Maurice Blanchot
Encyclopedia
Maurice Blanchot was a French
writer
, philosopher, and literary theorist
. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist
philosophers such as Jacques Derrida
.
and impossibility. The thread running through all his writing is the constant engagement with the 'question of literature', a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the profoundly strange experience of writing. For Blanchot, 'literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question' (Literature and the Right to Death).
Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé
in formulating his conception of literary language
as anti-realist and distinct from everyday experience. 'I say flower,' Mallarmé writes in Poetry in Crisis, 'and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.' In the everyday use of language, words are the vehicles of ideas. The word 'flower' means flower that refers to flowers in the world. No doubt it is possible to read literature in this way, but literature is more than this everyday use of language. For in literature 'flower' does not just mean flower but many things and it can only do so because the word is independent from what it signifies. This independence, which is passed over in the everyday use of language, is the negativity at the heart of language. The word means something because it negates the physical reality of the thing. Only in this way can the idea arise. The absence of the thing is made good by the presence of the idea. What the everyday use of language steps over to make use of the idea, literature remains fascinated by, the absence that makes it possible. Literary language, therefore, is a double negation, both of the thing and the idea. It is in this space that literature becomes possible where words take on a strange and mysterious reality of their own, and where also meaning and reference remain allusive and ambiguous.
Blanchot's best-known fictional works are Thomas the Obscure
, an unsettling récit ("[récit] is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen") about the experience of reading and loss; Death Sentence; Aminadab and The Most High (about a bureaucrat in a totalitarian state). His central theoretical works are "Literature and the Right to Death" (in The Work of Fire and The Gaze of Orpheus), The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, and The Writing of Disaster.
on the question of the philosopher's death, showing how literature and death are both experienced as anonymous passivity, an experience that Blanchot variously refers to as "the Neutral". Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot rejects the possibility of an authentic response to death, because he rejects the possibility of death, that is to say of the individual's experience of death, and thus rejects, in total, the possibility of understanding and "properly" engaging with it.
Blanchot also draws heavily from Franz Kafka
, and his fictional work (like his theoretical work) is shot through with an engagement with Kafka's writing.
Blanchot's work was also strongly influenced by his friends Georges Bataille
and Emmanuel Levinas
. Blanchot's later work in particular is influenced by Levinasian ethics and the question of responsibility to the Other
. On the other hand, Blanchot's own literary works, like the famous Thomas the Obscure
, heavily influenced Levinas' and Bataille's ideas about the possibility that our vision of reality is blurred because of the use of words (thus making everything you perceive automatically as abstract as words are). This search for the 'real' reality is illustrated by the works of Paul Celan
and Stéphane Mallarmé
.
The main intellectual biography of Blanchot is by Christophe Bident: Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible.
Blanchot studied philosophy at the University of Strasbourg
, where he became a close friend of the Lithuanian-born French phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas
. He then embarked on a career as a political journalist in Paris. From 1932 to 1940 he was editor of the mainstream, conservative daily the "Journal des débats". Early in the 1930s he contributed to a series of radical nationalist magazines, while also serving as editor of the fiercely anti-German daily "Le rempart" in 1933 and as editor of Paul Lévy's anti-Nazi polemical weekly "Aux écoutes". In 1936 and 1937 he also contributed to the far right monthly "Combat" and to the nationalist-syndicalist daily "L'Insurgé", which eventually ceased publication - largely as a result of Blanchot's intervention - because of the anti-semitism of some of its collaborators. Charges that Blanchot himself was the author of anti-semitic texts in the 1930s have yet to be properly proven and rely for the most part on unfounded allegations. (On the contrary, Blanchot is the known author of a number of texts attacking anti-semitism.) There is no dispute that Blanchot was nevertheless the author of a series of violently polemical articles attacking the government of the day and its confidence in the politics of the League of Nations, and warned persistently against the threat to peace in Europe posed by Nazi Germany.
In December 1940, he met Georges Bataille
, who had written strong anti-fascist articles in the thirties, and who would remain a close friend until his death in 1962. During the occupation of Paris, Blanchot worked in Paris. In order to support his family, he continued to work as a book reviewer for the Journal des débats from 1941 to 1944, writing for instance about such figures as Sartre and Camus, Bataille and Michaux, Mallarmé and Duras for a putatively Pétainist readership. In these reviews he laid the foundations for later French critical thinking, by examining the ambiguous rhetorical nature of language, and the irreducibility of the written word to notions of truth or falsity. He refused the editorship of the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Française
, for which, as part of an elaborate ploy, he had been suggested by Jean Paulhan
. He remained a bitter opponent of the fascist, anti-semitic novelist and journalist Robert Brasillach
, who was the principal leader of the pro-Nazi collaborationist movement, and was active in the Resistance. In June 1944, Blanchot was almost executed by a Nazi firing squad (as is recounted in his text The Instant of My Death).
Blanchot's political activities after the war shifted to the left. He is widely credited with being one of main authors of the important "Manifesto of the 121", named after the number of its signatories, who included Jean-Paul Sartre
, Robert Antelme
, Alain Robbe-Grillet
, Marguerite Duras
, René Char
, Henri Lefebvre
, Alain Resnais
, Simone Signoret
and others, which supported the rights of conscripts to refuse the draft in Algeria. The manifesto was crucial to the intellectual response to the war.
In May 1968, Blanchot once again emerged from personal obscurity, in support of the student protests. It was his sole public appearance after the war. Yet for fifty years he remained a consistent champion of modern literature and its tradition in French letters. During the later years of his life, he repeatedly wrote against the intellectual attraction to fascism, and notably against Heidegger's post-war silence over the Holocaust.
Blanchot authored over the course of his career more than thirty works of fiction, literary criticism, and philosophy. Up to the 1970s, he worked continually in his writing to break the barriers between what are generally perceived as different "genres" or "tendencies", and much of his later work moves freely between narration and philosophical investigation.
In 1983, Blanchot published La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community) in response to, and as a critical engagement with, The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy
's attempt to approach community in a non-religious, non-utilitarian and un-political exegesis.
He died on February 20, 2003 in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis
, Yvelines
, France
.
Many of Blanchot's principal translators into English established reputations as prose stylists and poets in their own right; some of the more well-known include Lydia Davis
, Paul Auster
, and Pierre Joris
.
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, philosopher, and literary theorist
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
philosophers such as Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
.
Works
Blanchot's work is not a coherent, all-encompassing 'theory', since it is a work founded on paradoxParadox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
and impossibility. The thread running through all his writing is the constant engagement with the 'question of literature', a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the profoundly strange experience of writing. For Blanchot, 'literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question' (Literature and the Right to Death).
Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
in formulating his conception of literary language
Literary language
A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...
as anti-realist and distinct from everyday experience. 'I say flower,' Mallarmé writes in Poetry in Crisis, 'and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.' In the everyday use of language, words are the vehicles of ideas. The word 'flower' means flower that refers to flowers in the world. No doubt it is possible to read literature in this way, but literature is more than this everyday use of language. For in literature 'flower' does not just mean flower but many things and it can only do so because the word is independent from what it signifies. This independence, which is passed over in the everyday use of language, is the negativity at the heart of language. The word means something because it negates the physical reality of the thing. Only in this way can the idea arise. The absence of the thing is made good by the presence of the idea. What the everyday use of language steps over to make use of the idea, literature remains fascinated by, the absence that makes it possible. Literary language, therefore, is a double negation, both of the thing and the idea. It is in this space that literature becomes possible where words take on a strange and mysterious reality of their own, and where also meaning and reference remain allusive and ambiguous.
Blanchot's best-known fictional works are Thomas the Obscure
Thomas the Obscure
Thomas the Obscure is a 1941 experimental novel by Maurice Blanchot, his debut novel. It was translated into English in 1973 by Robert D. Lamberton.The protagonists are Thomas and Anne who meet at a country hotel....
, an unsettling récit ("[récit] is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen") about the experience of reading and loss; Death Sentence; Aminadab and The Most High (about a bureaucrat in a totalitarian state). His central theoretical works are "Literature and the Right to Death" (in The Work of Fire and The Gaze of Orpheus), The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, and The Writing of Disaster.
Themes
Blanchot engages with HeideggerMartin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
on the question of the philosopher's death, showing how literature and death are both experienced as anonymous passivity, an experience that Blanchot variously refers to as "the Neutral". Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot rejects the possibility of an authentic response to death, because he rejects the possibility of death, that is to say of the individual's experience of death, and thus rejects, in total, the possibility of understanding and "properly" engaging with it.
Blanchot also draws heavily from Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, and his fictional work (like his theoretical work) is shot through with an engagement with Kafka's writing.
Blanchot's work was also strongly influenced by his friends Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
and Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Lévinas
Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator.-Life:Emanuelis Levinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania...
. Blanchot's later work in particular is influenced by Levinasian ethics and the question of responsibility to the Other
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
. On the other hand, Blanchot's own literary works, like the famous Thomas the Obscure
Thomas the Obscure
Thomas the Obscure is a 1941 experimental novel by Maurice Blanchot, his debut novel. It was translated into English in 1973 by Robert D. Lamberton.The protagonists are Thomas and Anne who meet at a country hotel....
, heavily influenced Levinas' and Bataille's ideas about the possibility that our vision of reality is blurred because of the use of words (thus making everything you perceive automatically as abstract as words are). This search for the 'real' reality is illustrated by the works of Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
and Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
.
The main intellectual biography of Blanchot is by Christophe Bident: Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible.
Pre-1945
Little was known until recently about much of Blanchot's life, and he long remained one of the most mysterious figures of contemporary literature.Blanchot studied philosophy at the University of Strasbourg
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....
, where he became a close friend of the Lithuanian-born French phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Lévinas
Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator.-Life:Emanuelis Levinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania...
. He then embarked on a career as a political journalist in Paris. From 1932 to 1940 he was editor of the mainstream, conservative daily the "Journal des débats". Early in the 1930s he contributed to a series of radical nationalist magazines, while also serving as editor of the fiercely anti-German daily "Le rempart" in 1933 and as editor of Paul Lévy's anti-Nazi polemical weekly "Aux écoutes". In 1936 and 1937 he also contributed to the far right monthly "Combat" and to the nationalist-syndicalist daily "L'Insurgé", which eventually ceased publication - largely as a result of Blanchot's intervention - because of the anti-semitism of some of its collaborators. Charges that Blanchot himself was the author of anti-semitic texts in the 1930s have yet to be properly proven and rely for the most part on unfounded allegations. (On the contrary, Blanchot is the known author of a number of texts attacking anti-semitism.) There is no dispute that Blanchot was nevertheless the author of a series of violently polemical articles attacking the government of the day and its confidence in the politics of the League of Nations, and warned persistently against the threat to peace in Europe posed by Nazi Germany.
In December 1940, he met Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
, who had written strong anti-fascist articles in the thirties, and who would remain a close friend until his death in 1962. During the occupation of Paris, Blanchot worked in Paris. In order to support his family, he continued to work as a book reviewer for the Journal des débats from 1941 to 1944, writing for instance about such figures as Sartre and Camus, Bataille and Michaux, Mallarmé and Duras for a putatively Pétainist readership. In these reviews he laid the foundations for later French critical thinking, by examining the ambiguous rhetorical nature of language, and the irreducibility of the written word to notions of truth or falsity. He refused the editorship of the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Française
Nouvelle Revue Française
La Nouvelle Revue Française is a literary magazine founded in 1909 by a group of intellectuals, including André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger...
, for which, as part of an elaborate ploy, he had been suggested by Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan was a French writer, literary critic and publisher, director of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1968. He was a member of the Académie Française...
. He remained a bitter opponent of the fascist, anti-semitic novelist and journalist Robert Brasillach
Robert Brasillach
Robert Brasillach was a French author and journalist. Brasillach is best known as the editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper which came to advocate various fascist movements and supported Jacques Doriot...
, who was the principal leader of the pro-Nazi collaborationist movement, and was active in the Resistance. In June 1944, Blanchot was almost executed by a Nazi firing squad (as is recounted in his text The Instant of My Death).
Post-1945
After the war Blanchot began working only as a novelist and literary critic. In 1947, Blanchot left Paris for the secluded village of Eze in the south of France, where he spent the next decade of his life. Like Sartre and other French intellectuals of the era, Blanchot avoided the academy as a means of livelihood, instead relying on his pen. Importantly, from 1953 to 1968, he published regularly in Nouvelle Revue Française. At the same time, he began a lifestyle of relative isolation, often not seeing close friends (like Levinas) for years, while continuing to write lengthy letters to them. Part of the reason for his self-imposed isolation (and only part of it - his isolation was closely connected to his writing and is often featured among his characters) was the fact that, for most of his life, Blanchot suffered from poor health.Blanchot's political activities after the war shifted to the left. He is widely credited with being one of main authors of the important "Manifesto of the 121", named after the number of its signatories, who included Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, Robert Antelme
Robert Antelme
Robert Antelme was a French writer. During the Second World War he was involved in the French Resistance and deported....
, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
, Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...
, René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
, Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for his work on dialectics, Marxism, everyday life, cities, and space.-Biography:...
, Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.He began...
, Simone Signoret
Simone Signoret
Simone Signoret was a French cinema actress often hailed as one of France's greatest movie stars. She became the first French person to win an Academy Award, for her role in Room at the Top...
and others, which supported the rights of conscripts to refuse the draft in Algeria. The manifesto was crucial to the intellectual response to the war.
In May 1968, Blanchot once again emerged from personal obscurity, in support of the student protests. It was his sole public appearance after the war. Yet for fifty years he remained a consistent champion of modern literature and its tradition in French letters. During the later years of his life, he repeatedly wrote against the intellectual attraction to fascism, and notably against Heidegger's post-war silence over the Holocaust.
Blanchot authored over the course of his career more than thirty works of fiction, literary criticism, and philosophy. Up to the 1970s, he worked continually in his writing to break the barriers between what are generally perceived as different "genres" or "tendencies", and much of his later work moves freely between narration and philosophical investigation.
In 1983, Blanchot published La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community) in response to, and as a critical engagement with, The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher.Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe...
's attempt to approach community in a non-religious, non-utilitarian and un-political exegesis.
He died on February 20, 2003 in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis
Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis
Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France.-Demographics:-References:*...
, Yvelines
Yvelines
Yvelines is a French department in the region of Île-de-France.-History:Yvelines was created from the western part of the defunct department of Seine-et-Oise on 1 January 1968 in accordance with a law passed on 10 January 1964 and a décret d'application from 26 February 1965.It gained the...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
.
Principally fiction or narrations (récits)
- Thomas l'ObscurThomas the ObscureThomas the Obscure is a 1941 experimental novel by Maurice Blanchot, his debut novel. It was translated into English in 1973 by Robert D. Lamberton.The protagonists are Thomas and Anne who meet at a country hotel....
, 1941 (Thomas the Obscure) - L'Arrêt de mortL'Arrêt de mortDeath Sentence is a philosophical novel by Maurice Blanchot. First published in 1948, it is his second complete work of fiction.-External links:...
, 1948 (Death Sentence) - Le Très-Haut, 1949 (The Most High)
- Le Pas au-delà, 1973 (The Step Not Beyond)
- L'Instant de ma mort, 1994 (The Instant of My Death)
Principally theoretical or philosophical works
- Faux Pas, 1943
- La Part du feu, 1949 (The Work of Fire)
- L'Espace littéraire, 1955 (The Space of Literature - main theoretical work)
- Le Livre à venir, 1959 (The Book to Come)
- L'Entretien infini, 1969 (The Infinite Conversation)
- L'Amitié, 1971 (Friendship)
- L'Ecriture du désastre, 1980 (The Writing of the Disaster)
- La Communauté inavouable, 1983 (The Unavowable Community)
- Une voix venue d'ailleurs, 2002 (A Voice from Elsewhere)
Many of Blanchot's principal translators into English established reputations as prose stylists and poets in their own right; some of the more well-known include Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is a contemporary American writer noted for her short stories. Davis is also a French translator, and has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Proust's Swann’s Way and Flaubert's Madame Bovary....
, Paul Auster
Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...
, and Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris, born in Strasbourg, France in 1946 and raised in Ettelbruck, Luxembourg, is a poet and translator. He left Luxembourg at nineteen and since then has lived in the US, Great Britain, North Africa and France...
.
Further reading
- Michael Holland (ed.), The Blanchot Reader (Blackwell, 1995)
- George QuashaGeorge QuashaGeorge Quasha is an artist and poet who works across media, exploring a principle in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound & music, installation, and performance...
(ed.), The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Station Hill, 1998) - Michel FoucaultMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside (Zone, 1989) - Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, 2000)
- Emmanuel LevinasEmmanuel LévinasEmmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator.-Life:Emanuelis Levinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania...
, On Maurice Blanchot in Proper Names (Stanford, 1996) - Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (Routledge, 1997)
- Gerald Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997)
- Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible(Paris: Champ Vallon, 1998) [ISBN 978-2-87673-253-7]
- Hadrien Buclin, Maurice Blanchot ou l'autonomie littéraire(Lausanne: Antipodes, 2011)
- ANTONIOLI Manola, Maurice Blanchot Fiction et théorie, Paris, Kimé, 1999.
- AYACHE Élie, L'écriture Postérieure, Paris, Complicités, 2006.
- Editions Complicités, Paris "Maurice Blanchot de proche en proche", collection Compagnie de Maurice Blanchot, 2007
- Editions Complicités "L'épreuve du temps chez Maurice Blanchot", collection Compagnie de Maurice Blanchot, 2005
- Editions Complicites "L'Oeuvre du Féminin dans l'écriture de Maurice Blanchot", collection Compagnie de Maurice Blanchot, 2004
- COLLIN Françoise, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'écriture, Paris, Gallimard, 1971.
- COOLS Arthur, Langage et Subjectivité vers une approche du différend entre Maurice Blanchot et Emmanuel Levinas, Louvain, Peeters, 2007.
- Critique n°229, 1966 (numéro spécial, textes de Jean Starobinsky, Georges Poulet, Levinas, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, René Char...).
- DERRIDA Jacques, Parages, Paris, Galilée, 1986.
- DERRIDA Jacques, Demeure. Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Galiléee, 1994.
- HILL Leslie, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, Londres, Routledge, 1997.
- HOPPENOT Eric dir., L'Œuvre du féminin dans l'écriture de Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Complicités, 2004.
- HOPPENOT Eric dir.,coordonné par Arthur COOLS, L'épreuve du temps chez Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Complicités, 2006.
- HOPPENOT Eric & MILON Alain dir., Levinas Blanchot penser la différence, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Paris X, 2008.
- LANNOY Jean-Luc, Langage, perception, mouvement. Blanchot et Merleau-Ponty, Grenoble, Jérôme Millon, 2008.
- LAPORTE Roger., l'Ancien, l'effroyablement Ancien in Études, Paris, P.O.L, 1990.
- Lignes n°11, 1990 (numéro spécial contenant tout le dossier de La revue internationale).
- MADAULE Pierre., Une tâche sérieuse ?, Paris, Gallimard, 1973, pp. 74–75
- Meschonnic, HenriHenri MeschonnicHenry Meschonnic was a French poet, linguist and theoretician of language, and essayist....
., Maurice Blanchot ou l’écriture hors langage in Poésie sans réponse (Pour la poétique V), Paris, Gallimard, 1978, pp. 78–134. - MICHAUD Ginette, Tenir au secret (Derrida, Blanchot), Paris, Galilée, 2006
- SCHULTE-NORDHOLT Anne-Lise, Maurice Blanchot, l'écriture comme expérience du dehors, Genève, Droz, 1995.
- WILHEM Daniel, Intrigues littéraires, Paris, Lignes/Manifeste, 2005.
- ZARADER Marlène, L'être et le neutre, à partir de Maurice Blanchot, Paris, Verdier, 2000.
External links
- Site Maurice Blanchot et ses contemporains
- Full Online Books by Blanchot - Google Books
- Espace Maurice Blanchot
- Death Sentence (Persian translation by Ahmad Parhizi)
- Timothy Clark: Literary Encyclopedia Entry
- Studio Cleo
- Stephen Mitchelmore: The Absent Voice
- Lars Iyer: The City and the Stars
- Lars Iyer: Our Responsibility: Blanchot's Communism
- Beatitude: Blanchot and Death
- Blanchot the extreme, An article by Philippe Sollers (fr)
- "A Voice from Elsewhere", trans. Charlotte Mandell, SUNY Press 2007
- Maurice Blanchot at 100 by Pierre Joris, one of Blanchot's English translators (he translated "The Unavowable Community")
- Site de la collection Résonances de Maurice blanchot
- Artelittera,plateforme de téléchargement de chapitres de livres Many chapters of books about Maurice Blanchot to upload - COMMERCIAL SITE