Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was one of the most important writers
of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary
criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over
several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works
such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of
the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of
the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the
traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. As a journalist and
political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted
uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews
and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion.
These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated
ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions.
He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May '68
revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian
war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being
executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in
far-right circles in the '30s. Now translated into English,
Christophe Bident's magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical
biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot's
itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with
the writer's close friends. But the book is both a biography and
far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity,
Bident's book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to
this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his
thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and
speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close
companion and friend to philosophy. The book is also a historical
work, unpacking the 'transformation of convictions' of an author
who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the
1950s and after. Bident's extensive archival research explores the
complex ways that Blanchot's work enters into engagement with his
contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in
which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille,
Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques
Derrida. Finally, the book traces the strong links between
Blanchot's life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to
anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot's life itself
becomes an oeuvre-becomes a literature that bears the traces of
that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident's
sophisticated reading of Blanchot's life together with his work
offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts,
whether from Blanchot's detractors or from his champions, of a life
too easily sensationalized. This definitive biography of a seminal
figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned
with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.
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