March 12, 2020 37
conscience whose every element is psy-
chological: it does not introduce him
into another universe.” A true revolu-
tion would do precisely that—open onto
another universe and, in so doing, trans-
figure this world. Christianity, Blan-
chot argued, had lost its mysticism and
needed to reclaim it: “We do not suffer
from a lack of faith; we suffer because
so many impure elements, so many false
values have appeared at the very heart
of our faith.” Bident summarizes such
views well: “Revolution is the sustained
refusal, in all its demands and excesses,
of any form of spiritual disorder.”
Blanchot saw such disorder every-
where he looked: in capitalism, par-
liamentarianism, Communism, and
Nazism. Nazism “is trying to base itself
on mysticism,” yet it was a “false” mys-
ticism of race. He repudiated Marxism
for the same reason he repudiated capi-
talism: both promoted a dehumanizing
materialism. He objected to Commu-
nism’s opportunistic attempts to ben-
efit from anti-Hitler sentiment. Given
the persecution of intellectuals in Rus-
sia, “Communists and Marxists have
lost any right to speak in the name of
free thought and true culture.”
Fifty years later, long after his “trans-
formation of convictions,” as Levinas
called it, Blanchot would avow that his
more extremist texts of the 1930s were
“detestable and inexcusable.” One of
the articles “for which I am reproached
today, and rightly so,” was “Terrorism
as a Method of Public Safety,” pub-
lished in Combat in 1936. T here he took
aim at Léon Blum and his left-wing
Popular Front government that came
to power in 1936. While Blanchot never
embraced the visceral anti- Semitism of
the French far right, he deployed some
of its stereotypes in his attacks on the
Popular Front. For example: “A fine
union, a holy alliance, is what this con-
glomeration of Soviet, Jewish, capitalist
interests represents,” he wrote. In the
Jewish socialist Blum, he saw someone
who symbolically united those who ap-
propriated capital (Jews) and those who
appropriated and denatured revolution
(Communists). Convinced that “legal,
traditional opposition” would get no-
where with “this nothing government
that the Blum government is,” Blan-
chot called for a “bloody upheaval” that
would take it down, with “a few bullets”
aimed at its “limited, weak, puny” lead-
ers. “At the present time,” he declared,
“terrorism appears to us as a method of
public safety [salut public].”
By 1936, Blanchot’s dislike of anti-
Semitism, fascism, and Nazism ceded
precedence to anti-Communism, while
his nationalism exasperated itself in
paradoxes. He went so far as to argue
that France should support Franco in
the Spanish civil war in order to make
his victory France’s victory rather than
Germany’s. Perhaps Blanchot was re-
calling this paroxysm of logic when, in
1991, he wrote, “There is no such thing
as good nationalism. Nationalism tends
always to integrate everything, all val-
ues, that is how it ends up being inte-
gral, i.e., the sole value.”
As in the rest of his exhaustive biog-
raphy, Bident’s chapters on Blanchot’s
writings of the 1930s are thorough,
probing, and nuanced. Neither white-
washing nor condemning the more
controversial passages, Bident clari-
fies the interconnected political and
editorial settings in which they were
written. Bident’s prose is often opaque
and unfriendly—John McKeane does
an admirable job of translating it into
accessible English—yet Bident serves
Blanchot well in his rigorous, histori-
cally informed analyses of the politi-
cal writings, both of the 1930s as well
as the late 1950s and 1960s, when he
briefly came out of his self-imposed
seclusion to take a public stand against
de Gaulle’s prosecution of the war in
Algeria, and then a few years later to
support the student uprisings of 1968.
Biography is by definition an indis-
creet, even obscene genre. Navigating
his way through the private life of a man
who, more than any other writer of his
era, shunned publicity and erected a
protective wall around himself, Bident
attempts to respect that fiercely guarded
privacy while at the same time including
all the detailed information about Blan-
chot’s austere personal life that he was
able to gather over years of intensive
research. In the end—as in any biogra-
phy—one can’t help feeling that a cer-
tain degree of violation has taken place.
Bident’s book originally appeared
in France in 1998, while Blanchot was
still alive. It followed two important
books about him. The British scholar
Leslie Hill published in 1997 an excel-
lent intellectual biography titled Blan-
chot: Extreme Contemporary (a more
lucid and readable book than Bident’s).
The same year, the American scholar
Gerald Bruns also published a probing
study called Maurice Blanchot: The
Refusal of Philosophy. Between Bi-
dent, Hill, Bruns, and Bident’s transla-
tor McKeane—who contributes a fine
essay on Blanchot’s thought, life, and
politics at the end of Bident’s book—
one can say that Blanchot is now very
well served when it comes to biogra-
phies and commentaries in English.The year 1937 marked a turning point
in Blanchot’s life. Increasingly con-
cerned that his own positions would be
conflated with those of fascism, Nazism,
and anti-Semitism, he ended his collab-
orations with the most active circles of
the far right. He continued to write for
Le Journal des Débats during the war,
yet his contributions dealt more and
more with literary rather than politi-
cal topics. He devoted much of his en-
ergy from 1938 to 1940 to finishing his
first novel, Thomas the Obscure, which
was published in 1941. Written in an
impersonal proto-new-novel style, this
highly original work of fiction explores
thoughts of fear, absence, and death. It
bears Blanchot’s distinctive signature
of abstraction and refusal—in this case
“the refusal of psychology, the cancer
of the French novel,” as he put it.^1
At the end of 1940 Blanchot met Ba-
taille, “he who was, with Emmanuel
Levinas, my closest friend.” It was one
of the most important encounters of
his life. Their friendship would flour-
ish far from the gaze of others, in the
shadows of deeply shared sensibilities
and intellectual interests: incommuni-
cability, sickness, excess, nothingness,
and, most crucially, death. Both had
near-death experiences (Blanchot and
his family were mock-executed by Ger-
man soldiers in 1944, an experience herecounted fifty years later in his short
book The Instant of My Death). Both
believed that death extends far beyond
the biological end of life; that its uncer-
tain certainty and impossible possibil-
ity haunt human life from the start; and
that mortality remains the ground (or
nonground) of authentic selfhood and
relations with others. In addition to
this Heideggerian idea of the “world-
disclosive” power of death, Blanchot
and Bataille shared in common the
Levinasian notion that the “abyss” (the
Abgrund, or nonground) reveals itself
above all in my relation to the other, in-
deed, that it makes possible my mean-
ingful encounter with others.
Blanchot and Bataille were in many
respects markedly different from each
other. Their friendship flourished not
only because of what they had in com-
mon but because they turned their
“otherness” into a form of intimacy. In
his late book The Unavowable Com-
munity (1983), Blanchot was thinking
most likely of Bataille, then deceased,
when he wrote:Now, “the basis of communica-
tion” is not necessarily speech, or
even the silence that is its founda-
tion and punctuation, but expo-
sure to death, no longer my own
exposure, but someone else’s,
whose living and closest presence
is already eternal and unbearable
absence, an absence that the work
of deepest mourning does not di-
minish. And it is in life itself that
the absence of someone else has to
be met: it is with that absence...
that friendship is brought into play
and lost at each moment, a relation
without relation or without relation
other than the incommensurable.Here Blanchot is in his proper noctur-
nal element, far from the journalism of
the day and deep into the paradoxes of
“the neuter,” an obscu re ter m that takes
on a central importance in his later writ-
ings. The philosopher Joseph Kuzma
aptly defines it as “a lexical placeholder
for the trace of what remains outside of
being and nonbeing.”^2 Within the force
field of the neuter, friendship draws life
from exposure to death ; distance makes
possible intimacy; and communication
arises from incommensurability.Friendship was sacred for Blanchot.
It was perhaps the only constant of his
life, during which he changed his politi-
cal views significantly, yet without ever
giving them priority over friendship.
One could say that he loved his friends
to death. He met them in the realm of
estrangement—call it the space of lit-
erature—where the human condition
reveals its existential forsakenness.
There is an ever-receding absence in
the friend, an intangibility or unten-
ability, precisely in the moment when
he or she is most present to me.
Blanchot did not have a well-
articulated theory of friendship—his
book Friendship (1971) certainly does
not offer one—yet his life and thought,
I think, revolved around his friends.
Referring to Martin Buber, he wrote
that “the great feat of Israel is...to
have founded history upon a dialogue
between divinity and humanity, thisconcern for reciprocal speech, in which
the I and the You meet without erasing
one another.” He then adds, “Speech
alone can cross the abyss... the mys-
tery and friendship of speech, its justice
and reciprocity, the call it conveys and
the response it awaits.”
By invoking a friendship between
God and humanity, Blanchot muddies
the waters. I would claim that God does
not befriend us, and that friendship is
what we have in lieu of God. If pushed,
Blanchot would probably agree, given
that he contradicts himself regarding
the “reciprocity” of speech when he
goes on to write, “The voice of God
alone, God as voice, as power that ad-
dresses without letting itself be ad-
dressed in turn, makes this separation
[between God and humanity] the locus
of understanding.” This is the Deus ab-
sconditus who plays hide-and-seek with
us in a way that we—and Blanchot—
would find unworthy of a true friend.
Blanchot, who almost never al-
lowed himself to be photographed,
who never married, who had only one
serious liaison—with Denise Rollin, a
woman who, like him, insisted on liv-
ing alone (with her child)—was blessed
with many meaningful friendships:
in addition to Levinas and Bataille
there was Rollin, René Char, Robert
Antelme, Dionys Mascolo, and Mar-
guerite Duras, to mention only a few.
Shortly after the war, Blanchot spent a
decade in almost complete isolation in
the south of France—he was seriously
ill and exhausted much of the time—
yet he never communed more intensely
with his friends, exchanging countless
letters with them. Solitude for this most
reclusive of writers consisted of what he
called, in the title of a major book pub-
lished in 1969, “L’Entretien infini,” a n
infinite conversation, not only with his
living friends but also with the dead, i.e.,
those writers and thinkers with whom he
conversed through reading and writing.
Blanchot thought with and through
his friends. Since most of them were
writers in their own right, “reciprocal
speech” mostly took the form of the
written word. Indistinguishable from
his love of thought, Blanchot’s love of
friends turned distance into closeness
and solitude into fellowship, rendering
his solitude “essential.” (“The Essen-
tial Solitude” is the lead essay of The
Space of Literature, perhaps his best-
known book, written during his years
in southern France.)As the decades wore on, Blanchot
saw most of his friends, new and old,
disappear. The first wave of deaths
came in the 1960s: Albert Camus in
1960, Bataille in 1962, Elio Vittorini
and André Breton in 1966, Jean Paul-
han in 1968, Paul Celan in 1970. (Blan-
chot wrote Friendship in this period.)
In 1978 he lost his brother René, who
had protected and cared for him his
whole life. Rollin died two weeks after
his brother. In the 1980s and 1990s an
entire generation of titans, variously
close to Blanchot, also died: Roland
Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre (1980),
Jacques Lacan (1981), Foucault and
Henri Michaux (1984), Char (1988),
Samuel Beckett (1989), Gilles Deleuze
and Levinas (1995), Duras (1996), and
Mascolo (1997).
Blanchot had what I would call a
“disastric” rather than tragic concep-
tion of death, the latter understanding
disaster as misfortune, the former as(^1) Blanchot is known in America pri-
marily as a critic and philosopher, yet
during his lifetime he published four
novels that have earned him his status
in France as a major postwar novelist.
(^2) See Kuzman’s superb entry for
Blanchot in the Internet Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.