Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot ( ; ; 22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist. His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Biography

Pre-1945

Blanchot was born in the village of Quain (Saône-et-Loire) on 22 September 1907.

Blanchot studied philosophy from 1926 at the University of Strasbourg, where he represented monarchist views, was a committee member of a student association modelled on the German Burschenschaften, and became a close lifelong friend of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. On his friend's recommendation, he read Martin Heidegger's newly published Being and Time and described it as an "intellectual shock". In 1930 he earned his , roughly equivalent to an M.A. at the University of Paris, with a thesis titled "La Conception du dogmatisme chez les sceptiques anciens d'après Sextus Empiricus" ("The Conception of Dogmatism in the Ancient Sceptics According to Sextus Empiricus").

He then embarked on a career as a political journalist in Paris. From 1932 to 1940 he was editor of the mainstream conservative daily Journal des débats. 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 explores a philosophy of death, not in humanistic terms, but through concerns of paradox, impossibility, nonsense and the noumenal that stem from the conceptual impossibility of death. He constantly engaged with the "question of literature", a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the idiosyncratic act of writing. For Blanchot, "literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question".

Blanchot drew on the poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan, as well as the concept of negation in the Hegelian dialectic, for his theory of literary language as something that is always anti-realist and so distinct from everyday experience that realism does not simply stand for literature about reality, but for literature concerning paradoxes made by the qualities of the act of writing. Blanchot's literary theory parallels Hegel's philosophy, establishing that actual reality always succeeds conceptual reality. For instance, "I say flower," Mallarmé wrote in "Poetry in Crisis", "and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, [...] there arises [...] the one absent from every bouquet."

What the everyday use of language steps over or negates is the physical reality of the thing for the sake of the abstract concept. Literature – through its use of symbolism and metaphor – frees language from this utilitarianism, thereby drawing attention to the fact that language refers not to the physical thing, but only to an idea of it. Literature, Blanchot writes, remains fascinated by this presence of absence, and attention is drawn, through the sonority and rhythm of words, to the materiality of language.

Blanchot's best-known fictional works are Thomas l'Obscur (Thomas the Obscure), an unsettling récit (which "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. 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.

Many of Blanchot's principal translators into English have since established reputations as prose stylists and poets in their own right; some of the more well-known of them include Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Pierre Joris.

Themes

Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question of how literature and death are both experienced as an anonymous passivity, an experience that Blanchot variously refers to as "the Neutral" (le neutre). Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot instead rejects the possibility of an authentic relation to death, because he rejects the conceptual possibility of death. In a manner similar to Levinas, who Blanchot later became influenced by with regards to the question of responsibility to the Other, he reverses Heidegger's position on death as the "possibility of the absolute impossibility" of Dasein, instead viewing death as the "impossibility of every possibility".

Selected bibliography

Fiction and narrations (récits)

Thomas l'Obscur (1941; revised 1950). Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (David Lewis, 1973; Station Hill Press, 1995)
Aminadab (1942). Aminadab, trans. Jeff Fort (University of Nebraska Press, 2002)
L'Arrêt de mort (1948). Death Sentence, trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1978)
Le Très-Haut (1949). The Most High, trans. Allan Stoekl (University of Nebraska Press, 1996)
Au moment voulu (1951). When the Time Comes, trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1985)
Le Ressassement éternel (1951). Vicious Circles
Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas (1953). The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1992)
Le Dernier homme (1957). The Last Man, trans. Lydia Davis (Columbia University Press, 1987)
L'Attente l'oubli (1962). Awaiting Oblivion, trans. John Gregg (University of Nebraska Press, 1997)
La Folie du jour (1973). The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1981)
Après Coup, preceded by Le Ressassement éternel (1983). Vicious Circles: Two Fictions & "After the Fact", trans. Paul Auster (Station Hill Press, 1985)
L'Instant de ma mort (1994). The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford University Press, 2000)

Philosophical or theoretical works

Faux Pas (1943). Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 2001)
La Part du feu (1949). The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 1995)
Lautréamont et Sade (1949). Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford University Press, 2004)
L'Espace littéraire (1955). The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, 1982)
Le Livre à venir (1959). The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 2003)
L'Entretien infini (1969). The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
L'Amitié (1971). Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford University Press, 1997)
Le Pas au-delà (1973). The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (State University of New York Press, 1992)
L'Ecriture du désastre (1980). The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
La Communauté inavouable (1983). The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Station Hill Press, 1988)
Une voix venue d'ailleurs (2002). A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (State University of New York Press, 2007)

Articles and essays

Chroniques littéraires du « Journal des Débats », avril 1941-août 1944 (2008)
Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941, trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2014)
Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942, trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2014)
A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943, trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2016)
Death Now: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1944, trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2019)

Compilations in English

The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1981)
The Sirens' Song: Selected Essays, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (Indiana University Press, 1982)
The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Blackwell, 1995)
The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Station Hill Press, 1999)
Political Writings, 1953-1993, ed. Zakir Paul (Fordham University Press, 2010)