Maurice Blanchot (; French: [blɑ̃ʃo]; 22
September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a
French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist.
His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist
philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel
Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
== Biography ==
=== Pre-1945 ===
Little was known until recently about much
of Blanchot's life, and he long remained one
of the most mysterious figures of contemporary
literature.
Blanchot was born in the village of Quain
(Saône-et-Loire) on 22 September 1907.
Blanchot studied philosophy at the University
of Strasbourg, where he became a close friend
of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish phenomenologist,
Emmanuel Levinas.
He then embarked on a career as a political
journalist in Paris.
From 1932 to 1940 he was editor of the mainstream,
conservative daily the Journal des débats.
Early in the 1930s he contributed to a series
of radical nationalist magazines, while also
serving as editor of the fiercely anti-German
daily Le rempart in 1933 and as editor of
Paul Lévy's anti-Nazi polemical weekly Aux
écoutes.
In 1936 and 1937 he also contributed to the
far right monthly Combat and to the nationalist-syndicalist
daily L'Insurgé, which eventually ceased
publication – largely as a result of Blanchot's
intervention – because of the anti-semitism
of some of its contributors.
There is no dispute that Blanchot was nevertheless
the author of a series of violently polemical
articles attacking the government of the day
and its confidence in the politics of the
League of Nations, and warned persistently
against the threat to peace in Europe posed
by Nazi Germany.
In December 1940, he met Georges Bataille,
who had written strong anti-fascist articles
in the thirties, and who would remain a close
friend until his death in 1962.
Blanchot worked in Paris during the Nazi occupation.
In order to support his family, he continued
to work as a book reviewer for the Journal
des débats from 1941 to 1944, writing for
instance about such figures as Sartre and
Camus, Bataille and Michaux, Mallarmé and
Duras for a putatively Pétainist readership.
In these reviews he laid the foundations for
later French critical thinking, by examining
the ambiguous rhetorical nature of language,
and the irreducibility of the written word
to notions of truth or falsity.
He refused the editorship of the collaborationist
Nouvelle Revue Française, for which, as part
of an elaborate ploy, he had been suggested
by Jean Paulhan.
He remained a bitter opponent of the fascist,
anti-semitic novelist and journalist Robert
Brasillach, who was the principal leader of
the pro-Nazi collaborationist movement, and
was active in the Resistance.
In June 1944, Blanchot was almost executed
by a Nazi firing squad (as recounted in his
text The Instant of My Death).
=== Post-1945 ===
After the war, Blanchot began working only
as a novelist and literary critic.
In 1947, Blanchot left Paris for the secluded
village of Èze in the south of France, where
he spent the next decade of his life.
Like Sartre and other French intellectuals
of the era, Blanchot avoided the academy as
a means of livelihood, instead relying on
his pen.
Importantly, from 1953 to 1968, he published
regularly in Nouvelle Revue Française.
At the same time, he began a lifestyle of
relative isolation, often not seeing close
friends (like Levinas) for years, while continuing
to write lengthy letters to them.
Part of the reason for his self-imposed isolation
(and only part of it – his isolation was
closely connected to his writing and is often
featured among his characters) was the fact
that, for most of his life, Blanchot suffered
from poor health.
Blanchot's political activities after the
war shifted to the left.
He is widely credited with being one of the
main authors of the important "Manifesto of
the 121", named after the number of its signatories,
who included Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Antelme,
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, René
Char, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Resnais, Simone
Signoret and others, which supported the rights
of conscripts to refuse the draft in Algeria.
The manifesto was crucial to the intellectual
response to the war.
In May 1968, Blanchot once again emerged from
personal obscurity, in support of the student
protests.
It was his sole public appearance after the
war.
Yet for fifty years he remained a consistent
champion of modern literature and its tradition
in French letters.
During the later years of his life, he repeatedly
wrote against the intellectual attraction
to fascism, and notably against Heidegger's
post-war silence over the Holocaust.
Blanchot wrote more than thirty works of fiction,
literary criticism, and philosophy.
Up to the 1970s, he worked continually in
his writing to break the barriers between
what are generally perceived as different
"genres" or "tendencies", and much of his
later work moves freely between narration
and philosophical investigation.
In 1983, Blanchot published La Communauté
inavouable (The Unavowable Community).
This work inspired The Inoperative Community
(1986), Jean-Luc Nancy's attempt to approach
community in a non-religious, non-utilitarian
and un-political exegesis.
He died on 20 February 2003 in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis,
Yvelines, France.
== Work ==
Blanchot's work is not a coherent, all-encompassing
'theory', since it is a work founded on paradox
and impossibility.
The thread running through all his writing
is the constant engagement with the 'question
of literature', a simultaneous enactment and
interrogation of the profoundly strange experience
of writing.
For Blanchot, 'literature begins at the moment
when literature becomes a question' (Literature
and the Right to Death).Blanchot draws on
the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé
and the negative of the Hegelian dialectic
in formulating his conception of literary
language as anti-realist and distinct from
everyday experience.
'I say flower,' Mallarmé writes in Poetry
in Crisis, 'and outside the oblivion to which
my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it
is something other than the calyx, there arises
musically, as the very idea and delicate,
the one absent from every bouquet.'In the
everyday use of language, words are the vehicles
of ideas.
The word 'flower' means flower that refers
to flowers in the world.
No doubt it is possible to read literature
in this way, but literature is more than this
everyday use of language.
For in literature 'flower' does not just mean
flower but many things, and it can only do
so because the word is independent from what
it signifies.
This independence, which is passed over in
the everyday use of language, is the negativity
at the heart of language.
The word means something because it negates
the physical reality of the thing.
Only in this way can the idea arise.
The absence of the thing is made good by the
presence of the idea.
What the everyday use of language steps over
to make use of the idea, and what literature
remains fascinated by, is the absence of the
physical materiality of thing, annihilated
from its existence.
Literary language, therefore, is a double
negation, both of the thing and the idea.
It is in this space that literature becomes
possible where words take on a strange and
mysterious reality of their own, and where
also meaning and reference remain allusive
and ambiguous.
Blanchot's best-known fictional works are
Thomas l'Obscur (Thomas the Obscure), an unsettling
récit ("[récit] is not the narration of
an event, but that event itself, the approach
to that event, the place where that event
is made to happen") about the experience of
reading and loss; Death Sentence; Aminadab
and The Most High (about a bureaucrat in a
totalitarian state).
His central theoretical works are "Literature
and the Right to Death" (in The Work of Fire
and The Gaze of Orpheus), The Space of Literature,
The Infinite Conversation, and The Writing
of the Disaster.
=== Themes ===
Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question
of the philosopher's death, showing how literature
and death are both experienced as anonymous
passivity, an experience that Blanchot variously
refers to as "the Neutral" (le neutre).
Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot rejects the possibility
of an authentic relation to death, because
he rejects the possibility of death, that
is to say of the individual's experience of
death.
He thus rejects, in total, the possibility
of understanding and "properly" engaging with
it; and this resonates with Levinas' take
too.
Blanchot reverses Heidegger's position on
death as the "possibility of the absolute
impossibility" of Dasein, instead viewing
death as the "impossibility of every possibility".Blanchot
also draws heavily from Franz Kafka, and his
fictional work (like his theoretical work)
is shot through with an engagement with Kafka's
writing.
Blanchot's work was also strongly influenced
by his friends Georges Bataille and Emmanuel
Levinas.
Blanchot's later work in particular is influenced
by Levinasian ethics and the question of responsibility
to the Other.
On the other hand, Blanchot's own literary
works, like the famous Thomas the Obscure,
heavily influenced Levinas's and Bataille's
ideas about the possibility that our vision
of reality is blurred because of the use of
words (thus making everything you perceive
automatically as abstract as words are).
This search for the 'real' reality is illustrated
by the works of Paul Celan and Stéphane Mallarmé.
The main intellectual biography of Blanchot
is by Christophe Bident: Maurice Blanchot,
partenaire invisible.
== Principal works ==
=== Principally fiction or narrations (récits)
===
Thomas l'Obscur, 1941 (Thomas the Obscure)
Aminadab, 1942
L'Arrêt de mort, 1948 (Death Sentence)
Le Très-Haut, 1949 (The Most High)
"Le Dernier homme", 1957 (The Last Man)
Le Pas au-delà, 1973 (The Step Not Beyond)
La Folie du jour, 1973 (The Madness of the
Day)
L'Instant de ma mort, 1994 (The Instant of
My Death)
=== Principally theoretical or philosophical
works ===
Faux Pas, 1943
La Part du feu, 1949 (The Work of Fire)
L'Espace littéraire, 1955 (The Space of Literature
– main theoretical work)
Le Livre à venir, 1959 (The Book to Come)
L'Entretien infini, 1969 (The Infinite Conversation)
L'Amitié, 1971 (Friendship)
L'Ecriture du désastre, 1980 (The Writing
of the Disaster)
La Communauté inavouable, 1983 (The Unavowable
Community)
Une voix venue d'ailleurs, 2002 (A Voice from
Elsewhere)
Lautréamont and Sade.
Trans.
Stuart Kendell and Michelle Kendell.
Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 2004.Many of Blanchot's principal translators
into English established reputations as prose
stylists and poets in their own right; some
of the more well-known include Lydia Davis,
Paul Auster, and Pierre Joris.
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Michael Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader
(Blackwell, 1995)
George Quasha (ed.), The Station Hill Blanchot
Reader (Station Hill, 1998)
Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought
from Outside (Zone, 1989)
Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony
(Stanford, 2000)
Emmanuel Levinas, On Maurice Blanchot in Proper
Names (Stanford, 1996)
Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary
(Routledge, 1997)
Gerald Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal
of Philosophy (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997)
Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire
invisible (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1998) ISBN
978-2-87673-253-7
Hadrien Buclin, Maurice Blanchot ou l'autonomie
littéraire (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2011)
Manola Antonioli, Maurice Blanchot Fiction
et théorie, Paris, Kimé, 1999.
Élie Ayache, L'écriture Postérieure, Paris,
Complicités, 2006.
Éditions Complicités, Paris "Maurice Blanchot
de proche en proche", collection Compagnie
de Maurice Blanchot, 2007
Éditions Complicités "L'épreuve du temps
chez Maurice Blanchot", collection Compagnie
de Maurice Blanchot, 2005
Éditions Complicites "L'Oeuvre du Féminin
dans l'écriture de Maurice Blanchot", collection
Compagnie de Maurice Blanchot, 2004
Françoise Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la
question de l'écriture, Paris, Gallimard,
1971.
Arthur Cools, Langage et Subjectivité vers
une approche du différend entre Maurice Blanchot
et Emmanuel Levinas, Louvain, Peeters, 2007.
Critique n°229, 1966 (numéro spécial, textes
de Jean Starobinsky, Georges Poulet, Levinas,
Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, René Char...).
Jacques Derrida, Parages, Paris, Galilée,
1986.
Jacques Derrida, Demeure.
Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Galilée, 1994.
Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary,
Londres, Routledge, 1997.
Eric Hoppenot dir., L'Œuvre du féminin dans
l'écriture de Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Complicités,
2004.
Eric Hoppenot dir.,coordonné par Arthur COOLS,
L'épreuve du temps chez Maurice Blanchot,
Paris, Complicités, 2006.
Eric Hoppenot & Alain Milon dir., Levinas
Blanchot penser la différence, Paris, Presses
Universitaires de Paris X, 2008.
Mario Kopić, Enigma Blanchot (Pescanik, 2013)
[1]
Jean-Luc Lannoy, Langage, perception, mouvement.
Blanchot et Merleau-Ponty, Grenoble, Jérôme
Millon, 2008.
Roger Laporte, l'Ancien, l'effroyablement
Ancien in Études, Paris, P.O.L, 1990.
Lignes n°11, 1990 (numéro spécial contenant
tout le dossier de La revue internationale).
Pierre Madaule, Une tâche sérieuse ?, Paris,
Gallimard, 1973, pp. 74–75
Meschonnic, Henri, Maurice Blanchot ou l'écriture
hors langage in Poésie sans réponse (Pour
la poétique V), Paris, Gallimard, 1978, pp.
78–134.
Ginette Michaud, Tenir au secret (Derrida,
Blanchot), Paris, Galilée, 2006
Anne-Lise Schulte-Nordholt, Maurice Blanchot,
l'écriture comme expérience du dehors, Genève,
Droz, 1995.
Jadranka Skorin-Kapov, The Aesthetics of Desire
and Surprise: Phenomenology and Speculation
(Lexington Books, 2015).
Jadranka Skorin-Kapov, The Intertwining of
Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations,
Ecstasy, Sublimity (Lexington Books, 2016)
Daniel Wilhelm, Intrigues littéraires, Paris,
Lignes/Manifeste, 2005.
Zarader, Marlène, L'être et le neutre, à
partir de Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Verdier,
2000.
