Fordham University Press Chapter Title: Introduction: “Affirming the Rupture” Chapter Author(s): ZAKIR PAUL Book Title: Political Writings, 1953-1993 Published by: Fordham University Press. (2010) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c5cj89.5 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Fordham University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Writings, 1953-1993 This content downloaded from 74.108.50.155 on Wed, 11 Dec 2019 02:23:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction ‘‘Affirming the Rupture’’ ZAKIR PAUL ‘‘Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic. His life is entirely devoted to liter- ature and to its own silence.’’ These two laconic phrases replace the tradi- tional biographical note in the majority of Blanchot’s works published as French paperbacks. Given that they omit any mention of his political writ- ings, and given the various self-perpetuating myths surrounding his work, the reader might justifiably wonder what brought a novelist and critic whose life was ‘‘entirely devoted to literature’’ to write texts of a political nature in the first place. We are given some clues in one of the last letters Blanchot sent to Georges Bataille, on January 24, 1962, in which he com- ments upon the proximity between Rene´ Char, Bataille, and himself. Im- plicitly placing himself between Char and Bataille, Blanchot ascribes their differences not to a varied temperament for ‘‘politics’’ but rather to diver- gent responses to pressures internal to the enterprise of writing. He goes on to describe dual forces that he has come to recognize in his own work: I do not at all think that an interest or disinterest in ‘‘politics’’ is at stake; this is merely a consequence and perhaps a superficial one. For my part, . I have seen better for some time now the double impulse [mouvement], necessary yet nonetheless irreconcilable, to which I must always respond. One (to express myself in an extremely vulgar and simplifying way) is the passion, the realization, and the speech of the whole [tout] in dialectical accomplishment; the other is essentially nondialectic, does not concern it- self at all with unity and does not tend toward power (toward the possible). These two vectors, which have opposite directions—one totalizing and dialectical, the other fragmentary and nondialectical—produce different discourses, as the letter goes on to explain: To this double impulse responds a double language, and for all language a double gravity: one is a speech of confrontation, opposition, and negation, meant to reduce any opposition so that the truth as a whole may be affirmed xxxi This content downloaded from 74.108.50.155 on Wed, 11 Dec 2019 02:23:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ................. 17727$ INTR 06-28-10 11:32:22 PS PAGE xxxi xxxii Introduction in its silent equality (a path the demand of thought must take). But the other is the speech that speaks before all, and outside of all, speech that is always first, without concord or confrontation, and ready to welcome the unknown, the stranger (where the poetic demand passes). One names the possible and wants the possible. The other responds to the impossible. Be- tween these two impulses, which are both necessary and incompatible, there is a constant tension, often very difficult to bear, and truly, unbear- able. But one can renounce neither one out of bias, nor the measureless search that imposes their necessity, and the necessity of uniting the incom- patible, upon humans.1 This statement of Blanchot’s conception of writing seems quite distant from the devotion to literature and its distinctive silence suggested by the two enigmatic phrases inscribed in his books. Here the whole is cleft in two, into ‘‘naming the possible’’ (the ‘‘demand of thought’’) and ‘‘respond- ing to the impossible’’ (the ‘‘poetic demand’’). It is between these two poles that Blanchot oscillates as a writer. They are related to the demand for a double language: a totalizing language of contestation and refusal, on the one hand, and a fragmentary language of hospitality and welcome, on the other. The texts collected in this volume are not exempt from the impulse to these two incommensurable languages, and often enough they comprise the very search that tries to bring them together. For Blanchot, ‘‘political writing’’ has little to do with lending one’s signature to a cause as a writer; rather, it is an attempt to find the impossible language that would allow one to refuse and contest certain political events while watch- fully preserving the possibility of others. The texts collected in this volume testify to the unbearable tension between the necessary and incompatible impulses that course through Blanchot’s postwar political writings from 1953 to 1993. These dates are largely arbitrary, given that Blanchot’s political writings span from 1931 to 2002, if we consider the many manifestos to which he continued to lend his signature until his death.2 To be sure, there are many reasons why this book should not exist in its current form. It could be argued that, since many of these texts were written anonymously and signed collectively, to assemble and publish them under Blanchot’s name erroneously attributes them to a single authority. Moreover, the now fa- miliar trajectory of Blanchot from a nationalism of the right to an interna- tionalism of the left cannot be fully reconstructed until the interwar This content downloaded from 74.108.50.155 on Wed, 11 Dec 2019 02:23:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ................. 17727$ INTR 06-28-10 11:32:23 PS PAGE xxxii ‘‘Affirming the Rupture’’ xxxiii journalism is made available. This effort is already underway with the re- cent publication of all the uncollected literary articles Blanchot wrote for the Journal des de´bats between 1941 and 1944.3 The majority of the politi- cal texts that Blanchot published earlier in the newspapers and journals of the extreme right—particularly Combat and L’Insurge´—have yet to be reprinted in French, although four exemplary texts were published and discussed in the final volume of a triple issue of Gramma by Michael Hol- land and Patrick Rousseau in 1976.4 What such attempts, along with Christophe Bident’s monumental bio- graphical essay Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible (Maurice Blanchot: In- visible Partner) and Leslie Hill’s Blanchot, Extreme Contemporary, have made clear is the complexity of the place where Blanchot began his political journalism. The milieu of Catholic nonconformism, notably around the young dissidents of the Action franc¸aise led by Thierry Maulnier, was dou- bled by a close connection to Jewish nationalist groups around Paul Le´vy and the weeklies Le rempart and Aux e´coutes. Blanchot’s position was one of contestation: anticapitalist, antiparliamentarian, anticommunist, anti- German and anti-Hitler. As early as 1933, he contributed articles denoun- cing the establishment of labor camps and the ‘‘barbarous persecution of the Jews.’’5 In addition to an underlying desire for a national spiritual revolution that would countervail what he then perceived to be the dual pitfalls of social democracy and communism, three major interdependent concerns have been identified in Blanchot’s interwar journalism.6 The first is the overwhelming necessity of opposing Hitler. The second is his growing distress at the undermining of national sovereignty by French foreign pol- icy starting in 1924. In his view, French politicians were increasingly aban- doning diplomatic traditions in favor of vacuous internationalism, as embodied by Aristide Briand’s support for the League of Nations. Finally, he opposed the ‘‘abstract and juridical conception of politics’’ that allowed the leaders of the Third Republic to identify with the League of Nations in the first place, an identification that raised the threat of war by decreas- ing the defense of national interest. As he wrote in Le rempart in May 1933, ‘‘One of the main errors of democracy is to have defamed force. It has done everything, to the greatest extent, to weaken the law [le droit].’’7 Blanchot conceives both the foundation and the defense of law as being inextricably bound up with the use of force. The government’s weakening of force only intensifies the necessity of political action. And yet Blanchot’s triad of concerns does not in the least amount to a political program. As Hill points out, there is no element of a future program beyond the will This content downloaded from 74.108.50.155 on Wed, 11 Dec 2019 02:23:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ................. 17727$ INTR 06-28-10 11:32:24 PS PAGE xxxiii xxxiv Introduction to depose an incompetent government. This is where ‘‘a call to just vio- lence, to insurrection,’’ is invoked and aporetically declared ‘‘the most sa- cred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.’’8 Whatever future could follow such an act of ‘‘just violence’’ is apprehended ‘‘almost exclu- sively in terms of the self-presence of the nation, that is, beyond represen- tation, the nation’s self-identity and proximity to itself as political subject and origin.’’9 The difficulties of selecting ‘‘representative’’ texts from such a nonrep- resentational context and presenting them as an appendix to the current volume would have been manifold, if not insurmountable.