, for a few moments, only for harsh memories to then return” (postcard from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, January 4, 1965).
2. This is what Blanchot wrote in the text that he proposed for a call for a boycott of the ORTF; noting that all forms of artistic and intellectual expression, even the most critical, were immediately recuperated by power (by De Gaulle) as “proof of ‘national’ prestige,” he called on “all men of thought, writers, scholars, journalists to refuse to work together with the services, organizations, institutions, or mouthpieces controlled by the government, and without any true autonomy, such as the ORTF” (unpublished text).
3. Maurice Blanchot et al., “The Solidarity That We Assert Here,” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 79.
4. Maurice Blanchot, “On the Movement” (1968), ibid., 109.
5. Leiris did write a laconic note (September 12, 1968) on “the ridiculous aspect of Mascolo, Blanchot, Schuster, etc.” Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 628. But he had taken part in several demonstrations (see For Friendship [1993], in Political Writings, 141), and the following year would express his deep admiration for Schuster when he appeared before a correctional tribunal after having reproduced in Coupure an issue of La cause du peuple, which had once again been banned by the ministry of the Interior; see Jean Schuster, Magazine littéraire (February 1992): 51–52.
6. [The Confédération Générale du Travail is one of France’s largest confederations of labor unions. —Trans.]
7. “I addressed a few words to him, he himself unaware of who was speaking to him,” in Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, in Foucault—Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 63. Foucault would say that he never met or recognized Blanchot. And in any case that spring and early summer the philosopher was most often in Tunisia. There were several possible dates when they could have met, however: on May 27, for example, Foucault was at Charléty, and at the end of June he was indeed at the demonstrations and assemblies at the Sorbonne.
8. Dionys Mascolo, cited in Marianne Alphant, “Une présence secrete,” Libération (January 28–29, 1984), 23.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Intellectuals under Scrutiny” (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 224.
10. Mascolo recounts how one of the most famous slogans of May, “Be realistic / Demand the impossible,” originated in a discussion at the Renault factory in Billancourt. A trade unionist said to two members of the Committee, “We must be realistic, we must not demand the impossible.” Mascolo stated that that afternoon, at Censier, “We had some paper, and a print worker available to us, and we were searching for themes. It was spontaneous, I can only present it as a collective intuition.” The trade unionist’s statement was inverted. Naming the possible, responding to the impossible: we also know that for several years this had been the major formulation in Blanchot’s thinking of both the necessity of dialectics and the demand of the wholly other.
11. Blanchot retained the greatest respect for Derrida’s reservations over the “fusional spontaneity” of May ’68, reservations which in his eyes only confirmed the necessity of retaining a distance in all friendships within thought. This paradoxical essence of friendship meant that 1968 was both the year when they were continuously present for one another, and that when they did not converge politically (in this sense, there is a symbolism in the fact that they took part separately in the march of May 13: Blanchot with Antelme, Mascolo, Nadeau; Derrida with Goux, Sollers, Baudry).
12. Maurice Blanchot in “The Most Profound Question” (February 1961), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 22 (“this being-other that it is,” read the first version). See the lines written by Blanchot in 1961 on revolutionary speech, something that would be embodied in the movement of May (ibid., 22–23); as well as, six months before the événements, the final pages of “Atheism and Writing. Humanism and the Cry” (November 1967), ibid., 246–263, quoted by Levinas in an explicit reference to May ’68 in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 74. Last, one should cite the entire preface to Sade: “Insurrection, the Madness of Writing” (1965), in The Infinite Conversation, 217–229.
13. “What founds it is rather an insurrection of thought,” Blanchot would say of Contre-Attaque, which retrospectively he saw as “prefiguration of what happened in May ’68”; The Unavowable Community, 13. Robert Antelme would recall that “in that month of May . . . history, as has been said, was thought”; “Sur L’écriture du désastre de Maurice Blanchot,” Textes inédits (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 68. On this point, the two thinkers express one of the essential truths about the May movement.
14. Maurice Blanchot, “The Most Profound Question” (1960), in The Infinite Conversation, 23.
15. Maurice Blanchot, “Insurrection, the Madness of Writing” (1965), ibid., 222, 226.
16. Such was the famous saying by Sade, cited by Blanchot at the end of his preface, just before the main text: “HOWEVER MUCH IT MAY MAKE MANKIND TREMBLE, PHILOSOPHY MUST SAY EVERYTHING,” in “Insurrection, the Madness of Writing” (1965), in The Infinite Conversation, 229. “Say everything,” Blanchot remarked, “one must say everything, freedom is the freedom to say everything” (this was the very truth of the May movement), “this limitless movement that is the temptation of reason, its secret vow, its madness.”
17. “We have crossed over to the far side of fear”: according to Blanchot, this was one of the statements made by the erection of the barricades. “Exemplary Acts” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 99.
18. Blanchot, Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, 63.
19. Ibid., 63–64. See also The Unavowable Community, 29–33, and For Friendship, 141–142.
20. “Communism: what excludes (and is excluded from) any already constituted community,” writes Blanchot in 1968; as well as this, which will also return later: “Communism cannot be an heir. We must be convinced of this: it is not the heir of itself. . . . Between the liberal-capitalist world, our world, and the present of the communist demand (present without presence), there is only the hyphen of a disaster, of a change of star”; “Communism without Heirs” (October 1968), Political Writings, 93.
21. Maurice Blanchot, “Atheism and Writing: Humanism and the Cry” (1967), in The Infinite Conversation, 262.
22. Ibid., 30.
23. Whence such phrases as: “Everything was accepted. The impossibility of recognizing an enemy, of taking into account a particular form of adversity, all that was vivifying while hastening the resolution, though there was nothing to be resolved, given that the event had taken place.” The Unavowable Community, 31. This is why in the bulletin of the Committee there is almost no discussion of the actual content of the students’ and workers’ demands. Nothing concerning the specificities of the possible is essential without the movement of the impossible.
24. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Derrida, May 19, 1968. In parallel with this, Blanchot developed several of the terms in this line of thought in “Exemplary Acts.”
25. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 31.
26. Maurice Blanchot, “Tracts, Posters, Bulletins” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 95.
27. Ibid.
28. Maurice Blanchot, “The Possible Characteristics” (1968), in Political Writings, 85–86.
29. Those cited were: Guevara, Trotsky, Orwell, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rosa Luxembourg, and Hölderlin, and (twice each) Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
30. Eighteen texts are by Blanchot, seven by Mascolo (but they were longer, and the number of pages provided by each figure is almost equal, with roughly a dozen pages each), four by Bellefroid, one by Schuster, and one by Rochefort.
31. Maurice Blanchot, “Political Death” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 89–90. These violent attacks on General De Gaulle have much to do with the contemporary one by Sartre: “The old man saw red, and said to his supporters: “ENOUGH MESSING AROUND, NOW YOU CAN HIT THEM”” in Le Nouvel Observateur (June 19, 1968), 27. Such attacks were not new for Blanchot, nor were they foreign to the caustic humor he always used against De Gaulle. For instance, once when seeing him on television putting on a nuclear protection suit before inspecting a submarine: “no doubt about it, he always finds ways to surprise us,” he said to Louis-René des Forêts, with whom he was watching the program.
32. Maurice Blanchot, “For a Long Time, Brutality” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 94.
33. Maurice Blanchot, “Clandestine Resistance out in the Open” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 103.
34. Maurice Blanchot, “For Comrade Castro” (October 1968), in Political Writings, 100. Whence the following peroration or call to reengagement, to vigor: “Comrade Castro, do not dig your own grave, and if you are so tempted, let yourself slip into it from the natural exhaustion of power. Let us write on the walls of Havana, as was magnificently written on the walls of Prague: LENIN WAKE UP!” Ibid., 102.
35. Blanchot, “Exemplary Acts,” 99.
36. See the letter on this topic from Maurice Blanchot to Dionys Mascolo, dating from late 1968 and published first anonymously in an issue of Les Lettres Nouvelles (June–July 1969): 184–185, then attributed to Blanchot in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 359–360; also collected in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 315–317.
37. The gap between the positions of Christiane Rochefort and Jean Schuster on Castro’s condemnation of the Prague movement, which is clear in the issue of Committee, bears witness both to what remained of a relation of nonrelation and to the fact that it probably no longer existed for the other participants.
38. However, in the same period (October–November 1968), against a backdrop of an unquenchable demand, Blanchot was still taking part in some discussions with students about the creation of the “experimental university” of Vincennes.
39. In April 1969, the adolescent nephew of Dionys Mascolo died.
40. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Derrida, May 13, 1969.
1. [In French, pas can indicate negation, but it can also be a noun referring to a step or pace (or steps or paces). The English title given to Blanchot’s work deals with this ambiguity by translating the term twice: The Step Not Beyond could equally (though less polysemically) have been called The Step Beyond or The Not Beyond. The book itself also contains further play involving passion, passivity, patience, and so on. —Trans.]
2. Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book” (1969), in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 435.
3. Ibid., 426, 431. “The Absence of the Book” was the text that he gave to Louis-René des Forêts for L’Ephémère in spring 1969, which was included at the last moment in The Infinite Conversation. The book appeared in fall 1969.
4. Ibid., 464, 435.
5. Two in 1969, two in 1970, three in 1971, two in 1972, one in 1973. In 1970 he also published a letter to Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier, in which he apologizes for providing only a few thoughts, instead of a true article, for the special issue that Topique was dedicating to Charles Fourier. In doing so he lays down the model for a long series of letters that would bear witness to his weariness with critical writing, to the fact that he would protect his health, to his attempts to sidestep the pressing demands coming at him from all sides, and ultimately to his attentiveness not to let down those demands that seemed to him to have some interest and to which, previously, he would have responded fully.
6. Let us recall the following words from the last lines of the first version of Death Sentence: “These pages can end here, and nothing that follows what I have just written will make me add anything to it or take anything away from it. This remains, this will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and he would be my victim. In the darkness, he would see me: my word would be his silence, and he would think he was holding sway over the world, but that sovereignty would still be mine, his nothingness mine, and he too would know that there is no end for a man who wants to end alone.” In The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 187. On the removal of the two final paragraphs of Death Sentence, and the shock that it produced, see the book by Pierre Madaule, Une tâche sérieuse? (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
7. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 18. We should also note the reprinting of Le ressassement éternel as Vicious Circles in 1970 by Gordon & Breach.
8. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 33. References in this chapter are henceforth to this translated work, unless stated otherwise.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “The Ease of Dying” (May 1969), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 149–168.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “A Note on Transgression,” in ibid., 187.
11. Blanchot had already given expression to this demand for discontinuity in the second part of an essay of 1960, not included in any book, “Reprises”; in it, the aphorism is distinguished from the maxim in the same way that here, the fragment is distinguished from both these forms; in NRF 93 (September 1960): 479–483.
12. Blanchot saw a similar questioning of the “masterful language” of the philosopher, preferring to it the withdrawal of a “pure-impure speech,” which he saw in the “philosophical discourse” (the scare quotes are Blanchot’s) of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; “Le discours philosophique” (1971), in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 332–337.
13. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 7.
14. “If, coming here, you were to find this little room—which was perhaps not so little, due to the three steps that made it possible to go down toward the part where he waited for him, murmuring in the corner” (18); “He lived there, the house was being reconstructed around him, I saw him behind the window, waiting without hearing me, exhausting the overfullness of our words by waiting” (72); “he must have noticed the room that was suddenly immense, surrounded by books, as if to accentuate the emptiness of the space” (79).
15. [While often the French banlieue is a deprived area not translatable by “suburbs,” in this case the area Blanchot lived in is in fact suburban in the American sense. —Trans.]
16. In November 1973, on reading The Step Not Beyond, Georges Perros wrote coldly to Michel Butor: “Stuck my nose into the latest Blanchot. Death is at hand. It would appear that Gallimard is slipping him a few banknotes so that he can survive”; Michel Butor and Georges Perros, Correspondance, 1955–1978 (Nantes: Joseph K., 1996), 709.
17. “I am on the side of weakness” (Bram Van Velde, cited by Daniel Dobbels, “Du côté de la faiblesse,” text relating to the exhibition “L’oeuvre—le sacré” at Villa du Parc, Annemasse, Atelier Cantoisel, Joigny, 1991.
18. This was also one of the effects of fragmentary writing: “As if the invisible were secretly distributed, without the distribution of points of visibility taking any part, therefore not in the intimacy of a design, but too much outside, in a place beyond Being of which Being bore no trace” (94).
19. The journal of dying is capable of everything, except its initial penchant for self-portraiture (in the reflection in the mirror, dying condemns one to “the shimmering of an absence of face,” 94). For the return of any interest in oneself would only be bearable in the weakening of attentiveness and the powerlessness of speech to which death’s imminence condemns one (at such times, it is the most common interest). But such an interest also condemns all words to be erased, and its calmness can cause pain to one’s friends (137).
20. This inability of speech was echoed in an article of 1971: “(these dead who are there, and who in their own way speak, speaking, in all of our vain words, against us),” in “Une nouvelle raison?” (1971), in La condition critique, 325–332.
21. This response dating from between 1969 and 1971 was not first published in French, but is collected in Friendship under the title “War and Literature,” 109–110. It contains the first mention of the “holocaust of the Jews” as “an absolute.” It also evokes the “dark radiance” of the books on the camps, and in closing it mentions the one book among them that was said to be “the simplest, the purest, and the closest to this absolute that it makes us remember: Robert Antelme’s Human Race.”
22. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Emmanuel Levinas (1969), published by the latter in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (1977; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 115–116. The citations in the remainder of this paragraph are taken from this letter; some translations have been modified. Blanchot would express himself in exactly the same terms in 1986, in a text given to Maurice Nadeau; “Do Not Forget!” (1986), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 34–37. See also Levinas’s interviews in La Vie Protestante of May 10, 1974, “L’autre est d’abord un visage” (7) and in the Journal des Communautés in May 1980: “Quand Sartre découvre l’histoire sainte,” collected in Les imprévus de l’histoire (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 158.
23. Roger Laporte indicates the etymological sense in which Blanchot used the word “absolute”: “The Latin absolvere means to detach, untie, disengage. An absolute event is one where the chain is broken,” in “Tout doit s’effacer. Tout s’effacera,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 20; also collected in Études (Paris: POL, 1990), 53–62.
24. “A line has been drawn”: this was the expression used by Blanchot in a letter of February or March 1969 to Dionys Mascolo.
25. This irritation is clear in his correspondence, but also through many public allusions to it: see the beginning of the article dedicated to Brice Parain, “Une nouvelle raison?” (325), or the end of the homage to Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “this posthumous use of a thinking that is no longer defended, that on the contrary is delivered unto others, to their quarrelling, to the intrigues of the comedy of intellectuals, of vanity, prestige or influence,” in “Le discours philosophique” (1971), in ibid. (337). This criticism is repeated in similar terms in The Step Not Beyond: “as if the anonymous, a shadow whose light would be unaware that it shines only in order to project precisely this shadow, arranged the whole comedy of glories, powers, and sanctities in order to move closer to us, signaling to us across signification, and precisely where all signs would be lacking” (37).
26. On this point see The Step Not Beyond, 115–116.
27. In the conclusion of the homage to Merleau-Ponty, he put it as follows: “At least when a philosopher or a writer falls silent, we learn from his silence not to appropriate for ourselves what he was in order to serve our own ends, but to disappropriate ourselves from ourselves and to share with him inhuman muteness.” La condition critique, 337. Mascolo’s declaration, “Contre l’exploitation dont sont l’objet les noms d’Antonin Artaud, de Georges Bataille et d’André Breton,” was published in La Quinzaine Littéraire in March 1971. It was also signed by Robert Antelme and by Michel Leiris.
28. It was a question of taking commentary beyond the illumination of meaning, even polysemic meaning: Blanchot returns to this in The Step Not Beyond (50–51). But he had been calling for the “ruination of commentaries, from the coarsest to the subtlest (commentaries that are in fact necessary in order to be refuted)” since Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 111.
29. Maurice Blanchot, “The Last to Speak” (1972), in A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 57.
30. The editorial committee for L’Ephémère also included Yves Bonnefoy, Paul Celan, André du Bouchet, Jacques Dupin, and Michel Leiris (Gaëton Picon had been a founding member, but left after May ’68). The writers (or poets) that it brought together did not include any not dear to Blanchot. He regretted the closure of this journal, which allowed him to contribute freely with a few texts, now that he was no longer writing regularly for the NRF. Over the coming years, Le Nouveau Commerce would sometimes occupy this role.
31. The article on Klossowski was published in 1970, and beyond the book that he had just published (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 1969), a more general homage to Nietzsche was the subject of the first extract of The Step Not Beyond to be published. As for Henri Michaux, beyond the great admiration that Blanchot had for him, he had been particularly receptive to the poet’s text published following Celan’s death; “Sur le chemin de la vie, Paul Celan . . .” (1970), L’Ephémère 17 (Spring–Summer 1971): 116–117. It could be said that this dedication remained secret for a long time: it only appeared on the text’s second publication, in 1984, following Michaux’s death.
1. Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Jacques Derrida, January 7, 1975.
2. Letter from Denise Rollin to Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, not dated, 1975 or 1976. This letter belongs to a series that bears witness to significant tension between the two correspondents. Fardoulis-Lagrange had asked Denise Rollin to pass to Blanchot his latest manuscript, L’observance du même, but he allowed his reader no more than a week before demanding that it be returned (he was in a hurry to find a publisher). Denise Rollin took issue with this wrongheaded haste, which lacked sensitivity and respect. When Fardoulis declared his astonishment that Blanchot had found some passages fascinating, she responded that “if MB writes ‘fascinating pages,’ it is true, profound, and just, he never says words that do not count, unlike all of those chatterboxes who trade in power.” Blanchot had been able to read only part of the manuscript, which he thought very uneven.
3. Letter from Dionys Mascolo to Maurice Blanchot, October 22, 1974, published in Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 34.
4. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 46. He also writes: “Death suddenly powerless, if friendship is the response that one can hear and make heard only by dying ceaselessly,” 29.
1. See The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 20. Unless otherwise stated, references in this chapter are to this translated work.
2. On this presumption Blanchot wrote that it is not only the Cartesian “I think therefore I am,” but also the affirmations by Nietzsche and Foucault—“God is dead,” “mankind is dead”—that resonate. He adds that they were perhaps “only the symptom of a language still too powerful, too sovereign as it were, which thus gives up speaking poorly, in vain and forgetfully, gives up failure, indigence, the extinction of the breath. And these are the sole marks of poetry” (92). These words were first published in “La poésie, Mesdames, Messieurs,” Givre 2–3 (1977): 177.
3. Blanchot selects the word disaster for all of these reasons concerning language. The disaster allows the “discourse on patience” to come to it: this was the title of the first ensemble of fragments published, in Le Nouveau Commerce in 1975, and which would be collected in the first fifty pages of the book. Mascolo underscores that the word “disaster” had appeared for the first time in Committee; see À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 408. Indeed, in that context the disaster as a “change of star [astre]” underlines what Blanchot had named the departure “from historical space” (The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 269) and the demand made by a communism that he was soon to declare unavowable. We should also recall the “After the Disaster” column that was probably begun by Blanchot at the Journal des Débats in July 1940, and that for him had the same sense of a historical rupture. After the war, poetry too would be charged with this sense: “Poetry . . . is the realm of disaster,” he wrote in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 263. We can also pick up another occur-rence, concerning A Throw of the Dice, which speaks to a failure of ontology, the strength for rupture of “the general rule which gives chance the status of law” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 232. And while in The Step Not Beyond the “immobile disaster that lets everything remain” (trans. Lycette Nelson [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], 120) takes on a more overtly personal turn (it designates the implacable return and something like the law of anguish), we know how much with Blanchot this personal discourse is linked to history.
4. “To write is perhaps to bring to the surface something like absent meaning, to welcome the passive pressure which is not yet what we call thought, for it is already the disastrous ruin of thought. Thought’s patience. Between the disaster and the other there would be the contact, the disjunction of absent meaning—friendship” (41).
5. It is not that the disaster is the absolute: rather, it faces it: “Unless it be the case that knowledge—because it is not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously—carries us, carries us off, deports us (whom it smites and nonetheless leaves untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly” (3).
6. This was the case from the outset, when the book itself had perhaps not yet been formally conceived. The first fragments to appear accompany or extend reflections on other works: the first, in Change, fitted into a homage to Jabès; those of “Discours sur la patience” (Discourse on Patience) had the subtitle “(in the margins of the books of Emmanuel Levinas)”; “A Child Is Being Killed” overtly reiterates the title of Serge Leclaire’s work On tue un enfant, which Blanchot saluted even as he kept his distance from it: “using (perhaps falsifying),” he warned, “the impressive remarks of Serge Leclaire” (67).
7. Mascolo would speak of the Blanchot of The Writing of the Disaster in terms of a “revolt against concepts, a struggle with them, which must at all costs be stripped of their unbearable power to exclude” in “Parler de Blanchot” (1981), in À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993), 409.
8. Something that Robert Antelme would be the first to recognize: “The most withdrawn life, the thinking the closest to that of others, the least turned toward itself, the self always as the self plus the other,” or: “The movement of recognizing the other, the infinite other, the nature of this thought is—its servitude: never abandoning the human race. This thinking is a thinking accompanied, it bears the shadow of the other, it would be the silence, the ‘mute speech’ of the reader” in “Sur L’écriture du désastre de Maurice Blanchot,” in Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 67–68.
9. “Since the gift is not the power of any freedom, or the sublime act of a free subject, there would be no gift at all if not the gift of what one does not have, under duress and beyond duress, in answer to the entreaty which strips and flays me and destroys my ability to answer, outside the world, where there is nothing save the attraction and the pressure of the other: the gift of the disaster” (49).
10. [Leclaire’s work is named On tue un enfant: Un essai sur le narcissisme primaire et la pulsion de mort, and its English translation is A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive, trans. Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). —Trans.]
11. Regarding “A Child Is Being Killed,” see The Writing of the Disaster, 65–72. The first version of the text reads as follows: “companion, but of no one, whom we seek to particularize [by incarnating it] as an absence.” The words in square brackets disappear in the book version: they tend toward not making lack into a fictitious body; the few other modifications also create a similar effect, making the reflections more intensely impersonal, in such a way as to discourage any possibility of the subsequent “scene” being interpreted biographically: an interpretation that Blanchot dismisses as “relatively undemanding,” and according to which “a disappointed subject, or one uncertain of his identity, [would] be affirmed in being annulled” (125). See in parallel the rereading of the myth of Narcissus proposed by Blanchot (125–128, 134–135).
12. An echo of this is also present in a citation of Schelling taken from Heidegger: “Only he who one day has abandoned everything and has been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has capsized and who sees himself alone with the infinite, has come to the very bottom of himself and recognized all the profundity of life. This is a great step which Plato compared to death” (99).
13. Here, too, there was an event experienced through the other and kept discreet. In 1997 Jean Rollin would reveal the following episode, which deeply marked his mother after she experienced it as a child: “when she was very small in the countryside, the playmate that she adored had choked to death”; “the atrocious death, the swollen tongue protruding from her friend’s mouth, traumatized Denise for ever.” In Dialogues sans fin (Trellières: Miran-dole, 1998), 30. Blanchot who shared this anguish once wrote to Denise Rollin: “I am thinking about the little girl who was your companion, in life and in death. Each of us lives with a dead infant who is perhaps silence within us. Let me accompany you silently in this silence” (31).
14. Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion” (1980), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 152.
15. In 1972, Robert Paxton published Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York: Knopf), which was a precursor to further-reaching debates over French anti-Semitism during the Second World War.
16. “Why can we not bear, we do we not desire that which is without end?” Blanchot asks of Christianity, of Hegelianism, of all knowledge, of “political reason” (143).
17. “The unexpected quality of the resurrection of Israel, this promise suddenly extended beyond the realm of the possible, marks how strange the contemporary world is, and how overwhelming it is that we [on] have not been able to welcome it as we would welcome a peerless event whose sole witnesses (near or far) we were. What’s more, it has troubled our consciousness as temporal men, revealing to us that there is something about life to which we do not match up, which we cannot master, and which delivers us to an infinitely responsible relation which makes demands upon us all the more, given that we are unable to respond to it”; Maurice Blanchot, letter of February 11, 1980, to the editors of Exercices de la patience, collected in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 367–368. “Come what may, I am with Israel. I am with Israel when Israel is suffering. I am with Israel when Israel suffers for causing suffering,” Blanchot would even write in a short text printed and widely distributed by a monthly magazine on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the Israeli state; “What is closest to me . . .” (1988), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 39. Salomon Malka published these lines, stating erroneously that this was “the first time that Blanchot has made a public statement about Israel.” But the laconic and brutal nature of the statement in its publication context could lead to misunderstandings. By “Israel,” Blanchot of course means an element within the people (the element that was, he wrote, “on the side of Peres,” the leader of the Labor Party), or even the element that was its conscience, which is to say Israel strictly speaking or the name Israel.
1. Maurice Nadeau, “A l’écoute de Maurice Blanchot,” La Quinzaine Littéraire 173 (October 16, 1973): 3.
2. Apart from special issues of Gramma in France and of Sub-stance in the United States, over the whole decade only one article in Les Cahiers du Chemin, one in Poétique, and two in Littérature appeared.
3. Jeffrey Mehlman, “Orphée scripteur,” Poétique, 20 (November 1974): 458. The passage is not included in Mehlman’s own translation “Orpheus Writing: Blanchot, Rilke, Derrida,” Structuralist Review 1 (Spring 1978): 42–75. Michel Pierssens, “Cris et chuchotements,” Critique 367 (December 1977): 1,146.
4. Jean Frémon, “Lire Maurice Blanchot,” La Quinzaine Littéraire 166 (June 16, 1973): 3.
5. Jude Stéfan in Dialogue des figures (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1988), 73.
6. Roger Laporte, “Une passion (nouvelle version),” in A l’extrême pointe (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 34.
7. Maurice Blanchot did not wish to see the film. He asked his brother René, Monique and Robert Antelme, and Louis-René des Forêts to attend the first private projection (spring 1971), which they did. Their judgments were harsh; they made no secret of this to Benoît Jacquot. The film was discreetly shown on television and overall was badly received.
8. Edmond Jabès, “The Unconditional (Maurice Blanchot).” In a later text, “The Unconditional II (Maurice Blanchot),” Jabès would again evoke the “unconditional retreat of the word” into the strangeness of writing: the place where “God dies into God”; The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 193. Judaism would clearly be one of the decisive links between Blanchot and Jabès; indeed, it was concerning the latter that Blanchot first made the connection between the errancy and exile of the Jewish people and those of the writer—their shared lack of conditions; “Traces” (May 1964), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 217–227.
9. Some of them, initially given to the journals Gramma (1976), Glyph (1980), and Nuova Corrente (1981) and to a North American edited volume called Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), would be collected in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986); others are still unpublished.
10. Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture. Since then this work has been reprinted by Gallimard in the “Tel” collection (1986). For Levinas’s view of it, see Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 45–46.
11. For criticism of Collin, see Jacques Bersani, “Blanchot l’obscur,” in Le Monde des Livres (August 20, 1971). He accuses Collin, drawing on comparisons to do so, of “plagiarism, pastiche or paraphrase” and recalls the scruples stated by Blanchot himself at the beginning of a text on Georges Bataille: “The commentator is not being faithful when he faithfully reproduces” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 203.
12. Daniel Wilhelm, Maurice Blanchot: La voix narrative (Paris: UGE, 1974). See also “Hors de prix,” a review of The Step Not Beyond published in Critique 329 (1974) and reprinted as the first text in Pierre Klossowski: Le corps impie (Paris: UGE, 1979), 9–38.
13. Georges Préli, La force du dehors—extériorité, limite et non-pouvoir à partir de Maurice Blanchot (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Encres, 1977), published in the “Recherches” series directed by Félix Guattari. Blanchot would refer to Préli’s work in The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 32. Claude Lévesque, L’Étrangeté du texte: Essais sur Nietzsche, Freud, Blanchot et Derrida (Paris : U.G.E., 1978).
14. Henri Meschonnic, “Maurice Blanchot ou l’écriture hors langage,” Les Cahiers du Chemin 20 (January 15, 1974): 79–117.
15. “Notice” by the editors (Alain Coulange, Christian Limousin, Patrick Rousseau), Gramma 3–4 (1976): 4. See also the “Propositions” in the same issue, 11–18.
16. Steven Ungar, “Introduction: Flying White,” Sub-Stance 14 (1976): 4.
17. Tzvetan Todorov, “La réflexion sur la littérature dans la France contemporaine,” Poétique 38 (April 1979): 131–148.
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 47.
2. He wrote to Christian Limousin in this sense, as the latter was preparing the issue of Gramma: “I believe that [the issue] should be conceived in the greatest spirit of freedom in relation to me; this work must not appear to be guaranteed, certified, or prepared in collaboration with an author”; letter of February 13, 1975, in Gramma 3–4 (1976): 5. And he wrote again, three months later: “this freedom matters to me above all”; letter of May 4, 1975, ibid., 6. These letters are collected and translated in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 16–18.
3. This game of meaning, in its precision, attracted even those closest to him: “How many nuances within white! From the glacial white of mountain peaks to the warm white of the paper reserved for his name”; Edmond Jabès in “The Unconditional (Maurice Blanchot),” in The Book of Margins, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 96.
4. Manuals and dictionaries of literature speak of him with the utmost seriousness in terms of “the granitic heights of his thought,” of “reptilian phrases,” of an author who has often been turned into “a high priest of the white page”; André Clavel and Michel P. Schmitt, “Blanchot,” in Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française, ed. Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, Alain Rey (Paris: Bordas, 1987), 1:284–285.
5. Jude Stéfan relates that a manual of twentieth-century literature released by the Magnard publishing house had even “mistakenly indicated that he died in 1980”; “M.B.” in Limon 1 (November 1987): 10.
6. See Jean-Paul Curnier, “Esthétique de l’événement,” Lignes 29 (October 1996): 106–121.
7. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (New York: Verso, 1990), 83–84, emphasis added.
8. Let us recall Leiris who, of course with less inflexibility, also detested having his photograph published or his interviews recorded: “One likes to see the author in flesh and blood instead of really being interested in what he has written. . . . One can just about imagine that a day will come when art will only be an irritating mediator, a screen placed between the idol and the audience. Or if art still exists, one can imagine it being reduced to the art of introducing oneself”; note of October 27, 1966, in Michel Leiris, Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 617–618.
9. Jean-Louis Ézine, “Peut-on être Blanchot?” Les Nouvelles Littéraires (October 16, 1980): 3; Jude Stéfan, Dialogues avec la soeur (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1987), 18; Georges Perros, Papiers collés (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 3:18–19.
10. Philippe Mesnard, “Une visite,” postscript to Maurice Blanchot, le sujet de l’engagement (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996).
11. Maurice Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation, 422. The drawing by Ylipe accompanied a text by Maurice Nadeau on Awaiting Oblivion; “Un jeu torturant,” L’Express (May 17, 1962). The white square was surrounded by a text by Jean-Pierre Thibaudat on Juliet, Laporte, and Noël; “Les enfants de Blanchot,” Libération (August 30, 1979), 9.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “A Letter to Blandine Jeanson,” trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 33.
13. Anonymous, “Auteurs cachés,” Lire 117 (June 1985): 46.
14. Jean-Marc Parisis, “Blanchot et ses voisins,” Le Nouvel Observateur (March 20, 1987), 103.
15. François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas (1987; Paris: La Manufacture, 1992) (the new edition of 1992 no longer featured the dossier of photographs); Pierre-André Boutang, Emmanuel Levinas, an “Océaniques” program produced by La Sept, first broadcast on October 17, 1988.
16. Maurice Blanchot, “From Taine to M. Pesquidoux,” in Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 204.
17. Georges Bataille, La limite de l’utile, in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 7:245.
18. “No one is ever anything but the copy of a copy,” adds Roland Barthes in a work that owes much to Blanchot’s thinking of the image; Camera Lucida (1980), trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 102.
19. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Sur le désoeuvrement: L’image dans l’écrire selon Blanchot,” Littérature 94 (May 1994): 113–124.
20. On what Blanchot himself says about the image, see notably “The Two Version of the Imaginary” (1951), in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 254–263; and “The Laughter of the Gods” (1965), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 169–182.
21. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, Ill.: Marlboro/Northwestern, 1998), 3.
22. Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Paris: M. Nadeau, 1987), 28.
23. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 76.
24. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 55, 69.
25. Maurice Blanchot, “Inspiration, Lack of Inspiration” (1953), in The Space of Literature, 187; “Friendship” (1962), in Friendship, 291.
26. Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New Press, 1994), 53.
27. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 69.
28. In terms of Villemaine, having obtained if not consent then at least the absence of any opposition (“I do not wish to be the guardian of “my” works, and even less their owner,” Blanchot wrote to him, adding: “What no longer belongs to me does not belong to anyone else, either”—letter of October 19, 1986), he worked with Gisèle Renard to stage Death Sentence in 1987, basing himself on the récit of that name and on Thomas the Obscure. On this production—which led him to think about the possibility of a new mode of communication in the theatre, based on the works of Celan, Jabès, Kafka, Artaud or Giacometti—see “De l’écrit à la parole,” a roundtable chaired by Jacques Munier and featuring Maurice Attais, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Théâtre/Public 79 (January–February 1988): 36–41; as well as Pierre-Antoine Villemaine, “Le temps d’une représentation,” Écritures contemporaines et théâtralité (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1990), 63–70; and “Un éclair qui se prolonge,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 86–90. In 1995, Micheline Welter also staged Thomas the Obscure; see René Solis, “Pari difficile aux Bernardines,” Libération (February 9, 1995), 32.
29. Daniel Dobbels, “Présentation,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 11.
30. [A selection of the proceedings of the London conference appeared in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996). —Trans.]
31. Special issues of reviews have appeared regularly: Exercices de la Patience in 1981, L’Esprit Créateur in 1984, Nuova Corrente in 1985, then Lignes and Ralentir Travaux. Many theses have been written in France and abroad (especially in the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands), where they have often addressed Blanchot’s relation to other writers (listed at random: Baudelaire, Beckett, Derrida, Gordimer, Heidegger, Lispector, Saussure, Shakespeare). They have been slightly slow in filtering through to publication: none was published in the 1980s, but those by Brian T. Fitch (1992), Anne-Lise Schulte-Nordholt (1995), and Chantal Michel (1997) did appear, and were exclusively dedicated to Blanchot. Last, in 1997, the first accessible work aimed at students was published by Laure Himy.
32. Tzvetan Todorov himself declared that: “I shall therefore take on the thankless task of the boor and try to translate into my own words this speech that says nothing”; this role did in fact seem to fit so nicely with such a “translation” that it can be seen as being as boorish as it had—with ironic intentions—described itself, and is unable to take off this mask; “Les critiques-écrivains,” in Critique de la critique (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 67.
33. [This is a French translation of a work of the previous year, Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). —Trans.]
34. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche (Paris: Seuil, 1983; new ed. Brussels: Complexe, 1988), 257.
35. Philippe Mesnard, Maurice Blanchot: Le sujet de l’engagement (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 83. This is “a test case,” he states, relating to what he calls “The Blanchot File,” xviii.
36. For instance, it is frightening that Philippe Mesnard is able to state that between a 1936 article for Combat and the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination, “fundamentally, few elements differ,” just as there is something frightening in the repeated judgment in his book regarding Bataille’s alleged “superfascism.”
1. Maurice Blanchot in The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), 23. Unless indicated otherwise, references in this chapter are henceforth to this translated work.
2. Maurice Blanchot, “La maladie de la mort (éthique et amour),” Le Nouveau Commerce 55 (Spring 1983): 46.
3. This phrase recalls Judith’s cry to Claudia in When the Time Comes: “Nescio vos,” translated exactly by Blanchot as “I don’t know who you are” (60).
4. This allows us to emphasize once again everything that separates him from Sartre, for instance the priority of the ethical demand (18), or conception of society’s relation to community and to communism (7).
5. In this there is an echo of what Duras said about Bataille’s narrative: “Edwarda will remain sufficiently unintelligible over several centuries that whole theologies will grow up around it”; in “À propos de Georges Bataille” (1958) in Outside (Paris: Albin Michel: 1981), 34.
6. Blanchot, “La maladie de la mort,” 31.
7. See the collected works Rejouer le politique (Paris: Galilée, 1981) and Le retrait du politique (Paris: Galilée, 1983); the amalgamated English version is Retreating the Political, trans. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997).
8. See Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 26 n., and Leslie Hill’s analysis in Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 197–198.
9. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 31. Beyond his in-depth meditation on the entirety of Blanchot’s work, Nancy was the first to recognize how important the texts published in Committee were. It could be said without great risk that his thinking and even the title of his article flows from the rupture in the following phrase, which he cites, from “Communism without Heirs” (1968): “Communism: what excludes (and is excluded from) any already constituted community” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 93.
10. He refers to several articles in The Infinite Conversation (7), twice cites The Step Not Beyond (9, 10), and tacitly borrows from various fragments of The Writing of the Disaster (15–16); see The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 49–50, 89–90, 108–111.
11. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Compagnie de Blanchot,” Ralentir Travaux 7 (Winter 1997): 77.
12. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 3. This is taken up in different terms by Blanchot: “the isolated being is the individual, and the individual is only an abstraction, existence as it is represented by the weak-minded concept of everyday liberalism.” (18)
13. Ibid., 30.
14. Marguerite Duras in The Malady of Death, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 55.
15. Sarah Kofman in Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 70.
16. Duras, The Malady of Death, 1. This mistake was noticed by Francis Marmande in “Le mot de passe,” Lignes 11 (September 1990): 108. Strangely, the citation is correct in the version published in Le Nouveau Commerce. Whatever the source of the eventual slippage, the conditional clearly sits uneasily with Blanchot’s reading (“there remains this statement (it is true in the conditional),” 37).
17. Maurice Blanchot in “The Narrative Voice (the “It,” the Neutral)” (1964), in The Infinite Conversation, 462. See also Marguerite Duras, La vie matérielle (Paris: POL, 1987), 36.
18. Blanchot, “The Narrative Voice.” [“The one”—celle—can refer to either a woman or an impersonal feminine noun such as la pensée, “thought.” The square brackets are Bident’s. —Trans.]
19. Ibid.
20. Maurice Blanchot, “Destroy” (1970), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 113–116.
21. “A reader (but am I?),” he wrote at the beginning of the article in Le Nouveau Commerce (31). And in the book: “I am no longer speaking exactly, as I should, of Marguerite Duras’s text,” (50) recognizing an element of betrayal in what he was writing.
22. Published twenty years after Awaiting Oblivion, The Malady of Death is strangely close to it and seems to describe the same situation: “She was seated, motionless, at the table; lying next to him on the bed; sometimes standing next to the door and in that case coming from very far away. This is how he had seen her the first time. Standing, having come in without saying a word and not even looking around . . . he ought to have immediately felt like an intruder in this room.” Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 29. The main difference is the man’s intimate knowledge of women’s bodes (“between him and every feminine figure a long familiarity that made him close to each of them,” ibid.). In this récit, Blanchot had perhaps written the impossible dialogue that is lacking at the end of The Malady of Death: “ ‘You, too, forgot me’—‘Perhaps, but in forgetting you, I reached an ability to forget you that far exceeds my understanding and that links me, well beyond me, to what I forget. It is almost too much for one person.’—‘You are not alone.’—‘Yes, I am not the only one who forgets, if I forget’ ” (78). But beyond the analogy between the narrative situations, the use of voices whose dialogue punctuates Awaiting Oblivion would enter Duras’s fiction from the 1960s and especially the 1970s, seeming to guide her practice of effacing genres (and even of the materiality of the signifier: “text theater film” would be her subtitle for India Song). These voices are placeholders for absence, the place of a third presence in which pleasure is always experienced through loss and death.
23. See Marguerite Duras, “Dans les jardins d’Israël il ne fait jamais nuit” (1985), reprinted in Les yeux verts, new ed. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma: 1987), 228–248, at 231–233; “Les hommes,” in La vie matérielle, 38: “People, from Peter Handke to Maurice Blanchot, thought that it was directed against men in their relations with women.”
24. See notably Autour d’un effort de mémoire: sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Paris: M. Nadeau, 1987), 39–43, where Mascolo opposes the hypothesis that friendship is an exclusively male construct.
25. Many descriptions or allusions confirm this. Stein is the narrative’s discreet authority, the one who utters decisive words, to whom others look, and who even sees things on behalf of others; Destroy, She Said, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 28, 31. He walks “with his long indefatigable stride” (11), even at night, when he goes down to the park, an exalted victim of insomnia (13). He is a writer or “in the process of becoming one,” and it has “always been like that.” This can be seen in “the way [he] keep[s] asking questions. Questions that get [him] nowhere” (10). As if ironically, a character in the narrative mistakenly names him Blum (p. 77). Blum: the missing link in the metonymy leading from Blanchot to Stein. This is a Judaized Blanchot, turning his back on the insults of the past. Duras would even say that Stein is the key element of the book: “First there was no Stein, but then when he arrived then the book also arrived.” She added, surprisingly contradicting the narrative itself, that “Stein, for his part, does not make love”; in Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier, Les parleuses (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 47.
26. Maurice Blanchot, “Destroy” (Spring 1970), in Friendship, 114. Blanchot would therefore see the characters as gods, “new gods, free of all divinity” (115), whom he describes as he did those in Awaiting Oblivion.
27. Ibid., 116.
1. On October 13, 1992, Blanchot wrote to Dionys Mascolo that “political and social difficulties torment me as passionately as before.”
2. Jacques Derrida relates that in 1995 he humorously referred to his health as “his strong nature.”
3. Roger Laporte, Entre deux mondes (Montpellier: Gris Banal, 1988), 55.
4. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 9.
5. This nephew is said to have planned to open up the house in Quain to create a museum in honor of his uncle.
6. Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier à parler (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1984); Maurice Blanchot and Joë Bousquet, Maurice Blanchot/Joë Bousquet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987). Strangely, the latter’s table of contents and the copyright information give conflicting information. In fact, although it was included in Faux pas in 1943, Blanchot’s article had not been published in the Journal des Débats.
7. Blanchot had written an article on the art of the book, including sections on the relation of illustration and text: “The Book” (1943), in A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 29–35.
8. The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). It is edited and introduced by Michael Holland and includes translations by Susan Hanson, Michael Holland, Roland-François Lack, Ian Maclachlan, Ann Smock, Chris Stevens, and Michael Syrotinski.
9. Maurice Blanchot in “After the Fact,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1998), 494–495.
10. Maurice Blanchot, “The Great Reducers” (1965), in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 64.
11. Maurice Blanchot in Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984), in The Blanchot Reader, 226.
12. Maurice Blanchot in For Friendship (1993), in Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 142.
13. “Encounters” (1984), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 27–28.
14. Maurice Blanchot/Joë Bousquet, 17.
15. It would recall Blanchot’s response to Catherine David’s questions about commitment; “Refuse the established order” (1981); trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 20–22.
16. The Blanchot Reader, 207.
17. [Blanchot refers to “the air of the time” in a short text accompanying the first appearance of “Intellectuals under Scrutiny” and reproduced in Les intellectuels en question: Ébauche d’une réflexion (Tours: Farrago, 2000), 60. The text, which does not feature in The Blanchot Reader, reads as follows: “These notes were not initially intended for publication. Prompted by the air of the time, by Bredin’s book, by the republication of Social Criticism, by Glucksmann’s recent book—which I most often feel in agreement with, even as I wonder how such an important personal conviction can be imposed on or even proposed to others, or to everybody—; these notes developed beyond what I intended, even without me being able to reach the end of my path. Pierre Nora has persuaded me that they might be able to help the ‘permanent debate’ which is the journal’s raison d’être. I therefore offer them up in their inadequacy, convinced as I am only of the certainty that I must have expressed at the end, under the sign of René Char.” —Trans.]
18. The Blanchot Reader, 208, 224.
19. Ibid., 225, 207.
20. Ibid., 210.
21. Ibid., 223.
22. Ibid., 213, 225.
23. “The fact that Céline was a writer in the grip of delirium does not make him uncongenial to me, but this delirium found expression in anti-Semitism; delirium here is no excuse; all anti-Semitism is basically a delirium, and even if it is delirious, anti-Semitism remains the capital offense”: in a letter of 1966 to Raymond Bellour in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 15–16.
24. The Blanchot Reader, 223.
25. Ibid., 226.
26. Ibid., 226, 208.
27. Maurice Blanchot in “Our Clandestine Companion” (1980), in Political Writings, 145.
28. Ibid., 152.
29. Ibid. Blanchot would ask, in parenthesis, of Emmanuel Levinas: “(what have I not borrowed from him)” in “Writing devoted to silence” (1989), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 40.
30. Notably Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (1987), trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and his “Transcendence Ends in Politics” (1981), trans. Peter Caws in Social Research 49, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 405–440. Blanchot cites the latter in Intellectuals under Scrutiny (1984).
31. Maurice Blanchot, “Thinking the Apocalypse” (1988), in Political Writings, 123.
32. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 82; “Do not forget!” (1986), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 34–37; “Writing devoted to silence” (1989) in ibid., 39–41.
33. Blanchot, “Do not forget” (1988 letter to Salomon Malka), in Political Writings, 124–129.
34. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 143.
35. Maurice Blanchot, “Peace, peace to the far and to the near” (1985), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 28–33. Blanchot had already sketched out in his May 1981 response to Catherine David what can be named as such a “Judaism of thought,” something applied to the place left empty by the writer, in which his real sense of engagement would be found. He would return to it in an article dedicated to the figure of Moses as a writer: “Thanks (be given) to Jacques Derrida” (1990), trans. Leslie Hill in The Blanchot Reader, 317–323. [“The heaviest blessing” (Le bienfait le plus lourd) seems to have been the title given to an extract of this same text published in Le Nouvel Observateur. —Trans.]
36. Maurice Blanchot, letter of September 15, 1989, in Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adventures on the Freedom Road, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Harvill, 1995), 318. See also the way in which the name of Jabès is used rhythmically, three times, at the end of “Writing devoted to silence” (1989) in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 39–41.
37. “Rumor has it that in 1986 Blanchot wrote a seven-page text on the early (‘nighttime’) texts for inclusion in a forthcoming study by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.” Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 164.
38. [The letter has since been published, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, lettre-récit (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 47–62. —Trans.]
39. Leslie Hill, “Introduction” in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), 9, 20.
40. Letter of December 24, 1992, from Maurice Blanchot to Roger Laporte, in ibid., 209.
41. Maurice Blanchot, “Our Responsibility” (1986), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 37–38. Dominique Lecoq chairs the association of “The Friends of Georges Bataille,” to whose oversight committee Blanchot belonged.
42. Similarly, in a note in Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him the same year, he wrote: “disciplines go back to prehistoric times when, for example, a bear was transformed, through successful training, into what would later be a watchdog or courageous policeman.” In Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 87.
43. Maurice Blanchot, “I think it is better for a writer . . .” (1991), trans. Michael Holland in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 42. Blanchot’s regular signing of petitions should also be noted: for instance, for an international Parliament of writers in 1993, for the legal recognition of homosexual couples in 1996, for civil disobedience against the Debré law on immigration in 1997 (this last movement openly echoed the Manifesto of the 121). His presence and intransigence stood firm, even if fitfully, against the banalization of politics that was underway. For instance, at the end of 1996 Blanchot learned that his publisher of nearly thirteen years, Bruno Roy, with whom he had published six books, had recently brought out a work by Alain de Benoist, a theorist of the far right, editor of the review Krisis, leader of GRECE (Group for Research and Study of European Civilization), and fellow traveler of the National Front. His reaction was immediate. Blanchot informed those close to him that he was withdrawing his books from Fata Morgana; Jacques Dupin, Louis-René des Forêts, Roger Laporte, and Gerald Macé decided to do the same. On September 2, he wrote a letter to Bruno Roy explaining his departure from the publishing house: “at least for as long as you retain him in your catalogue and on sale.” This ultimatum was met by Roy with a threat approaching blackmail: He recalled Blanchot’s political texts of the 1930s, a threat that left the latter totally indifferent. Blanchot’s letter and an extract from Bruno Roy’s were published by Maurice Nadeau in La Quinzaine Littéraire of November 1. The dailies, weeklies, and journals took hold of this new “affair,” most often with the bad faith and ignorance that might be imagined.
44. Maurice Blanchot, “We work in the dark” (1983), trans. Leslie Hill in Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 25–27.
45. Maurice Blanchot, “The question is certainly a traditional one” (1985), trans. Michael Holland in ibid., 28.
46. Blanchot, “I think it is better for a writer,” 42; “Allow me to reply briefly,” 43.
47. Maurice Blanchot, “Who?” in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 58–60.
48. See, for instance, the response to Claire Nouvet for the special issue of Yale French Studies on “Literature and the Ethical Question”: “Dear Madam, excuse me for responding to you by letter. Reading the one you sent me . . . I became afraid and almost without hope. ‘Again, again,’ I said to myself. It is not that I claim to have exhausted an inexhaustible subject, but on the contrary that such a subject was returning to me precisely because it is so uncompromising. Even the word ‘literature’ is suddenly alien to me.” “Enigma,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 5. On the frequent use of “again, again” to signal fright in the “literature” of Blanchot, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 192, 264–265.
49. Maurice Blanchot, “The Inquisition destroyed the Catholic religion . . .” (1993), Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 43.
50. Blanchot, Foucault—Blanchot, 70. He would himself evoke “the insufficiency of commentary” in a text on Louis-René des Forêts; A Voice from Elsewhere, 14.
51. Maurice Blanchot, “Oh All to End” (1990), in The Blanchot Reader, 635. He thus began this article by signaling his mistrust of words, just as he did with his article on Derrida: “After such a long silence (perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years) I shall begin to write again, not on Derrida (how pretentious!), but with his help, and convinced that I shall betray him immediately” in “Thanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derrida” (1990), trans. Leslie Hill in The Blanchot Reader, 317.
52. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, 28.
53. Blanchot, Foucault—Blanchot, 108, 81.
54. Maurice Blanchot, “L’Excès-Usine ou l’infini morcelé,” Libération (February 24, 1987), 35.
55. Maurice Blanchot, “The Ascendant Word, or Are We Still Worthy of Poetry?” (1984), in Political Writings, 160, 157.
56. Maurice Blanchot in “Thanks (Be Given) to Jacques Derrida” (1990), in The Blanchot Reader, 322.
57. Maurice Blanchot, “Oh All to End” (1990), in ibid., 635–637.
58. Maurice Blanchot, “The Ascendant Word” (1984), in Political Writings, 154.
59. Blanchot, A Voice From Elsewhere, 7.
60. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 72; A Voice From Elsewhere, 28.
61. This is what Blanchot says of the “biography” of Roger Laporte, who “supposed (whence the ordeal) that his life only began with writing, meaning that this writing could not be anything anterior or exterior that it would be necessary to write”; Maurice Blanchot, “Ces quelques lignes ne sont qu’une annonce . . . ,” in La condition critique: Articles 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 426–430.
62. Maurice Blanchot in A Voice from Elsewhere, 6, 13. It is easy to understand Blanchot’s anger in 1992 when a reprint of Thomas the Obscure in the “L’Imaginaire” series included without his agreement two pages of straightforwardly biographical information (some of which was wrong). Such (anonymous) pages negated the narrative to follow: they negated nothing less than their essence, their poetry, their writing.
63. Foucault—Blanchot, 103–104.
64. Daniel Dobbels in Robert Antelme, Textes inédits . . . (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 77.
65. Maurice Blanchot, “Avec Dionys Mascolo,” Lignes 33 (March 1998). With the sinister affair that set Levinas’s two children against one another after his death, Blanchot would also think it necessary to publicly mark his presence by writing a letter supporting Michaël Levinas; see the article by Nicholas Weill in Le Monde (June 22–23, 1997), 25.
66. Three years later, on September 22, 1997, for Maurice Blanchot’s ninetieth birthday, Didier Cahen and Michel Deguy brought together, in the Maison des Écrivains in Paris, around twenty people who were close either to the man or his work. It is a strange thing to celebrate the birthday of someone who is not there. There were several readings: those from The Madness of the Day by Jacques Dupin, and from Friendship by Louis-René des Forêts, did bear witness to a presence, a voice, a smile, a trace of happiness.
67. Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3.
68. Ibid., 11.
69. Jacques Derrida in The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 77. “Fiction and Testimony” is Derrida’s subtitle, and he reads Blanchot’s narrative as a knot formed by the relation of the two. We are indebted to his analyses, which just like the narrative on which they provide a commentary, mark an epoch. They do so as this narrative and for this narrative: published with Fata Morgana in 1994 (two years before the affair that would set Blanchot against Bruno Roy), The Instant of My Death was reproduced in its entirety in Derrida’s book. Blanchot would also thank his friend for having helped—as it were—“get it across” to Galilée.
70. Blanchot in The Instant of My Death / Demeure, 7.
71. In Quain, the family is said to have possessed a saber from the Napoleonic era that had belonged to ancestors who were soldiers of the first Empire.
72. Marguerite was the only other witness of the events, except for his sister-in-law Anna, the wife of René, who was probably also there.
1. Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (1980; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 71.
2. Maurice Blanchot in “The Madness of the Day,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1998), 191.
3. Daniel Dobbels, “Le grand récit du corps,” in the Blanchot dossier in Magazine Littéraire 424 (October 2003), 45. My translation, as are those that follow, unless indicated otherwise.
4. Jacques Derrida, “À Maurice Blanchot,” in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 323–332. For obvious reasons, the text on Blanchot did not feature in the earlier, English version of this work, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See also Derrida’s more developed text “Maurice Blanchot est mort,” in Parages, 2nd ed. (1986; Paris: Galilée, 2003), 267–300. Previously, Derrida had published the first edition of Parages, a collection of texts on Blanchot (and particularly on The Madness of the Day); and, focusing on The Instant of My Death, available in Blanchot /Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
5. Christophe Bident in Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques (Tours and Paris: Farrago/Scheer, 2003), 61–63. I wish to thank Christophe for his collaboration on the translation as well as his comments on this text.
6. See the anonymously authored obituary in the London Times (February 26, 2003). In parallel to this and to Derrida’s Demeure, a further work functions as bio/thanatography with regards to Blanchot: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Ending and Unending Agony, trans. Hannes Opelz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). It is constructed around two key Blanchot texts, The Instant of My Death and “A Primal Scene?”
7. This point was made by Leslie Hill in “Maurice Blanchot has died . . .” in Nowhere Without No: in Memory of Maurice Blanchot, ed. by Kevin Hart (Sydney: Vagabond and Stray Dog, 2003), 20–22.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 320.
9. In the years preceding his death in 2003, Blanchot published nothing. In late 2002, however, he did sign the petition against the Iraq war—this despite its slogan, “Not in my name,” being in direct opposition to his activism of anonymity in the 1960s.
10. The thesis can be consulted in the Blanchot archival holdings at Harvard University (MS Fr 662, box 12).
11. There are localized issues of vocabulary: where there was no clear reason (beyond exoticization, something of which French studies in English is sometimes guilty) to keep a term in French, I have translated it: thus il y a has become there is. For Blanchot’s commonly used term l’exigence, I felt that exigency added an unnecessary layer of distance, and therefore used demand.
12. Maurice Blanchot in “The Essential Solitude” (1953), collected in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 23.
13. Ibid., 258.
14. Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.
15. “Icon” is from Greek eikein, to be similar/to be like.
16. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 254, 262.
17. Ibid., 255.
18. See also “The Image” in “The Essential Solitude,” in ibid., 32–33. For critical discussions, see Ian Maclachlan, “Blanchot and the Romantic Imagination,” in Blanchot Romantique, ed. John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 155–172; and Sergey Zenkin, “Maurice Blanchot et l’image visuelle,” in Blanchot dans son siècle (Lyon: Paragon, 2009), 214–227.
19. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 256.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 259.
22. See “Orpheus’s Gaze” in ibid., and, for Lazarus, see The Work of Fire, 327; “Reading” in The Space of Literature; Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1988), 38; and Blanchot’s response to Jean Cayrol’s Pour un romanesque lazaréen, “Les justes” in L’Observateur 15 (July 20, 1950): 17. Jean-Luc Nancy writes on “Blanchot’s Resurrection,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (2005; New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 89–97.
23. Full publication details for works cited in this section are available in this volume’s bibliography.
24. On the latest acquisition, see http://blogs.harvard.edu/houghtonmodern/2015/10/01/maurice-blanchot-papers-acquired-by-harvard. On the other, see my “Change in the Archive: Blanchot’s L’entretien infini,” in Forum for Modern Language Studies 50, no. 1 (2014): 69–81; and Kevin Hart, “Une réduction infinite,” Cahier de l’Herne: Blanchot (2014): 323–328.
25. Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
26. Michael Holland, “État présent: Maurice Blanchot,” French Studies 58, no. 4 (October 2004), 533–538.
27. Monique Antelme, Gisèle Berkman, Christophe Bident, et al., eds., Blanchot dans son siècle (Lyon: Paragon, 2009); Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); McKeane and Opelz, Blanchot Romantique; Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (London: Continuum, 2012); Leslie Hill, Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).
28. Kevin Hart, ed., Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), and Christopher Langlois (ed.), Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
29. Éric Hoppenot and Alain Milon, Maurice Blanchot et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris-Ouest, 2010); Éric Hoppenot, ed., L’oeuvre du féminin dans l’écriture de Maurice Blanchot (Grignan: Complicités, 2004); Éric Hoppenot and Alain Milon, Emmanuel Levinas-Maurice Blanchot, penser la différence (Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris-Ouest, 2007). Links to a further three collective volumes from this period can be found on the web-site Maurice Blanchot et ses contemporains.
30. See Gramma 3–4 and 5 (1976); Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997).
31. Maurice Blanchot, letter of December 24, 1992, to Roger Laporte in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, 209.
32. Edited by David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). This volume appeared after the main body of this afterword was written. Uhrig also writes that “around sixty articles of literary journalism [of the 1930s] are being reserved for publication in a separate volume” (9).
33. Michel Surya, L’autre Blanchot: L’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 2015); Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désavouée (Paris: Galilée, 2014), trans. Philip Armstrong as The Disavowed Community (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Henri de Monvallier and Nicolas Rousseau, Blanchot l’obscur: ou la déraison littéraire (Paris: Autrement, 2015).
34. The early Blanchot is attacked for having been “the friend, the collaborator of overt anti-Semites” (20). Surya writes of a “French fascism to which Blanchot was as close as it is possible to be, being close to some of its major representatives” (97). Regarding the later period, the attack focuses on a misjudged statement on Judaism, not directly concerning Blanchot, and made by Dionys Mascolo (122).
35. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Ending and Unending Agony, trans. Hannes Opelz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1. The scare quotes accompanying “break” are Lacoue-Labarthe’s.
36. See Michael Holland, “D’un retour au tournant” (2009), in Avant dire: Essais sur Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2015).
37. Maurice Blanchot, letter to Roger Laporte of December 22, 1984, in Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 61.
38. Surya’s book is divided into three “sequences,” the first addressing the 1930s, the second 1958–1968, and the third the period following 1968.