Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot

A Critical Biography

  • Auteur: Bident, Christophe; McKeane, John
  • Éditeur: Fordham University Press
  • ISBN: 9780823281763
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780823281787
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823281770
  • Lieu de publication:  New York , United States
  • Année de publication: 2018
  • Année de publication électronique: 2018
  • Mois : Novembre
  • Langue: Anglais

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century.

As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May ’68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the ’30s.

Now translated into English, Christophe Bident’s magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident’s book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy.

The book is also a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident’s extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot’s work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.

Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot’s life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot’s life itself becomes an oeuvre—becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident’s sophisticated reading of Blanchot’s life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot’s detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized.

This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.

  • Cover
  • MAURICE BLANCHOT
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • CONTENTS
  • Translator’s Note
  • Preface
  • Part I 1907–1923
    • 1. Blanchot of Quain: Genealogy, Birth, Childhood (1907–1918)
    • 2. Music and Family Memory: Marguerite Blanchot in Chalon (1920s)
    • 3. The Fedora of Death: Illness (1922–1923)
  • Part II 1920s–1940
    • 4. The Walking Stick with the Silver Pommel: The University of Strasbourg (1920s)
    • 5. A Flash in the Darkness: Meeting Emmanuel Levinas (1925–1930)
    • 6. There Is: Philosophical Apprenticeship (1927–1930)
    • 7. Aligning One’s Convictions: Paris and Far-Right Circles (1930s)
    • 8. “Mahatma Gandhi”: A First Text by Blanchot (1931)
    • 9. Refusal, I. The Revolution of Spirit: La Revue Française, Réaction, and La Revue du Siècle (1931–1934)
    • 10. Journalist, Opponent of Hitler, National-Revolutionary: Le Journal des Débats, Le Rempart, Aux Écoutes, and La Revue du Vingtième Siècle (1931–1935)
    • 11. The Escalation of Rhetoric: The Launch of Combat (1936)
    • 12. Terrorism as a Method of Public Safety: Combat ( July–December 1936)
    • 13. Patriotism’s Breaking Point: L’Insurgé (1937)
    • 14. These Events Happened to Me in 1937: Death Sentences (1937–1938)
    • 15. On the Transformation of Convictions: A Journalist of the Far Right (1930s)
    • 16. From Revolution to Literature: Literary Criticism (1930s)
    • 17. Murderous Omens of Times to Come—Writing the Récits: “The Last Word” and “The Idyll” (1935–1936)
    • 18. Night Freely Recircled, Which Plays Us: Thomas the Obscure (1932–1940)
  • Part III 1940 –1949
    • 19. The Universe Is to Be Found in Night: Resistance (1940–1944)
    • 20. Using Vichy against Vichy: Jeune France (1941–1942)
    • 21. Admiration and Agreement: Meeting Georges Bataille (1940–1943)
    • 22. In the Name of the Other: Literary Chronicles at the Journal des Débats (1941–1944)
    • 23. A True Writer Has Appeared: The Publication and Reception of Thomas the Obscure (1941–1942)
    • 24. Lift This Fog Which Is Already of the Dawn: The Publication of Aminadab (1942)
    • 25. Writers Who Have Given Too Much to the Present: NRF Circles (1941–1942)
    • 26. From Anguish to Language: The Publication of Faux pas (1943)
    • 27. The Prisoner of the Eyes That Capture Him: Quain (Summer 1944)
    • 28. The Disenchantment of the Community: Editorial Activity after Liberation (1944 –1946)
    • 29. The Year of Criticism: L’Arche, Les Temps Modernes, and Critique (1946)
    • 30. Respecting Scandal: Literary Criticism (1945–1948)
    • 31. The Black Stain: Writing The Most High (1946–1947)
    • 32. The Passion of Silence: Denise Rollin (1940s)
    • 33. The Mediterranean Sojourn: The Writing of the Night (1947)
    • 34. Something Inflexible: The Madness of the Day, a New Status for Speech (1947–1949)
    • 35. The Turn of the Screw: The Second Version of Thomas the Obscure (1947–1948)
    • 36. The Authority of Friendship: The Completion of Death Sentence (1947–1948)
    • 37. Quarrels in the Literary World: Publication and Reception (1948–1949)
  • Part IV 1949–1959
    • 38. Invisible Partner: Èze, Withdrawal (1949–1957)
    • 39. The Essential Solitude: Writing the Récits (1949–1953)
    • 40. The Radiance of a Blind Power: When the Time Comes (1949–1951)
    • 41. Are You Writing, Are You Writing Even Now? The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me (1951–1953)
    • 42. The Critical Detour: A Few Articles of Literary Criticism (1950–1951)
    • 43. The Author in Reverse: The Birth of The Space of Literature (1951–1953)
    • 44. Always Already (The Poetic and Political Interruption of Thought): Toward The Book to Come (1953–1958)
    • 45. Of an Amazing Lightness: The Last Man (1953–1957)
    • 46. Grace, Strength, Gentleness: Meeting Robert Antelme (1958)
    • 47. In the Gaze of Fascination: The Return to Paris (1957–1958)
    • 48. Refusal, II. In the Name of the Anonymous: The 14 Juillet Project (1958–1959)
  • Part V 1960–1968
    • 49. Note That I Say “Right” and Not “Duty”: The Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War (1960)
    • 50. Invisible Partners: The Project for the International Review (1960–1965)
    • 51. Characters in Thought: How Is Friendship Possible? (1958–1971)
    • 52. Act in Such a Way That I Can Speak to You: Awaiting Oblivion (1957–1962)
    • 53. The Thought of the Neuter: Literary and Philosophical Criticism—the Entretien and the Fragment (1959–1969)
    • 54. A First Homage: The Special Issue of Critique (1966)
    • 55. Between Two Forms of the Unavowable: The Beaufret Affair (1967–1968)
    • 56. The Far Side of Fear: Political Disillusionment (May 1968)
  • Part VI 1969–1997
    • 57. Life Outside: The Step Not Beyond, a Journal Written in the Neuter (1969–1973)
    • 58. Friendship in Disaster: Distance, Disappearance (1974–1978)
    • 59. The Last Book: The Writing of the Disaster (1974–1980)
    • 60. Forming the Myth: Readings and Nonreadings (1969–1979)
    • 61. Making the Secret Uncomfortable: Blanchot’s Readability and Visibility (1979–1997)
    • 62. With This Break in History Stuck in One’s Throat: The Unavowable Community (1982–1983)
    • 63. Even a Few Steps Take Time: Literature and Witnessing (1983–1997)
  • Amor: Blanchot since 2003
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

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