Maurice Blanchot

A Critical Biography

Christophe Bident, John McKeane

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823281770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century.As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May '68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the '30s.Now translated into English, Christophe Bident's magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot's itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer's close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident's book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy.The book is also a historical work, unpacking the 'transformation of convictions' of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident's extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot's work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot's life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot's life itself becomes an oeuvre—becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident's sophisticated reading of Blanchot's life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot's detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized.This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.

PART I

1907–1923

Neither synchrony nor diachrony, an anachrony of every instant. Demourance (old French had such a word) as anachrony. There is no single time, and since there is no single time, since no instant shares a measure with any other—thanks to death, thanks to death coming between, thanks to interruption by cause of death intervening, if you will, by cause of passing-away—well, there is no chronology or chronometry. Even when the sense of the real has been regained, time cannot be measured. And thus the question returns, how many times: how much time? How much time? How much time?

JACQUES DERRIDA, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony

CHAPTER 1

Blanchot of Quain

Genealogy, Birth, Childhood (1907–1918)

On Sunday, September 22, 1907, at 2:00 a.m., in the depths of the night that would become for him the time of exile and of writing, Maurice Blanchot was born in Quain, a hamlet of Devrouze, near Saint-Germain-du-Bois in the Saône-et-Loire. It was the feast day assigned to Saint Maurice. The family was Catholic and baptized its last child in accordance with the calendar of saints’ days. A day or two on either side, and the newborn might have been known as Janvier, Eustache, Mathieu, Andoche, or Lin.

This place mattered to this well-off and distinguished family, which, through the maternal line, owned farmland and also, for over a century, had owned a fine large dwelling that in The Instant of My Death the writer would later name, exaggerating somewhat, the “Château.”¹ Maurice Blanchot’s mother, Marie Eugénie Alexandrine Mercey, had been born there on December 9, 1874, at 9:00 a.m. A legitimate child and the family’s youngest daughter, the future inheritor of the property, she had been given as her first Christian name that of her mother, Marie Moreau (thirty-eight years old), as her third a feminized version of her father’s, Alexandre Mercey (thirty-nine years old), and as her second that of the Empress, the wife of Napoleon III who had surrendered to Prussia four years earlier. Eugénie’s rigid Catholicism and political machinations must have had some influence over the choice made by the Mercey family, which was the dominant lineage in the hamlet of Quain, a family that even if not gentry still kept up relations with the only aristocratic family in the commune, that of the Baron du Marais, which owned a real château known as Ronfand. The Mercey family took pride in its roots in Quain. Still today in the church cemetery, a tomb is adorned with the words “BLANCHOT-MERCEY FAMILY OF QUAIN,” creating a noble and sober effect. Inside the nave, a commemorative plaque hails Élise Mercey, Marie Eugénie Alexandrine’s elder sister, “FOR 57 YEARS OF UNTIRING COMMITMENT TO THIS PARISH.”

At the time of Maurice Blanchot’s birth, Devrouze (a name from the Gaulish dubron, meaning a stretch of water or small river) had 796 inhabitants, which has declined to around 300 today. It is a small village in the Bresse region of Burgundy, less than nineteen miles (30 km) east of Chalon. It is farming country, with forests here and there, slightly rolling but for the most part desperately flat, quite capable of evoking the distress caused by the numerous wars that have been fought across it. Blanchot himself would speak of the “climate of despair” in this countryside. In addition to four large ponds, including one at Quain, one finds the marshy environs of the cemetery where, according to early twentieth-century tales, wills-o’-the-wisp can be seen. Round about, most dwellings are grouped together, but Devrouze is spread out, with the hamlet of Quain being about 1.2 miles (2 km) from the center, at a crossroads. One of the roads leads east, toward Saint-Germain-du-Bois, a market town known for fairs; the other comes from the north, from Navilly on the River Doubs, the hometown of Blanchot’s father.

Joseph Isidore Léon Blanchot was born there at midnight on April 30, 1859.² He was the oldest son of Léon Blanchot, a landowner and farmer (twenty-three years old) and Marie Jacquin (twenty-two years old). He was baptized a few days later, on May 5: his godmother was Louise Jacquin, his aunt; the godfather was Joseph Blanchot, his grandfather, whose name he used only for official purposes. He would instead go by another of his first names, Isidore, in social and family circles, a practice that was common at the time. Born on July 24, 1861, his younger brother François Joseph Léon, more commonly known as Edmond (a name that eventually replaced Léon on the birth certificate), would take the cloth. He worked as the parish priest in the church at Devrouze for several decades, baptizing all Joseph-Isidore’s children. Born into an agricultural (paysanne) family that does not seem to have been without financial means, the two brothers would gain other forms of social recognition, a clericalism that was literal for one and symbolic for the other. Joseph Isidore Blanchot became a teacher of literature, a tutor for children of well-off families.

On Wednesday, September 5, 1894, at 11:00 a.m., Edmond married Joseph and Marie in the church at Devrouze. Joseph was thirty-five, Marie nineteen. It was no longer necessary to follow the model of a year’s difference in age, as between the parents on each side. The biblical analogy of a meeting between Joseph and Mary was not evident in everyday practice: Joseph was known as Isidore and Marie as Alexandrine, and these were the names they used to sign the parish register. Isidore’s mother had died in 1879, at only forty-two years old, and Alexandrine’s mother two years earlier. Isidore’s father became an accountant and lived in Chalon. Alexandrine’s mother single-handedly managed a property that henceforth would be run by women alone: by her daughters and then her granddaughter. The Merceys’ sedentary lifestyle contrasted with the Blanchots’ nomadic existence. At the time they were married, Isidore Blanchot was pursuing his role as a tutor at Aillières, in the distant département of Sarthe, where the young married couple would first live together. Henceforth, until the war, the couple would live independently and move house often, living far from their region, from Normandy to Paris, as dictated by Isidore’s tutoring work (Marie-Alexandrine never took on a profession). However, in a concession to tradition, all four of their children were born at the house of their maternal grandmother, their births recorded at Devrouze, and their baptisms performed a few days later by their uncle Edmond.

A year after the wedding, on October 2, 1895, the first child was born: George [sic] Antoine Marie Joseph. Naturally, the two surviving grandparents were chosen as godmother and godfather. Less than two years later, on May 15, 1897, a daughter appeared: Marguerite Élise Marie Geneviève. This time, in accordance with a rigorous logic but inverting it, the baptism would be witnessed by the paternal uncle and the maternal aunt (who were thereby thanked for their charitable work). Edmond, who baptized Marguerite, would also be her godfather, and the child took her second Christian name from Élise, the pious and charitable godmother.³ At the turn of the century, the parents and children left Sarthe for Paris. They would dwell for nearly seven years in the Rue de Montessuy, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, not far from the Trocadéro. Their arrival in the capital was marked by that of another child: 1901 was the year René Ferdinand Marie Antoine was born.

Two years separated George and Marguerite, four Marguerite and René, six René and Maurice. When on September 22, 1907, Maurice Léon Alexandre was born and was given the names of a saint and his two grandfathers, he had a forty-eight-year-old father, a thirty-two-year-old mother, two brothers of twelve and six, and a sister of ten. He was the family’s last child. Eight days later, George would be named as his godfather, and Anne-Marie Thevenot, a cousin from Chalon, as his godmother.⁴ Born and baptized in Quain, Maurice was brought back to the family house at 10 Rue des Hayes, Elbeuf. A precocious talent on the piano, Marguerite recounted: “At 11 years old [it was therefore 1908], I sometimes played the great organ in the church at Elbeuf when the usual player, who was blind, was not available.”⁵ This was how, still a young child, she was recognized by Marcel Dupré, who was born in Rouen and was then only twenty-two years old.⁶ She would later be a brilliant student at the Conservatoire in Paris. According to their father’s demands, the four children received a solid classical education. He is said to have been very erudite, speaking Latin and forcing his children to speak it at table. Marguerite would become an organist, George a well-qualified (agrégé) teacher of German, and René an architect.⁷ Maurice Blanchot passed his baccalaureate at the age of fifteen.

Around the beginning of the war, the family returned to Burgundy and set themselves up in Chalon. Isidore Blanchot gave many private lessons. At 1916, at the age of nineteen, Marguerite was asked to begin playing the great organ at Saint-Vincent cathedral; the incumbent organist, Mr. Moine, had been called to the trenches. Quain was not far away. We can imagine that the family regularly spent a few days or weeks there. As an adult, Maurice Blanchot would return there often, usually in summer. The “upper room” would be kept for him, and he must have written there. He would always remain attached to the house where he was born and, at the end of the Second World War, nearly died. The house and the grounds, which today can be seen from the road, cannot have changed much. They are not without charm or tranquility. On the facade of this large dwelling (demeure) a date is written in iron numbers: 1809. Set slightly back from the road, the building is surrounded by trees, outbuildings, a well, and two discreet tombstones lying flat, known as cenotaphs. The grounds are planted with oaks, lime trees, hazels, chestnuts, and other fruit trees. The trees form a small copse in the part of the grounds bordering the road to Saint-Germain.

In The Instant of My Death, Blanchot speaks of a young man who goes away from the “dwelling” “until he found himself in a distant forest, named ‘the heathland,’ where he remained sheltered by trees he knew well.”⁸ It is only the trees of one’s childhood that one knows well. They are as if always-already inscribed in the time-without-time of writing. Blanchot would evoke them much later, in what could be the “primal scene,” presented as autobiographical, of the child-writer. We can imagine him in Quain, at the beginning of the war, in 1914 or 1915:

(A Primal Scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this: the child—is he seven years old, or eight perhaps?—standing by the window, drawing the curtain and, through the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child’s way, his play space, he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with clouds, grey light—pallid daylight without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had been broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein—so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this primal scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an endless flood of tears. He is thought to be suffering from a childish sorrow; attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.⁹

Despite the discretion of the parentheses, despite the precaution of the question mark and the indefinite article, the event (at once psychological, metaphysical, and mystic) still presents an irremediable character, opening onto the entire atheological reach of Blanchot’s work. This event is a promise of solitude, solitude as children experience it, which Rilke uses as the model of the only “great inner solitude,” “with the grown-ups going to and fro around us,” indifferent to the profundities of childhood, separated from any link to life’s density.¹⁰ It is an event that “[carves] out in the darkened body of memory,” puts to the test, via a “figure of chance,” a child who would continue to confide his entire inner experience, his entire abyssal feeling of being shaken (émoi), to the profundity and the fragmentation of the outside. It would do so “at the greatest distance from mere questions,” with the creative authority of childhood, a childhood outside mere representation or discussion precisely because it would remain (demeurera) as the impersonal subject of vision and fascination.¹¹ And this event opens onto the time of the absence of the heavens, the absence of the gods who have “already disappeared and not yet appeared,” the Hölderlinian time of distress.¹² It eclipses the daylight and condemns one, in a Pascalian night, to the mystical joy of an experience without transcendence, which is to say without object. It tears open a distressing gulf that eludes our conceptual grasp and gaze, but nonetheless takes hold of our bodies as if from a distance, interminably giving rise to a spinning of vision. We bore down into what is no longer a discovery but a fall into an avid drunkenness “as liberating as that of the great swarms of stars,” and we do so in complicity with the obscene movement of death, its unfeeling and violent presence.¹³ In undergoing this event, we are confronted with the brilliant nudity of what is wholly other, with the devastating emptiness of the there is (not: there is nothing, but: there is nothing other than this there is). The entire friendship of thought is already there, saturating the scene, binding it together, inflexible, with its anachronistic reference and its inevitable worklessness, with no other origin than this first experience of the supplement. This event without date, an irresponsible lightness, traces out the responsibility of all the récits to come, that of all common knowledge and all nonknowledge, beginning with the nonknowledge of death, so inevitably encountered, “as if the death outside of him could henceforth only collide with the death in him.”¹⁴ An event like the silent reservoir from which proceed all these haphazard clashes (heurts)—whether in happiness (l’heur) or misfortune (le malheur). And in the figure of chance.

Many years later, Maurice Blanchot would happen to discover another of these unexpected scenes t...