Maurice Blanchot

Biography

Maurice Blanchot is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing. His work encompasses the writing of novels and récits as well as articles and books of philosophical (or to be precise anti-philosophical) criticism. He is one of the few significant theorists of literature of the last century to have worked outside a university context.

Blanchot was born on the 22nd September 1907 to a genteel, rural catholic family in Quain, a hamlet of Devrouze in the canton of Saint-Germain-du-bois (Saône-et-Loire) in Eastern France. In a brief autobiographical text published in Le Nouvel Observateur in November 1984, Blanchot presents the crucial moments of his life in terms of encounters with friends: Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, René Char and Robert Antelme. Friendship is one of Blanchot's recurrent topics (see the collection of essays L'amitié [Friendship] of 1971). The most lasting and formative friendship was that with Emmanuel Levinas, a fellow student with Blanchot at the University of Strasburg where they met in 1925. Blanchot's work, post-1945, often forms an implicit dialogue with that of Levinas, especially after the publication of Levinas' Totality and Infinity in 1961.

After university, in the early nineteen thirties, Blanchot was employed on the editorial staff of Journal des Debats with editorial responsibility for foreign political affairs. Prophetic of the forthcoming collapse of France, he also engaged himself at this time in various writings for journals of the far right, notably Combat, associated with the movement for the restoration of the French monarchy. The young Blanchot took an extreme nationalist and Catholic stance stance against modern materialist culture, was anti-communist as well as anti-capitalist, associating with a French brand of fascism that saw itself as the only possible salvation of France from the growing threat of Hitler's German Reich. Blanchot remained with the Journal des Debats till it folded in 1944, though he withdrew from his editorship with the fall of France in 1940 when the paper became a collaborationist organ. Blanchot continued contributions to the paper, but only in the form of a weekly literary column. The war and occupation of France confirmed the collapse of the young, right-wing extremist Blanchot. The figure who emerged post-1945 is an atheist, deeply reclusive and, when roused to do so, consistently taking a stance on the far left of politics.

The war years saw the publication of Blanchot's first novels, Thomas l'obscur (1941) and Aminadab (1942), influenced by Franz Kafka and by Georges Bataille who had become a friend in late1940. In 1947 Blanchot left Paris and worked in journalism from Éze-Village, a small town on the southern coast near Nice. It was during the next decade that Blanchot was to emerge as a distinctive figure in French letters, publishing more fiction (notably L'arrêt de mort [Death Sentence] (1948), Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas [The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me] (1953) and Le dernier homme [The Last Man] (1957)) and also collecting his essays and reviews into various critical books, La part du feu [The Work of Fire] (1949), Lautréaumont et Sade (1949), and L'espace littéraire [The Space of Literature] (1955). This last book in particular is strongly marked by Blanchot's reading of the German thinker Martin Heidegger, especially his work on the origin of the work of art.

In 1960, along with Robert Antelme, Dionys Mascolo and Maurice Nadeau, Blanchot signed – and was probably the author of – the 'Déclaration sur le droit à l'insoumission dans la guerre d'Algérie'. This was the so-called 'Manifest des 121'. These one hundred and twenty-one signatories incited a clamp-down from the French authorities, who tried to stifle its distribution and prosecute its signers. In 1968 Blanchot again took on, briefly, a public role during the student uprisings of May, writing pamphlets for the 'Comité d'action étudiants-écrivains'.

Literature fascinates Blanchot as a site of irreducible strangeness and resistance to conceptual thought. Blanchot's critical thinking re-engages the old dispute between poetry and philosophy. The mode of being of literature eludes notions of strict essence, evaluation or weighing, in terms of its supposed truth or falsehood. The space of literature is not one that can feed into any sort of thinking in terms of cultural monuments, human values or edifying reflection. It is a space of crisis and the dissolution of certainty.

After the early 1960s two major shifts stand out in Blanchot's literary career. One is the abandonment of the writing of récits, or rather the merging of the récit as a form into the invention of a new kind of fragmentary critical/literary writing. A second watershed is marked by his intense engagement with questions of a certain sort of ethics, sometimes explicitly in debate with the thinking of Levinas. After this time the distinction between the 'literary' and the 'critical' in Blanchot's work loses all pertinence.

Maurice Blanchot died on 20th March 2003.

The literary is “an object capable of rendering contradictory or meaningless any attempt to study it theoretically” ('The Novel is a Work of Bad Faith' (1947)). Blanchot's work, in this sense, is a dismantling of classical and Romantic aesthetics, concepts of unity, work, meaning and form (one would call it a 'Destruction' in Heidegger's sense of the term were it not that Blanchot's work is often also in tension with Heidegger's own idealization of the poetic). Blanchot's presence in contemporary criticism, especially those elements of it associated with Derrida and deconstruction, is an immense one, though mainly he is treated as a recurrent point of reference rather than as the founder of any sort of school or recognizable critical method.

With thanks to the Literacy Encyclopedia.