Maurice Blanchot shaped French theory while almost never appearing in public
In June 1944 Maurice Blanchot came within moments of being shot by a Nazi firing squad, an episode he retold half a century later. The surviving writer then withdrew from view for decades, yet his strange essays on death and language fed directly into Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze.
Born in the village of Quain on 22 September 1907, Blanchot studied philosophy at Strasbourg from 1926. There he held monarchist views and formed a lifelong friendship with Emmanuel Levinas, who urged him to read Heidegger's Being and Time, an experience he called an intellectual shock. He finished a Paris thesis on the ancient sceptics in 1930 and turned to political journalism, editing the conservative Journal des débats from 1932 to 1940. His 1930s writing appeared in nationalist and far-right papers, yet he also edited anti-Nazi titles and warned repeatedly about the danger Germany posed to European peace.
During the occupation he kept reviewing books to support his family, and in those pieces began exploring how writing resists being judged simply true or false. He met Georges Bataille in December 1940, turned down the editorship of the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Française, and worked with the Resistance. After the war he lived by his pen rather than teaching, retreating in 1947 to the village of Èze and later rarely seeing even close friends, partly because of chronic ill health, though he wrote them long letters.
His politics moved left. He is credited as a principal author of the Manifesto of the 121, which defended French conscripts' right to refuse service in Algeria. May 1968, when he backed the student protests, was his only public appearance after the war, and in later years he criticised Heidegger's silence about the Holocaust.
Across more than thirty books he blurred fiction and philosophy. Borrowing from Mallarmé and Hegel, he argued that naming a flower replaces the real bloom with an absence, and that literature dwells on that gap. Reversing Heidegger, he saw death as the impossibility of every possibility. Lydia Davis and Paul Auster were among his translators. He died on 20 February 2003.
Source: Maurice Blanchot
