Amor: Blanchot Since 2003

Amor: Blanchot since 2003 Book or Report Section Accepted Version Mckeane, J. (2018) Amor: Blanchot since 2003. In: Bident, C. and Mckeane, J. (eds.) Maurice Blanchot: a Critical Biography. Fordham University Press, Bronx, NY, pp. 465-478. ISBN 9780823281763 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/77545/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Publisher: Fordham University Press All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online ‘AMOR’ Blanchot since 2003 John McKeane 20 February 2003 was the date of an event that Maurice Blanchot had described as ‘natural,’ as ‘more insignificant and more uninteresting than a little heap of sand collapsing.’1 Fulfilment, release, an ‘immense pleasure’ for he who underwent it: such are a few ways of seeing this event.2 But none of these ways speaks to the absolute unknowability of death that is the driving force behind his œuvre, even and especially as its author attempts to think the instant of his death. That instant is now fixed in cold marble. The grave of Maurice Blanchot can be found in the cemetery at Le Mesnil Saint-Denis, the suburb of Paris where latterly he lived in a cul- de-sac named Place des pensées. He shares this grave with his sister-in-law Anne Blanchot (née Anna Wolf), and is remembered with the simple inscription MAURICE BLANCHOT 1907- 2003. The tombstone’s last word is AMOR: whether added at the author’s request or not, it certainly echoes the openness and generosity of his work. Amor, amour, amitié: this loving friendship was offered to the near and to the far, it was offered to thought itself by an œuvre that privileges not knowledge but understanding, not sophism or sophistry but philo-sophy in the most demanding sense. This was the end for the tall, thin, often unwell body that featured so prominently in Blanchot’s narratives, and which was thought about extensively by a man medically trained. The body that was exposed or exhibited in this way was not fixed or easily-comprehensible: as one critic writes, ‘there will always be a shoulder too many, an elbowing […]. This type of physical event—shuddering, shivering, distress, vomiting—, is what is constantly occurring in Blanchot’s narratives.’3 But even such an unruly body eventually grew still. It was incinerated, and the ashes interred in a private ceremony. The eulogy was given by Jacques Derrida, who although he spoke elsewhere of incineration and inhumation, of the body’s destiny or destinerrancy, here concentrated on the question of legacy: ‘Blanchot did not have what is called influence, and he did not have disciples. Something entirely different is in play. The legacy he leaves will have reserved a more internal and more serious trace: a non- appropriable one. He will have left us alone, he has left us more alone than ever with our endless responsibilities.’4 Such a sense of Blanchot’s legacy being not an order but a demand, not a duty but a right, to dedicate oneself to thought, was also present at a major colloquium, planned before his death, that took place the month following it, Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques (Critical Narratives). Christophe Bident opened proceedings with the following words: Maurice Blanchot has died [Maurice Blanchot est mort]. His passing was not unthinkable. But I gave it no credence at all. Over these two years in which Pierre Vilar and I have prepared this conference, not for a moment did I 1 imagine that Blanchot could die before this morning’s opening, nor— therefore—that he would die so close to today, 34 days beforehand. Whether in good or bad faith, but what does it matter now, we had good reasons to believe in another reprieve. But we had nothing but reasons. The reprieve has been withdrawn. This places our words in the temporality of a mourning that responds strangely to a future perfect: Maurice Blanchot has died, Maurice Blanchot will have died.5 Thus Blanchot’s biographer became, as it were, his thanatographer: but he was well prepared for the role, given the constant meditations on death undertaken in Maurice Blanchot: a Critical Biography.6 It is as if this work were a rehearsal for the uttering of the words ‘Maurice Blanchot est mort’ which seem striking in their simplicity (and indeed were reiterated by Derrida in the title of his talk closing the colloquium, ‘“Maurice Blanchot est mort”’). When we come to translate them, however, we realize that there are in fact two possibilities in English: ‘Maurice Blanchot is dead’ and ‘Maurice Blanchot has died’.7 I have chosen the second translation due to its greater emphasis on a connection to the present, whether that of 2003 or of today. This connection to the present is very much alive, notwithstanding the death of Blanchot’s body—a physical death which he referred to, citing Hegel sympathetically, as ‘“the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water”.’8 In the remarks that follow I wish to point out some of the ways in which Maurice Blanchot has continued to live (or continued to die) since the publication of Bident’s work in 1998.9 These include the controversial publication of a dossier of photographs of Blanchot, the appearance of several volumes of articles and correspondence, and some major critical interventions. The purpose of these remarks will be to signal the existence of various fault-lines and debates, rather to enter into them: but even in doing so, it will be necessary to point out modes of reading that have remained conspicuous by their absence. * First, though, a few notes on translation, which has certainly proved to be a tool for re- thinking and re-reading as Bident’s work has been brought across into English. The sinuosity of French syntax has been apparent, particularly in the passages of the work when Bident demonstrates Blanchot’s metamorphic effects on one’s own thinking and writing (a writing that draws on a 1992 thesis on Blanchot, Bataille, and Duras entitled The Imaginary of Death—much of its thinking is clearly present in this 1998 biography). In any case, it is sometimes said of pre-modern English that—to parody this style—the words any way round one can arrange. But this is less the case nowadays; for its part, formal academic French lies somewhere between the two (this mode of writing is in evidence in much of this work; however some of the more straightforward biographical passages go to the other extreme, and adopt the short, fragmented sentences of journalistic French, which is very different). I have sometimes stretched English syntax and expression to reflect Bident’s academic French, but 2 on other occasions simplified matters.10 In short, it has been necessary to listen to the sometimes-competing demands of both readability and accuracy. The translation of tenses has proved a particular conundrum. Regarding historical events, Bident makes use of the possibility in French of referring to the past using the present tense: e.g. ‘Blanchot ne se contente pas de témoigner son accord.’ In English, whilst it is possible to use the present to refer to past historical events—‘Blanchot is not content with demonstrating that he is in agreement’—, to do so is a stretch, adding a sense of strangeness not present for a Francophone reader of Bident’s text. I have therefore used the past tense in English in such historical cases: ‘Blanchot was not content with demonstrating that he was in agreement.’ By contrast, with the French present tense when it relates to written texts— ‘Blanchot est Thomas au sens où Thomas n’est personne’—, there was the choice of either using the calm narration of the simple past—‘Blanchot was Thomas in the sense that Thomas was no-one’—or retaining the strange dislocation of the literary present: ‘Blanchot is Thomas in the sense that Thomas is no-one.’ I have most often chosen the latter, so as not to relegate Blanchot’s work to a reified, safely historical phenomenon, lacking the greater risks (and rewards) of the truth-claim made when writing is said to be speaking to us, here and now. So two different approaches have been used in these two different areas. But where to draw the line between history and writing, politics and literature, the possible and the impossible? This is nothing other than the question of Blanchot’s life and œuvre. The latter is not disconnected from his life, and concurrently, a great deal of his life had an intensive relationship to the strange, irruptive temporality of literature (above all the instant of his death in summer 1944, an episode I have retained in the present tense). There is a delicate balance, given the importance Blanchot accorded—or accords!—to erasing the distinction between life and œuvre. Thus, whilst events that are clearly historical have been rendered with the past tense, and discussions that are clearly literary with the present, there has inevitably been some shifting between the two. Sometimes the shifts come in quick succession or indeed within a single sentence (perhaps due to an adverbial phrase), when the balance moves from what was the case in the historical moment or context to what is discussed in the relevant Blanchot text.

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