Blanchot politique - On a Reflection Never Interrupted
Fabula, Damien Guggenheim, 24 octobre 2020
He is counted among the most illustrious: an outstanding writer, a literary critic of rare sensitivity and unmatched influence, a craftsman of deconstruction before its time, a thinker of literature at its most demanding. And yet a doubt or suspicion hangs over his work - if not, according to rumor, a blame or a fault: the political commitments of the pre-war writer.
Leslie Hill,
Blanchot politique
On a Reflection Never Interrupted
Furor, 2020
EAN: 9782940601097
560 p. - Publication date: November 2, 2020.
As is well known: between 1931 and July 1940, Maurice Blanchot pursued political journalism in right-wing, nationalist, sometimes extremist publications. We think we know these pre-war political writings, but up to now, out of embarrassment or well-meaning hostility, they have almost never been read. And people have just as carefully avoided questioning the relationship between the novelist's and literary critic's work and his later political commitments: under the Occupation, against the Gaullist Republic, against the Algerian War, against antisemitism, and for a certain communism.
It is precisely this essential task that this Blanchot politique undertakes, rigorously and for the first time. What emerges is a more accurate and still unprecedented portrait of the man Georges Bataille called "indeed the most original mind of his time."
Born in 1907 and died in 2003, Maurice Blanchot lived through almost the entire twentieth century. As a journalist, he witnessed, between the wars, the successive crises of parliamentary democracy, the rise of Nazism, and the often disastrous failures of French foreign policy; as an author of fiction and fragmentary writing, he freed writing from its subordination to History; as a critic, he emphasized the subversive power of literature. But Blanchot is also - though people tend to forget it, or want to make it forgotten - a rigorous thinker of politics, of its demands and impasses. With Paul Levy, he fought Nazi antisemitism and rejected the Munich agreements and the Weygand and Petain armistice; with Xavier de Lignac and Romain Petitot, under Vichy, he opposed the dangerous compromises of the Jeune France Association; with Jean Paulhan, he resisted the disciplining of literature by the forces of the Occupation; and with Dionys Mascolo, Robert Antelme, and Marguerite Duras, he contested General de Gaulle's return to power and was active in May 68, all the way to rupture within the Student-Writer Action Committee. Decisions that, in their audacity and persistence, each time affirmed a new understanding of politics, or of the political. By putting all of Blanchot's journalism back into historical context, without ideological partisanship or polemical prejudice - along with his novels, narratives, and essays - Blanchot politique renews our understanding of his work. To those who think they already know him, as well as to those who do not yet know him, it offers, for our twenty-first century, new proof of the indispensable importance of the thought of the one who sometimes signed: Maurice Blanchot.
Leslie Hill is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick (UK), and the author of several books on French literature, including Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (1997); Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (2001); Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism (2010); Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (2012); and Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy (2018).