Maurice Blanchot ( ; ; 22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist. His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on

post-structuralist Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of Power (social and poli ...

philosophers such as

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes o ...

Michel Foucault Paul-Michel Foucault ( , ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French History of ideas, historian of ideas and Philosophy, philosopher who was also an author, Literary criticism, literary critic, Activism, political activist, and teacher. Fo ...

Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida;Peeters (2013), pp. 12–13. See also 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was a French Algerian philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, ...

and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Biography

Pre-1945

Blanchot was born in the village of Quain (

Saône-et-Loire Saône-et-Loire (; Arpitan: ''Sona-et-Lêre'') is a department in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in France. It is named after the rivers Saône and Loire, between which it lies, in the country's central-eastern part. Saône-et-Loire is B ...

) on 22 September 1907. Blanchot studied philosophy at the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. Founded in the 16th century by Johannes Sturm, it was a center of intellectual life during ...

, where he became a close friend of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish phenomenologist

Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas (born Emanuelis Levinas ; ; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the rel ...

. He then embarked on a career as a political journalist in Paris. From 1932 to 1940 he was editor of the mainstream conservative daily the ''Journal des débats''. In 1930 he earned his DES (diplôme d'études supérieures), roughly equivalent to an M.A. at the

University of Paris The University of Paris (), known Metonymy, metonymically as the Sorbonne (), was the leading university in Paris, France, from 1150 to 1970, except for 1793–1806 during the French Revolution. Emerging around 1150 as a corporation associated wit ...

, with a thesis titled "La Conception du Dogmatisme chez les Sceptiques anciens d'après Sextus Empiricus" ("The Conception of Dogmatism in the Ancient Sceptics According to Sextus Empiricus").Alan D. Schrift (2006), ''Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers'', Blackwell Publishing, p. 101. Early in the 1930s he contributed to a series of radical nationalist magazines while also serving as editor of the fiercely anti-German daily ''Le rempart'' in 1933 and as editor of Paul Lévy's anti-Nazi polemical weekly ''Aux écoutes''. In 1936 and 1937 he also contributed to the far right monthly ''Combat'' and to the nationalist-syndicalist daily ''L'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 the League of Nations, and warned persistently against the threat to peace in Europe posed by

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

. In December 1940, he met

Georges Bataille Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (; ; 10 September 1897 – 8 July 1962) was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, ...

, who had written strong anti-fascist articles in the thirties, and who would remain a close friend until his death in 1962. Blanchot worked in Paris during the Nazi occupation. In order to support his family he continued to work as a book reviewer for the ''Journal des débats'' from 1941 to 1944, writing for instance about such figures as Sartre and Camus, Bataille and Michaux, Mallarmé and Duras for a putatively Pétainist Vichy readership. In these reviews he laid the foundations for later French critical thinking by examining the ambiguous rhetorical nature of language and the irreducibility of the written word to notions of truth or falsity. He refused the editorship of the collaborationist ''

Nouvelle Revue Française ''La Nouvelle Revue Française'' (; "The New French Review") is a literary magazine based in France. In France, it is often referred to as the ''NRF''. History and profile The magazine was founded in 1909 by a group of intellectuals including And ...

'' for which, as part of an elaborate ploy, he had been suggested by Jean Paulhan. He was active in the Resistance and remained a bitter opponent of the fascist, anti-semitic novelist and journalist Robert 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 text ''The Instant of My Death'').

Post-1945

After the war, Blanchot began working only as a novelist and literary critic. In 1947, Blanchot left Paris for the secluded village of

Èze Èze (; ; ) is a seaside commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in Southeastern France. It is located on the French Riviera, 8.5 km (5.2 mi) to the northeast of Nice and 4.5 km (2.7 ...

in the south of France, where he spent the next decade of his life. Like Sartre 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 in ''Nouvelle Revue Française''. At the same time, he began a lifestyle of relative isolation, often not seeing close friends (like Levinas) 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 the fact 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 The Manifesto of the 121 (), was an open letter signed by 121 intellectuals and published on 6 September 1960 in the magazine ''Vérité-Liberté''. It called on the French government, then headed by the Gaullist Michel Debré, and public opi ...

", named after the number of its signatories, who included

Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism, literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th ...

, Robert Antelme,

Alain Robbe-Grillet Alain Robbe-Grillet (; 18 August 1922 – 18 February 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the ''Nouveau Roman'' () trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simo ...

Marguerite Duras Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu (, 4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996), known as Marguerite Duras (), was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film ''Hiroshima mon amour'' (1959) ea ...

, René Char,

Henri Lefebvre Henri Lefebvre ( ; ; 16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for furthering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social ...

, Alain Resnais, Simone Signoret and others, which supported the rights of conscripts to refuse to serve in the colonial war 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 against

Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers a range of topics including metaphysics, art, and language. In April ...

's post-war silence over

The Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...

. 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 published ''La Communauté inavouable'' (''The Unavowable Community''). This work inspired ''The Inoperative Community'' (1986), Jean-Luc Nancy's attempt to approach community in a non-religious, non-utilitarian and un-political exegesis. He died on 20 February 2003 in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines, France.

Work

Blanchot's work explores a philosophy of death, not in

humanistic Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. The meaning of the term "humanism" ha ...

terms, but through concerns of

paradox A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true or apparently true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictor ...

, impossibility, nonsense and the noumenal 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". Blanchot drew on the poetics of

Stéphane Mallarmé Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French Symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools o ...

and Paul Celan, as well as the concept of negation in the Hegelian dialectic, for his theory of

literary language Literary language is the Register (sociolinguistics), register of a language used when writing in a formal, academic writing, academic, or particularly polite tone; when speaking or writing in such a tone, it can also be known as formal language. ...

as something that is always anti-realist and so distinct from everyday experience that realism 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." 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 are ''Thomas l'Obscur'' (''Thomas the Obscure''), an unsettling '' récit'' (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 ...") about the experience of reading and loss, ''Death Sentence'', ''Aminadab'', and ''The Most High''. His central theoretical works are "Literature and the Right to Death" (in ''The Work of Fire'' and ''The Gaze of Orpheus''), ''The Space of Literature'', ''The Infinite Conversation'', and ''The 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 include Lydia Davis,

Paul Auster Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include '' The New York Trilogy'' (1987), '' Moon Palace'' (1989), '' The Music of Chance'' (1990), ' ...

and

Pierre Joris Pierre Joris (July 14, 1946 – February 26, 2025) was a Luxembourgish- American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He moved between Europe, North Africa, and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poet ...

Themes

Blanchot engages with

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 to Levinas, who Blanchot later became influenced by with regards to the question of responsibility to the Other, he reverses Heidegger's position on death as the "possibility of the absolute impossibility" of Dasein, instead viewing death as the "impossibility of every possibility".Maurice Blanchot, ''The Writing of the Disaster'' (trans. Ann Smock), University of Nebraska, 1995

Selected bibliography

Fiction and narrations ('' récits'')

*''Thomas l'Obscur'' (1941; revised 1950)''. Thomas the Obscure'', trans. Robert Lamberton (David Lewis, 1973) * ''Aminadab'' (1942). ''Aminadab'', trans. Jeff Fort (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) *'' L'Arrêt de mort'' (1948). ''Death Sentence'', trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1978) *''Le Très-Haut'' (1949). ''The Most High'', trans. Allan Stoekl (University of Nebraska Press, 1996) *''Au moment voulu'' (1951). ''When the Times Comes'', trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1985) *''Le Ressassement éternel'' (1951). ''Vicious Circles'' *''Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas'' (1953). ''The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me'', trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1992) *''Le Dernier homme'' (1957). ''The Last Man'', trans. Lydia Davis (Columbia University Press, 1987) *''L'Attente l'oubli'' (1962). ''Awaiting Oblivion'', trans. John Gregg (University of Nebraska Press, 1997) *''La Folie du jour'' (1973). ''The Madness of the Day'', trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1981) *''Après Coup'', preceded by ''Le Ressassement éternel'' (1983). ''Vicious Circles: Two Fictions & "After the Fact"'', trans.

(Station Hill Press, 1985) *''L'Instant de ma mort'' (1994). ''The Instant of My Death'', trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford University Press, 2000)

Philosophical or theoretical works

*''Faux Pas'' (1943). ''Faux Pas'', trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 2001) *''La Part du feu'' (1949). ''The Work of Fire'', trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 1995) *''Lautréamont et Sade'' (1949). ''Lautréamont and Sade'', trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford University Press, 2004) *''L'Espace littéraire'' (1955). ''The Space of Literature'', trans. Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, 1982) *''Le Livre à venir'' (1959). ''The Book to Come'', trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 2003) *''L'Entretien infini'' (1969). ''The Infinite Conversation'', trans. Susan Hanson (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) *''L'Amitié'' (1971). ''Friendship'', trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford University Press, 1997) *''Le Pas au-delà'' (1973). ''The Step Not Beyond'', trans. Lycette Nelson (State University of New York Press, 1992) *''L'Ecriture du désastre'' (1980). ''The Writing of the Disaster'', trans. Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, 1986) *''La Communauté inavouable'' (1983). ''The Unavowable Community'', trans.

(Station Hill Press, 1988) *''Une voix venue d'ailleurs'' (2002). ''A Voice from Elsewhere'', trans. Charlotte Mandell (State University of New York Press, 2007)

Articles and essays

* ''Chroniques littéraires du « Journal des Débats », avril 1941-août 1944'' (2008) ** ''Into Disaster: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1941'', trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2014) ** ''Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942'', trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2014) ** ''A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943'', trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2016) ** ''Death Now: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1944'', trans. Michael Holland (Fordham University Press, 2019)

Compilations in English

* ''The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays'', ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1981) * ''The Sirens' Song: Selected Essays'', ed. Gabriel Josipovici (Indiana University Press, 1982) * ''The Blanchot Reader'', ed. Michael Holland (Blackwell, 1995) * ''The Station Hill Blanchot Reader'', ed. George Quasha (Station Hill Press, 1999) * ''Political Writings, 1953-1993'', ed. Zakir Paul (Fordham University Press, 2010)