Maurice Blanchot | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 22 September 1907 Devrouze,Saône-et-Loire, France |
| Died | 20 February 2003(2003-02-20) (aged 95) Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, France |
| Education | |
| Education | University of Strasbourg (B.A., 1922) University of Paris (M.A., 1930) |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Main interests |
|
| Notable ideas | The Neutral (le neutre) Right to death Two kinds of death[a] |
Maurice Blanchot (/blɑːnˈʃoʊ/blahn-SHOH;French:[blɑ̃ʃo]; 22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a French writer, philosopher andliterary theorist.[4] His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongsidepoetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence onpost-structuralist philosophers such asGilles Deleuze,Michel Foucault,Jacques Derrida andJean-Luc Nancy.
Blanchot was born in the village of Quain (Saône-et-Loire) on 22 September 1907.[5][6][7]
Blanchot studied philosophy at theUniversity of Strasbourg, where he became a close friend of theLithuanian-bornFrench JewishphenomenologistEmmanuel Levinas. He then embarked on a career as apolitical journalist in Paris. From 1932 to 1940 he was editor of themainstream conservative daily theJournal des débats. In 1930 he earned his DES (diplôme d'études supérieures), roughly equivalent to anM.A. at theUniversity of Paris, with a thesis titled "La Conception du Dogmatisme chez les Sceptiques anciens d'après Sextus Empiricus" ("TheConception ofDogmatism in theAncientSceptics According toSextus Empiricus").[8]
Early in the 1930s he contributed to a series of radicalnationalist magazines while also serving as editor of the fiercely anti-German dailyLe rempart in 1933 and as editor of Paul Lévy'santi-Nazipolemical weeklyAux écoutes. In 1936 and 1937 he also contributed to thefar right monthlyCombat and to thenationalist-syndicalist dailyL'Insurgé, which eventually ceased publication – largely as a result of Blanchot's intervention – because of the anti-semitism of some of its contributors. There is no dispute that Blanchot was nevertheless the author of a series of violently polemical articles attacking the government of the day and its confidence in the politics of theLeague of Nations, and warned persistently against the threat to peace in Europe posed byNazi Germany.
In December 1940, he metGeorges Bataille, who had written stronganti-fascist articles in the thirties, and who would remain a close friend until his death in 1962. Blanchot worked in Paris during theNazi occupation. In order to support his family he continued to work as a book reviewer for theJournal des débats from 1941 to 1944, writing for instance about such figures as Sartre and Camus, Bataille and Michaux, Mallarmé and Duras for a putativelyPétainistVichy readership. In these reviews he laid the foundations for later Frenchcritical thinking by examining the ambiguousrhetorical nature of language and the irreducibility of the written word to notions of truth or falsity. He refused the editorship of thecollaborationistNouvelle Revue Française for which, as part of an elaborate ploy, he had been suggested byJean Paulhan. He was active in the Resistance and remained a bitter opponent of the fascist, anti-semitic novelist and journalistRobert Brasillach, who was the principal leader of the pro-Nazi collaborationist movement. In June 1944, Blanchot was almost executed by a Nazi firing squad (as recounted in his textThe Instant of My Death).
After the war, Blanchot began working only as a novelist and literary critic. In 1947, Blanchot left Paris for the secluded village ofÈze in the south of France, where he spent the next decade of his life. LikeSartre and other French intellectuals of the era, Blanchot avoided the academy as a means of livelihood, instead relying on his pen. Importantly, from 1953 to 1968, he published regularly inNouvelle Revue Française. At the same time, he began a lifestyle of relative isolation, often not seeing close friends (likeLevinas) for years, while continuing to write lengthy letters to them. Part of the reason for his self-imposed isolation (and only part of it – his isolation was closely connected to his writing and is often featured among his characters) was that, for most of his life, Blanchot suffered from poor health.
Blanchot's political activities after the war shifted to the left. He is widely credited with being one of the main authors of the important "Manifesto of the 121", named after the number of its signatories, who includedJean-Paul Sartre,Robert Antelme,Alain Robbe-Grillet,Marguerite Duras,René Char,Henri Lefebvre,Alain Resnais,Simone Signoret and others, which supported the rights of conscripts to refuse to serve in the colonialwar in Algeria. The manifesto was crucial to the intellectual response to the war.
In May 1968, Blanchot once again emerged from personal obscurity, in support of the student protests. It was his sole public appearance after the war. Yet for fifty years he remained a consistent champion of modern literature and its tradition in French letters. During the later years of his life, he repeatedly wrote against the intellectual attraction to fascism, and notably againstHeidegger'spost-war silence overThe Holocaust.
Blanchot wrote more than thirty works of fiction, literary criticism, and philosophy. Up to the 1970s, he worked continually in his writing to break the barriers between what are generally perceived as different "genres" or "tendencies", and much of his later work moves freely between narration and philosophical investigation.
In 1983, Blanchot publishedLa Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community). This work inspiredThe Inoperative Community (1986),[9]Jean-Luc Nancy's attempt to approach community in a non-religious, non-utilitarian and un-political exegesis.
He died on 20 February 2003 inLe Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines, France.
Blanchot's work explores a philosophy of death, not inhumanistic terms, but through concerns ofparadox, impossibility, nonsense and thenoumenal 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".[10]
Blanchot drew on the poetics ofStéphane Mallarmé andPaul Celan, as well as the concept of negation in theHegelian dialectic, for his theory ofliterary language as something that is always anti-realist and so distinct from everyday experience thatrealism 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."[11]
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 areThomas l'Obscur (Thomas the Obscure), an unsettlingrécit (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 ...")[12] about the experience of reading and loss,Death Sentence,Aminadab, andThe Most High. His central theoretical works are "Literature and the Right to Death" (inThe Work of Fire andThe Gaze of Orpheus),The Space of Literature,The Infinite Conversation, andThe 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 includeLydia Davis,Paul Auster andPierre Joris.
Blanchot engages withHeidegger 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 toLevinas, who Blanchot later became influenced by with regards to the question of responsibility tothe Other, he reverses Heidegger's position on death as the "possibility of the absolute impossibility" ofDasein, instead viewing death as the "impossibility of every possibility".[13]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
