Published in France in 1943, "Faux Pas" is the first collection of
Maurice Blanchot's essays on literature and language, consisting of
fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in
literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that
defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays--like
those collected in the other five books of criticism published over
several decades--have established Blanchot as the most lucid and
powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century.
Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and
modern, both literary and theoretical texts, they have attained the
status of model readings for authors as diverse as da Vinci and
Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust, Moliere, Goethe, and Mallarme.
However, the book is not a miscellaneous collection of exquisite
essays. The first section of the volume, "From Anguish to
Language," indicates the relative unity of its trajectory and its
special moment in the development of Blanchot's thought. "Anguish"
was a prominent notion for the existentialist philosophies of the
period of his first work, and in this book Blanchot reflects on the
necessary transition from the paradoxes of anguish to a focus on
the paradoxes of language. He does so without ever betraying the
affective tensions that attach themselves to linguistic utterances,
but he also insists that the pathos of anxiety is, in the last
resort, comical. Whoever writes "I am lonely" can judge himself to
be quite comical, as he evokes his solitude by addressing a reader
and using means that make it impossible to be alone.
This comedy of language is retraced in Blanchot's intensely
luminous essays on poetry and narration, on silence and symbolism,
the novel and morals, the stranger, the enigma, time, and the very
possibility of literature in the works of Blake, Balzac, Rimbaud,
and Gide, Bergson and Brice Parain, Rilke and Bataille, Sartre,
Camus, Queneau, and so many others.
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