Political Writings, 1953-1993Maurice Blanchot is a towering yet enigmatic figure in twentieth-century French thought. A lifelong friend of Levinas, he had a major influence on Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, and many others. Both his fiction and his criticism played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written, especially in its intense concern with the question of writing as such. Never an academic, he published most of his critical work in periodicals and led a highly private life. Yet his writing included an often underestimated public and political dimension. This posthumously published volume collects his political writings from 1953 to 1993, from the French-Algerian War and the mass movements of May 1968 to postwar debates about the Shoah and beyond. A large number of the essays, letters, and fragments it contains were written anonymously and signed collectively, often in response to current events. The extensive editorial work done for the original French edition makes a major contribution to our understanding of Blanchot's work. The political stances Blanchot adopts are always complicated by the possibility that political thought remains forever to be discovered. He reminds us throughout his writings both how facile and how hard it is to refuse established forms of authority. The topics he addresses range from the right to insubordination in the French-Algerian War to the construction of the Berlin Wall and repression in Eastern Europe; from the mass movements of 1968 to personal responses to revelations about Heidegger, Levinas, and Robert Antelme, among others. When read together, these pieces form a testament to what political writing could be: not merely writing about the political or politicizing the written word, but unalterably transforming the singular authority of the writer and his signature.
Cet ouvrage, publi dans le cadre d'un programme d'aide la publication b n ficie du soutien financier du minist re des Affaires trang s et du Service culturel de l'ambassade de France aux Etats-Unis, ainsi que de l'appui de FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). |
Contents
Translators Note | ix |
Affirming the Rupture XXX1 | xxxi |
Chronology | lvii |
An Approach to Communism Needs Values 3 78 | 3 |
Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian | 15 |
The Declaration is not a protest manifesto | 22 |
Interrogation with the judge | 29 |
Maurice Blanchot to JeanPaul Sartre | 36 |
The First Issue | 85 |
On the Movement | 106 |
Refusing the Established Order | 117 |
Do Not Forget | 124 |
Yes Silence Is Necessary for Writing | 130 |
Our Clandestine Companion | 144 |
The Ascendant Word or Are We Still Worthy of Poetry? | 153 |
Encounters On the Resistance and May 68 | 161 |
The gravity of the project | 56 |
The Course of the World | 67 |
Berlin | 73 |
Tracts of the StudentWriter Action Committee Sorbonne | 79 |
Letter to Blandine Jeanson | 167 |
I think it suits a writer better On Nationalism | 173 |
199 | |