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CounterPunch
March 8,
2003
Radical Politics and the Writer
Maurice Blanchot
(1907-2003)
By NORMAN MADARASZ
French writer, essayist and novelist, Maurice
Blanchot died on Thursday February 20 at the age of 95. In a
fantasy world his death would have gone almost unnoticed. Only
in a fantasy, nonetheless. For Blanchot was the most enigmatic
writer of 20th century France. And, in an untypical sense, he
was one of its greatest.
After frenetic activity as a rightwing
political journalist in his youth, Blanchot leaned toward the
novel and nationalist revolution, only to join the French Resistance
during WWII. In the ensuing decades, his galvanizing communism
led him away from fiction and toward the essay idiom to forge
one of the most profound oeuvres in French literature. He published
little since the nineteen-eighties. Yet his literary presence
draped an unfathomed cape of darkness over the course of what
we call here: 'French poststructural thought'; and there: philosophy
tout court.
Next to Jean-Paul Sartre, Blanchot's
incarnation as a writer turned an entire generation of philosophers
and intellectuals toward musings on literature. Alain Badiou
unequivocally labeled his effect on philosophy as one of literary
fetishism. His work shrunk philosophy into the meandering lines
of ambiguity in which truth is less determined as a value than
as descriptive energy. Its consequence was to make the 'void'
into an ever-evolving concept, regardless of its perpetual withdrawal.
To be sure, the metaphysical extremism
characteristic of Blanchot's deepest essays is a Western study
in philosophical fanaticism. From the care with which his circle
kept him screened from media exposure, to his elation for political
extremism first of the Right, then of the Left, Blanchot's truth
has lain in the shelter that a shadow affords. But it also made
analysis succumb to the confusion of a place from which there
is barely a return.
In the heat of the events of May-June
1968 in Paris, the author described his silhouette venturing
into the assemblies of a student occupied Sorbonne. At a moments'
resolve, Michel Foucault had hoisted a black flag in celebration
of the fall of classical France. A passing non-encounter with
Foucault embodied the terms according to which Blanchot struck
his key concept of the dehors, the outside, into the nature
of friendship itself. Yet only in writing did the silhouette
he carry for his readers in real life end up endowed with a body.
Writing for him was a spiritual, radical act of creation. As
the author's self vanished in the text, events arose into the
obscure presence of the type of act from which consecration is
unleashed.
In the 1960s, Blanchot's written art
was primarily one in search of spatial limits. His individualistic
and uncompromising undertaking into the drift lines of Holderlin's
poetry and Kafka's world on a pinhead best embodied the approach
and immersion he sought of the infinite. This was no mathematical
journey, regardless of how 'Platonic' a mathematician is willing
to be. Blanchot's infinite was the lived experience of death
in L'Espace literaire (translated by Ann Shmock in 1989
as The
Space of Literature). It swung stoically to and fro on
a painful line by which the utterly outside was made accessible.
That this was no unreachable absolute was underscored by the
openness of his prose to any reader. Its experience was nonetheless
reserved for the slow tempo of reading, and for readers alone.
To say that you are confronted to your
own death in reading Blanchot is merely to proclaim the desirable.
A pattern of thought emptied to the extreme of categories and
models is a desert landscape where only scorpions thrive. Yet
even their contours fail to resist the kind of depletion the
mind performs at its limits.
Nor was there perhaps an essayist as
sadistic with the "infinite interview" compelled onto
a writer in his relationship with the tools of art. Beneath the
frustration with the timeless inertia of Blanchot's death concept,
largely emanating from the misleading pressures of daily life,
lies a reading experience unrivalled in its proximity to the
reader's own dissolution. In it converge the desires of an atheist
meditation.
Brought up in a devout Catholic family,
Blanchot's rejection of God appears to bear out all margins of
faith. His literary extremism stretched between a step and a
breath. But the political extremism of his youth often moved
closer to a strike and a bomb. It is what one gets when depriving
analysis from the realities of class and sectorial struggle,
technocratic interest, the lies of international finance, emphatic
corporatism and religious tows and trends, not to mention consumerist
delusions and free market folly.
Strikingly, when some of these points
of attack were part of Blanchot's politics, he remained on the
far-right. When his writing conjured them away as profoundly
corrupted thought, his projection of egalitarian community grew
ever more concrete.
None of this belies the fact that the
beauty of Blanchot's prose was obtained only at the cost of having
embraced political extremism. Beauty's sustenance prevails in
writing after writing primarily in the wake of the memory and
strength of radical collective invention. For Blanchot truth
circulates within a compass, but the geography it measures only
ends up in terror when the writer fails art by forcing it to
coexist with politics.
This is how and why his question remains
ours as well. Is the bridge between poles and extremes the primary
access to deepest knowledge? And doesn't such knowledge compel
us as political and moral beings to have to seek social justice
and de-concentration of wealth by means that keep adjourning
the need to finally utter: let's get the deed done by any means
necessary?
Surely Blanchot's profoundly unwavering
friendship with philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is testimony to
the depths to which brotherly love prevails, unmoved by offence
and innovated upon the tensions relationships instigate. To Levinas'
ethical disposition, Blanchot offered radical subversion. To
Levinas' Talmudic dissolution of European Christian philosophy,
Blanchot, for a time, embraced anti-Semitism as the nihilistic
end of Western thought-at least in the representation it expressed
up to the Shoah. In the concept each thinker held of 'ends' lay
renewal in resistance, thought and the written form. And each
struggled consciously with the "errors" that extremism
seems often to bring out of necessity-to which neither were immune.
Blanchot's political resistance to modern
capitalism took hold at the moment when thought and art reach
their breaking point in the rule of mediocrity. The preeminence
of death as a motive for truth seemed to consciously reject the
idea of any commitment that sought to avoid confrontation as
a means to gain knowledge. This tension is what keeps shaping
our struggles today.
Devotion and loyalty, intrigue and death,
Blanchot's literature was ultimately a fanatical commitment to
breaking down politics as the destiny of humankind as so many
splintered groupings. Thrown into collectives and manifolds,
the outside is a moment reached only when the individual effects
self-dissolution. Yet, no matter how the ontological rigor of
his prose may have transformed many of his readers, it has also
left us deprived of the tie to political innovation. Or, at least,
did his logic entail that such innovation lay outside of what
can be imagined within the framework of contemporary democracies.
So is it that in his extremism Blanchot's
politics were beyond all else a devotion to liberty and difference.
He rejected the politics of victimization issuing from the privatized,
corporate collectivities fostered by management theory in the
latter's lofty attempts at coining the limits of efficient group
dynamics. And he showed not only little contempt for all the
privatized pseudo-scientific self-help therapies born in its
wake.
This is how the knowledge of the outside
to where Blanchot has brought us may ultimately be one from which
the rule of political moderation over extremism wields a most
subtle sword. Far from betraying his faith in extremism, this
conclusion only underscores how it is through a lack of compromise
in relation to truth that the manipulation the country now faces
must be dealt with. Radical collective innovation based on structurally
egalitarian models in art as in politics summons the truth like
no other stance.
In the end, Blanchot's lesson is that
one has to choose, and that one has no choice but to choose.
A new breed of necessity is what others misrepresent as destiny.
Few choices lead to effect. The greatness of Blanchot's work
is that effects made choice itself a radical necessity for art.
Far from the atheist saint his literary silhouette projects,
Blanchot's memory prevails in its most accomplished form as a
philosophical demon altering the terms on which communities may
match the expectations and demands of crowds.
Norman Madarasz,
a regular contributor to CounterPunch, lives in Brazil. He can
be reached at: normanmadarasz2@hotmail.com
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