Archeology of a critical gesture

The publication of Literary chronicles of Journal of debates, written by Maurice Blanchot from 1941 to 1944, has the value of an editorial and literary event. Not only does this publication contribute to dispel the painful caricature of Blanchot in a esthete only living only for literature and its purified peaks (these Chronicsupplied at a weekly rate, are also, let’s not forget, the criticism of the critic), but it also contributes to drawing up an exciting panorama of literary news in time of war. Porter here known authors (Dante, Rabelais, Descartes, Montesquieu, Blake, Hoffmann, Joyce, Giraudoux, Mallarmé, Valéry, Kafka) and writers who have fallen into oblivion: who remembers Georges Magnane today, Julien Blanc, Marius Grout ? If these forgotten names matter to us, beyond even their documentary value, it is also that they are like foam and trace of an era. Another Blanchot is looming, the Blanchot journalist, that of chronic time and this discontinuous which will make the theoretical matter of many trials of Infinite maintenance.

Even more, this unpublished, which we owe to the publishing work of Christophe Bident, introduces us into the very laboratory of the critical activity of Blanchot. Here we see this criticism, one of the most important in XX^e century, gradually invent as an author, and give some of his Chronic The dimension of an authentic work of thought. Hence the feeling, for the reader of XXI^e century, to access, in a way, to “ laboratory »Of a critical work which, of Misconduct has The share of firethen Infinite maintenancedid not stop questioning the literature, in a way, at the very source of what Mallarmé called “ This insane game to write ».

Let us add that Chronic constitute, in a way, the reliquary of the first critical collection of Blanchot, published in December 1943 on the initiative of Dionys Mascolo at Gallimard: Misconductcomposed of a selection of 55 articles from Deposit Journalfor the most part in their full version. Discover them Chronicit is a bit of access to the submerged part of the iceberg, and wonder about the occultation practiced by Blanchot of a whole section of his critical work. What interest, might wonder a hurried reader, is there to read these chronicles struck in the double corner of the disparate and anecdotal ? The interest, in our opinion, is twofold, and it engages the very question of literature, and of the problematic essence of the latter, a question that Blanchot has continued to think and submit to critic. It’s a bit like we were attending, with these Chronicto a double clearance: progressive invention, by Blanchot, of a clean style ; Gradual clearance in relation to national ideology, the critic inviting his reader here to a reading between the lines of his own critical gesture. Reading Chronic engages a real historical hermeneutics.

The invention of a critical gesture

These Chroniclet’s insist, form with Misconduct An exciting doublet. They make us witness the genesis of a critical thinking, discovering, in a way, a blancot Before Blanchot, an archaeological blanchot. The question that arises, over these Chronic and of their discontinuity, would be, in a way: how to read Blanchot reading ? We see here all a thought of Mimesis, forged in the challenge of a certain doxa “” realistic A whole thought of metaphor too, thought as a true plastic of language. It is a true poetics of the fable that is developed, over certain articles. Better still: it is very often at the turn of a sentence, as at random of the review of a failed work, that the poetics of Blanchot is part of negative. Based on the criticism of a missed novel by Odette Joyeux, develops a whole reflection on the imagination, its cohesion, its specific weight: “ (…) It is then necessary to invent the structure of a reality where everything that is meaning and where even what does not make sense, especially that, requires to be justified with regard to the original invention. Beyond the anecdotal, the hazard of the Reviews, emerges a certain thought of literature. We then think of what Blanchot writes about Albert Thibaudet in Misconduct : “ His criticism is created and shaped by literature. But the capital, capital, between the two criticisms, is that Blanchot poses to literature the Kantian question of his condition of possibility, insofar as one can apply to him what he himself says of Paulhan, in the important article of Chronic devoted to Terror in letters : “ He posed, in a form which recalls the famous Kantian revolution, this problem: how is literature possible ? “It is also this meta-criticism that allows the critic to invent themselves as an author, aware, however, that this invention engages this work of the negative which will be the business of the critical and novelist, his life during:” What is a criticism ? A poet, but who approaches poetry by non-beingin the sense that he does not want to be a poet, a novelist who participates in the secret of romantic creation and who nevertheless says no to the novel. (…). »»

But there is more. We know the importance that interminable confrontation will have in Blanchot’s thought with Hegelian dialectics, but also critical reading, enterprise in 1946, of Heidegger’s thought, not to mention the friendship of thought with Emmanuel Levinas, whose concept of “ There is »Offers so many affinities with the thought of the neutral which was developed in 1948, with the famous text taken up in The share of fire : “ Literature and the right to death ». In Literary chroniclesis already at work this joint possession between literature and philosophy which will be, his life during, the concern of the critical Blanchot, and as evidenced here by the articles devoted to Bergson, Alain, Valéry. In many ways, the great affair of the criticism is here that of thought, a thought always embodied, because inseparable from the very movement of writing, as it is said, p. 576-77, about the “ Balzac work “:” (…) For a prose writer, there is only a beginning of thought from written words, sentences linked to sentences, this precise necessity of writing that makes real thought by changing it. »»

A historical and political clearance

It is important here to re -situate briefly. Blanchot, for four years, has been in an antiparness and nationalist obedience journalism. In the forties, he wrote in the marshalist Deposit Journalbut he delivered literary chronicles of remarkable acuity in which the nationalism of the 1930s gradually erased. It is advisable to insist on this crucial point: Blanchot certainly published, in 1936 and 1937, very violent articles against Blum, but he never practiced, under the occupation, the anti -Semitic invective, as Céline, Morand, Brasillach, and so many others did. In many ways, the 173 articles of literary criticism given to Deposit Journal Between April 1941 and August 1944 proceeded from a clearance work, to read between the lines, compared to the Pétainist ideology. The presence of foreign literature, the references to Kafka and Freud, make it in their own way.

Here we see Blanchot practicing, gradually, a form of clearance in relation to the vehement rhetoric which had been able to be his in the thirties. The criticism of Drieu La Rochelle, that of the return to the land advocated by Giono, have an undeniable critical function in this regard, as well as the interest in world literature, that of Joyce, Kafka, as if to better escape the closely national borders of the language. And it is exciting to see Blanchot evolve, deconstruct, in an article of 1944, this sovereignty of the author whom he still affirmed in 1941 in an article devoted to Montherlant. Ask that “ The usual critic is a sovereign who escapes immolation, claims to exercise authority without expserving it and wants to be the master of a kingdom which he has without risk. So there is hardly any more miserable sovereign and, for not having refused to be something, closer to being nothing “, This seems to announce the criticism of sovereignty which will be developed in contact with battle and the famous sentence:” Sovereignty is nothing “, Commented in The writing of the disaster.