Out of time, Blanchot? Putting his archives into perspective proves on the contrary how active this author, often referred to his far-right past, was in May 68.
After Revelations of history (2006) and Comrade Mallarmé (2014), Jean-François Hamel happily persists, still at Minuit in the “Paradoxe” collection, “in immersing works in the continuum of practices, discourses and representations that form the material framework of their appearance” (p. 10). With Walter Benjamin as his guide, he is interested in authors reputed to be obscure and disengaged. His new opus is not a tome – it lacks volume and weight for that – but it has the effectiveness, usefulness and manageability of one. And what a title! A statement from the Student Writers Action Committee, published in The World May 28, 1968, in response to the Minister of the Interior who denounced a “daily growing underworld” in the streets… In just over a hundred pages, J.-F. Hamel manages to restore the bulk of the Harvard University collection relating to Maurice Blanchot’s participation in one of the 450 or so committees sparked by May 68.
Updates
The sequence of chapters is less chronological – even if we cannot escape a form of narrative – than thematic. These are 10 brief entries into the life of the Committee that alternate between striking snapshots and enlightening panoramas. On reading, however, it seems that nothing is missing. The rendering of the archives – tracts, posters, bulletins, press releases, letters, drafts, reading notes – tends towards a neutrality that does not exclude the firmness of a point of view:
Contrary to popular belief, the literary space was never an ivory tower for Blanchot. Nor was it, as his detractors would have it, a refuge far from current events for a writer wishing to make people forget his commitments as a publicist and editorialist in various far-right newspapers during the 1930s. (p. 61)
It is up to the reader to make the polemical connection with the recent palinodes of Jean-Luc Nancy in The Disowned Community (2014) and Michel Surya in The Other Blanchot (2015): after having been the thurifers of the work during the lifetime of the author and his friends, they now participate in the “tendentious amalgams” highlighted by J.-F. Hamel between “a right-wing anti-parliamentarianism, nationalist and xenophobic, and a left-wing anti-parliamentarianism, internationalist and democratic” (id.).
Rereading a text from April 1958, “Power and Glory”, taken up in conclusion of the Book coming soon A year later, and following the dialogue between Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo held throughout these years, J.-F. Hamel summarizes:
The radical contestation of the world by the writer will no longer have as a condition the autonomy of literature, that is to say its independence with regard to all social conflict, but the complete abolition of its autonomy and its immersion in the impersonal flow of discourses and words which circulate in the public space. (p. 65-66)
Blanchot’s activity in May, he who is known for his poor health and his withdrawal, is overflowing. He confronts police charges from the first night of the barricades, demonstrates, marches on May 13 and other days, attends meetings, including the one at the Charléty stadium, chairs sessions, goes to the Sorbonne and the Renault factories. His speeches attract attention commensurate with his discretion. His body, his voice and his thoughts rub shoulders, address other bodies, voices and thoughts informally, while persisting in addressing his closest friends formally, whose circumspect, even severe, positions with regard to the movement he respects ‒ like Derrida and Levinas. Christophe Bident had more than paved the way in his biography of Blanchot; the main interest of J.-F. Hamel’s book is to focus on his full and complete involvement in the adventure of the Student-Writers Action Committee.
The Ordinary of an Extraordinary Committee
The Committee is prefigured by the declaration of some thirty intellectuals and writers against police violence against students, published on May 10, 1968 in The World : “It is essential that the student movement opposes and maintains a power of refusal,” they declare. MM. Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre and a group of writers and philosophers.” It was in fact Blanchot who wrote it in large part, in agreement with his friends from rue Saint-Benoît who had met regularly since the end of the 1940s at Marguerite Duras’s house. They were resistant to the Communist Party and had contributed to the anti-Gaullist review July 14th in 1958, signed the “Manifesto of the 121” in 1960, sympathized with the Cuban revolution and supported the Vietnamese people. Created at the Institute of Philosophy of the occupied Sorbonne, before taking refuge in Censier, the Committee launched its first tracts on May 18, 1968, improvised its first meeting on the 20th, experienced its first schism the next day ‒ with the Union of Writers of Michel Butor, Jacques Roubaud and Jean-Pierre Faye, and the Group of Theoretical Studies of intellectuals evolving around the journal As IsHis last leaflets were printed in December.
There is also a bulletin, soberly entitled Committeeimagined in July 1968, initiated at the end of October, abandoned in March of the following year. The inaugural issue was written, as we now know, by Blanchot and Mascolo. Jacques Bellefroid, Jean Schuster and Christiane Rochefort contributed to it to a lesser extent. The second remained in preparation. A “communism of writing” was being experimented with, a risk was being taken – envisaged from the aborted project of a International Review in 1960-1965 ‒, assuming not without difficulty anonymity and radical fragmentation. This is what distinguishes this bulletin while making it similar to the protest press harassed by police justice.
Between the founding of the Committee and April 1969 – publication of “L’absence de livre” in the journal The Ephemeral Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet, Paul Celan and Louis-René des Forêts ‒, Blanchot does not publish anything under his name. In October, he leaves There NRFwhere he kept a very popular literary column for 15 years, notably at the origin of The Literary Space (1955) and the Book coming soon (1959). This act remains consistent with the policy of writing experienced in May, thought out well in advance, where literature tends to dissolve into a collective speech, to leave the book – even through the book -, to invest the walls, to avoid any cultural recovery, to abdicate the authority of the author, to relativize corporatist concerns, to minimize purely aesthetic debates, to concentrate in short on the revolutionary requirement.
A paradoxical communism
Choosing an action committee to the detriment of a party, even an avant-garde one, is to revive the experiences stifled during the Paris Commune, but also in Saint Petersburg as well as in Berlin and Budapest where, to quote J.-F. Hamel,
Communism is no longer (…) the hope of a historical accomplishment, but a form of collective life declined in the present through the anonymity of struggles (…), testifying to the concrete possibility of another way of living. (p. 115)
The essay opens with a dazzling perspective that measures the entire distance traveled from Hegel in Jena, seeing Napoleon from his window – “the soul of the world” in his eyes – in October 1806, to Blanchot who goes down into the street and mingles with the crowd with a view to bringing about a “revolution.” of the revolution” (letter to Marguerite Duras, October 13, 1968): anarchist, headless, impersonal, eager for direct and real democracy, unconditional and absolute freedom, irrecoverable time, uncontrollable inscriptions and words, uprising, dissidence, refusal, “unemployed negativity” (Georges Bataille), impersonality, sending back to back leaders and revolutionaries, exposing itself to being recuperated, criticized and misunderstood by both sides, indifferent to the State, to places of power, to parties, to the constitution, to authorities, to historical subjects ‒ proletariat as providential man ‒, to institutions, to law, to elections, to apparatuses, to organizations, to training, to unions, to work, to demands, cooled by the evolution of Castro, detesting de Gaulle, liberalism, capitalism, patriotism, including in its Stalinist version.
Recalling the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War ‒ the drafting of which owes much to Blanchot, starting with its title ‒, and a text on Sade dating from 1965, reprinted in The Infinite Interview (1969) ‒ “L’insurrection, la folie d’écrire” ‒, J.-F. Hamel compares Blanchot’s relationship to power to the “anarchic violence” theorized by Walter Benjamin instead of the dialectic between “founding violence” and “conservative violence”, constituent power and constituted power, which until then informed many historical cycles. We discover a Blanchot reading, annotating, quoting, inflecting the heterodox Marxists who gravitate around the review Arguments and the eponymous collection at Minuit. While he reveals himself to be close in particular to the “revolutionary romanticism” advocated by Henri Lefebvre, it is above all important for him to rehabilitate the subversive potential inherent in “life”, in “everyday speech”, in “the man in the street”, perceived as a true “reserve of anarchy” which escapes assignments, controls, determinations and subjugations, by its anonymity and its very multitude thwarting all divisions: public/private, visibility/discretion, activism/idleness.
After the disappearance of the Committee, Blanchot continued, together with Dionys Mascolo, to think of this paradoxical communism, far removed from any partisan politics, adjusted to the “man of need” (Robert Antelme), in solidarity with the uprising of the Blacks in the United States, faithful to an unlimited negation that some confuse with nihilism, anxious to avoid any reappropriation – commemoration included – of the interrupted time of the rebellious crowds.