Maurice Blanchot (pronounced blahn-SHOH; in French, [blɑ̃ʃo]; born September 22, 1907; died February 20, 2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work studied ideas about death and how poetry creates meaning. His writings had a major impact on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Biography
Blanchot was born in the village of Quain (Saône-et-Loire) on 22 September 1907.
Blanchot studied philosophy from 1926 at the University of Strasbourg, where he supported the idea of a monarchy, was a member of a student group modeled after German organizations, and became a close lifelong friend of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher. On his friend’s recommendation, he read Martin Heidegger’s newly published Being and Time and described it as an "intellectual shock." In 1930, he earned his DES (diplôme d’études supérieures), roughly equal to an M.A. at the University of Paris, 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").
He then worked as a political journalist in Paris. From 1932 to 1940, he was editor of the mainstream conservative daily Journal des débats. In the early 1930s, he wrote for radical nationalist magazines and served as editor of the fiercely anti-German daily Le rempart in 1933 and as editor of Paul Lévy’s anti-Nazi weekly Aux écoutes. In 1936 and 1937, he also contributed to the far-right monthly Combat and the nationalist-syndicalist daily L’Insurgé, which stopped publishing partly because of Blanchot’s actions against its anti-Semitic contributors. There is no dispute that Blanchot wrote strongly critical articles against the government and its trust in the League of Nations, and he warned repeatedly about the threat to peace in Europe from Nazi Germany.
In December 1940, he met Georges Bataille, who had written strong anti-fascist articles in the 1930s and remained a close friend until Bataille’s death in 1962. During the Nazi occupation of France, Blanchot worked in Paris to support his family, continuing as a book reviewer for Journal des débats from 1941 to 1944. He wrote about figures such as Sartre, Camus, Bataille, and others for a readership that supported the Vichy government. In these reviews, he explored the complex nature of language and the difficulty of defining truth or falsehood in writing. He refused an editorship at the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Française, even though Jean Paulhan had suggested him for the role as part of a plan. He was active in the Resistance and opposed Robert Brasillach, a pro-Nazi journalist and novelist. In June 1944, Blanchot was nearly executed by a Nazi firing squad, as he described in his text The Instant of My Death.
After the war, Blanchot focused only on writing novels and literary criticism. In 1947, he moved to the secluded village of Èze in southern France, where he lived for a decade. Like Sartre and other French intellectuals, he avoided working in universities and instead earned a living through writing. From 1953 to 1968, he regularly published in Nouvelle Revue Française. During this time, he lived in relative isolation, often not seeing close friends like Levinas for years, while continuing to write long letters to them. His isolation was partly due to poor health, which affected him for most of his life.
Blanchot’s political activities after the war shifted to the left. He is widely credited with writing the "Manifesto of the 121," a document signed by 121 people, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, and others, which supported soldiers’ right to refuse to fight in Algeria’s war. The manifesto was important in shaping public opinion about the war.
In May 1968, Blanchot publicly supported student protests in France. This was his only public appearance after the war. For fifty years, he remained a strong supporter of modern literature in French writing. In his later years, he wrote against the appeal of fascism and criticized Heidegger for not speaking out about the Holocaust after the war.
Blanchot wrote over thirty works of fiction, literary criticism, and philosophy. Up to the 1970s, he worked to break down the boundaries between different "genres" or "tendencies" in writing, and his later works often blended storytelling with philosophical ideas.
In 1983, Blanchot published La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community). This work influenced Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (1986), which explored the idea of community without religion, politics, or utility.
He died on 20 February 2003 in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines, France.
Work
Blanchot's work examines the idea of death, not from a human-centered perspective, but through themes like paradox, impossibility, nonsense, and the unknowable aspects of death that arise from the idea that death cannot be fully understood. He often focused on the "question of literature," which involves both the act of writing and the process of questioning what writing means. For Blanchot, "literature begins when literature becomes a question."
Blanchot used the poetic styles of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan, as well as the idea of negation from Hegel's philosophy, to explain how literary language is always anti-realist. This means it is very different from everyday experiences. Realism, in this context, does not mean writing about real life, but writing about the strange and confusing qualities of the act of writing itself. Blanchot's ideas about literature are similar to Hegel's philosophy, which suggests that real, physical reality always comes after ideas. For example, Mallarmé wrote, "I say flower," and described how the actual, physical flower exists beyond the words used to describe it.
Everyday language often ignores or sets aside the physical reality of things in favor of abstract ideas. Literature, through the use of symbols and metaphors, moves away from this focus on usefulness and instead highlights that language refers to ideas, not physical objects. Blanchot explains that literature is drawn to the idea of something being present even when it is absent. The sound and rhythm of words in literature help emphasize the physical nature of language itself.
Blanchot's most famous fictional works include Thomas l'Obscur (Thomas the Obscure), a mysterious story about the experience of reading and loss; Death Sentence; Aminadab; and The Most High. His main theoretical works are "Literature and the Right to Death" (from 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 translators into English have become well-known writers and poets themselves. Some notable translators include Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, and Pierre Joris.
Blanchot discusses Heidegger's ideas about how both literature and death are experienced as a form of passive, unnamed existence, which Blanchot calls "the Neutral." Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot believes it is impossible to have a true relationship with death because he thinks death cannot be understood as a concept. Like Levinas, whom he later influenced, Blanchot challenges Heidegger's view that death is the "possibility of the absolute impossibility" of human existence, instead seeing death as "the impossibility of every possibility."