36 The New York Review
The Nothing Beyond Nothing
Robert Pogue Harrison
Maurice Blanchot :
A Critical Biography
by Christophe Bident, translated
from the French by John McKeane.
Fordham University Press,
614 pp., $140.00; $40.00 (paper)
Either in spite or because of its disas-
ters, the twentieth century produced an
abundance of great writers and intellec-
tuals. Maurice Blanchot was among the
major ones. Born into a well-off French
Catholic family in 1907, he suffered se-
rious health problems for most of his
life—as early as the 1940s he would alert
friends that he was writ-
ing his final book or let-
ter—yet he died in 2003 at
the age of ninety-five. His
mauvaise santé de fer (a
French expression mean-
ing “poor health of iron”)
was only one of the many
paradoxes that dominated
his life and thought.
If Dante were able to
update his Divine Comedy
today, he most likely would
place Blanchot in the
sphere of Saturn, the re-
mote, cold, and silent sev-
enth heaven reserved for
the contemplatives. Here a
golden ladder stretches up
into the abyss of ultimate
mystery. Blanchot was a
mystic without God who
climbed that ladder into
the most rarefied regions
of verbal and conceptual
abstraction, yet like the
cardinal and monk Peter
Damian, who devotes
most of his speech in
Paradiso 21 to denounc-
ing the world’s corrup-
tion, Blanchot maintained
throughout his life a com-
mitment to its history, as
well as a militant attitude
of refusal when it came to
its political realities.
In one of his last books, The Writing
of the Disaster (1980), Blanchot evokes,
more than sixty years after the fact, a
childhood incident that took place at
his family home in Quain, a hamlet
near Devrouze in the Burgundy region
of France (Devrouze then had some
eight hundred inhabitants; today it has
around three hundred). The seven-year-
old Blanchot looks out the window at
“the garden, the wintry trees, the wall
of a house.” Suddenly the sky turns
absolutely black and absolutely
empty, revealing (as though the
pane had been broken) such an ab-
sence that all has since always and
forevermore been lost therein—so
lost that therein is affirmed and
dissolved the vertiginous knowl-
edge that nothing is what there is,
and first of all nothing beyond.The child experiences a “ravaging joy”
at this realization, and “will live hence-
forth in the secret.”
In Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Bi-
ography, Christophe Bident hails this as
the young Blanchot’s “primal scene.” It
has all the flavor of Mallarmé’s mystical
insight into le Néant, yet even if the epi-
sode did not take place exactly as Blan-
chot described it, there is no doubt that
he went on to probe that black empty
sky as deeply as thought and words
could take him. In his best-known works
he evokes its abyssal absence through
a variety of suggestive terms: the out-
side, the night, the neuter, the space of
literature, the Other. The only type of
“knowledge” he pursued in earnest was
precisely the “vertiginous knowledge
that nothing is what there is.”
Later Blanchot would write, “In the
night, everything has disappeared. Thisis the first night.... But when everything
has disappeared in the night, ‘everything
has disappeared’ appears. This is the
other night.” The other night is where
everything, including Blanchot’s prose,
becomes elusive, paradoxical, and, yes,
vertiginous: “What appears in the night
is the night that appears.... Here the in-
visible is what one cannot cease to see;
it is the incessant making itself seen.”
In words like these from The Space
of Literature (1955), we hear the pre-
cursor of French poststructuralism, the
weird interlocutor of Emmanuel Levi-
nas and Georges Bataille, and the vatic
voice venerated by the likes of Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida (the lat-
ter delivered the eulogy at Blanchot’s
funeral). Yet before he took refuge in
the night beyond the night, turning his
attention to “the death no one dies, the
forgetfulness which gets forgotten,”
Blanchot would venture headfirst into
the glaring light of day when he moved
to Paris in 1929 and became a political
journalist during the most tumultuous
decade in modern French politics.He arrived by way of the University of
Strasbourg, where he had gone to studyGerman and philosophy some five
years earlier. There, in 1925 or 1926,
he met and began a lifelong friendship
with Levinas—a “happy encounter
that illuminates what is darkest in a
life,” as Blanchot called their relation-
ship. Levinas encouraged him to read
Martin Heidegger, who would eventu-
ally become the most decisive influence
on Blanchot’s thinking. In Strasbourg,
Blanchot already had right-wing sym-
pathies: Levinas recalled that “in po-
litical terms, he was very far away from
me during that period, he was a mon-
archist, but very soon we had access toone another.” Yet their divergent views
never got in the way of their friendship,
which Derrida later described as “a
blessing on our time.”
Blanchot moved from Strasbourg
to Paris to study medicine at Sainte-
Anne hospital, where he specialized in
neurology and psychiatry. He eventu-
ally abandoned his medical studies to
become a full-time political journalist
and editor, writing many signed and
unsigned columns during the 1930s in
various far-right journals (Le Journal
des Débats, La Revue Française, Le
Rempart, Aux Écoutes, Réaction, La
Revue du Vingtième Siècle, Combat,
and L’Insurgé). Many of Blanchot’s ar-
ticles in the 1930s are hot to the touch,
politically speaking, and before delving
into them, Bident remarks about that
decade in France:This was a period that allowed
both ill-tempered splits and the
compatibility of opposites, both
heated invectives and compromis-
ing personal allegiances.... It was
possible to shout anti-Semitic slo-
gans before going to dinner with
Jewish acquaintances.... [Léon]
Blum recognized his anti-Semiticfriend [Jean] Jaurès as a “guide”
and a “teacher.” Like many others,
Blanchot found himself in this situ-
ation. He was close to Levinas [who
was Jewish] and close to [Thierry]
Maulnier [a member of the nation-
alistic anti-Semitic movement Ac-
tion Française]. These were the
contradictions of the times, borne
lightly and irresponsibly.It is easier to identify what Blanchot
railed against than what he advocated
for in this period. He did not believe in
democracy. He associated the French
Third Republic with moral
and political disorder
(“Disorder lies not only in
the immorality of the men
who lead us...but in the
madness of institutions”).
He championed “the true
traditions of la France pro-
fonde” and scorned “the
inhuman Declaration of
the Rights of Man” for the
way it defined the freedom
of the citizen negatively,
as merely being “freed
of historical antecedents,
liberated from his natural
bonds.” He lashed out fre-
quently at the League of
Nations, which he felt was
dictating—and paralyz-
ing—French policy toward
German expansionism.
In these years Blan-
chot was one of the “non-
conformistes des années
trente,” as the historian
Jean-Louis Loubet del
Bayle later dubbed the
conservative French agita-
tors who sought a “third
alternative” between so-
cialism and capitalism. He
was also a Germanophobe
and French nationalist. He
detested Hitler and consid-
ered Nazism an existential
threat to France. His denunciations of
the French government’s reluctance to
respond to Germany’s military buildup
became ever more shrill and vehement
as the decade progressed (“France,
silenced by a government that is not
worthy of it and that is betraying it...
only seems able to submit and to capit-
ulate”). Blanchot was also a revolution-
ary who called for insurrection against
the French state. “The adventures of
Italy and Germany are full of prom-
ise,” he wrote in Le Rempart. “While
they do not show us the kind of revolu-
tion that we should hope and prepare
for, they do show us that we can hope
for a revolution that will save us.”
The kind of “revolution that will save
us” would consist first and foremost of a
spiritual cleansing of society. Blanchot
believed that only a moral revolution
could clear the way for the right kind of
political revolution. In a piece he wrote
for a Catholic student paper in 1931, he
rejected Mahatma Gandhi’s Ahimsa,
or nonviolence, for its nonrevolutionary
spiritual quietism: “We wish to kill the
modern world through the spiritual vio-
lence of sacrifice. We wish to be the an-
archists of love.” For Gandhi, God was
nothing but a “sort of emblem of moralMetropolitanMuseumof^ Art/Art^ResourceAlfred Stieglitz: Songs of the Sky, 1924