BLANCHOT IN THE NRF, 1960–63

Abstract

In essays written between 1960 and 1963, Blanchot embarks on a new line of thought, beginning with fundamental philosophical division between language and vision. The contrast between the two domains is possible to the extent that they constitute two distinct modes of manifestation, each with its own space and its own conditions. The implications of this division emerge more clearly if one follows its elaboration through the column that Blanchot wrote for the La nouvelle revue française (NRF) during these years. Working through the essays in the sequence and the context of their original production, one can recognize how the thesis of a discontinuity in the relation to the world, given only in language, and not in perception, is formulated as a response to the intellectual and social environment of his time.

Keywords:

• language
• la parole
• change of epoch
• difference
• alterity
• presence
• plural language (la parole plurielle)

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The website Espace Maurice Blanchot (www.blanchot.fr) provides a bibliography which lists his articles in the order of their original publication. On the circumstances that led to Blanchot writing such a “chronique” for the NRF, see Christophe Bident, “Je t’aime … moi non plus – Maurice Blanchot à la NRF: sécretaire, critique, écrivain,” Letras de Hoje 48.2 (2013): 163–71.

2 In the essay entitled (in English translation) “Language,” available in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971) 187.

3 The concentration of Blanchot’s writing is such that interpretation is necessarily very close to translation. For this reason, I will translate the passages cited myself, although I have consulted the English translation: The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993). Page references will be to L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), abbreviated as EI.

4 On this and subsequent political involvements of Blanchot, see section V of Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham UP, 2018); Michael Holland, “Quand l’insoumission se déclare: Maurice Blanchot entre 1958 et 1968,” Communications 99 (2016): 55–68; the two introductions by Kevin Hart and Zakir Paul to Political Writings 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham UP, 2010); and Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (London: Continuum, 2012) 9–26.

5 Most of these examples had already appeared in earlier texts, especially in The Space of Literature, trans. Anne Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982). See, for example, the chapter in this work entitled “The Outside, the Night.” In the phase that we are studying, an essential text in this connection is “Being Jewish” (NRF, Sept. 1962; EI 180–90).

6 It is treated in most detail in two of the most demanding texts: “Nietzsche and Fragmentary Writing” (1966) and “Atheism and Humanism: Writing and the Cry” (1968).

7 These brief remarks evoke two texts from The Space of Literature: “The Two Versions of the Imaginary” and “Sleep, Dream.” Blanchot often returns to the analyses of earlier texts, without explicit reference.

8 Closer analysis of this “hermetic” language would require exploration of the links between “Speaking is Not Seeing” and L’attente l’oubli, a fictional text published in 1962. Many key phrases and formulations appear in both texts. In the fiction, these phrases have their sense in relation to the dramatic situation of the narrative. In the essay, their meaning is “translated” into discourse – not by the modification of their substance, which is often only slight, but by their relation to the historical and philosophical discourse in this and other texts in The Infinite Conversation.

9 It would require an entire study to determine the limits of this proximity between Blanchot and Derrida, which is often taken for granted. In the present context, it is worth noting that in a key passage of his essay on Levinas, Derrida argues that language cannot be separated from the experience of the light. See Writing and Difference, trans. Allen Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 140–41.

10 On the history and the significance of the NRF in the French intellectual world, see the studies of Martyn Cornick: “Une institution française: La Nouvelle Revue française de Jean Paulhan,” Études littéraires (Québec, Canada: Hiver, 2009) 77–96. “La Nouvelle Revue française de Jean Paulhan et le modernism,” in Jeanyves Guérin (ed.), La Nouvelle Revue française de Jean Paulhan (1925–1940 et 1953–1968) (Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit, 2006) 19–44; “Jean Paulhan and the NRF: Modernist Editor, Modernist Review?,” The Romanic Review 99.1 (2008): 9–26.

11 See “René Char and the Thought of the Neuter” (published in the journal L’Arc, summer 1963); “The Play of Thought,” on Georges Bataille, who had died the preceding year (NRF, Aug.–Sept. 1963); and “The Relation of the Third Kind: The Man without Horizon,” which was first published in The Infinite Conversation, but which by its content belongs with this group of texts.

12 Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979) 33; hereafter TI.

13 On the “confirmation” that Blanchot finds in Levinas, see Jean-Luc Lannoy, “De la marche de l’ecrevisse à la connaissance de l’inconnu” in Emmanuel Levinas–Maurice Blanchot, penser la différence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Nanterre, 2008) – and on the Blanchot–Levinas relation in general, the collection as a whole.

14 Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988); hereafter EE.

15 These last lines echo Levinas, who writes:

The relationship of language implies transcendence, radical separation, the strangeness of the interlocutors, the revelation of the other to me. In other words, language is spoken where there is no community between the terms of the relation, where there is no common ground, where this has to be constituted. (TI 73)

16 Within French intellectual discourse at this time, the term is first of all identified with the theory and practice of communism, as in Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973, first published in 1955) or Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Quinton Hoare (London: Verso, 2006, first published in 1960). There is a study to be done on “the dialectic,” as it appears through the pages of The Infinite Conversation and in other works of Blanchot, both as a conceptual movement and as a historical process.

17 The co-existence of presence and power is at the centre of Blanchot’s next article (NRF, Apr. 1962) on Robert Antelme’s memoir L’espèce humaine. On this text, see Christopher Fynsk, Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (New York: Fordham UP, 2013) 34–54.

18 The passage recalls elements of “The Gaze of Orpheus” in The Space of Literature. The use of the myth here is simpler than the earlier text, where the transgression in the gaze is presented as a necessary moment in the poetic process.

19 See Mark Hewson, Blanchot and Literary Criticism (New York: Continuum, 2011) chapter 4, “The Ambiguity of the Negative.”

20 This paradox is worked through by Jacques Derrida in his confrontation of the thought of Levinas with that of Husserl, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Writing and Difference, trans. Allen Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) especially 153–67.

21 The word “dissertation” has a wider sense in French than English. It can mean a work written for a doctoral degree, but it can also mean an organized or academic treatment of a particular topic: it is this latter sense which I approximate here with the term “monograph” to avoid the specialized sense of the English word “dissertation.”

22 See “Literature Again” (NRF, Dec. 1962); “Ars Nova” (NRF, May 1963); “The Great Reducers” (NRF, Apr. 1965, collected in Friendship).

23 This argument is elaborated further in a text written the following year: “Interruption” (NRF, May 1964).

24 The next article that appeared in the NRF, “The Play of Thought” (“Le jeu de la pensée”) (Aug. 1963), resumes this reflection on the “conversation.”

25 Blanchot’s first fragmentary work, published during this same period, L’attente, l’oubli (1962, translated into English as Awaiting Oblivion) also counts among the attempts to break the continuity of literary form. See the explanatory text which accompanied the publication of L’attente, l’oubli, which is very close in its ideas to “A Rose is a Rose.” The difficulty of his text, Blanchot writes, lies in its “discontinuous movement”: “from one paragraph to the next, sometimes from one sentence to another, there is an interruption, there is a cessation (un arrêt).” “Prière d’insérer pour L’attente, L’oubli” in La condition critique: articles 1945–1998 (Paris: Gallimard, 2010) 301–02.

26 The literary-historical arguments of these works had been re-stated in accord with Blanchot’s new way of posing the problems, in “Literature, Again” (NRF, Dec. 1962–Jan. 1963).

27 See Ian James, The New French Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), who makes this claim that the common ground of present-day philosophy in France is the need to separate from the generation of the 1960s, and describes this project in terms of the aim of overcoming or bypassing the “linguistic paradigm.” He refers, among others, to Alain Badiou’s claim (in The Theory of the Subject) that the structuralist and post-structuralist moment can be seen as a “linguistic idealism”: see especially James’s introduction (1–16).