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Blanchot Romantique
Le Romantisme et aprs en France
Romanticism and after in France
Volume 17
a series founded by Alan Raitt

and edited by Patrick McGuinness
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (eds)
Blanchot Romantique
A Collection of Essays
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien

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Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Blanchot romantique : a collection of essays / [edited by] John McKeane

and Hannes Opelz.
p. cm. -- (Romanticism and after in France ; 17)
English, with some French.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0353-0059-8 (alk. paper)
1. Blanchot, Maurice--Criticism and interpretation. 2.
Romanticism--France. 3. French literature--20th century--History and
criticism. I. McKeane, John, 1984- II. Opelz, Hannes, 1980-
PQ2603.L3343Z527 2010
843.912--dc22
2010034432
ISSN 1422-4896
ISBN 978-3-0353-0059-8
Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2011

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Printed in Germany
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations xi
HANNES OPELZ and JOHN McKEANE

Introduction: The Absolute, the Fragmentary 1
Legacies (I): Theory 55
GISLE BERKMAN
Une histoire dans le romantisme? Maurice Blanchot et lAthenum 57
CHRISTOPHE BIDENT
Le Neutre est-il une notion romantique? 75
YVES GILONNE
LAuto-rflexivit du sublime 93
Legacies (II): Praxis 107
MICHAEL HOLLAND
Blanchot and Jean Paul 109
vi
SERGEY ZENKIN
Transformations of Romantic Love 129
JRMIE MAJOREL
Au moment voulu: de mlancolie en mlancolie 141
Twentieth-Century Conversations in Romanticism 153
IAN MACLACHLAN
Blanchot and the Romantic Imagination 155
JAKE WADHAM
Blanchot, Benjamin, and the Absence of the Work 173
HECTOR KOLLIAS
Unworking Ironys Work: Blanchot and de Man Reading Schlegel 191
Romantic Fragmentations 209
LESLIE HILL
A Fine Madness: Translation, Quotation, the Fragmentary 211
MAEBH LONG
A Step Askew: Ironic Parabasis in Blanchot 233
Political Romanticism 245
MARTIN CROWLEY
Even now, now, very now 247
vii
IAN JAMES
The Narrow Margin 263
PARHAM SHAHRJERDI
crire la rvolution 275
Appendix 297
Bibliography 299
Notes on Contributors 307
Index 313
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank for their generous support of the conference and
of this volume: the Department of French (Cambridge University), the
Kathleen Bourne Fund (St Annes College, Oxford), the Maison franaise
dOxford, the Society for French Studies, St Johns College (Cambridge),
and the Sub-Faculty of French (Oxford University). We also thank all
those who contributed, in whatever way, to the conference, volume, or
both. We are grateful to the Houghton Library (Harvard University),
ditions Gallimard, and Cidalia Da Silva Blanchot for giving us permission
to reproduce the proofs of the page from LEntretien infini appended to
this volume. There is not sufficient space to thank all those who deserve it,
but we reserve particular thanks, for their attention and patience, for Lucy
Burns, Mike Holland, Patrick McGuinness, and Ian Maclachlan.
Abbreviations
Unless indicated otherwise, all references to the writings of Maurice

Blanchot will be given in the text, using the abbreviations listed alpha-
betically below. Abbreviations have also been given for frequently cited
secondary sources. Place of publication for items in French is Paris, unless
specified otherwise.
Works by Maurice Blanchot
A LAmiti (Gallimard, 1971).

AC Aprs coup, prcd par Le Ressassement ternel (Minuit,
1983).
AM LArrt de mort (Gallimard, 1948), n. edn 1977 (s. LImaginaire).
CI La Communaut inavouable (Minuit, 1983).
CL Chroniques littraires du Journal des dbats, avril 1941aot
1944, ed. posth. by Christophe Bident (Gallimard, s. Les
Cahiers de la NRF, 2007).
DH Le Dernier homme (nouvelle version) (Gallimard, 1977), n. edn
1992 (s. LImaginaire).
ED Lcriture du dsastre (Gallimard, 1980).
EI LEntretien infini (Gallimard, 1969).
EL LEspace littraire (Gallimard, 1955), n. edn 1988 (s. Folio
Essais).
EP crits politiques: Guerre dAlgrie, Mai 68, etc. (19581993), ed.
posth. (Lignes/Lo Scheer, 2003).
FJ La Folie du jour (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973), n. edn
2002 (Gallimard).
xii Abbreviations
FP Faux pas (Gallimard, 1943), n. edn 1971.

IM LInstant de ma mort (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), n.
edn 2002 (Gallimard).
IQ Les Intellectuels en question (Fourbis, 1996), n. edn 2000 (Tours:
Farrago).
LS Lautramont et Sade (Minuit, 1949), n. augm. edn 1963.
LV Le Livre venir (Gallimard, 1959), n. edn 2003 (s. Folio
Essais).
MV Au moment voulu (Gallimard, 1951), n. edn 1993 (s.
LImaginaire).
PAD Le Pas au-del (Gallimard, 1973).
PF La Part du feu (Gallimard, 1949), reprinted 2005.
TO Thomas lObscur (nouvelle version) (Gallimard, 1950), n. edn
1992 (s. LImaginaire).
VV Une voix venue dailleurs (Ulysse-fin de sicle, 1992), n. augm.
edn 2002 (Gallimard, s. Folio Essais).
Other Works
AL Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, LAbsolu lit-

traire: thorie de la littrature du romantisme allemand (Le
Seuil, s. Potique, 1978).
KA XVIII Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by
Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols (Munich/Paderborn: Schningh,
1958), XVIII: Philosophische Lehrjahre: 17961806 (1963).
KS Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, ed. by Wolfdietrich
Rasch (Munich: Hanser, 1964).
SW I Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. by Michael Jennings
et al., 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
19962003), I: 19131926 (1996).
Hannes Opelz and John McKeane
Introduction: The Absolute, the Fragmentary
Pas au-del de la religion: de la Littrature et de la politique, et mme

de ce quon nomme si emphatiquement lthique.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LAgonie de la religion1
Opening an Epoch
Blanchot romantique? Our title could perhaps be greeted with surprise,

and certainly with a question. On one level, its provocation must remain
sterile, unless one abolishes all literary-historical perspective. On another
level, Romanticism does seem to singularly resist such a perspective. Whilst
it refers of course to a circumscribed period or atmosphere, Romanticism
also stands for the demand whether nave, necessary, or both that such
circumscriptions be abandoned, in favour of an all-consuming, unreason-
able, infinite or absolute mode of literary experience, whereby the poetic,
the philosophical, and the political (if such substantives can register some
of the broader stakes raised by our title) enter into an entirely new kind of
relation. It is, in brief, the presence of this demand that this volume aims
to measure: in Blanchots work, in contemporary work on Blanchot, and
as such, in what we know today as criticism, literary theory, the roman,
the fragmentary, the neutre, the subject, community, affect, and revolu-
1 In Revue des sciences humaines, 253 ( JanuaryMarch 1999), 22729 (p.229).

2 Hannes Opelz and John McKeane
tion to mention only some of the major topics explored in the essays
collected here.
If there is a sense in which Romanticism may still be notre navet
(AL, 27; original emphasis), as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy argued in the late 1970s, perhaps it can be located in what Lacoue-
Labarthe termed la notion romantique (et spcifiquement romantique) de
mlange2 (his emphasis). And if Romanticism implies specifically [une]
poque du mlange,3 that epoch, by all accounts, is still wide open: it goes
today under the name of interdisciplinary studies. In an age in which the
combination of different modes of thought and writing is sought more
fervently than any single thought or writing, what Blanchot offers is not
just a unique way of relating literature, philosophy, and politics, but also a
way of keeping vigil over the very modalities of relation, over the irreducible
distance or space separating/relating one form of discourse from/to another.
Such a vigilance is, perhaps, precisely what Romanticism gains from an
encounter with Blanchot. In any event, the question of how Romanticism
and those in its wake seek to respond to this demand to draw together the
literary, the philosophical, and the political, is one of the more enduring
questions Blanchots writings would have us consider and consider with
the gravity of an almost ethical decision.
Such are, at least, some of the more general considerations that a
Romantic experience of literature lays bare in the vicinity of Maurice
Blanchot. That this experience owes much to a German tradition and
that such a debt had to be negotiated alongside other contending tradi-
tions raises further questions, to which we shall have to return. But what
can be sensed from the outset, regardless of cultural genealogies, is that
Romanticism in Blanchot forces us to recognize that literature is not
about producing des uvres belles, ni de rpondre un idal esthtique
but involves instead une exprience qui intresse le tout de la vie et le
tout de ltre (PF, 15354). In fact, it seems that through this recognition
2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Prsentation, Potique, 21 (1975), 12 (p.1).

3 Ibid.
Romanticism marks the inaugural site of a mode of writing that does not
only create but does so in view of a total Work (be it in the form of an
impossible roman eroded by what Blanchot famously terms dsuvre-
ment), and therefore that Romanticism is not just an island of gloriously
uncontrolled inspiration amidst a history of art or literature, but rather
the tectonic jolts of an experience mobilizing sthetics, philosophy, poli-
tics, history, life, being, and perhaps much more than this: something, or
better, anything, that cannot be named.
We continue to record today the aftershocks of this experience. Each of
the fourteen chapters of this volume explores, in its own way, the implica-
tions of using Blanchot as a seismograph for Romantic, counter-Romantic
or post-Romantic tremors. Accounts are given of Blanchots approach
to literary imagination, language, irony, self-reflexivity, and the sublime;
they range from Jean Paul and Hlderlin to Blake and Frhromantik (the
Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schleiermacher, etc.). Whats more, these writ-
ers and poets are set in relation to philosophical readings of reason and its
critique, as they figure in, for example, Kant, Fichte, or Hegel.4 The chapters
also propose counterpoints to Blanchots thought, relating it to other key
twentieth-century thinkers, from Walter Benjamin to Paul de Man, from
Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and
Jean-Luc Nancy. Moreover, the names, briefly though pointedly evoked
in this volume, of Albert Bguin, Roger Ayrault, Antoine Berman, Jean-
Marie Schaeffer, and Olivier Schefer are also a sign of what an encounter
with and, in some cases, a resistance to a Romantic Blanchot might
hold for specialist debates in France on German Romanticism. Finally, a
crucial aspect of reading Romanticism over Blanchots shoulder (and of
reading Blanchot over Romanticisms shoulder) to which this volume aims
to draw attention is Blanchots own practice as a writer of novels, rcits,
4 This latter characteristic is forcefully underlined by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in

LAbsolu littraire: le lieu de naissance du romantisme [dIna] se situait dans la phi-
losophie (AL, 374). This is also the line of enquiry taken up by Simon Critchley in
his Very Little Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge,
1997), pp.85138 (p.88).
and fragmentary texts; it is addressed here with regard to both theme

(the transformations of love in LArrt de mort (1948) or the two versions
of melancholy in Au moment voulu (1951), for instance) and genre (the
relationship between the idyll and the novel, for example, or between the
fragment and what Blanchot would call lexigence fragmentaire). This
volume, then, not only proposes the Romantics as decisive interlocutors
for Blanchot, ranking alongside better-known ones such as Kafka, Rilke,
or Char; it also proposes that the various Romanticisms examined in this
collection, by figuring prominently in the work of one of the past centu-
rys most indispensable writers, act as a source of what is challenging and
important in modern literary studies.
We should not be led to believe, however, that Romanticism has
become any more or any less relevant in the three decades since Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy published their seminal LAbsolu
littraire: thorie de la littrature du romantisme allemand (1978), firmly
under the sign of Blanchot.5 As Novalis once wrote, [n]ature and insight
into nature arise at the same time, just as antiquity and knowledge of antiq-
uity; for one makes a great error if one believes that the ancients exist. Only
now is antiquity starting to arise []. It is not actually given to us it is not
already there; rather, it must first be produced by us.6 Our current paradox
is perhaps this: to believe that the Romantics exist is to subsume ones own
5 Amongst other instances: Blanchot, et quelques autres [] nous ont permis de lire
les textes du romantisme (AL, 421). Cf. also the 1975 special issue of Potique entitled
(with Victor Hugos phrase) Littrature et philosophie mles; Lacoue-Labarthe,
its editor, opens with: Le programme que nous suivrons ici, il appartient en fait
Maurice Blanchot de lavoir trac; LImprsentable, Potique, 21 (1975), 5395
(p.53).
6 Quoted in Walter Benjamins appendix (The Early Romantic Theory of Art and
Goethe) to his doctoral thesis, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism
(1919), in SW I, 182. As Benjamin explains, Novaliss target was Goethes doctrine
of the canonical validity of Greek works (SW I, 182). On the relations between
Romanticism and classicism (Rome, Greece), see also AL, 11, 1921, 38182, and
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable, 6162. See also, in the present volume,
Gisle Berkmans various inquiries, via the thought of Benjamin and Foucault, into
perspective under an understanding of history, of art, of the philosophy

of these disciplines, that is rendered impertinent by a thinking first made
available by the Romantics. But before we conclude with Blanchot that
le romantisme [] ouvre une poque; davantage, il est lpoque o toutes
se rvlent (EI, 522), it is perhaps worthwhile asking precisely the kind
of questions such a conclusion would radically dislodge. For, dislodging
them, we may begin to clear a path in the direction of what Blanchot called
lessence non-romantique du romantisme (EI, 524).
Where Is Romanticism?
O est le romantisme? (EI, 517), asks Blanchot in a text which is central to

this volume, LAthenum, first published in August 1964 in the Nouvelle
Revue franaise and subsequently collected in LEntretien infini (1969).
The question is worth asking, not just because of what Blanchot has to say
about Romanticisms initial, excessive output in Jena, its lethargic decline
in Vienna, but because it raises, more generally, the issue of whether on
Blanchots reading Romanticism belongs to a distinctive place and culture.
Indeed, if, as Blanchot claims, [les] premiers assaults romantiques (518)
came predominantly from a German tradition, and from the Athenum in
particular, one might be tempted to ask whether Romanticism in Blanchot
is limited to that tradition and that review. Admittedly, Dove Cottage, for
instance, is not easily located if at all on Blanchots Romantic map;7 and
aside from fleeting references to later English Romantics such as Byron,
the historicity of Romanticism, and Ian Jamess discussion of the political heritage
of Romanticism between Novalis, Blanchot, and Nancy.
7 As far as we can tell, neither Wordsworth nor perhaps more surprisingly (given
his lasting engagement with German Romanticism) Coleridge are mentioned in
Blanchots uvre.
Shelley or Keats,8 a brief survey of Blanchots incursions into Romantic

territory would offer relatively little detail on Romantic activities taking
place on the other side of the Channel.
Nevertheless, British Romanticism is not altogether absent from
Blanchots Romantic topography. It is, in effect, in connection with an
early British Romantic one of the very first Romantics tout court (in
many ways, Blanchots interest in Romanticism, as we shall observe later,
is an interest in beginnings) that this apparent absence is alleviated. As
Ian Maclachlan reminds us in his contribution to this volume, Blanchots
engagement with William Blake and his characteristically Romantic con-
ception of the imagination would be crucial in determining his own concep-
tion of the image and what will be termed, after but already increasingly at
odds with Sartre, limaginaire. Even so, despite the fact that he discusses
key aspects of British Romanticism and, one should add, particularly in
relation to the imaginary or what he also often calls le merveilleux or le
fantastique, of American Romanticism ,9 Blanchots Romantics, one is
compelled to conclude, are not primarily British (or American).
Nor can they be found, for that matter, in France Unless, of course,
the term can be restricted, reinscribed or delayed to fit a select number
of individual poets and writers whom Blanchot, in what is perhaps his
other decisive text on Romanticism (judging at least from how often it is
cited in this volume), sets apart from la plupart des romantiques franais
8 See, for Byron, FP, 184; PF, 205; and LS, 65, 97; for Shelley, CL, 603; for Keats, EL,
238, n. 1.
9 We think, for instance, of his reading of Melville, his sporadic references to Poe or,
more rarely, Hawthorne. On Melville, see FP, 27377; LEnchantement de Melville,
Paysage Dimanche, 27 (16 December 1945), 3; LV, 1517; ED, 175. On Poe, see CL, 195,
201, 203, 24144, 564, 569, 60102, 603; FP, 18486, 26061; PF, 251; Du merveilleux,
LArche, 2728 (May 1947), in Maurice Blanchot: rcits critiques, ed. by Christophe
Bident and Pierre Vilar (Tours/Paris: Farrago/Scheer, 2003), 3345 (p.33); EL, 349;
LV, 322; and EI, 530; see also Sergey Zenkins essay in this volume. On Hawthorne,
see CL, 203; LEnchantement de Melville, p.3; Du merveilleux, p.33; and LV, 211.
(CL, 549).10 Published in February 1944 in the Journal des dbats, the
text in question, whose title De Jean-Paul Giraudoux speaks to
a Romanticism that, while rooted in a German tradition, clearly defies
cultural boundaries, is worth quoting at length, if only because it is little
known:11
laube du romantisme, Jean-Paul reprsente certains partis pris dont les romanti-
ques franais nont pas discern la valeur, mais qui aprs eux ou en dehors deux ont
pntr profondment notre temps. Le principal est le caractre dexprience reconnu
la littrature; la littrature devient une manifestation spirituelle; elle introduit celui
qui la recherche dans un mode dexistence nouveau; elle est une sorte dascse qui
nous permet daccder une vie plus authentique: en un mot, elle a pour lcrivain
une signification mystique. [] Alors que, pour la plupart des romantiques franais,
lart est subjectif parce quil rvle les mouvements intrieurs, exprime lintimit per-
sonnelle, pour le romantisme ou le pr-romantisme des Hlderlin, des Jean-Paul, des
Novalis, comme pour un Nerval ou un Rimbaud, lart est subjectif parce quil met
en cause ce que lartiste a de plus profond, non plus seulement pour lexprimer, mais
pour le transformer. Pour nos romantiques, lart garde une valeur psychologique, il
est expression sincre, miroir fidle; pour les romantiques trangers, la littrature a
10 At the expense, then, of earlier and perhaps more traditional French Romantic
poets like Lamartine, Hugo, or Musset. For Blanchots ambivalent though (perhaps
unexpectedly) positive assessment of Lamartine, see his Situation de Lamartine, in
FP, 17579, as well as occasional references in CL, 14243, 255, 353, 375, 395. For rare
references to Hugo (often coupled with Lamartine), see FP, 98, 176, 237; CL, 48, 90,
14243, 255, 352; LV, 160; and VV, 131. Musset, for his part, is hardly mentioned at all;
see CL, 352, 456, 458. As for Romantic or pre-Romantic French prose writers such
as Rousseau or Chateaubriand, discussions of their work are, on the whole, equally
scarce (with the exception of Sade, of course, about whom we shall have more to say
in a moment). On Rousseau, see in particular Cette affaire infernale, in CL, 22732
and Rousseau, in LV, 5969; see also CL, 477, 658; FP, 301; PF, 241; and EI, 3, 540.
For Blanchots reading of Chateaubriand, see Le Secret de Chateaubriand, in CL,
59598, as well as brief references in CL, 142; PF, 239; LV, 277; EI, 328; and A, 150;
see also Sergey Zenkins contribution to this volume.
11 Christophe Bidents recent volume (see CL) collecting the chroniques littraires
Blanchot published in the Journal des dbats from April 1941 to August 1944 (Bidents
edition excludes the articles already collected in Faux pas) has largely contributed to
bringing Blanchots earlier readings of Romanticism into focus.
une valeur dengagement: elle nexprime pas, elle bouleverse; elle est la fois moyen
de connaissance et pouvoir de mtamorphose; vivre, crire, cest un mme acte. La
posie est une exprience magique. (CL, 549)
For a Nerval or a Rimbaud.12 Readers familiar with Blanchot would

have doubtless added Baudelaire, Lautramont, Mallarm, Proust or Gide.13
Contemporaries such as Bataille or Michaux, as Christophe Bident points
out in his chapter (p.85), could also be included in this disparate com-
munity. Not to mention Blanchot himself. Yet is it appropriate to speak
here, even loosely, of community? Setting aside, for now, the main issue
at stake in the extract cited above the question of literary experience
(le caractre dexprience), of how such an experience absorbs, disrupts,
and transforms the writers existence one might wonder whether, in the
context of a profoundly subjective if desubjectifying experience of lit-
erature, Blanchot would have accepted such a term. To put in blunt and
downright brutal terms: is Romanticism, as the quoted passage seems to
imply, something that pertains to the singular, almost mystical experience
of an individual writer or poet, exposing him/her to what Blanchot would
famously describe, in LEspace littraire (1955), as a solitude essentielle?
Or does it necessarily entail, on the contrary (though it is perhaps less a
contradiction than an occasion for contemplating a deeper, double exi-
gency combining conflicting demands), a collective, impersonal venture,
12 Nearly the same constellation of names (relating German Romanticism to one or

more of the following French poets: Nerval, Lautramont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Mallarm) had already appeared in a number of Blanchots articles published in the
Journal des dbats; see, for example, his June 1939 review of Klber Haedenss Grard
de Nerval ou la sagesse romantique (1939): Un essai sur Grard de Nerval, Journal des
dbats, 22 June 1939, 2, as well as his May 1942 article Rflexions sur la jeune posie
and his July 1942 piece on Lamartine mentioned earlier (both collected in Faux pas):
FP, 14953 (p.149), 17579 (p.176). See also FP, 339 and CL, 125.
13 For a passage cast in almost exactly the same terms as the one quoted above but in
which the French counterpart is not Giraudoux but Gide (we shall come to it later
on), see Blanchots November 1942 article on Les Nourritures terrestres (1897), in
FP, 33742 (p.339).
as, for example, Blanchots interpretation of the Athenum in the 1960s

and, contemporaneous with that interpretation, his own project for the
Revue internationale would suggest?14
The question is perhaps never posed as such by Blanchot but it emerges
in if only in the margin of his later reading of Romanticism, when he
states, for instance, in a footnote to his 1964 essay on Jena Romanticism, that
Hlderlin nappartient pas au romantisme, il ne fait pas partie dune constel-
lation (EI, 518, n. 1).15 A tension would seem to surface here between, on the
one hand, Blanchots earlier reading of Romanticism in which Hlderlin can
be happily grouped together with Novalis under the heading of romant-
isme or pr-romantisme in order to affirm a deeply personal though
never psychological, sentimental or simply expressive experience of lit-
erature radically calling into question ce que lartiste a de plus profond
and as such deemed common to a selection of German (pre-)Romantic
and French (post-)Romantic (aprs eux) poets and writers spread across
the eighteenth, nineteenth, and (following the direction of Blanchots
title: De Jean-Paul Giraudoux) twentieth centuries; and, on the other
hand, his later reading of Romanticism in which Hlderlin is distinctly
removed from any Romantic constellations, a reading which not only
reinforces Romanticism as the exigency of a constellation, of a distinctive
group or movement namely, the collective undertaking that produced
the Athenum but also confines its manifestation to the deux annes, de
1798 1800 (EI, 520) in which the celebrated review appeared.
14 On the (failed) project of the Revue, undertaken in the wake of the Dclaration des
121 on the right to insubordination in the Algerian War and elaborated together
with a host of other contemporary literary figures (including Dionys Mascolo,
Robert Antelme, Louis-Ren des Forts, Maurice Nadeau, Roland Barthes, Michel
Butor, Michel Leiris, Marguerite Duras, Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Francesco Leonetti, Hans Enzensberger, Uwe Johnson,
and Gnter Grass), see EP, 4569. We shall return to this project toward the end of
the introduction.
15 On Hlderlins non-Romanticism, see also LV, 315, as well as Blanchots letter to
Vadim Kozovo, 26 August 1983, in Lettres Vadim Kozovo, ed. by Denis Aucouturier
(Houilles: Manucius, 2009), p.106.
This is not the place to address the debate around Hlderlins ambigu-
ous position within or vis--vis Romanticism.16 Nor can we answer, at least
at this stage of our enquiry, the question of whether, in Blanchots view, a
writerly community is possible or desirable and if so, under what circum-
stances. What we can say, however, is that Romanticism, after exposing
a subjective experience of literature upsetting subjectivity, made such a
question paramount and all the more so when writers and poets find
themselves (as was the case in the wake of the French Revolution and as
would be the case again in the early 1960s) at what Blanchot termed un []
moment extrme du temps (EP, 50). (To be sure, one of the key objectives
of the Revue internationale was, at least from Blanchots perspective, an
attempt to answer precisely that question.) That Blanchots conception of
[une] criture plurielle, possibilit dcrire en commun (EI, 526) or what
he also referred to, responding to contemporary political demands, as un
communisme dcriture (EP, 97), would eventually be paired under the
pressure of fragmentary, anonymous, and unavowable exigencies with a
disabling of traditional configurations (literary or otherwise) of community
and that such a disabling engages not just literary experience, criticism,
and theory but operates, as Ian Jamess and Martin Crowleys contribu-
tions make clear, at the level of the political, the ethical, the ontological,
and even the technological, are considerations that Romanticism, through
16 As Michael Holland notes (pp.11416), a similar ambiguity arises, albeit in a different

context, in relation to Jean Paul. One should add, in passing, that whilst Hollands
piece is among the first to concentrate on Blanchots relation to Jean Paul, much
critical attention has been given to Blanchots readings of Hlderlin (particularly
in relation to Heideggers readings of Hlderlin), which is also one of the reasons
Hlderlin figures only intermittently in this volume. On Blanchot and Hlderlin,
see, among others, Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge,
1997), pp.7791; Robert Savage, Between Hlderlin and Heidegger: The Sacred
Speech of Maurice Blanchot, in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy,
ed. by Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University
of Delaware Press, 2005), 14967; and Mark Hewson, Two essays by Blanchot
on Hlderlin, Colloquy, 10 (November 2005) <http://colloquy.monash.edu.au/
issue010/> (accessed 7 July 2010).
the Athenum, through Blanchots reading of it, and through the reading
of that reading in the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy, has bequeathed to us. This opens up a unique genealogy of modern
literature and, perhaps more importantly, of literature as a mode of modern
thought, as la passion de penser (EI, 518), or more precisely, anticipating
a line of thought drawn out by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, to which we
shall return, as le [] vertige dapprofondissement thorique (518).
From the perspective of these broader considerations, understanding
Blanchots position on Romanticism can go beyond the local, partial interest
or game of influences it might seem. Such an understanding would not only
touch his views on various models of community, whether bound together
by work or worklessness, thus allowing us, for instance, to measure, as we
shall do later, the degree and kind of political activity permitted to a writer
as a writer. It would also allow us to think along fundamental lines about
the definition of literature as something reaching well beyond itself, open
to or mingled with its other, whether it be life (vivre, crire, cest un mme
acte) or something anything else: the political and the philosophical
certainly, but also (to offer examples that would deserve attention in a
discussion of Blanchot and Romanticism but cannot be explored within
the space of this introduction) biography, death, madness, orality, affect,
etc.17 If, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy remark, cest [] seulement dans
lombre porte du romantisme que notre modernit aura pu inventer de
rapporter la littrature mme les accidents censs tre les plus extrieurs
17 This new-found availability of life to art, or what those with a more critical perspec-
tive saw perhaps as a desperation of art in its search for new material, led the authors
of the Athenum to write: Romantic poetry [] embraces everything that is purely
poetic, from the greatest systems of art, containing within themselves still further
systems, to the sigh, the kiss that the poetizing child breathes forth in artless song;
Athenum Fragment 116, in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Peter
Firchow, foreword by Rodolphe Gasch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), p.31. This attention to life is glossed by Blanchot as: la reprise de la posie,
non seulement par la vie, mais mme par la biographie, par consquent le dsir de
vivre romantiquement (EI, 524).
de son histoire: commencer, par exemple, par la mort de Novalis ou par

la folie de Hlderlin (AL, 390), literature and the arts after Romanticism
can no longer be defined merely in terms of place or culture; casting their
nets ever more widely, they would entail something of the order of an
absolute, introducing un mode dexistence nouveau.
When Is Romanticism?
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. To return to the idea of [une] possi-
bilit dcrire en commun introduced above, the question of Romanticism
as a collective effort seems nonetheless to have been a distinctly German one
for Blanchot. Certainly, there are references in Blanchots earlier, war-time
criticism to [le] groupe turbulent des Jeune France dont Thophile Gautier
et Grard de Nerval sont rests les matres (CL, 255). But only Nerval
appears frequently in Blanchots work, not the group; and appears not so
much as a master of or within Jeune France than as un artiste unique dans
un monde de solitude et dorgueil, o il a t conduit non par larbitraire,
mais par la puret de son art.18 Besides, Blanchot is rather sceptical of Jeune
France, criticizing it, for instance, for its banal, superficial provocations,
its bohemian, farcical character, its futile upheavals. Despite these short-
comings, however, he does see in it a moment in which literature is associ-
ated quelque chose qui la dpasse (CL, 255), a point at which poetry se
met en cause et ouvre lhomme un prodigieux abme o tout lui devient
impossible, mme la posie (256) an abyss, of course, which the best
part of Blanchots writings can be said to pursue: the void or, to speak
in a language that would pervade so much of his subsequent work: death,
absence, the (other) night in which literature affirms itself by withdrawing
or renouncing itself and becomes a reality, so to speak, by abolishing the
18 Maurice Blanchot, Un essai sur Grard de Nerval, p.2.

real. And yet it is not, Blanchot seems to suggest, the romantisme intgral
(255) of the Jeune France venture that was able to draw effectively all the
consequences of being au-del de ses limites (256). In their frenzied agi-
tation, the lycanthropes or hommes-loups, as they were called, revealed
(only) des causes plus srieuses dont les mouvements littraires prendront
quelques annes aprs nettement conscience (255). In effect, as a literary
movement, it was less in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries that true
Romanticism could be found in France that is to say, true to the (self-)
negating demand it carries (or ought to carry) than in the twentieth:
more exactly, in surrealism.
[C]ette tendance que les surralistes se sont plu redcouvrir (CL,
256), this propensity that not only negates the world but se dtruit lui-
mme (256) and thus directs its movement vers quelque chose qui est
comme rien (256), this legacy whereby cest vraiment le langage qui souvre
(259) and, in that opening, confers upon the poetic a remarkable force of
liberation, a self-conscious, efficacious outrance (256), would be confirmed,
decades later, by Blanchots reading of the Jena Romantics: le surralisme
se reconnat dans ces grandes figures potiques et reconnat en elles ce quil
dcouvre nouveau par lui-mme: la posie, puissance de libert absolue
(EI, 515). Indeed, to respond to this freedom, Blanchot maintains in his
1964 article, to abide by this principe de libert absolue (521) itself
governed by le principe de destruction qui est son centre (522) was
one of the revolutionary exigencies of the parole cratrice (521) affirmed
in Jena Romanticism. We shall return in a moment to this parole, to this
freedom in/of literary language, and, more generally, to literatures relation
to the political and in particular the political as revolution. Suffice it to
say, at this stage, that if lavenir Blanchot evokes at the end of his essay on
the Athenum may be construed in terms of a collective task, this future
belonged also intimately to surrealism.
From this perspective, Romanticism extends well beyond a given
period or movement marked out by historians, well beyond le romantisme
empirique, to borrow Gisle Berkmans expression (p.65); it transcends its
empirical manifestation, forever haunting those coming in its wake. In a
sense, what Blanchot says of surrealism in a well-known essay collected in

La Part du feu (1949) could just as well be said of Romanticism:
Personne nappartient plus ce mouvement, et tout le monde sent quil aurait pu en
faire partie. Il y a dans toute personne qui crit une vocation surraliste qui savoue,
qui avorte, apparat quelquefois usurpe, mais qui, mme fausse, exprime un effort
et un besoin sincres. Le surralisme sest vanoui? Cest quil nest plus ici ou l: il
est partout. Cest un fantme, une brillante hantise. (PF, 90)
The comparison with surrealism can be explored further,19 of course,

but what such an exploration would show, among other things, is that
the question when is Romanticism?, as Blanchots war-time parallels
between German (pre-)Romantic and French (post-)Romantic poets had
already indicated, suffers from the same displacements as the question
where is Romanticism? with which we began. The question, then, is how
Romanticism, outside mere considerations of influence, exceeds the where
and the when; in other words, we need to investigate the conditions of
this excess and get a clearer sense of how this excessive (transcendental,
displacing, haunting) movement takes place by exacerbating or interrupt-
ing historical or cultural contingency.
Admittedly, though, Blanchots reading of Romanticism, particularly
from the 1960s onwards, does privilege, as suggested earlier, a place ( Jena)
and a period (17981800). This is not to say that his reading of German
Romanticism is limited to the leading figures behind the Athenum (the
Schlegels, Novalis, Schleiermacher, et al.). We have already noted the impor-
tance of Romantic outsiders like Hlderlin or Jean Paul. Whats more,
Blanchot refers albeit, often, only briefly to a host of other German
Romantic poets and writers, from Sturm und Drang to Sptromantik
Hamann, Goethe, Schiller, Tieck, Wackenroder, Hoffmann, Brentano,
19 For example, around the question of language and/as the subject, compare what
Blanchot says of Jena Romanticism in LEntretien infini (EI, 524) with his account
of surrealism in La Part du feu (PF, 93).
Solger, Arnim, Heine, Mrike, Waiblinger, etc.20 , not to mention a number

of thinkers associated, directly or indirectly, with Romantic beginnings
or legacies, such as Kant, Lessing, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, or
Nietzsche. Blanchots concentration on the Athenum did not prevent
him, moreover, from drawing further comparisons between German
Romanticism and (post-Romantic) French literary experiences not just
the experience of surrealism mentioned above but also, as Jake Wadham
reminds us in his contribution (pp.18385), that of Paul Valry, whom
Blanchot once described as le plus romantique des hommes (AC, 87).
Finally, if Blanchots engagement with Jena Romanticism in the 1960s was
much more than an engagement with Jena Romanticism, it is also because
it announced both a development in his own practice of writing as it under-
went, from LAttente loubli (1962) onwards, a distinctly fragmentary turn,
and, from a theoretical-philosophical viewpoint, further reflections, in a
much later work like Lcriture du dsastre (1980), on the fragment and
the fragmentary, system and dialectics, subjectivity and death, language
and ontology.21
20 Of this preliminary list, it is worth singling out Goethe, an early and fairly constant
if discreet point of reference in Blanchots work. On Goethe, see Hollands chapter
in this volume. See also, for example, Maurice Blanchot, Journal dun intellectuel en
chmage, par Denis de Rougemont, LInsurg, 32 (18 August 1937), 4; CL, 22026; FP,
30610, 31117; PF, 51, 65, 205; LS, 96, 113; Le Compagnon de route, LObservateur,
11 (22 June 1950), 17; EL, 57, 97, 284, 286; LV, 18, 41, 45, 47, 13536, 14144, 239,
265; EI, 410, 473, 516, 518; A, 68, 73; ED, 183; AC, 92; as well as Blanchots letters to
Vadim Kozovo, 7 August 1981, 26 July 1982, 24 November 1982, and 25 February
1984, in Lettres Vadim Kozovo, pp.52, 78, 9091, and 116, respectively.
21 See, for instance, Blanchots discussions, in Lcriture du dsastre, of F. Schlegel (ED,
18, 94, 9899, 101, 166, 205), A. W. Schlegel (170), Schelling (181), Schleiermacher
(18), Novalis (18, 55, 56), Fichte (55), and Heidegger (16871).
What Is Romanticism?
So if, from now on, when we refer to Romanticism we mean, for the most
part, Early German Romanticism, and in particular the Athenum, this
interest in Romanticisms premier ge (EI, 519) cannot be reduced to an
interest in un moment important de lhistoire de lart (522) or une simple
cole littraire (522) or even [un] art potique (518). If what goes under
the name of Romanticism thus excepts itself from notions of sthetics
and art history (and not just art history but, as we shall see, History tout
court), what, then, is Romanticism? As is the case with Blanchots well-
known treatment of the question what is literature? (which, after all, is
also the question being posed when we ask: what is Romanticism?), the
endless answers such a question generates are an indication that something
there stubbornly resists the closure of an answer and intends to remain radi-
cally open.22 But what makes Romanticism so unique in this interrogative
scheme is the fact that, for the first time, the what is question can be asked
from within the domain of literature and not simply from the outside:
philosophy, politics, history, or any other discourse that would seek to
subsume its object under its authority. And this is because literature now
has a being (or so it seems) accessible to questioning. Art is no longer or
only the work of representation (mimesis); in its Romantic demand, it
becomes nothing less than the power to be: le pouvoir, pour luvre, dtre
et non plus de reprsenter (EI, 518).
How did (Romantic) literature acquire this ontological status? The
short answer is given in the opening paragraph (quoted above) of Blanchots
1964 essay: la posie, puissance de libert absolue (EI, 515). More exactly,
this freedom, Blanchot argues, lies in Romanticisms self-reflexive power
to reveal itself to itself force dautorvlation (520), as he puts it. [S]e
manifester, sannoncer, en un mot se communiquer (521) corresponds to
[un] acte inpuisable qui institue et constitue ltre de la littrature (521).
22 See, for example, EL, 279.

That this ontological institution or constitution is itself based on nothing-

ness and infinite, affirmative negation was the conclusion reached in a dis-
cussion of language via Alexandre Kojves reading of Hegel and Mallarm
in La Part du feu, the 1949 collection in which Blanchot had declared that
rien trouve son tre dans la parole et ltre de la parole nest rien (PF, 314).
Producing an other world what he referred to as lirralit (330) or la
ralit du langage (319) out of the conceptual annihilation of world-
hood, of the real, literature, Blanchot had shown, is the experience of the
nothingness, the nonexistence, the absence, the image, of whatever object
it names. There is no room here to deploy Blanchots complex theoriza-
tion of literary language and its image, of the ways in which the order of
both mimesis and poiesis can be reversed in a movement of dsuvrement.23
Suffice it to say that, for Blanchot, the Athenum expressed this movement
avant la lettre, revealing what he describes as lessence non romantique
du romantisme (EI, 524) and laying bare the other, intransitive share of
language la nuit du langage (524),24 that is to say, [le] langage devenu
indisponible, as Jacques Rancire puts it, [l] image qui ne fait pas voir.25
23 On Blanchots unworking of mimesis and poiesis, see Ian Maclachlans and Maebh
Longs chapters in this volume.
24 [T]outes les questions of la nuit du langage are densely summarized in his essay on
Jena Romanticism: crire, cest faire uvre de parole, mais [] cette uvre est dsu-
vrement; [] parler potiquement, cest rendre possible une parole non transitive
qui na pas pour tche de dire les choses (de disparatre dans ce quelle signifie), mais
de (se) dire en (se) laissant dire, sans toutefois faire delle-mme le nouvel objet de ce
langage sans objet (EI, 524). Benjamin, too, speaks of literary language in terms of that
which is unmediatable; in fact, he employs a term also frequently used by Blanchot:
magical; see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Avant-propos (1986), in Walter Benjamin,
Le Concept de critique esthtique dans le romantisme allemand, trans. by Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Anne-Marie Lang (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), pp.1013 (p.12).
A translation of this Avant-propos by David Ferris, entitled Introduction to Walter
Benjamins The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, is included in
Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin
(London: Continuum, 2002), pp.1112 (p.12).
25 Jacques Rancire, La Parole muette: essai sur les contradictions de la littrature (Paris:
Hachette Littratures, 1998), p.98.
(It is, of course, this intransitivity or unavailability of language and the non-
representational images it brings forth, in other words, la ralit propre de
lirrel (EI, 477), that bursts through and interrupts, so to speak, Blanchots
own fiction.)26
Political Romanticism: un trs curieux change
Before addressing some of the ways in which Romanticism responds to this

langage sans objet (EI, 524), to this parole non transitive (524), to the
vacant, unworked plenitude of literatures self-declarative being, before
considering how this response boils down for Blanchot to the observation
that la parole est sujet (524), that la vrit cratrice [se concentre] dans la
libert du sujet (525), it is worthwhile pausing here at one of the distinc-
tive strategies employed by Blanchot it would be no exaggeration to say
that much of the originality of his literary-critical discourse depends on it
to account for the absolute freedom of literature and/as the (Romantic)
subject, for what he also calls its plus dangereux sens (520). Bluntly put,
the strategy consists in drawing from the political and in particular from
the political as revolution a new language to conceive of the literary. In
truth, the political stakes of Romanticism are announced at the outset of
Blanchots Athenum article, the opening line of which reads: Le romant-
isme, en Allemagne et secondairement en France, a t un enjeu politique
(515). Whilst Blanchot begins with a discussion of the splintered recep-
tion of Romanticism in Germany and in France, tracing appropriations
and rejections of its legacy on both the left and right end of the politi-
cal spectrum and eventually leading him to characterize Romanticism as
26 On Blanchots fiction and the image as a reflexive break or breaking through, see
Hollands and Zenkins contributions.
lexigence ou lexprience des contradictions (516),27 his inaugural statement

also introduces the wider problematic of the relationship between literary
and political activity. If Romanticism, in the mode of self-revelation and
-manifestation, is capable of opening up an epoch, if, as avnement de la
conscience potique (EI, 522), it becomes something other than productive
poiesis or reproductive mimesis, it is because it has recognized in the sphere
of politics an event that coincides perfectly with its own: revolutionary
action. Not, then, a historical event but the self-declarative, self-conscious
event that interrupts and thus (un)makes history the history of politics
and the history of art, but also the history of History, so to speak.
A crucial passage at the heart of Blanchots essay brings us closer to
this revolutionary demand:
La littrature (jentends lensemble des formes dexpression, cest--dire aussi forces

de dissolution) prend tout coup conscience delle-mme, se manifeste et, dans
cette manifestation, na pas dautre tche que de se dclarer. En somme, la littrature
annonce quelle prend le pouvoir. [] Il nest pas besoin dinsister sur ce qui est bien
connu: cest la Rvolution franaise qui a donn aux romantiques allemands cette
forme nouvelle que constitue lexigence dclarative, lclat du manifeste. Il y a entre
les deux mouvements, le politique et le littraire, un trs curieux change. Les
rvolutionnaires franais, quand ils crivent, crivent ou croient crire ainsi que des
classiques et, tout pntrs du respect des modles dautrefois, ils ne veulent nullement
porter atteinte aux formes traditionnelles. Mais ce nest pas aux orateurs rvolution-
naires que les romantiques vont demander des leons de style, cest la Rvolution
en personne, ce langage fait Histoire, lequel se signifie par des vnements qui sont
des dclarations: la Terreur, on le sait bien, ne fut pas seulement terrible cause des
excutions, elle le fut parce quelle se revendiqua elle-mme sous cette forme majus-
cule, en faisant de la terreur la mesure de lhistoire et le logos des temps modernes.
Lchafaud, les ennemis du peuple prsents au peuple, les ttes quon coupe unique-
ment pour les montrer, lvidence lemphase de la mort nulle, constituent non
pas des faits historiques, mais un nouveau langage: cela parle et cela est rest parlant.
27 Readers of this volume will have an opportunity to consider the ways in which
Blanchots assessment of the (political) reception of Romanticism opens onto
questions of community (see Jamess contribution), history (Berkman), and work
(Wadham).
Lorsque lAthenum publie cette annonce: Tu ne gaspilleras pas ta foi ni ton amour
dans les choses politiques, mais tu te rserveras pour le domaine divin de la science
et de lart [], cette revue ne songe nullement rejeter les conqutes de la libert
[], mais au contraire donner lacte rvolutionnaire toute sa force de dcision en
ltablissant au plus prs de son origine: l o il est savoir, parole cratrice et, dans ce
savoir et cette parole, principe de libert absolue. (EI, 52021)
Such lines would require far more patience than can be offered here. Not
merely because of what they might say, more generally, about Blanchots
conception and experience of politics, but also, and perhaps more impor-
tantly, because of what they have to say about his conception and experience
of literature. Examining, for instance, the trope of the guillotine (lchafaud,
[] les ttes quon coupe), not an isolated one in Blanchot,28 would lead
us to a long and much needed discussion of the place of violence in his
thought as a whole, which, whilst it certainly has important implications
for Romanticism (the image of the beheaded revolutionary is, of course,
an eminently Romantic image), would exceed the scope of an introduc-
tion. To keep to our task and to remain within the detail of the relationship
established above between the literary and the political, it is worth noting
that there is no sense that Blanchot is concerned, when discussing the revo-
lutionary element at play in literature, with the empirical field of political
realities, whether this involves a mutually exclusive relation between litera-
ture and politics (perhaps best exemplified by Hlderlin who, as Blanchot
is wont to recall,29 fearing that the Revolution was imperilled, contemplates
dropping his pen altogether to fully take on the political struggle) or a
scheme identifying language, political action, and responsibility (as is the
case, for example, in Sartrean engagement). On the contrary, Blanchot is
careful and this care is already apparent in his pre-war critical writings,
most notably in his 1937 article De la rvolution la littrature30 to
28 It is found on at least three other occasions in his work; see Maurice Blanchot, Du
merveilleux, p.44; PF, 310; and LS, 186.
29 See EL, 282 and ED, 191.
30 See Hannes Opelz, The Political Share of Literature: Maurice Blanchot, 19311937,
Paragraph, 33:1 (March 2010), 7089.
distinguish the specifically empirical dimension of politics, including any

values to which a politics taking place in, or projected for, the real world
may be attached, from the broader problematic of the relationship between
the practice of writing and the notion of revolution.
Commitment, then, is not the issue; or if it is, it must be thought dif-
ferently. And if the opening paragraph of Blanchots essay refers to un senti-
ment nouveau de lart et de la littrature qui prpare dautres changements,
tous orients vers une rcusation des formes traditionnelles dorganisation
politique (EI, 516), it is not Romanticisms political heritage or promise per
se that is at stake here. Not, at least, if one intends to plot literatures relation
to the political according to a logical, dialectical, homogeneous, fusional,
or any other unifying or totalizing process. In truth, the literature/politics
relation is perhaps best understood in terms of analogy. A key passage from
Blanchots seminal essay La Littrature et le droit la mort (collected in
La Part du feu) brings this point home: [l]action rvolutionnaire est en
tous points analogue laction telle que lincarne la littrature: passage du
rien tout, affirmation de labsolu comme vnement et de chaque vne-
ment comme absolu (PF, 309; emphasis ours). If Blanchots approach to
Romanticism and to literature more generally appears to share in what
Simon Critchley calls Romanticisms deepest navet, that is, the linking
of its sthetic absolutism to the work of politics, to politics conceived on
analogy to sthetics31 (Critchleys emphasis), one has to consider closely
the conditions commanding the analogy so as not to confuse it with any-
thing like what de Man or rather what Critchley says de Man terms
sthetic ideology.32
When Blanchot claims that revolutionary action is in every respect
analogous to action as embodied in literature, he is not saying, as Critchley
says of Jena Romanticism, that the artwork [] provides us with an image
31 Simon Critchley, Very Little Almost Nothing, p.91.

32 On de Mans notion of sthetic ideology, see Andrzej Warminski, Allegories of
Reference, in Paul de Man, sthetic Ideology, ed. by Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp.133 (especially pp.111).
of what the world might be like if freedom were realized (p.91). Not
only is the direction of the analogy reversed in Blanchot revolution
provides us with an image of what literature might be like if its experience
were realized, and so the movement goes from freedom of/in history (la
mesure de lhistoire et le logos des temps modernes) to freedom of/in lit-
erary language (un nouveau langage, parole cratrice) but he is also at
pains to emphasize the irreducible difference or discontinuity inscribed in
analogical relation. In effect, the parallel drawn by Blanchot between the
literary and the political does not set up a scheme permitting an identifica-
tion or continuation between literature and a revolutionary political cause
or ideal: literature and revolution coincide insofar as they are both violent
forms of absolute negation (the conceptual negation of the real in the case
of literature, the material negation of the established order in the case of
revolution), yet this does not imply that the worlds to which they notionally
belong are linked by a logic of continuity or that they can be amalgamated.
Coincidence the word, we shall see, is Blanchots between political and
literary violence is neither continuation nor identification. So if the Marquis
de Sade represents for Blanchot lcrivain par excellence (PF, 311), it is not
just because, in Sade, the literary and the political coincided perfectly as
if the freedom of writing were the thrust of real(ized) freedom (though
everything hinges, of course, on the as if) but because this coincidence
unfolds in the mode of non-identification and contradiction.33 Such is,
at least, what Blanchots remarks would suggest in his piece on Sade col-
lected in LEntretien infini, the original version of which appeared in the
year following the publication of the Athenum article:
Avec Sade et un trs haut point de vrit paradoxale , nous avons le premier
exemple (mais y en eut-il un second?) de la manire dont crire, la libert dcrire,
peut concider avec le mouvement de la libert relle, quand celle-ci entre en crise
33 Holland also notes that Blanchot saw Sade as an important voice outside post-war
Sartrean commitment; The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p.23. This
seems to be validated by the considerable number of articles addressing Sade in the
late 1940s, culminating in Lautramont et Sade (1949).
et provoque une vacance dhistoire. Concidence qui nest pas identification. Et les
motifs de Sade ne sont pas ceux qui ont mis en branle la puissance rvolutionnaire.
Ils les contredisent mme. Et pourtant, sans eux, [] la rvolution et t prive
dune part de sa Raison. (EI, 330)
Just as he is about to maintain, then, that the movement of writing and the
movement of real freedom converge for the first time mais y en eut-il un
second?, wonders Blanchot, and immediately the Jena Romantics come to
mind (parole cratrice et, dans [] cette parole, principe de libert absolue,
lexigence ou lexprience des contradictions) just as he is about to say
that literature and revolution are one and the same thing, at this very high
point of convergence, Blanchot underscores difference and paradox, insists
that there is no relation but in coincidence, that writing, even when corre-
sponding perfectly to (revolutionary) political commitment, offers neither
origin nor horizon for the work of (revolutionary) politics: Et les motifs
de Sade ne sont pas ceux qui ont mis en branle la puissance rvolution-
naire. In fact: Ils les contredisent mme. This is the curiosity in the trs
curieux change taking place entre [] le politique et le littraire, the
paradoxical ana-logic governing the exchange.
What this means but we cannot attempt to explore this meaning
in any detail here is that lcriture, as Blanchot observed much later in
Lcriture du dsastre, [] ne sait pas ce quil en adviendra politiquement
delle: cest l son intransitivit, cette ncessit de ntre quen relation indi-
recte avec le politique (ED, 126). It is precisely this indirection that puts
literary experience and the (revolutionary) political into relation, thereby
deploying beneath what can perhaps only be termed coincidence [j]e
crois que le mot concidence est le plus juste (EI, 330) the unappeasable,
unsubsumable tension (what Blanchot readers might also call, taking all
necessary precautions, lautre or le neutre) maintained as what could be
termed the non-relational essence of relation: that which, in (the) relation
(between the literary and the political), escapes any assimilating or dialecti-
cal scheme. That writings relation to the political (and, for that matter, to
the philosophical) is arranged or disarranged by indirection, heterogeneity,
alterity or difference and in this Blanchot marks a radical departure from
Jena Romanticisms assimilating absolutism and, more specifically, from its

historical orientation toward, as he puts it, le travail en vue du tout et la
recherche dialectique de lunit (527) (hence, also, his rejection of what
he considers to be Schlegels notion of the fragment) does not suggest
that literature has no political import. Only, perhaps, that its political force
or what Blanchot describes as its pouvoir sans pouvoir (EP, 55) is to
resist and contest (desperately, impossibly) dialectical thinking and thus
notions of power at work in such thinking and in its ensuing practices.34
Yet this is not to suggest, in turn, that one should or can simply do away
with or ignore the dialectical domain and demand of the possible, of that
which is accomplished through power, in favour of what goes by the name
(and institution) of literature.
As chapters by Martin Crowley, Ian James, and Parham Shahrjerdi
included in this volume show, Blanchots writings also decisively envisage
new modes of political thought, action, and collectivity. And to recognize
these modes is first to recognize, as James remarks, that all thought and
action, and certainly all political or ethical articulation of community,
must pass through, or be exposed to, the experience of a certain practice
of writing (p.272). In this sense, the literary as practiced by Blanchot, by
exposing the political to the appropriative violence of its own movement
(whether dialectical or fusional), can be said perhaps to caution political
agency. This is not to say that such was always the case in Blanchot and
here, of course, the question opens onto the terms organizing the literature/
politics relation in his pre-war writings , only that without this exposure,
our understanding today of that relation would still be limited to, say, a
Sartrean notion of engagement. In noting this, we do not wish to ignore or
diminish the importance of this notion on the contrary, the fact that it
still determines (if only because it is still resisted) our modern conception(s)
of literature would beg to say otherwise but rather to draw attention to
its inability to conceive of another language that does not submit to the
dialectical and that therefore compels us to respond (and this is the writers
34 On literatures power without power, see also PF, 320; A, 80; and EP, 152.
most challenging, most discomforting responsibility) to what Blanchot calls

un double rapport (EI, 307), where dialecticity (possibility) encounters
non-dialecticity (impossibility), thereby opening up a new, dissymmetrical
modality of relation which breaks with without overcoming (how could
it?) the language of power and appropriation.
The implications of this double relation, for revolutionary politics, and
more precisely, for Blanchots own politics of radical refusal from the late
1950s onwards (following de Gaulles return to power), are far-reaching.
Like Sades libert dcrire, like the libert absolue in the Jena Romantics
parole cratrice, revolution or that which in Blanchot also goes under the
more unsettling name of Terror, on which Shahrjerdis contribution passes
uncompromising strictures 35 revolution, then, introduces une vacance
dhistoire, opening up a different (and deferring) relation to time. Time
becomes messianic. But if Blanchot is drawn, as many other revolutionaries,
to the time of Romantic messianism, or better, to the kind of rupture and
vacuum this time momentarily brings about, if, like Walter Benjamin, he
inherits from Early Romanticism a new philosophy of history and under-
standing of historical time as prophetic renewal and infinite becoming in
the present,36 he nonetheless steers clear from any appropriative relation
(ideological or otherwise) to such a moment. As Crowley explains, it is [a]
matter, somehow, of saying yes to this moment out of time, without filling
it in as Benjamin does, for example as a charismatic moment of redemp-
tive kairos, full of mystically-summoned, Romantic Jetztzeit, reclaimed
from the past by the historical materialist to blast open the continuum
35 On the relationship between revolution and Terror, see, most recently, Vanghlis
Bitsoris, Blanchot, Derrida: du droit la mort au droit la vie, in Blanchot dans son
sicle, ed. by Monique Antelme et al. (Lyon: Parangon, 2009), pp.17993, as well as
tienne Balibar, Blanchot linsoumis, in Blanchot dans son sicle, pp.289314.
36 Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, Walter Benjamins Critical Romanticism:
An Introduction, in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, pp. 16 (p. 1). On
Benjamins messianism, see also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Avant-propos, pp.1420;
Introduction to Walter Benjamins The Concept of Art Criticism in German
Romanticism, pp.1317.
of history (p.249). Informed neither by the assertive precedence of past

revolutionary experience, nor by the comforting promise of its future suc-
cess, the time of revolution in Blanchot ticks to the radical void ushered in
by the absence of both: Il y a un vide absolu derrire nous et devant nous,
he writes in December 1968, et nous devons penser et agir sans assistance,
sans autre soutien que la radicalit de ce vide (EP, 147). It is precisely this
void, Crowley argues, that must be affirmed in/as collective, oppositional
activity (p.248) and that requires a newly defined ethical response. And it
is from such an affirmation and other inflexions of it that Blanchot readers
like Shahrjerdi aspire today to draw a liberating impetus for political action
and writing so as to engage current political events.
The (Romantic) Subject of Literature
Without Blanchot, then, contemporary debate in emancipatory politics

and political theory has not fully acknowledged political Romanticisms
legacy in twentieth-century thought. This does not imply, of course (but
we have already seen this on several occasions above), that Blanchot fully
embraces this heritage. In fact, because Romanticism located its principe
de libert absolue (EI, 521) entirely within la libert du sujet (525), within
le tout o il est libre (522; Blanchots emphasis), he takes pains to unwork
that subjectivity (in his reading of Romanticism and in his own work) by
playing up la plnitude [qui] se saisit comme vide (520), le tout [qui] ne
contien[t] rien (523) and limpossibilit dtre quoi que ce soit de dter-
min, de fixe, de sr (525), as well as by accentuating, more generally, le
jeu souverain de lironie (524; his emphasis).37 In truth, Blanchots reading
of Romanticism comes to complicate the notion of the Romantic subject
37 The implications of treating irony here in relation to subjectivity are discussed by

Hector Kollias and Jake Wadham in their contributions to this volume.
early on. We may now return to the question of literary experience and
subjectivity mentioned above when, toward the beginning of this intro-
duction, we quoted a passage from Blanchots 1944 article De Jean-Paul
Giraudoux.
Readers will recall Blanchots emphasis there on le caractre dexprience
reconnu la littrature (CL, 549); after dismissing the psychological and
expressive values attached to literary experience in French Romanticism,
Blanchot highlighted how that experience, in Early German Romanticism
(Novalis, Hlderlin, Jean Paul) particularly, met en cause ce que lartiste
a de plus profond, non plus seulement pour lexprimer, mais pour le trans-
former, thereby exposing the writer to un mode dexistence nouveau, un
pouvoir de mtamorphose (549). Although it would serve as another
vantage point from which to address many of the issues discussed in this
introduction, this is not the place to examine the unrelenting attraction the
very word and notion of experience exercised on Blanchot throughout his
work; nor can we explore, with any justice, what such a concept (or non-
concept) might imply for his engagement with the literary subject. Let us
simply say that when Blanchot observes that [l]e principal est le caractre
dexprience reconnu la littrature, he is saying at least two things. Such
is, at least, what an article (on Andr Gide) Blanchot published in 1942
(and subsequently collected in Faux pas) seems to suggest:
[E]xprience, dabord au sens o elle [la littrature] exprime une exprience toute
personnelle et en dpend, et puis exprience, parce quelle est elle-mme un moyen
de mtamorphoses, un instrument dont lusage laisse lauteur autre quil ntait et
peut-tre quil ne croyait devoir tre. Il y a l un phnomne qui a trouv ses modles
et ses thoriciens chez les romantiques allemands []. La littrature vise un effet
qui doit retentir sur ltre tout entier. Non seulement, comme la posie primitive,
elle tend modifier magiquement lunivers, mais elle modifie celui qui la produit.
Entre les mains dun auteur trs conscient, elle est un exercice qui met en cause
ce quil est et le propose une condition nouvelle. Elle reprsente une aventure
ou, plus exactement, une vritable exprience dont les rsultats, si labores quen
aient t les donnes, si rflchie lopration, ne peuvent tre mesurs lavance,
quil faut pousser jusquau bout pour savoir o elle conduit son auteur, quelles
transformations de soi elle aboutit. [] La littrature, par ses conventions bizarres,
par ses rigueurs en apparence arbitraires, a une existence absolue. Elle a beau tre
leffet exact de lesprit qui la cre, elle affranchit de lui-mme cet esprit auquel elle
est strictement soumise, elle le rend libre de soi par les chanes spciales quelle lui
impose. (FP, 33940)
The key terms here (or at least those Blanchot readers might happily ignore)
are: et en dpend. For, what they reveal is to the extent to which the expe-
rience of literature in Blanchot, perhaps contrary to a view commonly
held by his commentators, is crucially informed by the notion of the sub-
ject, despite the latters mise en question or mise en jeu, metamorphosis or
alteration, modification or transformation. That Blanchots writings have
come to represent a triumph over the subject, epitomize its destitution or
disappearance the celebrated passage du je au il (EI, 558), whereby
le il narratif destitue tout sujet (56364) that such an experience is
hardly of the subject but rather (of ) the outside, (of ) that which lies irre-
trievably beyond subjectivity, such a view is not only justified but (we dare
say) no longer needs any demonstration. And in that, of course, the subject
of literature in Blanchot in itself already a misnomer is far removed
from what we might typically construe as the Romantic subject. But that
in order to reach and affirm the triumphant exteriority or impersonal-
ity of the outside (but is it ever reached? can it ever be affirmed?), one
has to acknowledge first that the loss or ruin of subjectivity is only ever
conceivable if the subject first seizes itself fully as a subject fully, that is
to say, to the limits of subjectivity that, in short, one does not just step
straight into the outside by bypassing the subject, such a reading, then, is
also suggested by Blanchot, though perhaps far less by his commentators
(including his staunchest critics). As a result, one cannot discount the vital
role played by a subject who or which is forced to withdraw into its most
personal, profound, inner, authentic, or mystical life (the words are all
Blanchots) before or better, as a condition of its dissolution as subjec-
tive entity or authority.
Besides, though perhaps this becomes apparent only in a much later
Blanchot, such a dissolution (destitution, disappearance, loss, ruin, absence,
dispersion, negation, effacement, unworking, death, etc.) is not some-
thing that can be positively completed, achieved, or exhausted: the subject
is always there to be dissolved, lost, ruined, dispersed, negated, effaced,

unworked, and so on. One can speak, at best, of lextnuation peut-tre
infinie du sujet.38 The key terms here are peut-tre infinie. Romantic or
otherwise, the question of the subject remains, for Blanchot, inexhaustible.
In a letter addressed to Ren Major in April 1988, he writes:
Oui, la question du sujet reste aujourdhui encore la question de la question. Le

je du cogito, le je transcendantal de Husserl, le je romantique de la subjectivit, la
Jemeinigkeit de Heidegger, et mme la contestation gnalogique de Nietzsche sont
des rponses qui laissent ouverte la question. Le Moi sans moi que jvoque quel-
quefois nest quune figure vanescente. Le lieu vide ne peut nous satisfaire. Poser la
question est dj difficile, mais ncessaire.39
As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy remarked, nous ne sommes pas sortis

de lpoque du Sujet (AL, 27). The difference, of course, is that Blanchots
evanescent figure (his Moi sans moi), unlike the philosophical configura-
tions of subjectivity listed above, is shot through with an infinitely cen-
trifugal, disappropriating force though these terms cannot adequately
reflect the complexity of the movement traced by, and effaced in, Blanchots
sans40 unworking that epoch from within and, as such, prefigures what is
known today as deconstruction.41 Put differently, Blanchots dying subject
38 Maurice Blanchot, Qui?, Cahiers Confrontation, 20 (Winter [February] 1989), 4951

(p.50). On the subsistence of the subject, see also VV, 12425: Le sujet ne disparat
pas: cest son unit, trop dtermine, qui fait question, puisque ce qui suscite lintrt
et la recherche, cest sa disparition (cest--dire une nouvelle manire dtre quest la
disparition) ou encore sa dispersion qui ne lanantit pas.
39 Maurice Blanchot, letter to Ren Major, 3 April 1988, in Cahiers Confrontation, 20
(Winter [February] 1989), 51.
40 On Blanchots use of the preposition sans, see Jacques Derrida, Pas (1976), Parages
(Paris: Galile, 1986), pp.19108 (pp.9093).
41 On Blanchot and deconstruction, see, among others, Herman Rapaport, Heidegger
and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989); Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derridas Notion
and Practice of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and, more
recently, Michael Holland, The Time of his Life, Paragraph, 30:3 (November 2007),
involves a redistribution of the scene in which thought and writing have

hitherto been staged so as to effect a displacement from the unifying,
continuous, dialectical (logical) movement of philosophical discourse
or at least of one of its most enduring traditions, what Blanchot calls
lidologie du continu (EI, 10, n. 1) to the fragmentary, discontinuous,
non-dialectical (ana-logical) movement demanded, according to him, by
literary dis-course. And in this, again, Blanchots conceptions of literature
and its subject distance themselves from Jena Romanticism: the poetic here
does not unite with the philosophical,42 but instead deploys an irreducible
relation (difference) between itself and philosophy.
The Absolute
If, as we noted above, the exhaustion of the literary subject can be described
as infinite, it is not because that subject is conceived dans son idalit ou
[] son absoluit (AL, 49). To return briefly to the passage from Faux pas
cited above, it is only because the subject of literature puts itself absolutely
into question, gives itself up entirely to the task at hand, that Blanchot can
write: La littrature [] doit retentir sur ltre tout entier, [l]a littrature
[] a une existence absolue (FP, 339, 340).43 There is no need to emphasize
4666; as well as Jrmie Majorel, Derrida et Starobinski, critiques de Blanchot?,

Tracs, 13 (December 2007), 14363.
42 See in particular Lyceum Fragment 115: All art should become knowledge, and all
knowledge art; poetry and philosophy should be united; Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische
Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols (Munich: Schningh,
1958), II: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I: 17961801 (1967), p.161 (our translation).
On this fragment, see also AL, 2223.
43 See also, among other examples, La Part du feu: ce besoin de la littrature contem-
poraine dtre plus que de la littrature: une exprience vitale, un instrument de
dcouverte, un moyen pour lhomme de sprouver, de se tenter et, dans cette tentative,
here how Romantic such lines may sound; they confer upon literature an
almost mythological or religious status, where la passion de lart becomes
la passion pour labsolu (EL, 286). As Jean-Luc Nancy concedes, il ny a
pas de doute que luvre de Blanchot nest pas exempte de romantisme, si
lon nomme ainsi la religion de lart et tout dabord de la littrature (de/
dans la communaut). Cette uvre ne cessera pas de provenir de l [].
But he adds at once: Cependant, considrer le mouvement de Blanchot,
on trouvera quil est aussi bien fait dun arrachement constant, sans doute
inquiet et difficile (peut-tre contre-cur parfois?), mais tenace et souci-
eux, la religion littraire. If this rupture (qui certes ne fut pas demble
donne Blanchot) avec toute nouvelle mythologie dfinit un cart et
au romantisme et la littrature mme,44 it also determines a departure
from a Romantic nostalgia for communitarian rootedness or spiritual har-
mony like that envisioned, for example, by Novalis in Die Christenheit
oder Europa and discussed in Jamess chapter in relation to a schema of
withdrawal and return, schism (Spaltung) and unification.45
As readers of LAbsolu littraire will recall, such a nostalgia for reli-
gion forms an initial definition of what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy term
de chercher dpasser ses limites (PF, 209), or Le Livre venir: Lexprience quest
la littrature est une exprience totale, une question qui ne supporte pas de limites,
naccepte pas dtre stabilise ou rduite (LV, 284). And must we recall the oft-
quoted words of the brief biographical note frequently inscribed at the beginning of
Blanchots essay collections: Sa vie est entirement voue la littrature? Finally,
one thinks of how consistently the term exigence returns in Blanchots descriptions
of literary experience: exigence de luvre, exigence dcrire, exigence fragmentaire,
exigence potique, exigence scripturaire, etc.
44 Jean-Luc Nancy, propos de Blanchot, Lil de buf, 1415 (May 1998), 5558
(p.57). On Blanchots (de)mythologization of literature, see also Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, Fidlits, in LAnimal autobiographique: autour de Jacques Derrida (Paris:
Galile, 1999), pp.21530 (especially pp.22730), and, by the same author, Agonie
termine, agonie interminable, in Maurice Blanchot: rcits critiques, pp.43949
(especially pp.44849).
45 See also Blanchots essay on the Athenum, where he refers to la scission, le fait dtre
partag ce que Brentano appelle die Geteiltheit (EI, 516).
the literary absolute: Il sagit den finir avec la partition et la division, la

sparation constitutive de lhistoire; il sagit de construire, de produire,
deffectuer cela mme que, lorigine de lhistoire, on pensait dj comme
un ge dor perdu et jamais inaccessible (AL, 2021).46 The Romantic
tendency toward a fusional unity, both originary and futural, is thus part of
a much wider discourse on the Ancients and the Moderns, on the stability,
exhaustion, and renovation of cultural values. And if this absolutism, where
an absolutely progressive demand is to be realized by an avant-garde,47 can
be understood in terms of a got de la religion (EI, 516), it can also be
construed in terms of what Blanchot describes as Romanticisms penchants
nationalistes (516). This can perhaps serve as a warning. For if Romanticism,
more than other periods, movements, or dispositions, is specifically con-
cerned with the exposition of an absolutely singular experience in and as
literature, then one can perhaps see this on one level as an anticipation
of the movement of exposition that is manifest in much of twentieth-
century thinking, where the unthought (for Heidegger or Derrida) or
the outside (for Blanchot, Foucault, or Nancy) comes to demand its due.
On another level, however, this pursuit of the singular also risks being a
move toward place, toward the local and the national. This is perhaps what
enabled us to ask above where is Romanticism?, and it is perhaps what,
to some degree, caused literature to be associated with place, and divided
into national traditions (with all its institutional ramifications). The risk,
therefore, is that this opening to the singular be turned to other ends, or
better, to ends tout court, to an economy of ends, that is to say, an economy
of work. Instances of these ends are, alas, well known; most disastrously,
46 See also Friedrich Schlegels letter to his brother August Wilhelm: As for religion
[] the time is ripe to found one [] I see the greatest birth of modern times already
emerging as unassuming as early Christianity, which no one could have suspected
would soon eclipse the Roman Empire, just as this great catastrophe in its widening
surge will swallow up the French Revolution that engendered it and that perhaps
had its only real merit in doing so; quoted by Walter Benjamin in SW I, 185.
47 There is no lack of movements to which this applies in some degree for instance,
modernism or surrealism (and perhaps French theory too).
they include a privileging of communitarian immanence embodied in the

myth of the nation, with all its exterminatory consequences.48 And it is
lassomption romantique de luvre comme sujet et du sujet comme uvre
that, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, permitted a putting-to-work of what
Nancy terms immanentisme as le peuple ou la nation: Linfinitisation
ou labsolutisation du sujet qui est au principe de la mtaphysique des
Modernes trouve l son issue proprement opratoire.49
It is, however, precisely the question of absolutization or infinitiza-
tion (of the subject, of the work) that Blanchot thinks differently from the
Romantics. As Benjamin has shown, for the Romantics criticism carries
out this absolutization via a consummation or completion of the work,
whereby poetry and criticism are inextricably combined, their difference
lifted or suspended (aufgehoben), such that the former contains the seed
of its own critique (SW I, 153).50 Admittedly, this synthetic movement is
calibrated differently from that carried out by Romanticisms systematiz-
ing and idealist peers. But how, one might ask, does Blanchots thinking
on worklessness and the fragmentary, which we shall see in more detail
shortly, respond to a language that seems so smilingly sublative, even if not
strictly Hegelian (Novalis: the lower self becomes identified with a better
48 This is the line of thought explored by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy from the early
1980s onwards; see in particular Lacoue-Labarthes and Nancys Le Mythe nazi (1980)
(Paris: LAube, 1998), as well as Nancys La Communaut dsuvre (1983) (Paris:
Bourgois, 1986).
49 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique (1987) (Paris: Bourgois, 1998),
pp.11112.
50 Such a total, fusional enterprise recalls Blanchots own uvre, insofar as it is that
of both a novelist and critic. However, the emphasis in Blanchot is perhaps less on
fusion than on prior dsuvrement. On this point, Michael Holland writes that
[t]he language of his fiction is thus, at one and the same time, that of a reader and
that of a writer. Which is why every character that figures in [Blanchots fiction]
can be traced to other fictions. The result is not a hybrid discourse, nor even a dual
one. It is rather discourse itself split to its core; Maurice Blanchot (19072003),
Paragraph, 26:3 (November 2003), 12730 (p.129; his emphasis).
self in [Romanticization])?51 How does such a response diverge not just

from the thinking introduced by the Jena group but also from that offered
by some of its most influential interpreters?
Three chapters in this volume address these questions at length: reading
de Man contra Blanchot, Hector Kollias investigates the role of Schlegelian
irony in generating an infinitized understanding, and examines the pecu-
liar sense in which this raising can become a razing whereby irony is not
assimilable so much so, in fact, that it operates as a block to understand-
ing (p.199).52 Comparing Blanchots approach to Jena Romanticism with
Benjamins, Jake Wadhams chapter discusses the Fichtean subject and its
hyperbolization to a point of infinite regress in Romanticism (p.177)
what Benjamin famously formulates as the thinking of thinking of think-
ing (SW I, 126). This point, as Wadham argues, is in fact construed by
Benjamins Romantics less as a regress than as an unfurling in universal
connectedness (Zusammenhang), extending Fichtes concept of reflection
beyond the self-positing I and investing the concept of criticism with the
philosophical seriousness of the Kantian Kritik. In a similar vein, but in
relation to notions of infinite reflexivity at play both in Blanchots reading
of Romanticism and in his own literary critical method, Yves Gilonne shows
how Blanchots conception of the essence of Romanticism as recherche
et recherche delle-mme (EI, 518) entails [une] recherche impossible de
la reprsentation soi (p.94).
Considering these issues, Romanticism can no longer be viewed merely
as something inflected psychologically as Sturm und Drang,53 and/or politi-
cally as le dsir de rvolte (EI, 516). To do so would be to sail too close to
51 Novalis, quoted by Walter Benjamin in SW I, 133.

52 Interestingly, de Man describes Blanchots reflections on literature as suspend-
ing laction mme de la comprhension; see Paul de Man, La Circularit de
linterprtation dans luvre critique de Maurice Blanchot, Critique, 229 ( June
1966), 54760 (p.547).
53 Such a Romanticism would be perhaps of less interest regarding Blanchot than its
contemporary, Sades libertine. In fact, one could take the Sadean and the Romantic
subject to reflect two instances where the Hegelian negative is infinitized.
Hegels judgement that not only at Jena but for the entirety of the Christian
era, Romanticism is the name for artistic activity as dissolution, decadence,
relativism, even nihilism.54 The clich this reading of Romanticism has
generated over time is addressed by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy as:
le motif dun romantisme essentiellement rebelle limprialisme de la Raison et

de ltat, au totalitarisme du Cogito et du Systme, dun romantisme de rvolte
libertaire et littraire, littraire parce que libertaire, et dont lart incarnerait linsur-
rection. Ce motif nest certes pas simplement faux. Mais il nest pas loin de le devenir,
si lon nglige son revers (ou son avers): car lAbsolu littraire aggrave et radicalise
la pense de la totalit et du Sujet, il infinitise cette pense, et cest ainsi prcisment
quil entretient son quivoque. (AL, 26; emphasis theirs)
At first sight, one could take certain aspects of Blanchots own work to fall
into the trap of the kind of Romanticism described in this motif. But whilst
there is certainly a sense in which Blanchot is drawn to what he terms, in
the essay on Sade cited earlier, linsurrection, la folie dcrire (EI, 32342),
his understanding of the relationship between art and insurrection is much
more complex than that offered by un romantisme de rvolte libertaire et
littraire. We have seen above how this complexity is articulated and how
any vocation for (revolutionary) action is combined, as Martin Crowley
explains, with the necessity to avoid any affirmation of fraternal or fusional
54 For Hegels view of Romanticism as (sthetically and morally) nihilistic, see Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable, pp.6364. It is worthwhile noting, in passing,
that Jena is also the place where something Hegel perhaps approved of more took
place. At the battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, as Blanchot recalls, Napolon, sur
son petit cheval gris, passait sous les fentres de Hegel qui reconnut en lui lme
du monde (IM, 1314). Decades earlier, Blanchot had evoked this scene to plot
the difference between revolutionary Terror and war: linvasion soldatesque nest
en rien assimilable ce qua de ncessairement dmesur dimpossible la Terreur
rvolutionnaire, lorsque celle-ci est appele dranger et transgresser toute loi. Les
armes napoloniennes libraient les peuples en se soumettant les gouvernements,
puis soumettaient les peuples au nom de luniverselle libert couronne, lme du
monde passant et repassant cheval sous les fentres du Philosophe. Nous sommes
ici trs en retrait par rapport lidologie jacobine. (EP, 130)
community. Ian James steers a similar course, inside a narrow margin, and
considers the problematic of art and community in light of a technologi-
cal age where writing becomes une technique (VV, 52). The question of
tekhne, particularly in relation to the development of art and the advance
of history, is, of course, an ancient one. It is, also, a deeply Romantic one,55
not least because it is in the wake of Romanticism (and of Hegels pro-
nouncement on art as a thing of the past) that this question really begins
to loom as a threat and that art, in the mode of la gnialit romantique
(EL, 285), can no longer be seen as providing a refuge from what Blanchot
calls, in LEspace littraire, la vitalit dialectique:
Lartiste qui croit sopposer souverainement aux valeurs et protger en soi, par son
art, la source de la toute-puissante ngation, ne se soumet pas moins au destin gnral
que lartiste qui fait uvre utile, peut-tre davantage encore. Il est dj frappant
quil ne puisse dfinir lart qu partir du monde. Il est le monde renvers. Mais ce
renversement nest aussi rien de plus que le moyen rus dont le monde se sert pour se
rendre plus stable et plus rel. Aide dailleurs limite, qui nest importante qu certains
moments, que lhistoire plus tard rejette, quand, devenue elle-mme visiblement la
ngation du travail, elle trouve dans le dveloppement des formes techniques de la
conqute la vitalit dialectique qui lassure de sa fin. (EL, 288)
It is in light of such statements that one should consider, alongside the

possible Blanchot (post-)romantique, a side to his thinking which would
be resolutely anti- or un-Romantic. And since we have already summoned
Hegel, it is in light of the same statements that we can also consider, along-
side the possible Blanchot (post-)hglien, a side which would be resolutely
anti- or un-Hegelian.56
55 On the relationship between Romanticism and la technique, see also EI, 399400;
on ontology, technology, and science, see EP, 6667.
56 [I]l se pourrait qucrire exige [] la fin et aussi lachvement de tout ce qui garantit
notre culture, non pas pour revenir idylliquement en arrire, mais plutt pour aller
au-del, cest--dire jusqu la limite, afin de tenter de rompre le cercle, le cercle de
tous les cercles: la totalit des concepts qui fonde lhistoire, se dveloppe en elle et
dont elle est le dveloppement. (EI, vii; Blanchots emphasis)
Negotiating Hegel
There are thus at least two sides to the debate on the absolute with which
Blanchot had to contend. For the Romantics were not alone in laying claim
to whatever the absolute might have been. In addition and in opposition to
the Romantics literary absolute, which sought not only to defend art but
to extend its reach immeasurably, opening or exposing it to the entirety of
life, along the way merging art, philosophy, politics, science, and religion,
one can and perhaps must also read Hegel, who famously condemns art as
chose passe (EL, 284; LV, 265) and dismisses its Romantic inflection as
wasteful and self-referential, given that Philosophy had now sublated art
in its procession toward absolute knowledge.57 On both sides, therefore,
there is a dramatic exacerbation, which will be reproduced in Blanchots
account of this debate between literature and philosophy, as it successively
takes one side then the other in a mise en abyme, this movement itself
is variously dialectical and a Romantic ironization or infinitization of the
dialectic. The two interpretations, mobilizations, or mises en uvre of the
absolute are important in order to advance our understanding of how
Blanchot saw literature and philosophy interacting.
The debate on differing inflections of the absolute is succinctly
addressed by Lacoue-Labarthe, when he proposes, in an essay on Blanchot
published in 1999, that the religion of politics (in Robespierres Paris) and
the religion of art (in the Schlegels Jena) emerge at the same time: Une
fureur est ainsi ne, parce que, ici et l, sur un mode ou sur lautre [], ce
qui tait voulu, ce ntait pas moins que la mise en uvre de lAbsolu, lequel,
dcidment, avait rvl quil ne stait pas rvl.58 (his emphasis). We have
57 This is not to say that Hegel did not hold art in high esteem. On the contrary, as
Blanchot reminds us in La Part du feu, [Hegel] avait de lart la plus haute ide quon
en puisse former, puisquil voyait comment lart peut devenir religion et la religion
art (PF, 295).
58 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LAgonie de la religion, p.227.
already mentioned the political mode of this fury when we discussed the
relationship between writing and revolution, between the self-declarative
mode of literature and the Jacobin Terror turned into le logos des temps
modernes (EI, 521). The other mode Lacoue-Labarthe has in mind is, of
course, the Romantic mode of [le] sujet royal (EL, 285), of la souverainet
du sujet (287), to use Blanchots expressions. But Lacoue-Labarthes state-
ment can also apply to the Hegelian mode of absolute spirit, of (again in
Blanchots words) labsolu [] devenu consciemment travail de lhistoire
(284).59 Indeed, an encounter, of literature (or at least of what was in the
process of acquiring the modern sense associated with that name) with
philosophy, and in particular with Hegels philosophy, was de rigueur, even
if it proved a missed encounter. To put it bluntly, what was at stake in this
encounter was the relation between a certain mode of discourse (literature,
philosophy) and its mode of thinking or presenting itself, of thinking its
(self-)presentation in other words, a works relation to its own genre,
concept, theory, principle, premise, axiom, system, idea, ideal, origin, or
condition of possibility.60 It is through this self-relational inflection inau-
59 In LEntretien infini, Blanchot invokes yet another type of absolute that of Mallarm
which he considers more radical (EI, 621) than the Romantic and Hegelian abso-
lutes in that it seizes itself comme ce qui conciderait avec labsence duvre, celle-ci
la dtournant alors de jamais concider avec elle-mme et la destinant limpossibilit
(622). There is, finally, another sense in which Blanchot, particularly in his later writ-
ings, conceives of absoluteness: the Holocaust, understood as the vnement absolu
de lhistoire (ED, 80; his emphasis); see also A, 12829; and EP, 161.
60 This point is made by Lacoue-Labarthe apropos of Blanchot: there is [] no liter-
ary work that does not wish to be definitive. What literature has wanted or sought,
since some such thing has existed, if it exists, is its end: the secret of its origin, the
condition (rule, law, prohibition) it must undergo to be possible. What literature
wants or seeks [] is the impossible; The Contestation of Death, trans. by Philip
Anderson, in The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot, ed. by Kevin
Hart and Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004),
pp.14155 (p.143; his emphasis). Strangely, this portion of text does not appear in
the published French version of the essay, La Contestation de la mort, Magazine
littraire, 424 (October 2003), 5860.
gurated by Jena Romanticism (what Blanchot also refers to as la passion

de penser et lexigence quasi abstraite, pose par la posie, de se rflchir
et de saccomplir par sa rflexion (EI, 518; his emphasis)) that literature
presents itself, that its theory or concept establishes itself, in short, that it
can impose itself, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy put it, comme lau-del
(la vrit, ou la critique, ou la dissolution) de ce que la potique ancienne
et la rhtorique avaient constitu comme genres de la chose crite ou par-
le61 (their emphasis). And it is precisely this movement transcending and
governing the work that, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, Hegel failed to
take account of in his dismissal of Romanticism:
[S]agissant [dans lanalyse de Hegel] de lesthtique ou de la potique du roman-

tisme, sagissant aussi de sa pratique littraire, ce fut chaque fois, semble-t-il, comme
pour viter den aborder de front lambition majeure, laquelle sintitulait pourtant
bien, au-del des projets de posie absolue ou de nouvelle mythologie, du concept de
littrature (dont il savre en dfinitive que Hegel naura nulle part souffl mot).62
Hegels absolute, for its part (and for everything else, of course), is
commanded by le principe de la relve,63 a principle which art must also
necessarily obey. Romantic art is only a moment le moment du dclin
(EI, 522) within the greater scheme of la relve, lAufhebung de lart, a
moment where lart parvient encore se survivre64 (Lacoue-Labarthes
emphasis) as a movement of dissolution (EI, 522). And yet, as Lacoue-
Labarthe maintains, lAuflsung [] de la littrature a laiss un reste, un
rsidu []: la littrature elle-mme, en tant quelle aura rsist, dans sa
propre dissolution, la dissolution philosophique65 (his emphasis). It
is precisely in this residual mode, then, that literature as dsuvrement
survives in Blanchot (and in others), survives its Romantic dissolution,
61 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Dialogue des genres, Potique,

21 (1975), 14857, p.149.
62 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable, p.55 (his emphasis).
63 Ibid., p.60.
64 Ibid., p.57.
65 Ibid., p.55.
and survives as that dissolution.66 Whilst on the face of it this is to accept

Hegels argument, it is in fact to turn that argument against itself, so as to
show that dans cette victoire, il y a une dfaite, dans cette vrit, celle des
formes, des notions et des noms, il y a un mensonge (EI, 47). Whence
the fundamental importance of irony for the Romantics (otherness in the
same), on which Kolliass and Longs chapters concentrate.
Nevertheless, if Romanticism appears to resist dialectical subsumption
(momentarily at least), it is remarkable that such a principle, universally
applicable, should seem so close but as its underside, as it were to the
Romanticized or infinitized subject. This proximity, without which no
resistance (that of Jena Romanticism to Hegel, and vice versa) perhaps could
have come about in the first place, can be seen in the figures of the spurious
infinite67 and of what Kojve and Bataille referred to as Hegels madness.68
Bearing this in mind, one can move beyond the knee-jerk rejection of Hegel
by much contemporary writing on Blanchot, for whom Hegel, fou de son
srieux, is also invincible (ED, 79). It seems subtler analysis is called for,
then, such as that of Kollias: The ruin of the system is for Blanchot an
66 On Blanchots response to a residue from the Hegelian system, namely of what Bataille
called ngativit sans emploi, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary,
pp.10311. Some critics have noted that Blanchots thinking on this issue informs Le
Dernier homme (1957). One should perhaps add that Romanticism provides another
context for this work: Mary Shelleys The Last Man (1826).
67 On the spurious infinite, see Kollias, p.203, and Crowley, p.251.
68 It is perhaps worth pointing out here that whatever this madness (discussed by
Gilonne) represents is articulated differently from the more famous Blanchotian
example of Hlderlins madness. Cf. Maurice Blanchot, La Folie par excellence,
Critique, 45 (February 1951), 99118; this text was revised as a preface to Karl Jaspers,
Strindberg et Van Gogh, Swedenborg et Hlderlin (Paris: Minuit, 1970), pp.932, and
partly revised again in PAD, 6566. On Blanchot and Hegel, see Andrzej Warminski,
Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel, Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 26775, as
well as Mathieu Bietlot, Blanchot et Hegel: limpossibilit den finir, in Maurice
Blanchot, de proche en proche, ed. by ric Hoppenot (Grignan: Complicits, 2008),
pp.1130.
imposture, a ruse whereby the system imposes its own exigency even after
the ruination brought by the fragment in its wake (p.198).
From this standpoint, there is, in the final analysis (or rather synthe-
sis), no possible reste or rsidu to the system, or better, this surplus is
always already part of the system. But if it is part of the system, it is not
something the system can present productively. It is at this point that
Lacoue-Labarthes reading of Hegel (in the context of the latters cham-
pioning of the poetry of Schiller) can help us see in greater relief the Jena
Romantics theory of art as Darstellung (presentation), and thus what
Blanchots response to this theory might be. He writes:
[L]a question hglienne est celle-ci: ce qui est penser, quel quil soit (ltre, la vrit,
la pense elle-mme) peut-il se prsenter comme tel, peut-il apparatre dans son propre
lment? Est-ce que se prsenter comme tel, pour ce qui est penser, est-ce quappa-
ratre dans son propre lment, ce ne serait pas, la limite, ne pas se prsenter du tout,
ne pas apparatre? Ny a-t-il pas, autrement dit, une ncessit de la manifestation?
Et dans ce cas, y a-t-il une rvlation possible, une parousie, sans perte ni reste, de
ce qui est penser?69
Unsurprisingly, Hegels answer is formulated in the affirmative. Lacoue-

Labarthe continues:
[S]il y a bien une ncessit de lapparence (de la manifestation), si la manifestation
est un moment, lui-mme essentiel, de lessence, il ne sagit prcisment que dun
moment, auquel par consquent doit succder [] le moment (o se dissout tout
moment) du retour, de la rintriorisation, de la rappropriation sans perte, sans la
moindre perte (pas mme celle de la manifestation, releve, et donc maintenue).
Cest la raison pour laquelle une (re)prsentation comme telle, une manifestation
dans son propre lment de ce qui est penser, nest pas seulement possible, mais
bel et bien ncessaire.70
It is here that what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call the literary abso-
lute comes into play. If Jena Romanticisms discourse was particularly philo-
69 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable, p.75 (his emphasis).

70 Ibid., p.76 (his emphasis).
sophical, then the problematic of that discourse was a greater privileging

of art as mise-en-uvre, poiesis, Darstellung, installation, confection, fic-
tion (fictionnement).71 The difference, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
remark, from Hegels prsentation philosophique de labsolu (AL, 380;
their emphasis) is that Romanticism does not solve or overcome this prob-
lematic in the mode of Aufhebung, thereby attaining the element of pure
thought, but presents it as Bildung (380), that is to say, as the work of art,72
as mise-en-forme, and not as purely speculative (dialectical, appropriative)
presentation. From this perspective, what counts, for the Jena Romantics,
is the productive mode of presentation. (Productive here has the sense of
something (self-)generative, rather than useful or effective.) It is precisely
because this presentation does not present itself as ltre, la vrit, la pense
elle-mme but produces itself absolutely that art can be theorized or criti-
cized (and not releve or aufgehoben).73 As auto-production en abyme
(AL, 420; their emphasis), then, art produces itself and its conditions of
production; in other words, it fuses both together into an absolute:
le romantisme nest ni de la littrature (ils en inventent le concept) ni mme, simple-
ment, une thorie de la littrature (ancienne et moderne), mais la thorie elle-mme
comme littrature ou, cela revient au mme, la littrature se produisant en produisant
sa propre thorie. Labsolu littraire, cest aussi, et peut-tre avant tout, cette absolue
opration littraire. (AL, 22; their emphasis)
And if Romanticisms mode of production is also, as we have seen, a mode

of dissolution, or, in Blanchotian idiom, if literatures movement vers elle-
mme is also a movement vers son essence qui est la disparition (LV, 265),
this dissolution or disappearance is not itself available to philosophical
71 Ibid., p.81.
72 In this vein, Schlegel stated that Goethes Wilhelm Meister perhaps takes precedence
over all other works of our poet; no other is to the same degree a work; quoted by
Benjamin in SW I, 157. Cf. Hollands chapter for various further pronouncements
by Novalis on Goethe, by Goethe on Jean Paul, and by Schlegel and Hegel on the
novels of Jean Paul and Sterne.
73 See AL, 38084.
sublation; its truth remains ultimately imprsentable, to borrow Lacoue-

Labarthes word. What at first sight could seem to be a collusion between
the two absolutes, between the Romantics affirmation of art as disso-
lution and the characterization of art by Hegel as a thing of the past,
reveals a crucial difference (of emphasis) between the Romantics and Hegel.
Literature does not manage to accomplish its own task, and therefore does
not accomplish any task: lart romantique [] naccde pas la vrit
de la dissolution, cest--dire la vrit spculative, rconciliatrice, de la
ngativit dtermine (Lacoue-Labarthes emphasis).74 Such a dissolution
of dissolution would suggest that it is necessary for the Darstellung to be
something other than a Darstellung of itself.75 At the heart, then, of the
Romantic absolute lies a difference. And it is this difference that brings us
back now to Blanchot, more precisely, to the deferring movement he calls,
in the Athenum essay, luvre de labsence duvre (EI, 517).
The Fragmentary Demand
Having briefly directed our attention to Hegel, we can now look at how
Romantic art theory might enable analysis of the way in which Blanchots
practice and conception of literature moves from lexigence de luvre to
74 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable, p.64. It is noteworthy in this context

that Lacoue-Labarthe goes on to propose une tude de ce que [] Hegel doi[t]
Schlegel. Car dans la thorie de la posie transcendantale, de lart romantique, de la
dissolution, etc., dans la systmatisation de la potique des genres, ce qui se prpare
et commence se mettre luvre (mais en se dportant, et toute la question est l),
cest, dj, une logique de la relve (p.89, n. 10; his emphasis).
75 [N]e faut-il pas, pour quune prsentation en gnral [] puisse avoir lieu, que ce
qui doit se prsenter [] se diffrencie, saline, sextriorise, sextasie, se donne (
voir et penser, thoriser) et, se donnant, se perde?; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
LImprsentable, p.75 (his emphasis).
labsence duvre to lexigence fragmentaire. It is here that the complex

relationship between the absolute and the fragmentary comes into view,
leading Blanchot to the statement which perhaps best summarizes (if such
a summary were indeed possible) his debt to Romanticism: affirmer ensem-
ble labsolu et le fragmentaire (EI, 518). (One could perhaps consider, very
schematically, that debt to be weighted toward the first term in his earlier
work, toward to the second in his later work, and in any case, to involve
a reworking and unworking supplementing, exposition, transgression,
ironization, exhaustion of the first by the second.)76
Blanchots writing can be fruitfully discussed in terms of various
genres such as fantastical Mrchen, the idyll, and the novel.77 These are all
associated with Romanticism, particularly in the latter case: for the Jena
Romantics, the Roman, as is well known, represented a genre of genres. It
is worthwhile recalling, in this context, that Blanchots early literary career
is largely devoted to the production of three novels published between
1941 and 1948, as well as to the theorization of the novel. As Hollands
contribution to this volume shows, Blanchots engagement with Schlegels
and Jean Pauls differing theories of the novel can be read as alternative
models to better-known ones of the Mallarmean Livre or Lautramonts
Maldoror.78 In a more contemporaneous setting, this conception of the
76 The two terms also appear together in a fleeting subtitle to Blanchots Athenum
essay: (Labsolu, le fragmentaire). The page proofs reveal that Blanchot considered
adding this subtitle, only to revert to the original 1964 title at the last moment; see
the page appended to this volume in facsimile (LEntretien infini, Houghton Library,
Harvard University, MS Fr 497, p.492).
77 The idyll, discussed in Michael Hollands chapter, provides another scenario for
Blanchots engagement with Hegels anti-Romanticism. More generally, on the
question of genre, and in particular the novel as non-genre or genre dgnr, see
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Dialogue des genres, 14857
(especially pp.14950, 15455), as well as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable,
pp.8889, n. 10.
78 See in particular Mallarm et lart du roman (FP, 18996) and Lautramont (197
202). On the notion of the Book in Blanchots later work, see LV, 30132 and EI,
62036.
novel as a work [qui] doit tendre tre labsolu quil convoite (FP, 194) can
be aligned with some of the defining novels of Blanchots century among
others, Sartres La Nause (1938). Indeed, the Romantic share of this all-
pervasive movement overtaking life or being perhaps sheds further light on
this aspect of Blanchots work, which has significantly been described as a
novel of existence.79 In Blanchot, though, this conception of an absolute
where the work strives towards totality causes totality to become an end-
less work in progress to the point, as Blanchot begins to insist from the
1950s onwards, of unworking the work. In fact, where Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy describe the Romantic project as une uvre indite, infini-
ment indite (AL, 21), one can read the proliferating versions of Blanchots
texts, and most emblematically Thomas lObscur.80 In his article on the
Athenum (but already before, particularly in LEspace littraire and Le
Livre venir), Blanchot develops this sense of openness and endlessness
at play in the literary work, this mouvement sans terme (EI, 520), which
lead the Romantics to conceive of un livre total, sorte de Bible en perp-
tuelle croissance (525). However, for Blanchot this Romantic conception
of the roman total (525) is ultimately overshadowed by the sense that la
seule manire de laccomplir et t dinventer un art nouveau, celui du
fragment (525). This statement gestures to one of the fundamental hinges
in Blanchots uvre: where lexigence de luvre moves to lexigence frag-
mentaire, as his writings progress, crudely speaking, from the novel, to the
rcit, to the fragment(ary).81
79 Michael Holland, The Blanchot Reader, p.21. Holland writes of Blanchots review of
Sartres La Nause: Sartre has taken the novel into the field of existence itself, reveal-
ing the possibility that it alone can make existence livable, adding: the contingency
and superfluousness experienced by Sartres hero, and explored in his philosophy,
never display the degree of absoluteness they attain in Blanchots experience and in
his fiction (p.20).
80 As is known, after its first publication in 1941, Blanchot published a nouvelle ver-
sion of Thomas lObscur in 1950. On Blanchots literary experience of what he terms
linterminable, see AC, 9193 (p.93).
81 Crudely speaking, since Blanchots earliest literary works were not strictly novels but
two short narratives Blanchot will later refer to them as rcits (AC, 91) entitled
It is at this point that Blanchot seems to swerve decisively from Jena

Romanticism namely, by distinguishing what he calls the fragmentary
from the fragment or aphorism. More exactly, the Romantic conception
of the fragment is too complicit, in Blanchots view, with a totality which,
although notionally absent, is merely put off rather than properly dealt with.
Two instances of this fragment where, as Blanchot has it, le doigt coup
renvoie la main (EI, 451) would be Novaliss grain of pollen, ready to
create a new life, a future totality, or a more general Romantic fascination
with ruins, ultimately nostalgic for past totality. Both these instances, then,
rely on a continuous temporality, on the possibility of maintaining or cre-
ating a link with the future or the past. It is precisely such continuity that
will be called into question by Blanchots unworking or interruption of the
fragment by what he calls the fragmentary. This is not to say that, by seek-
ing to interrupt a continuous relation to greater, absent totality, Blanchots
fragmentary privileges its own present moment, for instance by affirming
the immediate importance of its formal or sthetic embodiment. He makes
this distinction most clearly during a discussion of Schlegels metaphorical
view of the fragment as a hedgehog, rolled up and closed to the outside
world.82 Blanchots attempt is instead to wrest the Romantic fragment from
its apparent fermeture (EI, 527) and thus affirm a form une forme qui,
tant toutes formes, cest--dire la limite ntant aucune (518) that does
not exclude but steps beyond totality by traversing or interrupting it. The
fragmentary could be seen to be a form without form, a surplus to form,
that is nevertheless not identifiable or present as such: ni le fragment, partie
dun tout, ni le fragmentaire en soi (PAD, 62; our emphasis). If it is neither
concerned with totality (whether absent but recuperable, or present in
microcosmic form) nor simply the presence of that which exceeds totality,
we might think of the fragmentary as an infinite exposition or opening
Le Dernier mot and LIdylle (composed between 1935 and 1936, first published
in 1947, and subsequently collected in 1951 in Le Ressassement ternel and in 1983 in
Aprs coup), and his last literary work was not a fragmentary work but a relatively
linear, testimonial narrative a rcit? entitled LInstant de ma mort (1994).
82 Cf. Kolliass chapter on the accuracy or otherwise of this discussion.
to and not a presentation of des rapports nouveaux qui sexceptent de

lunit, comme ils excdent lensemble (EI, 527).
The question of the fragmentary in the August 1964 article on Jena
Romanticism allows us to turn to Blanchots involvement in the ultimately
abortive project of founding a Revue internationale, as it came to be called,
between 1960 and 1965.83 This project serves as a reminder that Blanchots
fragmentary was never merely theoretical but was inseparable from his con-
temporaneous political activities. A number of those involved in the Revue
project had come to know each other through the Dclaration des 121
(acall for soldiers right to insubordination in the Algerian war), and some
from that group, notably Blanchot, would carry their interest in collective
writing, anonymity, political radicalism, openings to the contemporary,
the destitute, the outside all of which were recognized as the concerns
of literature over into May 1968 and the short-lived review Comit. The
Romantics views of collective writing, the upholding of life as poetic, and
the political calling of an avant-garde are therefore of some importance to
understanding Blanchots thinking, as well as all that it indexes at a time
when, according to Blanchots hyperbolic words in a text first published
in 1960 (and later collected in LEntretien infini), il sagit manifestement
dun changement bien plus important [que la Rvolution franaise], dans
lequel viennent se rassembler tous les bouleversements antrieurs, ceux
qui ont eu lieu dans le temps de lhistoire, pour provoquer la rupture de
lhistoire (EI, 39495).84
Blanchots political commitment in the late 1950s and 1960s might
lead one to believe that he abandons purely literary concerns in favour
83 The review only produced a kind of trial issue, entitled Gulliver and hosted by the
Italian journal Il Menab, 7 (April 1964). On the relationship between the Athenum
and the Revue project, see Gisle Berkmans piece in this volume. See also Emmanuel
Alloa, Blanchot the Atopic, Atopia, 10 ( January 2007) <http://www.atopia.tk>,
and Roman Schmidt, Die Idee einer internationalen Zeitschrift, Atopia, 10 ( January
2007) <http://www.atopia.tk> (accessed 7 July 2010).
84 On this impending changement, see also Blanchots contemporaneous letter to
Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 December 1960, in EP, 4549 (p.48).
of engagement, thus relativizing, in a sense, lexigence de luvre. In fact,

however, in the 1960s and thereafter, his work becomes more experimental,
whether with the use of post-dialogic entretien or with the fragmentary. He
writes, for example, of Ren Chars fragmentary poetry: La juxtaposition
et linterruption se chargent ici dune force de justice extraordinaire. Toute
libert sy dispose partir de laisance (malaise) quelle nous accorde (EI,
453). Rather than being relativized, then, literature opens onto an ethi-
cal demand, an attentiveness and openness to the absolutely or radically
other: respectant et prservant cette extriorit (453; Blanchots empha-
sis). But this was not merely to believe that the other or outside was purely
unknowable: it was also very real, interpellative; it was contemporary, if
not the contemporary. This sense can be seen in Blanchots response to the
erection of the Berlin wall in 1961. He wrote that the city presented un
problme quon ne peut formuler adquatement, dans sa ralit complte,
quen dcidant de la formuler fragmentairement (EP, 72; his emphasis).
In other words, en parler de manire juste, cest en parler en laissant aussi
parler le manque abrupt de nos paroles et de notre pense, en laissant
donc parler notre impossibilit den parler dune manire prtendument
exhaustive (EP, 73).
This fragmentary demand can also be plotted in terms of collective
writing. As Blanchot wrote of the Athenum fragments, [le fragment] est
une anticipation de ce que lon pourrait appeler criture plurielle, possibilit
dcrire en commun (EI, 526).85 Such a possibility can no doubt be read
together with Blanchots comments on the impersonal life of the literary
work, where I am always already speaking to another (as Levinas recalls),
and where I am always already unable to speak as myself. But this imper-
sonality is all the more accentuated in the case of collective writing, and in
particular the kind of collective writing Blanchot envisaged for the Revue:
85 Novalis (quoted and translated by Blanchot): Les journaux sont dj des livres faits
en commun. Lart dcrire en commun est un symptme curieux qui fait pressentir
un grand progrs de la littrature. Un jour peut-tre, on crira, pensera, agira col-
lectivement (EI, 526).
not as a [p]ublication collective [] sans structure collective relle, ou bien

revue dogmatique, instrument de dmonstration et de combat, lorgane
dun parti ou dune cole (EP, 69) but instead as uvre cratrice collective
de dpassement where [c]hacun devient responsable daffirmations dont
il nest pas lauteur, dune recherche qui nest plus seulement la sienne, il
rpond dun savoir quil ne sait pas originellement par lui-mme (53). In
contradistinction to the infinitized Romantic subject, the emphasis here
is on a loss, destitution, or emptying of subjectivity. The insistence on the
possibilit collective (53) emerging from the projected impersonality and
international character of the Revue would later be developed into un com-
munisme dcriture (97),86 the expression used by Blanchot in 1968 in a
working paper for the review Comit. One could in fact argue that much of
what is at stake in this literary communism is already manifest in Blanchots
narration of and concern for various limit-experiences, namely that of
extreme suffering or weakness (whether in Le Dernier homme, LAttente
loubli, or his writing on Antelmes LEspce humaine or Levinass Totalit
et infini). In this respect, his work gives voice to plurality and the anony-
mous, existing not only in the movement between novels, rcits, criticism,
philosophy, the fragment, the fragmentary, and so on, but also extensible
to the impersonal, public language of the dispossessed, of les sans paroles
(EP, 98): Depuis mai [1968], la rue sest rveille: elle parle (112).
Another aspect of the Revue internationale related to Blanchots read-
ing of the Athenum is that of generic immixation, with all the implications
concerning the opening of literature to its other or outside. Again, what
begins in the early 1960s will surface again in 1968. For instance, an internal
document drafted by Blanchot for a section of the Revue reads:
86 On the relationship between writing and communism (where the experience of the
former always entails a rethinking of received notions of the latter), see EI, viiviii; EP,
5456, 9799; and A, 11314, 117. On communism and Romanticism, see Blanchots
1959 essay on Henri Lefebvre, collected in A, 98108 (especially pp.9899).
La structure de cette rubrique devra tre telle quelle puisse admettre, en-dehors
des textes de commentaires (des fragments), dautres textes imprims en dautres
caractres et formant comme des sortes de relais: a) des citations (par exemple: Aby
Warburg: der liebe Gott steht in Detail; ou bien: Par mille et mille circuits et sans
gagner dun pas, toujours revenir au mme point [Thtte]); b) des sortes daphoris-
mes (aphorismes de pense, plutt que de style); c) surtout des informations rdiges
trs sobrement, informations non pas destines avoir une valeur dinformation,
mais valeur de signification. (EP, 60)
In Blanchots working paper for Comit, we read:
Puisque le sens est donn par la mise en commun (la continuit dune srie de textes
toujours discontinus et mme divergents, de formes et de genres essentiellement dif-
frents), il ny a pas de raisons de distinguer entre textes dj publis ailleurs et textes
crits pour la publication. Il y a souvent dans de tels textes dj publis, latente en eux,
une possibilit de citation, cest--dire une appartenance au fragmentaire. (EP, 98)
In truth, Blanchots Athenum essay already explores this possibilit de

citation, insofar as seven quotations from Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling
jostle or ferment together (EI, 519). Thus the fragmentary here is in one
sense a synthesis, and is therefore distinct from the aphorismes [] de style
rejected by the first text for being too classical in their insistence on rigid
form, rather than on movement and flexibility.87 There is a further sense,
however, in which this synthesis or immixation is one of insurmountable
tension or discontinuity: the radically interruptive arrangement set up by
what Blanchot calls lintervalle (attente et pause) qui spare les fragments
(EI, 527), what he also refers to in the Comit working paper as leurs rap-
ports de diffrence (EP, 98). In other words, the fragmentary is not the
transcendence of the fragment, in the way that literature producing its own
theory or concept was perhaps for the Romantics. Instead, the fragmentary
produces an irreducible relation between the fragment and its outside. The
result, then, of generic immixation is a loss of classical style, of self-present
87 More generally for Blanchots interpretation of the fragment as aphorism, see EI,
452: Laphorisme est ferm et born, and EP, 63: Laphorisme, cest [] un horizon
qui borne et qui nouvre pas.
and presentable form. That this loss exists repetitively or infinitely rather
than as absolution from finite, genre-based form is signalled by the fact
that the fragmentary must continue to take its name and its sustenance
from the fragment (and in turn, from totality). This is one sense in which
Blanchots fragmentary is distinct from the synthetic absolutism of the Jena
Romantics: the fragmentary repeatedly fails to transcend the individual
fragment. Put differently, le langage nest pas donn par le contenu des
textes ni par leur forme, mais par leurs rapports (EP, 98): as those relations,
the fragmentary nexclut pas, mais dpasse la totalit (EI, 526). We can
perhaps make use here of Blanchots view of Romanticism as essentielle-
ment ce qui commence (517) by saying that, through its non fermeture
(EP, 98), the fragmentary is what is constantly, desperately beginning anew.
Blanchots readers know that he spent much of his later career responding
to this promise, unfulfillable as such, working and unworking, to varying
degrees, this degenerate88 but also strangely generative fragmentary, from
LAttente loubli to Lcriture du dsastre.
One final way of registering the kind of interruption or difference at
stake in Blanchots writings is through the question of translation, which
points to yet another instance of how much the Revue was marked by
Jena Romanticism. And as if one needed a reminder that here as else-
where in Blanchots uvre the subject is a question not easily discounted,
one reads in the working paper for the Revue: Le traducteur sera, dune
certaine manire, le vritable crivain de la revue (EP, 61). The Revues
endeavours, and the open subjectivity at stake in them, are thus still being
represented by a writer-figure, albeit one turned towards the outside: the
translator. Blanchot twice wrote of this figure, both in an essay responding
to Benjamins Task of the Translator (itself newly translated in 1960) and
as part of the Revue project, that s/he is able to possd[er], par exemple,
le franais titre privatif, riche cependant de cette privation (EP, 62; A,
72). Such richness can be seen as an example of the productive, generative
88 To borrow Lacoue-Labarthes and Nancys expression; see Le Dialogue des genres,

p.150.
aspect of an opening to the outside. In truth, this question allows us to chart

in a different key Blanchots relation to the infinitized Romantic subject
mentioned above, again with Benjamin as a key interlocutor. Blanchot is
doubtless aware of the fusional aspect associated with the translators task,
which is, in a very literal sense, to overcome the division of languages and of
peoples: Le traducteur, he writes, risque dtre un unificateur trop facile
(EP, 61). The Revues championing of the translator, however, did not seek
to produce such fusionalism; and it certainly did not seek to reverse it by
insisting on the singular understood as the local, the national or the com-
munitarian. Instead, the richness of privation in translation is a complex
notion allowing an opening to what Leslie Hills chapter engages with:
the secret infinity, the futural demand exposed by the difference not just
between languages but in language itself. If by concentrating on literary
language, Jena Romanticism announced faintly ltrange lacune qui est
sa propre diffrence et comme sa nuit (EI, 524), it would be perhaps the
exclusive privilege or madness of the translator to awaken la prsence
de ce quil y a de diffrences dans luvre originale (EP, 62).89 These, then,
are some of the stakes of Hills chapter, perhaps the first sustained effort
to account for Blanchots practice and notion of translation, both in the
Revue and more pervasively throughout his work.
89 In this sense, and as Berkman recalls, Novalis wrote of the Romantics own trans-
lations: En fin de compte, toute posie est traduction. Je suis convaincu que le
Shakespeare allemand est prsent meilleur que langlais. This was not to privilege
one linguistic or cultural identity over another, which would be to see translation as
mere appropriation. Rather, it is to privilege what is translated as such, as that which
belongs fully to neither language. On Novaliss observation, see Antoine Berman,
Lpreuve de ltranger: culture et traduction dans lAllemagne romantique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1984), pp.16770.
La Prsence relle
Whether revealed through translation, generic immixation, collective writ-

ing, or the absence of the work, the fragmentary seems to militate for a loss
dissolution, degeneration of the notion of genre, or at least of genre as
representing anything like a stable, delimited category (form, style, rule,
law, etc.) of writing.90 This poses the question: after the novel, the rcit,
and the fragmentary, after the (absence of the) book and work, can one
still speak of literature? After the article, the essay, the entretien, and the
fragmentary, can one still speak of criticism or theory? criture, nay, parole
dcriture (the expression Blanchot frequently employs in his later work), is
perhaps all one can speak of after Blanchot. As such, his writing, it would
seem, transgresses genre or (for it amounts here to the same thing) theory,
perhaps even writing itself. To return once more to Lacoue-Labarthe, who
has read Blanchot more closely than most: [L]e romantisme, en ralit,
transgresse toute thorie. Cest peut-tre, comme le souponne Blanchot,
le lot de lcriture elle-mme91 (his emphasis).
Perhaps the very existence of Blanchots work stands for this suspicion.
If so, we might ask ourselves (somewhat hyperbolically): who could talk
about the future of criticism or theory, about that which is still to come and
thus lies outside our critical-theoretical language, without running the risk
that this future already be accessible in Blanchot? This volumes work on
Blanchot and Romanticism draws together fourteen essays that approach,
ultimately, this risk. That the future or the outside might be here already
is suggested by two quotations. The first is from Foucault: [Blanchot] est
plutt pour nous cette pense [du dehors] mme la prsence relle, absolu-
90 As early as LEspace littraire, Blanchot writes: Le fait que les formes, les genres
nont plus de signification vritable [] indique ce travail profond de la littrature
qui cherche saffirmer dans son essence en ruinant les distinctions et les limites.
(EL, 292, n. 1)
91 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable, p.89, n. 10.
ment lointaine, scintillante, invisible, le sort ncessaire, la loi invitable, la

vigueur calme, infinie, mesure de cette pense mme92 (our emphasis).
The second is from Novalis: That place outside the world is given, and now
Archimedes can fulfil his promise.93 (his emphasis). Readers will decide for
themselves whether this outside insofar as it is incomplete, deferred, ever
futural, punctured, and unworked can be approached without (being)
Blanchot. This volume will serve its purpose if it can act as a lever to help
them reach a decision by undertaking a dual reading: of the Romantics
afterlife, and of the writer it names and un-names Blanchot romantique.
92 Michel Foucault, La Pense du dehors, Critique, 229 ( June 1966), 52346

(p.527).
93 Novalis, quoted by Walter Benjamin in SW I, p.169.
Legacies (I): Theory
Gisle Berkman
Une histoire dans le romantisme?

Maurice Blanchot et lAthenum
Ce qui frappe, dentre de jeu, cest le beau paradoxe apparent de linti-

tul du prsent volume et du colloque ponyme, Blanchot romantique.
Romantique, Blanchot? Romantique, celui que le clich a fig dans une
impersonnalit pure et dans la hautaine souverainet du neutre? Mais le
clich sefface, et le questionnement saiguise, ds que lon accepte de consi-
drer que le romantisme fut bien autre chose quune affaire dorages dsirs
et de tumultes intrieurs, ds que, paralllement, lon prend en compte
lexceptionnelle richesse des intrts littraires de Blanchot, la dimension
spculative de sa rflexion sur la littrature, et le rle central jou par la
culture allemande dans son travail. Pour cet Aufklrer paradoxal, attach aux
Lumires de lombre, lpoque quil est coutume de dsigner par le syntagme
de romantisme allemand est dune importance considrable. Et notam-
ment ce que lon appelle aussi premier romantisme, ou romantisme dIna,
cause de la constellation qui sy tait forme autour des frres Schlegel
et de lphmre revue lAthenum, laquelle rassembla des crivains-pen-
seurs tels que Novalis, Schleiermacher, puis Jean-Paul Richter. Lindivision
revendique entre littrature et philosophie, la pratique du fragment et de
cet clair de pense quest le Witz, une certaine revendication de lcriture
anonyme et collective dans ce qui fut nomm Symphilosophie (philoso-
phie en commun): il y a l des traits que Blanchot semble avoir repris dans
son criture et sa pense propres, comme pour les relancer au-del de leur
concrtisation historique, en un geste de reprise, dans le sens de ressouvenir
en avant que Kierkegaard a donn ce terme.
Ce qui vient compliquer les choses, cest que le romantisme constitue,
dans luvre critique de Blanchot, une sorte de filigrane tantt dissimul et
58 Gisle Berkman
tantt apparent. On en repre quelques traces dans Faux pas, et notamment

dans larticle Rflexions sur la jeune posie (1942):
Il semble que la posie soit plus que jamais attache une conception magique de
lart. Ce puissant courant dont le romantisme allemand a retrouv les dbuts et quont
retrouv en France Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarm, a creus si profond-
ment son lit que toute source rve dy couler. Lart le plus savant a eu, depuis plus
dun demi-sicle, lambition de rendre aux mots un pouvoir primitif. (FP, 149; nous
soulignons)1
Mais, dans ce recueil critique publi en 1943, les quelques lments touchant
au romantisme proprement dit se trouvent occults, tantt par la rfrence
lactualit littraire, tantt par les deux sources majeures que constituent
pour Blanchot Hlderlin et Mallarm. Do limportance de la publication
des Chroniques littraires, o lon peut mesurer lintrt que Blanchot porte
ce romantisme allemand quil oppose significativement au romantisme
franais dans un article de 1944, De Jean-Paul Giraudoux. Il y montre
comment, pour les romantiques allemands, lart na pas seulement une valeur
dexpression, mais une valeur dexprience, dans la mesure o il y a alors mise
en uvre de lexistence mme, que luvre accomplit et transforme:
Pour nos romantiques, lart garde une valeur psychologique, il est expression sincre,
miroir fidle; pour les romantiques trangers, la littrature a une valeur dengagement:
elle nexprime pas, elle bouleverse; elle est la fois moyen de connaissance et pouvoir
de mtamorphose; vivre, crire, cest un mme acte. La posie est une exprience
magique. (CL, 549)
Dans les grands textes critiques des annes cinquante, la rfrence

romantique se trouve occulte par la rflexion sur Hlderlin (dont Blanchot
dit lui-mme dans LEntretien infini (1969) quil ne sinscrit pas proprement
1 Voir galement, cette fois-ci au sujet du romantisme franais, Situation de Lamartine

(1942): Lamartine est le romantisme que lon condamne, alors que le romantisme
de Hugo, cause de son rayonnement et de sa gloire technique, chappe au moins
en apparence une contestation srieuse. (FP, 175)
parler dans la constellation romantique),2 et sur Rilke. Le rapport critique

la lecture heideggrienne de Hlderlin lemporte sur la rfrence directe au
romantisme allemand. Antoine Berman a certes raison de faire remarquer
que la rflexion de Blanchot sur Jo Bousquet, dans le chapitre Traduit
de de La Part du feu (1949), est totalement prise dans lespace littraire
ouvert par lAthenum.3 Assurment, Blanchot, dans larticle voqu, doit
avoir en tte limportance du romantisme allemand pour Jo Bousquet, et la
correspondance que celui-ci entreprit ce sujet, en 1937, avec Albert Bguin
et les Cahiers du Sud mais la filiation nest pas voque explicitement.4
Cest dans LEntretien infini que se trouve la contribution majeure
de Blanchot sur le seul romantisme qui vaille manifestement pour lui, et
qui est le romantisme allemand. Il sagit de larticle intitul LAthenum,
tout dabord publi en aot 1964 la Nouvelle Revue franaise, et signifi-
cativement plac dans la dernire section de LEntretien infini, LAbsence
de livre. Larticle se trouve au centre dune sorte de triptyque allemand, o
il est prcd par une rflexion sur la faon dont Thomas Mann, dans Le
Docteur Faustus (1947), a vou au nihilisme la musique de Schoenberg,
et suivi par une tude de la langue thtrale de Brecht. Il sagit dun texte
dune exceptionnelle densit, vritable centre focal de LEntretien infini,
o seffectue ce que lon peut appeler, avec Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et
Jean-Luc Nancy, non pas une histoire du romantisme, mais une histoire
dans le romantisme (AL, 10; Lacoue-Labarthe et Nancy soulignent).5
2
Cf. EI, 518, n. 1: [] il faut lajouter aussitt: Hlderlin nappartient pas au roman-
tisme, il ne fait pas partie dune constellation.
3 Antoine Berman, Lpreuve de ltranger: culture et traduction dans lAllemagne roman-
tique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p.160, n. 2.
4 Voir la correspondance entretenue en 1937 et 1938 entre Jo Bousquet et Albert Bguin
loccasion de la parution dun numro des Cahiers du Sud sur le romantisme alle-
mand et recueillie dans Albert Bguin, Cration et destine, choix de textes et notes
par Pierre Grotzer, 2 vols (Paris: Le Seuil, 197374), I: Lme romantique allemande
(1973), pp.6271.
5 Notre propos nest mme pas du tout celui dune histoire, quelle quelle soit, du
romantisme. Il serait plutt tout prendre [] celui, pour une part, dune histoire
dans le romantisme. (AL, 10)
60 Gisle Berkman
Rien de commun, donc, entre ce texte, et la section que Roger Ayrault

consacre, en 1969, lAthenum, au tome III de son monumental ouvrage,
La Gense du Romantisme allemand.6 Les perspectives diffrent, dans la
mesure o Blanchot ne cherche pas documenter le romantisme, faire
ce que Nietzsche, ddaigneusement, nomme une histoire antiquaire. Pour
lui, le romantisme allemand, ouvrant une poque qui est celle de labsence
duvre,7 constitue ce dans quoi la modernit littraire et philosophique des
annes soixante se trouve encore prise. cet gard, crire du romantisme,
cest accompagner celui-ci dans son accomplissement, insparable de son
extnuation dans la neutralit de labsence duvre: l rside sa descendance
paradoxale, son hritage que nul testament na prcd, pourrait-on dire
en paraphrasant Char. Do la question: que fait Blanchot, cest--dire:
quel geste critique dploie-t-il, quelle historicit convoque-t-il, parlant du
romantisme? Dans ce mouvement qui jamais ne thmatise mais rflchit,
au sens spculatif du terme, le retentissement du romantisme au cur de
lactuel, on ne peut sempcher de dceler un cho de ce qucrivait Walter
Benjamin dans Paris, capitale du XIXe sicle (1935): Le texte est le tonnerre
qui fait entendre son grondement longtemps aprs.8 Car cest bien du
roulement de tonnerre prolong du romantisme au cur du prsent quil
est ici question.
6 Voir le chapitre LAthenum, in Roger Ayrault, La Gense du romantisme allemand,

4 vols (Paris: Aubier, 196176), III: 17971804 (1969), pp.3845.
7 Et certes, il est souvent sans uvre, mais cest quil est luvre de labsence duvre,
posie affirme dans la puret de lacte potique, affirmation sans dure, libert sans
ralisation, puissance qui sexalte en disparaissant (EI, 517); Le romantisme, avne-
ment de la conscience potique, nest pas une simple cole littraire, ni mme un
moment important de lhistoire de lart: il ouvre une poque (522).
8 Walter Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe sicle, trad. par Jean Lacoste (Paris: Cerf,
1993), p.473.
Le Moment-Athenum
Le geste critique de Blanchot sattache dployer, sur plusieurs portes

successives, le jeu perptuel de renversements, dantinomies, de coexisten-
ces des contraires dont se fonde le romantisme des frres Schlegel et de
Novalis. Aussi ne sagit-il surtout pas de thmatiser le romantisme, mais
bien den montrer toute la puissance deffectuation, laquelle est aussi une
puissance continue, prolonge dans une certaine auto-rflexion moderne
(Blanchot, toutefois, ne prononce pas le mot) de la littrature, comme
advenue la conscience de son dsuvrement constitutif. Ce qui revient
penser le romantisme dans son inachvement et son incompltude natifs,
mais aussi dans la puissance explosive, proprement rvolutionnaire, qui en
est le corollaire. Le romantisme allemand, cest ici ce qui ouvre une poque
dans laquelle nous sommes encore pris, ce qui porte une question qui se
transmet Nietzsche et, au-del, lavenir, comme lcrit Blanchot la fin
de son article:
commenant de se rendre manifeste elle-mme grce la dclaration romantique, la
littrature va dsormais porter en elle cette question la discontinuit ou la diffrence
comme forme , question et tche que le romantisme allemand et en particulier celui
de lAthenum a non seulement pressenties, mais dj clairement proposes, avant de
les remettre Nietzsche et, au-del de Nietzsche, lavenir. (EI, 527)
cet effet, le texte dploie six moments successifs, six angles dapproche,
six propositions complmentaires dans lesquelles ce qui est en jeu, cest
lhistoricit du moment-romantisme, vritable cristal de lvnement total,
pour citer, l encore, Benjamin.9
1. Lexpos de la rception politique du romantisme, entre France et

Allemagne, permet de disposer une premire structure de renver-
sement dont on verra quelle est intimement lie ce que Blanchot
9 Ibid., p.477.
62 Gisle Berkman
nomme lessence non romantique du romantisme (EI, 524). Ainsi

le mme mouvement a-t-il t, en Allemagne, pris par les tho-
riciens littraires du nazisme, et, en France, dprci par Lukcs,
mais galement par lextrme droite franaise, remis lhonneur
par les surralistes, puis par Albert Bguin et Les Cahiers du Sud.
Demble, le romantisme figure pour Blanchot un medium histo-
rique, indissociable, cet gard, du prsent qui le rflchit et quil
rflchit. Noublions pas que larticle de 1964 sur lAthenum est
contemporain de larticle Berlin, initialement destin par Blanchot
cette Revue internationale dont le programme semble pouvoir
tre reli point pour point celui de lAthenum.10
2. Do la difficult caractriser le romantisme, qui permet
Blanchot de disposer une seconde srie dapories autour de la
question suivante: O est le romantisme? Ina ou Vienne?
L o il se manifeste, riche de projets? L o il steint, pauvre
duvres? (EI, 517) La structure mme du romantisme est ainsi
celle dun ou bien ou bien perptuel. Il figure ici ce qui suspend
le pouvoir mme de la mdiation, ce qui fait, du fragment, tout
autre chose que le deuil dune unit imaginairement prexistante,
cest le pouvoir, pour luvre, dtre et non plus de reprsenter,
dtre tout, mais sans contenus ou avec des contenus presque indif-
frents et ainsi daffirmer ensemble labsolu et le fragmentaire, la
totalit, mais dans une forme qui tant toutes formes, cest--dire
la limite ntant aucune, ne ralise pas le tout, mais le signifie
en le suspendant, voire en le brisant (518). Comment ne pas tre
tents de mettre en rapport ce que Blanchot dit ici du suspens
10 Larticle sera finalement publi dans la revue Il Menab, dirige par Italo Calvino et
Elio Vittorini; cf. Il Menab, 7 (avril 1964). Sur lhistoire, complexe et douloureuse
pour Blanchot, de lchec de la Revue internationale, voir Christophe Bident, Maurice
Blanchot: partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), pp.40817. Voir gale-
ment la phrase inaugurale de larticle Berlin, qui pourrait fort bien sappliquer ce
que dit Blanchot de la rception du romantisme: Berlin est pour tous le problme
de la division. (EP, 71)
romantique avec telle formulation du Pas au-del (1973) relative

au mouvement suspensif du neutre? Il neutralise, (se) neutralise,
ainsi voque (ne fait quvoquer) le mouvement de lAufhebung,
mais sil suspend et retient, il retient seulement le mouvement de
suspendre, cest--dire la distance quil suscite par le fait quoc-
cupant le terrain, il la fait disparatre. [] Mme la ngation du
Neutre est drobe (PAD, 10506).
3. Recevoir, comme neuf, ces premiers assauts romantiques (EI,
518), ce sera repenser le romantisme depuis son retentissement
au cur de notre prsent, saisir ce qui en lui est ouverture de ce
prsent lui-mme. Le troisime moment, moment de situation,
sattache penser lhistoricit mme du romantisme, indissocia-
ble de celle du prsent. Nous sommes, l encore, trs proches de
Benjamin, qui crivait dans un texte de 1931, Histoire littraire
et science de la littrature: [] il ne sagit pas de prsenter les
uvres littraires dans le contexte de leur temps, mais bien de
donner voir dans le temps o elles sont nes le temps qui les con-
nat cest--dire le ntre11 (nous soulignons). Corollairement,
Blanchot dfait la doxa qui voit dans le romantisme pur instinct
et pur dlire sensible, l o, celui-ci pour lui, se situe sous le signe
de la pense, sous le signe de la passion ou de lexcs de pense: Le
romantisme est excessif, mais son premier excs est un excs de
pense (EI, 518). Lindivision entre littrature et philosophie qui
sensuit est bien lie lauto-rflexion qui caractrise ce romantisme
de pense et lon mesure ici, entre les mots, tout ce qui apparente,
pour Blanchot, le romantisme des frres Schlegel et de Novalis et
sa propre dmarche dcrivain-penseur, lui qui proclamera, dans
Lcriture du dsastre (1980), linsulte majeure de la posie et de
la philosophie indistinctes (ED, 179).
11 Walter Benjamin, Histoire littraire et science de la littrature, in uvres, trad.

par Maurice de Gandillac, Rainer Rochlitz et Pierre Rusch, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard,
2000), II, pp.27483 (p.283).
64 Gisle Berkman
4. Le moment-Athenum sera donc le moment performatif par excel-

lence, puisque la littrature sy dclare, que la posie sy produit, et
que le romantisme, ni cole, ni mouvement, est penser comme ce
qui ouvre une poque: cest la Rvolution franaise qui a donn
aux romantiques allemands cette forme nouvelle que constitue
lexigence dclarative, lclat du manifeste (EI, 520). Passage quil
faudrait rapprocher et opposer tout ensemble ce qui tait en jeu,
ds 1948, dans La Littrature et le droit la mort
5. [L]essence non romantique du romantisme (EI, 524) est alors
penser comme une dramaturgie du tout: la posie ny est autre que
la parole qui se parle, luvre de parole tant dsuvrement, et le
roman ne saccomplissant que dans le fragment. Lon retrouve, mais
un autre niveau dintelligibilit du phnomne, cette dialectique
larrt entre tout et le tout que Blanchot dcrivait prcdem-
ment, et manifeste par le pouvoir, pour luvre, dtre et non
plus de reprsenter, dtre tout, mais sans contenus (518). Il sagit,
prsent, du pouvoir qua le romantisme de se faire recherche dune
forme nouvelle daccomplissement qui mobilise rende mobile
le tout en linterrompant et par les divers modes de linterruption
(525). Ainsi le romantisme prsente-t-il dj, pour Blanchot, les
modalits de cette parole dinterruption dont LEntretien infini
sattache dployer lentrelacs lacunaire et le nuage dintermit-
tences (388).12
6. Dernire figure du temps prsent: ce qui est ouvert et rendu
possible par le romantisme, cest prcisment ce que Friedrich
Schlegel lui-mme oublie, et qui est que le romantisme sexcepte
de lunit. Ce programme que les romantiques nont pas mis en
uvre jusquau bout, dans la mesure o, pour en remplir la mis-
sion, il et fallu sexcepter soi-mme de lunit, et par l mme
sauter comme pieds joints hors de son temps, constitue ds lors,
12 Lentrelacs lacunaire (le nuage dintermittences) est lun des intertitres (splendides)
du chapitre LAthisme et lcriture, lhumanisme et le cri.
selon Blanchot, la question mme lgue la littrature, remise

Nietzsche, et au-del, lavenir. Il y a comme une dimension
transcendantale du geste de Blanchot, en ce quil distingue implici-
tement le romantisme empirique, et la question que celui-ci porte
et supporte, et qui est celle de la discontinuit ou la diffrence
comme forme (EI, 527).
LOuverture dune poque
Le chapitre LAthenum est lun des centres focaux de LEntretien infini,

dont il fait travailler un certain nombre de motifs tout en les levant une
puissance nouvelle. Cest un peu comme sil rflchissait le parcours de la
dernire section, LAbsence de livre, et le parcours qui y mne du Livre
romantique lextnuation de luvre, de la Bible refonde labsence
de livre, de la parole romantique auto-dclare lcriture hors-langage
et lattrait de la (pure) extriorit (EI, 625). Il permet une relecture de
LEntretien infini tout entier, cette relecture constituant elle-mme une
effectuation de lessence non romantique du romantisme. Ainsi LEntretien
infini est-il, certains gards, une uvre romantique, dans la mesure o il
porte ce mouvement dinfinitisation luvre qui, pour Novalis, sappelle
proprement: romantiser. Mais ce travail sur la forme du contenu, comme
et dit Adorno, est lui-mme mise lpreuve dun rapport lhistoricit
historicit en acte, dont on signalera trois composantes:
1. Tout dabord, le romantisme de lAthenum est lu par Blanchot

depuis ce prsent mme quil ouvre. Le romantisme apparat ici
comme rvlant et rvl, en donnant au terme de rvlation le
sens du rvlateur photographique, lequel constitue, produit la
visibilit de la figure dans le temps mme o il la laisse merger.
Aussi sagit-il, dans ce chapitre, de lire notre prsent, historique
66 Gisle Berkman
et politique, depuis cette traduction quen offre le romantisme,

la fois traducteur du prsent, et traduit depuis ce prsent mme
quil donne lire cest Antoine Berman qui, dans Lpreuve de
ltranger (1984), montre combien la traduction est au cur de
lentreprise romantique.13 Cest pour cette raison que le texte sur
lAthenum doit tre lu comme faisant systme avec des textes
que lon classe dans les crits politiques: le texte de Blanchot sur
le mur de Berlin, dj voqu, et le projet de Revue internationale
qui fut men de 1960 1964, et qui peut tre considr comme
une vritable tentative de remise en jeu, de ractualisation de
lAthenum. Il faudrait ici pouvoir commenter longuement les
textes et la rsonance que lon ne peut manquer de trouver entre
eux et le programme de lAthenum envisag dans ses dimensions
historique, politique et proprement esthtique. Cest le cas de
la lettre de Blanchot Sartre du 2 dcembre 1960, qui marque
la continuit entre le projet de revue et la Dclaration des 121,
et pose le programme dune revue de critique totale, critique o
la littrature serait ressaisie dans son sens propre [] une revue
donc o le mot critique retrouverait aussi son sens qui est dtre
global (EP, 4849); et cest galement le cas du texte program-
matique rdig par Blanchot, et qui, l encore, fait cho de faon
saisissante au programme mme de lAthenum.14 Que le projet
de Revue internationale nait pu se raliser, cest peut-tre aussi,
paradoxalement, ce qui permettra Blanchot de relancer un certain
mouvement du neutre comme plus dissolvant, plus dconstruc-
teur encore. Si le Witz des romantiques allemands est une sorte
de choc des penses, de coincidentia oppositorum, qui a pu fasciner
13 Voir le chapitre La Thorie spculative de la traduction, in Lpreuve de ltranger,

pp.16592, et notamment, pp.16770, lanalyse dune lettre de Novalis August
Wilhelm Schlegel de novembre 1797, dans laquelle Novalis crit: En fin de compte,
toute posie est traduction. Je suis convaincu que le Shakespeare allemand est
prsent meilleur que langlais.
14 Voir Maurice Blanchot, [La Gravit du projet] [1961?], in EP, 5069.
Blanchot de par lindtermination quil porte, il sagira ds lors de

frayer encore plus en de que le Witz, de dsactiver, par le travail
imperu du neutre, jusque lironique puissance de suspens du
Witz, encore trop tributaire de lesprit du temps.
2. En posant que le romantisme est ce qui ouvre une poque, Blanchot
invoque une historicit spcifique, quelque chose qui ne saurait
tre contenu dans le concept foucaldien dpistm, et qui pro-
cde bien davantage dune tension non rsolue et non rsolutive
entre linactuel et lhistorique. Cest que le romantisme est aussi,
pour Blanchot, ce qui porte et supporte la question, elle-mme
dissmine, diffracte, agissante, qui est celle de la littrature, et
au-del, cette question de tout dont le romantisme a pu figurer
comme lune des concrtisations.15 Le chapitre sur lAthenum
doit tre mis en rapport avec ce qui est dvelopp dans le fonda-
mental chapitre: la question la plus profonde, et dans la longue
note qui le prolonge. Dans ce chapitre, qui commence par mimer
lallure du questionnement heideggrien pour mieux sen dissocier
par une critique radicale et conjointe de la dialectique et de lon-
tologie fondamentale, il y a une question que la question du tout
(laccomplissement dialectique), elle qui porte tout, ne comprend
pas (EI, 32, n. 1). Aussi faut-il en venir poser que la question
la plus profonde est la question qui chappe la rfrence de
lUn: Cest lautre question, question de lAutre, mais aussi ques-
tion toujours autre (34, n. 1). On comprend mieux, ds lors, ce
qui spare tout en les rapprochant Foucault et Blanchot autour
de la question romantique en tant que celle-ci est porteuse dune
certaine intransitivit de la littrature dans laquelle la modernit
se rflchit, selon une ligne qui irait de Novalis (le fameux mono-
logue de 1798, voqu par Blanchot qui connat certainement la
15 Cf. EI, 13. On aura not le style heideggrien de ce questionnement, le chapitre

se refermant toutefois sur une longue note qui envoie dos dos la dialectique et
lontologie fondamentale de Heidegger.
68 Gisle Berkman
fameuse confrence de 1959 de Heidegger, Le Chemin vers la

parole) Mallarm, puis Nietzsche et Artaud.16 Foucault, lui,
fait de la littrature romantique la puissance inverse et jumelle de
la philosophie, ramenant le langage son intransitivit nue:
La littrature, cest la contestation de la philologie (dont elle est pourtant la
figure jumelle): elle ramne le langage de la grammaire au pouvoir dnud de
parler, et l elle rencontre ltre sauvage et imprieux des mots. De la rvolte
romantique contre un discours immobilis en sa crmonie, jusqu la dcou-
verte mallarmenne du mot en son pouvoir impuissant, on voit bien quelle fut,
au XIXe sicle, la fonction moderne de la littrature par rapport au mode dtre
moderne du langage.17
En revanche, pour Blanchot, le romantisme allemand, sil

ouvre une poque, ne sinscrit pas dans une pistm. Il faut lire
LAthenum la lumire de cet autre chapitre de LEntretien
infini quest LAthisme et lcriture, lhumanisme et le cri, pro-
fonde relecture des Mots et les choses (1966). Do il ressort, mots
couverts, quune certaine conception de lpistm, cest--dire, en
dernier ressort, du rapport entre le transcendantal et lempirique,
fait lconomie de la question mme de la transcendantalit du
transcendantal, de mme que les discours occultent la question
mme de lcriture qui leur est sous-jacente.18 Pour Blanchot, la
vocalit romantique, expressment cite, ouvre sur le cri sans voix,
16 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Le Chemin vers la parole, in Acheminement vers la parole,

trad. par Jean Beaufret, Wolfgang Brokmeier et Franois Fdier (Paris: Gallimard,
1976), pp.22757.
17 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: une archologie des sciences humaines (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966), p.313.
18 Cf. EI, 375: lempirique nest jamais par lui-mme lempirique: il nest pas dexprience
qui puisse prtendre delle-mme tre en elle-mme connaissance ou vrit, et [] le
transcendantal ne se trouvera localis nulle part. Questionnement que Blanchot
insre, avec une grande subtilit, dans son commentaire des Mots et les choses, et qui
nest pas celui de Foucault, dans la mesure o le poser revient faire vaciller sur ses
bases la valeur opratoire de lpistm.
lcriture hors langage, lhumanit de lautre, celui-ci ft-il, comme

Artaud, la bte mentale par excellence. Et, de mme que lenco-
che de hasard faite par les premiers hommes rencontre, comme
son insu, ce que Blanchot nomme dune extraordinaire formule,
lillgitime criture de lavenir (EI, 392), de mme, dans larticle
LAthenum, la tentative romantique senvoie tout entire vers
cet avenir qui est aussi le dernier mot du texte. Un peu comme si
Blanchot, si critique pourtant par rapport lontologie heidegg-
rienne, ne renonait pas au concept mme de lenvoi, lors mme
que ce qui senvoie, ce nest plus ltre, cest la mise en question
mme de la totalit.
3. Le phnomne le plus remarquable est sans doute celui dune
historicit performative, lie en quelque sorte au destin du texte
LAthenum, un texte qui a lui-mme fait poque, ouvrant, en
France tout du moins, une certaine gnalogie de la modernit,
dont tmoignerait, entre autres exemples, lintitul dun numro de
Potique de 1975, dirig par Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Littrature
et philosophie mles:19 au-del de lallusion Hugo, cest la rf-
rence Blanchot qui domine, et la lecture fondatrice que celui-ci
a donne, dans LEntretien infini, dune certaine indivision entre
littrature et philosophie dans laquelle une certaine modernit
trouve se rflchir et se relancer. Ainsi Blanchot nest-il pas
seulement pris lui-mme dans la descendance du romantisme
allemand, comme le constatait Berman; sa lecture du romantisme
rend lisible une poque, effectue ce que Lacoue-Labarthe et Nancy
nomment une histoire dans le romantisme. Si lon prfre: une
certaine auto-position de la modernit passe, dans les annes
soixante-dix, par la lecture que Blanchot fait de lAthenum, cest-
-dire, mme sil ne prononce pas le mot, dune certaine modernit
lie lindivision des champs du savoir, la dclosion du rapport
19 Cf. Littrature et philosophie mles, sous la dir. de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,

Potique, 21 (1975).
70 Gisle Berkman
entre littrature et philosophie. Ainsi larticle LAthenum se

voit-il, en 1978, pourvu dune dimension inaugurale par LAbsolu
littraire (1978), le grand livre que Lacoue-Labarthe et Nancy ont
consacr la thorie de la littrature du romantisme allemand.20
Voil Blanchot comme inscrit dans une certaine constellation
de la modernit, quen mme temps il dborde absolument. On
se souvient que, pour Blanchot, le romantisme allemand est cela
mme qui ouvre une poque. Lacoue-Labarthe et Nancy, dans
lavant-propos de LAbsolu littraire, sont plus explicites encore.
LAthenum y figure le lieu de naissance de lavant-garde: Cest
en fait, il nest pas du tout exagr de le dire, le premier groupe
davant-garde de lhistoire. Nulle part en tout cas, dans ce qui
sintitule notre poque avant-garde [], on ne peut constater
le moindre cart par rapport cette forme inaugure il y a aura
bientt deux cents ans. LAthenum est notre lieu de naissance
(AL, 17). Il faudrait pouvoir examiner trs prcisment ici la trs
importante reprise de Blanchot opre par les deux philosophes,
une reprise qui ouvre toutefois lespace dune diffrence: selon
eux, le romantisme doit tre saisi comme projet thorique, et la
littrature se produit comme uvre indite, produit sa propre
thorie. Ce qui a pour corollaire la mise en place dune gnalogie
philosophique: de Kant Schelling, puis au romantisme propre-
ment dit, il y a un jeu de diffrences de diffrences, mais aussi de
filiations. Et le mouvement des choses est encore dialectique, l o,
chez Blanchot, figure ce qui, ft-ce linsu des romantiques eux-
mmes, dsuvre la dialectique elle-mme. Quant au numro de
Potique voqu plus haut, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, au dbut de
son article LImprsentable, en inscrit explicitement le programme
sous lgide de Blanchot: Le programme que nous suivrons ici, il
20 Voir la fin du chapitre consacr au fragment (AL, 80), o Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et

Jean-Luc Nancy citent de nombreux extraits de larticle LAthenum de LEntretien
infini, au sujet du dsuvrement et de lexigence fragmentaire.
appartient en fait Maurice Blanchot de lavoir trac21 Mais,

l encore, le propos de Lacoue-Labarthe est plus hglien que ne
lest celui de Blanchot. La thse de larticle LImprsentable est
en effet que, si la leon des romantiques allemands, cest que la
fin de la philosophie nest autre que la littrature, alors, Hegel, en
critiquant la Lucinde parachve, son insu, un certain programme
romantique, puisquen lui opposant un accomplissement philoso-
phique de la philosophie, il ne ferait que pousser bout la logique
de dissolution qui est celle de la littrature.
Voil qui repose, la lumire de la rception de Blanchot, la question dune

certaine historicit de la question romantique dans la modernit litt-
raire et philosophique franaise des annes soixante-dix. Blanchot la fois
inaugure bien une certaine faon indite, en France, de lire la littrature,
et sen dissocie du mme coup, djouant toute gnalogie, toute filiation,
et cela mesure mme aussi de ce quil a profondment pens le jeu des
discontinuits au cur des filiations, et le dsuvrement de la dialectique
au cur de la question de tout. Il y a bien, dans la pense franaise des
annes soixante-dix, ce que lon peut appeler une archive romantique. Une
certaine modernit a pu tre tente de sinventer, de se fonder, dans une
relecture de lAthenum incarnant lavant-garde par excellence, jusques et
y compris dans la dimension ncessairement phmre que revtent de tels
mouvements. Aussi ne stonnera-t-on pas de voir apparatre, depuis une
dizaine dannes, de nouvelles lectures du romantisme allemand, lies au
regard critique port sur une certaine modernit littraire et philosophi-
que, et au dsir de sortir dune certaine configuration thorico-critique
pour retrouver les positivits. On voquera, entre autres, la critique allu-
sive adresse par Olivier Schefer LAbsolu littraire, dans lintroduction
de son anthologie du romantisme allemand, La Forme potique du monde
(2003). Critiquant la faon dont, selon lui, lhistoire de la philosophie na
21 Voir Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, LImprsentable, Potique, 21 (1975), 5395

(p.53).
72 Gisle Berkman
longtemps envisag la part philosophique du romantisme qu la lumire

de la pense systmatique de lidalisme post-kantien, Schefer prfre jouer
la carte interprtative de linfini positif, envisag comme puissance dilli-
mitation, plutt que celle de labsolu:
Il nest donc pas sr, comme laffirment les auteurs de LAbsolu littraire, que ce roman-
tisme recueille et relance lexigence idaliste du Systme travers la question du
fragment, et plus gnralement travers celle de luvre absolue auto-rflexive. []
En somme, la grande affaire de la philosophie comme de lesthtique romantique
aura plus t celle de linfini que celle de labsolu.22
On aura not que le nom de Blanchot est occult, selon tout un mouve-
ment qui va effacer progressivement la rfrence prcise au texte fondateur
LAthenum, pour imputer la dconstruction ou au structuralisme
la responsabilit dune occultation des enjeux vritables de ce que fut le
romantisme allemand. Cest ainsi que Denis Thouard considre que la
tradition hermneutique lgue par le romantisme sest trouve occulte
par un double hritage qui est celui de la descendance romantique, structu-
raliste dun ct, dconstructiviste de lautre;23 mais lon aurait galement
pu citer lentreprise analogue de Manfred Frank, dans Quest-ce que le no-
structuralisme?.24 Sur un autre versant, Jacques Rancire, dans La Parole
muette (1998), critique, chez Blanchot, cette absolutisation de la littrature
qui trouve sa provenance dans le romantisme:
22 Cf. La Forme potique du monde: anthologie du romantisme allemand, sous la dir. de

Charles Le Blanc, Laurent Margantin et Olivier Schefer (Paris: Corti, 2003), p.77
(Schefer souligne). La mention du texte de Blanchot sur lAthenum est absente de
la bibliographie gnrale sur le romantisme.
23 Cf. Denis Thouard, Critique et hermneutique dans le premier romantisme allemand
(Villeneuve-dAscq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1996), p.10: [] la descend-
ance romantique, structuraliste dun ct, dconstructiviste de lautre, sinterdit de
poser la question dune hermneutique littraire, au profit du formalisme intransigeant
dune mthode pour lune, de la virtuosit gniale dun savoir-faire individuel pour
lautre, et pp.2036 pour lanalyse critique de Schlegel.
24 Cf. Manfred Frank, Quest-ce que le no-structuralisme? (Paris: Cerf, 1989).
Les spculations de Blanchot sur lexprience littraire, ses rfrences aux signes sacrs
ou son dcor de dsert et de murailles seraient possibles parce que, voici bientt deux
sicles, la posie de Novalis, la potique des frres Schlegel et la philosophie de Hegel
et de Schelling ont irrmdiablement confondu lart et la philosophie avec la religion
et le droit, la physique et la politique dans la mme nuit de labsolu.25
La critique se fait ici au nom dun matrialisme littraire qui reverse, au

profit de ces rglages du lisible et du dicible qui sont comme une autre
version de lpistm foucaldienne, labsolutisation dnonce comme une
rsurgence de la mtaphysique
Du Neutre comme au-del du Witz
La fidlit au romantisme, montre larticle LAthenum, ne saurait tre que

paradoxale. Faire le neutre, ce sera aussi porter le romantisme toujours plus
au-del de lui-mme. En raliser le programme, linfinitiser, cest aussi le
dissoudre, conformment la logique qui le porte tout en le dfaisant. Le
Neutre peut-il tre considr comme ce Witz indit o saccomplirait, cest-
-dire, se dferait, lessence non romantique du romantisme? Il faudrait,
pour donner un dbut de rponse cette question, elle-mme prise dans
la question plus radicale qui est pour Blanchot la question de tout, relire
Le Pas au-del et Lcriture du dsastre en y reprant avec prcision tout
ce qui y est critique dissolvante dun certain fond de croyance romantique.
Cest ainsi que, dans Lcriture du dsastre, Blanchot formule une double
critique lencontre de certains fragments de Schlegel. Il leur reproche de
sacraliser le langage, mais aussi, de ne pas aller assez loin dans lexigence
fragmentaire, en tant que celle-ci ouvre sur lexprience imperue du dsas-
tre, entendu comme ce qui ruine tout en laissant tout en ltat (ED, 7).
25 Jacques Rancire, La Parole muette: essai sur les contradictions de la littrature (Paris:
Hachette Littratures, 1998), pp.1213.
74 Gisle Berkman
Il y a bien, dit Blanchot, quelque chose que pressent Schlegel, mais qui
finalement lui chappe, ne peut que lui chapper:
Quelle [lexigence fragmentaire] traverse, renverse, ruine luvre, parce que celle-ci,
totalit, perfection, accomplissement, est lunit qui se complat en elle-mme, voil
ce que pressent F. Schlegel, mais qui finalement lui chappe, sans quon puisse lui
reprocher cette mconnaissance quil nous a aids, quil nous aide encore discerner
dans le moment mme o nous la partageons avec lui. (ED, 99)26
Partie du beau paradoxe dun intitul, Blanchot romantique, jabou-

tis un autre paradoxe, non moins profond: en 1980, soit deux ans aprs
seulement la parution de LAbsolu littraire qui sinscrit sous son gide,
Blanchot uvre dissoudre, silencieusement dconstruire la dimension
utopique quil confrait, en 1964 et 1969, ce mme romantisme. Il est vrai
que le dsastre, qui na pas la navet dune fin de lhistoire, semble dfaire
de lintrieur cette dimension denvoi historial qui tait encore au cur de
larticle sur lAthenum Sourire pensif du visage non dvisageable que le
ciel la terre disparus, le jour la nuit passs lun dans lautre, laissent celui
qui ne regarde plus et qui, vou au retour, ne partira jamais (ED, 220): la
phrase sublime qui dit, la fin de Lcriture du dsastre, limpossibilit du
dpart et la douceur du neutre retient toutefois, jusque dans sa syntaxe
tout ensemble houleuse et minrale, comme une rsonance des Chants de
laube de Schumann.
26 Voir aussi ED, 170, o Blanchot joue en quelque sorte Levinas, pour qui le langage
est dj scepticisme, contre le dangereux penchant sacraliser celui-ci [le langage].
Or (et Blanchot cite alors lexpression clbre de Heidegger sur le langage, maison de
ltre), le mouvement spontan du romantisme est de rapporter aux temps anciens,
originaires, la reconnaissance du caractre religieux de toute parole (ED, 170). Une
tout autre gnalogie que dans larticle LAthenum se profile alors: cest celle qui
relie le romantisme allemand Heidegger, via notamment Hamann.
Christophe Bident
Le Neutre est-il une notion romantique?
En ouverture sa premire tirade, dans la version de Racine, Phdre pro-

nonce un hmistiche clair et nanmoins complexe et nuanc: Mon mal
vient de plus loin. ma manire, je pourrais dire aujourdhui: Mon neutre
vient de plus loin. Ce premier nonc appelle quelques commentaires.
1. Il cre virtuellement un axe paradigmatique o se retrouvent asso-

cis le neutre et le mal. Ce serait dj en soi une belle proposition
de travail et qui nest pas totalement trangre au sujet, au thme,
au mouvement qui nous rassemble, le romantisme. Jy reviendrai
donc, comme fatalement, mme si ce ne sera pas lobjet de mon
texte.
2. Que le neutre vienne de loin, de plus loin, cest ce que finalement
luvre de Maurice Blanchot ne cesse daffirmer. Soit dune manire
historique, en le lisant chez Hraclite, en voquant ses rapports
lhistoire de la philosophie, soit de manire thorique, en le
situant hors de tout plan dimmanence comme de toute dimen-
sion transcendante ou transcendantale, et dans une parent avec
des notions comme le lointain ou le dehors. Ces deux modalits
de lloignement du neutre reviendront donc aussi croiser mon
propos: lhistoire, parce que le romantisme sy inscrit de manire
la fois circonscrite et dvorante (circonscrite, parce que lon
saccorde dater et reprer le romantisme en des temps et en des
lieux prcis; dvorante, parce que lon peut encore se demander
aujourdhui si nous en sommes ou non sortis); la thorie, parce
que le couple de limmanence et de la transcendance proccupe
srieusement les crivains romantiques.
76 Christophe Bident
3. Que le neutre vienne, cela peut signifier quil provienne, ou quil

arrive: soit, les notions de lorigine et de lvnement. Mais le neutre
a-t-il une origine, et peut-il se prsenter comme un vnement? Ce
sont prcisment des questions que pose luvre de Blanchot.
4. Dernier point dinterrogation, peut-tre le plus dconcertant:
puis-je dire mon neutre? Puis-je dire mon neutre sans immdiate-
ment droger la notion de neutre? Autrement dit, le neutre est-il
subjectivable? Cest prcisment parce que je le pense, et parce quil
me semble que cest une proposition romantique, que je voudrais
minterroger ici en commenant par cette question.
Mon neutre, cela signifie dabord ici le neutre tel que je le thorise. Pour
moi, le neutre est une notion que nul na travaill autant que Blanchot, si
ce nest peut-tre Barthes. Mais je suis extrmement sensible sa prsence
chez des crivains et des artistes, dans des champs et en des temps extrme-
ment divers. En 2001, Roger Laporte avait publi un petit livre intitul Le
Neutre chez Bertholin. En se consacrant ainsi certains auteurs, on pourrait
lgitimement crire bien des monographies, bien des neutrographies: Le
Neutre chez Kandinsky, chez Klee, chez Beckett, chez Duras, chez Rgy, chez
Lispector, ou dautres encore
Ces quelques noms nous obligent. Ils nous obligent un travail concep-
tuel oppos toutes les ignorances malveillantes comme toutes les rduc-
tions nihilisantes auxquelles on veut souvent soumettre la notion de neutre.
Ce travail conceptuel se donne un premier objectif: rendre au neutre une
voix active qui ne lassigne pas la neutralisation. Il soppose ainsi aux usages
les plus courants du mot, notamment dans les domaines de la morale, de la
psychologie ou de la politique, et peut-tre dans tout domaine qui appli-
que ainsi un usage spar et restreint, puisquil demande encore, sinon de
rendre vaines, au moins de critiquer les significations particulires de la
grammaire, de la smiologie, de la philosophie. Ce travail, Roland Barthes
et Maurice Blanchot en ont pris la mesure: cest lune des constantes et
peut-tre la proccupation premire de leurs penses, de leurs critures.
Une proccupation qui rejoint celle de nombreux artistes du dix-neuvime
et du vingtime sicle mais qui, hors du champ de la littrature, nengage
avec elle quun dialogue timide, rare et rserv. Quont en commun, dans
leur souci du neutre, Mallarm, Kandinsky, Klee, Schlemmer, Decroux,
Lecoq, le Nouveau Thtre, le Nouveau Roman, Supports/Surfaces, lhy-
perralisme, Antoni Tpies, Barnett Newman, Djamel Tatah? La neutrali-
sation du jeu de lacteur, par exemple, a t une des grandes affaires du sicle
dernier. Craig utilise le paradigme de la surmarionnette, Jarry enferme
les acteurs dans un masque, Schlemmer colorie daccessoires la neutralit
de la figure, Beckett ou Duras imposent des tons neutres dans un tempo
neutre Decroux rclame un masque neutre quil trouve sublime, celui de
lhomme qui est sorti de sa tombe pour raconter sa vie; ce masque dgage
la figure corporelle, qui en parat presque abstraite: elle est dj comme
une histoire de lhomme, dgage de lhomme (on apprciera le tempo de
cette phrase, tout fait blanchotien).1 Dans son parcours de formation
de lacteur, Jacques Lecoq donne une place dcisive au travail du masque
neutre: le masque neutre dveloppe essentiellement la prsence de lacteur
lespace qui lenvironne. Il le met en tat de dcouverte, douverture, de
disponibilit recevoir; il suspend le personnage et permet de travailler
distance; il accrot les sensations de lacteur et du spectateur. Travailler
le mouvement partir du neutre donne des points dappui essentiels pour
le jeu, qui arrivera aprs. Ainsi, le masque neutre devient rfrentiel, ce
qui signifie aussi que toute rfrence passe par son prisme.2 Chez Kolts,
deux personnages ne peuvent se rencontrer que sur un terrain neutre et
dsert, rapport nu de laffrontement, de la comparution et de la reconnais-
sance. Chez Tpies, Jacques Dupin voque la neutralisation des figures et
des objets par des signes qui parlent une langue absente, ou neutre, mais
sensible, poignante.3 Chez Djamel Tatah, jai tent danalyser une prati-
que de neutralisation de licne dans labstraction et lathisme du portrait
occidental.
1 tienne Decroux, in tienne Decroux, mime corporel, sous la dir. de Patrick Pezin
(Saint-Jean-de-Vdas: LEntretemps, 2003), p.134.
2 Jacques Lecoq, Le Corps potique (Arles: Actes Sud-Papiers, 1997), p.49.
3 Jacques Dupin, Matire dinfini (Antoni Tpies) (Tours: Farrago, 2005), pp.26, 39.
Ce sont ces intrts divers que je voudrais, dans un travail ultrieur,

tenter de relever, danalyser, de comparer. Je voudrais montrer que si le
neutre a marqu autant dartistes et de penseurs, ce nest jamais, prcis-
ment, dans un sens moral ou diplomatique, mais, disons, pour une raison
historique: il me semble que le neutre leur est apparu, chaque fois, comme
le concept ou le percept susceptible de repenser une mergence de ltre, du
corps ou du visage dans un espace stri de ngations qui simposaient avec
une brutalit totalitaire visant carter toute possibilit de renversement
dialectique. Il sagirait de dcrire le neutre, bien loin du nihilisme auquel
on le condamne souvent, comme larme secrte du ngatif. Et il me semble,
grce la proposition de Hannes Opelz et John McKeane, que je peux faire
remonter ces proccupations lpoque du romantisme.
Ce nest pas la premire fois que jvoque publiquement cet norme
projet. Je lavais dj fait en 2004, et cest dire sil a peu avanc depuis.
Curieusement, il sagissait dj, pour moi au moins, dun contexte sem-
blable: un colloque sur Blanchot, ltranger, dans un pays anglo-saxon
(lAustralie), dont le titre, Blanchot the Obscure,4 pourrait ne pas tre sans
affinit avec celui du prsent volume et du colloque ponyme. Cette mise en
rapport pose une question supplmentaire, celle des liens entre lobscurit
blanchotienne et lobscurit romantique.
Dans mon intervention au colloque de Melbourne, javais tent
de saisir, au regard du neutre, trois grands mouvements dans luvre de
Blanchot. Dans un premier temps, dans la proximit de lil y a de Levinas
et du non-savoir de Bataille, un certain nombre de recherches et de formu-
lations bouleversent la pense phnomnologique et la pense de lcriture.
Un bouleversement auquel Blanchot ne mettra jamais un point final, parce
quil est indissociable chez lui dune potique, et dabord de sa propre poti-
que, celle de ses romans, de ses rcits et de ses fragments. Une potique que
4 Les actes en ont paru dans la revue Colloquy, text theory critique, 10 (novembre
2005), et dans After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, sous la dir. de Leslie
Hill, Brian Nelson et Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
2005).
viennent complter de nombreux textes critiques et thoriques, une poti-

que de linterruption du sens dont Blanchot nommera les variations dans
lcriture du pome (Mallarm), le dialogue romanesque (Duras), la parole
psychanalytique (Freud) ou lesthtique thtrale (Brecht). Cest le second
mouvement, o se croisent les rcits, dissolution de chaque preuve singu-
lire dans une exprience donne comme indfinie, et les critiques, relve de
la part du neutre propre chaque cration signe dun nom dauteur. Cest
ce mouvement que Barthes, ds Le Degr zro de lcriture (1953), accom-
pagne, dans une double attitude demphase et de rticence. Il ny reviendra
vraiment, dans son cours sur Le Neutre (197778), que lorsque Blanchot,
ailleurs, autrement, cherchera nommer le fondement dune thique pour
cette ligne potique. Cest le troisime et dernier mouvement, qui travaille,
dans la suite de la lecture dAntelme, dfinir une reconnaissance sans rv-
lation (il nest pas confi LEspce humaine (1947) de rvler la mort ou
le dsastre; le rcit appelle plutt un mouvement de reconnaissance sans
fin, ce que Blanchot nomme tre autrui pour soi-mme, et qui touche
ce que Levinas appelle lindiscrtion lgard de lindicible).
On sait limpact exerc par cette pense du neutre sur les philosophies
de Jacques Derrida (la dissymtrie, la vrit, le tmoignage), de Jean-Luc
Nancy (la communaut, le dsuvrement), de Michel Foucault (le dehors),
ou encore de Gilles Deleuze et Flix Guattari, faisant de Blanchot un nou-
veau penseur de lvnement qui distingue, selon leurs propres termes, dune
part ltat de choses le long duquel nous passons, nous-mmes et notre corps,
et dautre part lvnement dans lequel nous nous enfonons ou remon-
tons, ce qui recommence sans avoir jamais commenc ni fini, linternel
immanent.5 Une puissance neutre actualise un vnement: elle trace des
lignes de force, de contact, de toucher, dadhsion, de courbure, dcart, de
rpulsion, des lignes de reconnaissance interminables, qui profilent pourtant
en pleine dmesure la ralit des rapports au monde, soi, lautre, cette
ralit qui dcide de toutes les inflexions sentimentales, familiales, morales,
5 Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie? (1991) (Paris: Minuit,
2005), p.148.
politiques possibles. Il faut rappeler la lettre crite par Robert Antelme

Dionys Mascolo aprs que celui-ci la ramen des camps:
Dionys, je voudrais te dire que je ne pense pas lamiti comme une chose positive, je
veux dire comme une valeur, mais bien plus, je veux dire comme un tat, une identi-
fication, donc une multiplication de la mort, une multiplication de linterrogation, le
lieu miraculeusement le plus neutre do percevoir et sentir la constante dinconnu,
le lieu o la diffrence dans ce quelle a de plus aigu ne vit comme on lentendrait
la fin de lhistoire , ne spanouit quau cur de son contraire proximit de la
mort.6
Le neutre exige ici une suspension de la personne, au moment mme de

lamiti et du salut, car il est travers par la tentative dexemption de sens
et de reconnaissance quest lextermination, mais la ressource quil dploie
retrouve ainsi la personne, plus fortement, et au-del de la personne, la
reconnaissance illimite de toute altrit. Cest un mouvement la fois
politique et esthtique, car il suppose une prsentation et une reprsen-
tation. Antelme la bien compris qui fait de LEspce humaine la fois un
tmoignage et une littrature.
La littrature, crit encore Deleuze, et cela peut sentendre aussi bien
de tout art, ne commence que lorsque nat en nous une troisime personne
qui nous dessaisit du pouvoir de dire Je (le neutre de Blanchot).7 Cette
reconnaissance du devenir de lvnement fait du neutre la condition mme
de lexercice et de la possibilit de lart. Le neutre apparat ainsi comme le
plan inamovible, le socle de rsistance, la part inappropriable de lidentit.
L o il rejoint une forme duniversalit immdiate et pourtant innomme.
Que les noms narrivent jamais circonscrire. Qui dresse les figures, les
toiles, les notes, les lumires, les jeux de scne.
Il sagit de rapporter maintenant ce questionnement aux proccu-
pations du romantisme. Vaste et impossible programme, dautant quil
faudrait rappeler, pour commencer avec le romantisme, tout ce que ce
6 Robert Antelme, lettre Dionys Mascolo, 1949 ou 1950, in Dionys Mascolo, Autour
dun effort de mmoire (Paris: M. Nadeau, 1987), pp.2324.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), p.13.
mot a pu et peut encore signifier et voquer. Je ne le ferai pas ici, parce que
jimagine que dautres, singulirement, le feront et parce que, ensemble,
collectivement, nous le ferons tous, nous laurons fait, nous lavons, par
principe, toujours-dj fait. Quil me suffise de rappeler les diffrences de
temporalit, de langage, dobjectifs et de visions entre les diffrents roman-
tismes, mme pour nous en tenir ici ceux qui nont pas laiss Blanchot
indiffrent, soit les romantiques allemands, le plus souvent, et parfois les
Anglais et les Franais. Quil me suffise encore de rappeler les diffrences
de priodisation et de conceptualisation entre les penseurs du romantisme
ultrieurs au romantisme. Quil me suffise enfin de rappeler que la question
peut-tre essentielle entre toutes consiste savoir si nous sommes sortis ou
non de lpoque romantique, ce qui impliquerait de mettre en regard les
priodisations et les conceptualisations du romantisme et celles du moder-
nisme et du post-modernisme.
Avant daller au bout de nos peines, ou de nos joies, il convient au
moins de tracer, mme rapidement, une petite gnalogie (rappelons, au
sens de Deleuze, une perspective diffrentielle et gntique) du romantisme
ou des romantismes chez Blanchot. Jessaierai de men acquitter dautant
plus consciencieusement que Hannes Opelz et John McKeane mavaient
confi lhonneur insigne et la tche redoutable douvrir le colloque Blanchot
romantique. Non sans oublier un domaine dont Danielle Cohen-Levinas,
philosophe, musicologue et lectrice de Blanchot aurait pu nous parler: la
musique. Car sans que je puisse me reconnatre la comptence daller plus
avant, je tiens simplement rappeler que sil y a une rfrence romantique
majeure pour Blanchot, ce nest pas un crivain, mais un compositeur:
Schumann.
Le moins quon puisse dire est que Blanchot ne vient pas dun milieu
ou de milieux qui prdisposent au romantisme. Rien nest moins vident,
dans les annes trente, quun Blanchot romantique quoique, bien sr,
les choses soient plus complexes quelles en ont lair. Car, du point de vue
politique, on peut dire que les jeunes dissidents du maurrassisme dont il se
trouve proche, tmoignent dun romantisme quils ont peine avouer ou
savouer; du point de vue critique, les annes trente voient merger des choix
et des conceptions que confirmeront les chroniques des annes quarante,
Nerval, Lautramont, les romantiques allemands, le got de labme et de

lobscur; du point de vue littraire, ces annes sont les premires dune
cration romanesque dont on pourrait montrer, avec la ou les premires
versions de Thomas lObscur, tout ce quelle doit un romantisme de pre-
mire ou de seconde main (je pense, pour cette seconde main, linfluence
dun Giraudoux, que Blanchot svertue prendre pour le sosie exalt de
Jean-Paul).8 Ds les annes quarante, les questions du romantisme partagent
Blanchot: dun ct, la veine terroriste de linspiration quavec Paulhan il
aurait plutt tendance condamner; de lautre, la mise en jeu dune exp-
rience quavec Bataille il aurait tendance valoriser. O lon voit venir la
question du rapport de lexprience lcriture. Cest par cette question que
le romantisme va exercer une influence sur sa thorie critique et sa littrature
fragmentaire. Cest au romantisme de lAthenum que Blanchot, partir
des annes soixante, va plutt se rfrer: cela est sensible dans LEntretien
infini (1969), bien sr, et dans les livres fragmentaires.
Dans le vaste corpus blanchotien, par une mesure slective due aux
contraintes de place, je voudrais marrter sur deux moments: celui des
chroniques des annes quarante (par choix, je men tiendrai au volume des
Chroniques, rcemment paru, mais les articles publis depuis longtemps
dans Faux pas (1943) confirmeraient les analyses qui suivent) et celui de
larticle publi dans LEntretien infini intitul prcisment LAthenum.
Coince entre les exigences rgulires ou rgaliennes de Paulhan et les
impratifs sculiers de Bataille, mais polarise par les rfrences alleman-
des qui nen quittent jamais lhorizon, la lecture blanchotienne du roman-
tisme dans les annes quarante se cherche et se redfinit darticle en article.
Elle vise extraire certaines composantes de lcriture romantique et en
construire ou reconstruire une logique, un mouvement, une lgitimit.
lire plusieurs articles dcisifs, et les passages quil y consacre notamment
8 moins que ce ne soit le contraire, Jean-Paul comme sosie exalt de Giraudoux

La syntaxe de la phrase est curieuse et chez Blanchot, le paradoxe reste toujours pos-
sible. Voir CL, 54852 (p.548).
Hoffmann et Jean-Paul, on peut dcrire la vision blanchotienne de lcriture

romantique en quatre points.
Premier point, ou premier geste, la mtaphore, la mtamorphose, la
transfiguration. Blanchot donne cette lecture des contes dHoffmann:
On glisse des objets rels aux ressources dune existence fabuleuse o les sensations,
loin de disparatre, sont plus riches, mieux lies, plus profondes que celles de la
vie ordinaire. La sensation, comme elle est le principe du rve, est le principe dun
enchantement qui compose une impression de surnaturel avec ce quil y a de plus
constant dans la nature. Cest des parfums, des couleurs, des sons de cristal, cest--
dire de tout ce qui nous est gnralement prsent dans notre existence habituelle,
que se forme le sentiment de linextricable force divresse, de lincroyable force
de surprise. (CL, 204)
Le paradoxe romantique tient tout entier dans la glissade inaugurale: insen-

siblement, Hoffmann nous fait passer de lordinaire au fabuleux, du naturel
au surnaturel, de lhabituel linextricable un adjectif bataillien, si bien
quon a encore envie de dire, du possible limpossible. Par une rfrence au
moins baudelairienne (les parfums, les couleurs et les sons), pousse son
paroxysme (leur cristallisation), Blanchot insiste sur la sensation comme
moyen dancrage de lcrit dans la rception du lecteur. Cest un tel premier
geste que Blanchot lira nouveau chez Jean-Paul:
Le caractre singulier de lart de Jean-Paul vient du rle quy jouent les images. Il nest
pas dcrivain pour qui crire soit un plus haut degr le pouvoir de mtamorphoser
les choses par linvention de mtaphores. Pour lui, les comparaisons ne sont pas seu-
lement des figures qui intressent superficiellement le style; elles sont un chemin de
dcouverte, une voie qui de proche en proche nous fait passer du visible linvisible,
du connu linconnu, du familier lvidence de lnigme. Cest l un trait de lart
qui est devenu de nos jours tout fait courant. Mais Jean-Paul a t lun des premiers
romanciers sentir que la mtaphore pouvait tre un instrument extraordinaire de
transmutation, et sa prose saisie dune vritable frnsie, change tout contre tout,
assemble les harmonies les plus tranges, produit les concidences les plus chimriques,
recre le monde en en faisant le lieu de la ressemblance universelle. (CL, 55051)
Notons enfin que tel est le point de dpart de la rflexion de Blanchot sur
Lautramont.
Mais la mtaphore mtamorphosante ne serait rien quillusion si elle

ne senracinait, et cest le deuxime point, dans ce que Blanchot nomme
propos dHoffmann une exprience originale et propos de Jean-Paul,
une vie authentique. Chez Hoffmann, il nhsite pas puiser dans le savoir
biographique, de manire presque nave et touchante:
Mais cet enchantement nest possible que parce que le pote fait graviter ses fantasma-
gories autour dune exprience originale qui leur donne une authenticit, un srieux
dont on subit lattrait. Le mythe du Vase dor, du lis flamboyant et du serpent vert,
laventure dAnselme qui russit gagner lamour de Serpentine, dans la posie, la foi
et le rve, en chappant aux charmes terrestres de Vronique, cest la transposition,
analogue celle dAurlia, de lamour dHoffmann pour Julia Marc, sa petite lve
de Bamberg, quil sut sacrifier afin de vivre, misrable et libre, en total accord avec
son art. Cet idal romantique qui, pris sous sa forme prosaque, apparat aujourdhui
singulirement dcolor et inefficace, retrouve dans une uvre comme Le Vase dor,
une vie originale et pure, une sorte de richesse de source. Luvre prolonge la dure de
linstant, de lillumination do elle a tir son origine, et par une combinaison de chair
et desprit, par un mlange de chaleur, dintimit et dabstraction, ternise lexprience
concrte dont nulle habilet ne saurait remplacer labsence. (CL, 20405)
Jean-Paul, lui, nest quun prtexte pour opposer les conceptions plus mi-
vres, celles dune littrature dexpression, propres au romantisme franais (au
premier romantisme franais, ce que lon nomme en gnral le romantisme
franais), aux conceptions plus riches des romantiques allemands:
laube du romantisme, Jean-Paul reprsente certains partis pris dont les romanti-
ques franais nont pas discern la valeur, mais qui aprs eux ou en dehors deux ont
pntr profondment notre temps. Le principal est le caractre dexprience reconnu
la littrature; la littrature devient une manifestation spirituelle; elle introduit celui
qui la recherche dans un mode dexistence nouveau; elle est une sorte dascse qui
nous permet daccder une vie plus authentique: en un mot, elle a pour lcrivain
une signification mystique. (Plus tard, un sicle plus tard, un autre crivain allemand,
Kafka, dira: crire cest prier.) Alors que, pour la plupart des romantiques franais,
lart est subjectif parce quil rvle les mouvements intrieurs, exprime lintimit per-
sonnelle, pour le romantisme ou le prromantisme des Hlderlin, des Jean-Paul, des
Novalis, comme pour un Nerval ou un Rimbaud, lart est subjectif parce quil met
en cause ce que lartiste a de plus profond, non plus seulement pour lexprimer, mais
pour le transformer. Pour nos romantiques, lart garde une valeur psychologique, il
est expression sincre, miroir fidle; pour les romantiques trangers, la littrature a
une valeur dengagement: elle nexprime pas, elle bouleverse; elle est la fois moyen
de connaissance et pouvoir de mtamorphose; vivre, crire, cest un mme acte. La
posie est une exprience magique. (CL, 549)
Au loin, on la entendu, se profile Kafka; derrire le mot dexprience, on

reconnat Bataille; dans la phrase conclusive, la posie comme exprience
magique, sannonce Michaux, qui Blanchot consacre un article sous ce
titre.
Ainsi lcriture romantique ne tmoigne dune exprience que pour
lui donner une puissance de transfiguration. Ce nest pas encore tout. Si
une telle criture sest donne ce projet, et pour ce projet ne sest donne
aucune rgle, elle ne peut exister et se dvelopper qu la condition dexer-
cer sa libert pour sen donner de nouvelles. Paradoxalement, encore hant
par la rflexion paulhanienne, cest Blanchot qui lavait souffl Bataille:
lexprience est elle-mme lautorit. On peut voquer tous les rves, tous
les souvenirs fabuleux, tous les sentiments double visage (CL, 14748)
que lon veut, ces tentatives ne sont possibles que par laccord des dons les
plus spontans avec une conscience du monde assez grave et, aprs tant
douvrages illustres qui en perptuent la russite ou lchec, elles ne peuvent
tre recommences que si une exprience personnelle profonde trouve les
moyens dun art libre (148). Cest pourquoi le mythe essentiel, le mythe
de tous les mythes, est toujours chez les romantiques celui de lart:
Cest sous cette forme que se prsente le mythe essentiel de Hoffmann. Toutes ses
uvres importantes reproduisent, en effet, un mme thme qui est lexpression sym-
bolique de sa vie et qui est celui de lartiste ou de lamour de lartiste. Dans Le Chat
Murr, le personnage de lartiste a trouv son incarnation dans la figure du matre de
chapelle Johannes Kreisler, double suprieur de lcrivain et image de ce quil aurait
voulu tre. Cette figure, trs complexe, est fort loin de celle quun romantisme facile
oppose au botien, au philistin traditionnels. Elle runit les deux penchants de luni-
vers hoffmannien, dun ct sensible aux pressentiments tnbreux et la discordance
des dsirs terrestres, mais dautre part capable de vivre en accord avec la vrit mys-
trieuse de la nature et de la reflter dans un art. (CL, 41314)
Ainsi, si lcriture romantique ne tmoigne dune exprience que pour

lui donner une puissance de transfiguration, cest encore condition de
la rflchir comme lexprience artistique elle-mme. Mais cest l, aprs
ce triple mouvement de reconnaissance, que Blanchot se trouve face au
paradoxe le plus brlant du romantisme: cette exprience artistique est
une exprience de fin de lart. Quel sens et quelle valeur accorder cette
puissance de mtamorphose qui culmine en puissance de destruction,
Blanchot ne le sait pas encore dans ce dbut des annes quarante. Suivons
les contorsions du passage suivant consacr nouveau aux romantiques
allemands:
Il ny a pas revenir, dans ces brves notes, sur le rle jou dans lart moderne par la
recherche de ce que Goethe et le romantisme allemand ont appel le ct nocturne
de lme. Chacun garde le souvenir de ces uvres qui ont travers notre temps et qui,
mme chappes au systme de nos admirations, conservent le pouvoir dagir sur
nous, comme des astres noirs, invisibles, dtruits et cependant capables de nouvelles
chutes. Mais il faut remarquer que ce souci de saisir lhomme dans la srie vertigi-
neuse de ses glissades et de ses faux pas, cette enqute qui a conduit lart substituer
un monde clair un monde sans perspective ni couleur, cette passion de ce qui ne
peut tre ni vu ni connu sest accompagn aussi dun ddain de luvre comme telle
et, aprs avoir pulvris le jour et la lumire, a tent galement de rduire en poudre
lquilibre et la forme de la fiction destine recevoir les dbris de la nature visible.
tait-ce une consquence ncessaire? tait-il fatal que la peinture dun monde cras,
soumis laction dun Destin aveugle et inconnaissable, entrant la mise en miettes
de luvre o cette peinture devait se raliser? Cest ce qui demanderait une trop
longue recherche pour que nous puissions nous y arrter maintenant; du moins est-il
sr, comme la fait justement remarquer Andr Malraux, que ce qui spare William
Faulkner dEdgar Poe ou dHoffmann, ce nest pas lobsession des forces nocturnes,
lapptit terroris des ombres o sincarne labsurde, ni mme le caractre des visions
qui reprsentent ces valeurs, cest le souci de luvre dart, du rcit qui tend, chez
lauteur des Contes extraordinaires, une existence objective, complte et parfaite, et
dont le romancier de Tandis que jagonise et de Sanctuaire rejette (dailleurs incom-
pltement) la servitude. (CL, 20001)
Tel est le paradoxe brlant: que le souci de luvre dart puisse gale-
ment valoir comme destruction (ou vice versa). Cest ce quil retrouve chez
Ptrus Borel et Grard de Nerval:
Ptrus Borel et Philothe ONeddy appartiennent assez rgulirement lhistoire

littraire. Tous deux font partie du groupe turbulent des Jeune France dont Thophile
Gautier et Grard de Nerval sont rests les matres. [] Les Jeune France qui se
donnent le nom de lycanthropes (les hommes-loups, mi-chemin vers une double
mtamorphose) veulent reprsenter le romantisme intgral, ce qui ne signifie pas quils
sont un peu plus romantiques que Lamartine ou Victor Hugo, mais quils sont dj
au-del de ses limites, une force qui, en dtruisant tout ce quelle ne peut tolrer, nest
plus quimage de destruction; ils tendent faire de la littrature la voie suprme des
catastrophes o non seulement la mauvaise littrature et le monde bourgeois doivent
sombrer, mais o est destine prir la ralit littraire tout entire. La posie se met
en cause et ouvre lhomme un prodigieux abme o tout lui devient impossible,
mme la posie. (CL, 25556)
Cette fois, le mot dimpossible est lch.

Avec ce dernier des quatre gestes qui recomposent le mouvement et,
pour Blanchot, la lgitimit de lcriture romantique, nous en voici au point
o les annes soixante vont les reprendre: celui de labsolu littraire, et dj
en tous les sens, solution, absolution, dissolution. Car cest maintenant
vers le romantisme dIna, peine voqu dans les annes quarante, quil
va se tourner (dans les Chroniques, les noms de Friedrich Schlegel et de
Novalis sont cits lun une seule fois, lautre trois fois, toujours au passage
et en peine une ou quelques lignes; ne parlons ni dAugust Schlegel ni
de Schelling, absents).
Curieusement, Blanchot lui-mme oriente notre lecture dans le sens
de son volution. Certes, il nest pas rare quil construise ses articles en
commenant par critiquer telle interprtation de luvre ou de lauteur quil
voque. Mais commencer cet article de 1964 en repoussant dun mme geste
la lecture marxiste de Lukcs et les lectures de la critique franaise dextrme
droite, parce quelles partageraient la mme dtestation du romantisme
allemand, consiste la fois laisser des traces de ses lectures passes et
indiquer o la lecture nouvelle va reprendre (EI, 515). Pour comprendre le
romantisme allemand, souligne Blanchot, il ne faut pas senfermer dans la
dnonciation infinie de ses contradictions (du reste foncirement idolo-
giques) mais accepter que le cur du mouvement batte dans lexigence ou
lexprience des contradictions, la ncessit de se contredire, la scission, le
fait dtre partag (516). Cest pourquoi le romantisme allemand se soucie

peu de finir: finir demanderait une relve dfinitive des contradictions.
Ainsi il est souvent sans uvre, parce quil est luvre de labsence duvre,
posie affirme dans la puret de lacte potique, affirmation sans dure,
libert sans ralisation, puissance qui sexalte en disparaissant (517). Contre
la morosit de Goethe, qui apprciait peu ces livres inachevs, ouvrages
inaccomplis, on ressent la jubilation de Blanchot, car lAthenum vient lui
donner dans les annes soixante tout ce quil cherche, la formulation dun
impratif esthtique qui passerait par un mode paradoxal daccomplisse-
ment, un accomplissement sans accomplissement:
le pouvoir, pour luvre, dtre et non plus de reprsenter, dtre tout, mais sans conte-
nus ou avec des contenus presque indiffrents et ainsi daffirmer ensemble labsolu et
le fragmentaire, la totalit, mais dans une forme qui, tant sans formes, cest--dire
la limite ntant aucune, ne ralise pas le tout, mais le signifie en le suspendant, voire
en le brisant. (EI, 518)
Cette lecture la limite de la dconstruction de la mtaphysique

romantique, Blanchot la prolonge essentiellement sur lessence de la rflexi-
vit: avec lcole dIna, cest le cur de la posie qui est savoir, cest son
essence dtre recherche et recherche delle-mme (EI, 518). La littrature
(jentends lensemble des formes dexpression, cest--dire aussi forces de
dissolution) prend tout coup conscience delle-mme, se manifeste et,
dans cette manifestation, na pas dautre tche ni dautre trait que de se
dclarer (520). Cette conscience delle-mme livre la littrature labsolu:
labsolu delle-mme et labsolu du tout qui, selon Novalis ici cit par
Blanchot, agit dans chaque instant, dans chaque phnomne (521). Cest
pourquoi Blanchot ne peut accepter davantage la lecture de Hegel qui,
du jour o, suivant les volonts de lAthenum, il nomme romantique lart
de toute lre chrtienne, ne reconnat dans le romantisme proprement
dit que la dissolution du mouvement, son mortel triomphe, le moment
du dclin o lart, tournant contre lui-mme le principe de destruction
qui est son centre, concide avec son interminable et pitoyable fin (522).
Cest, pour Blanchot, ter toute forme de positivit ce mouvement
ngatif: en clair, en faire une sorte de nihilisme avant la lettre. Car si
le romantisme allemand affirme sa puissance de dissolution, cest aussi

dans le rve dun livre total, qui ne peut saccomplir quinaccompli, qui
ne peut voquer le tout que par un art nouveau, celui du fragment. La
parole fragmentaire nentrave pas la communication mais cherche la
rendre absolue (525).
On le remarquera: le mot neutre est absent de cet article sur lAthenum.
Mais il est prsent constamment, dune main invisible qui guide lcri-
ture de ces quelques pages. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy
lavaient dj remarqu, eux qui closent leur si blanchotien Absolu littraire
(1978) en proposant de penser cette auto-manifestation de la littrature
comme une manifestation neutre (AL, 422; Lacoue-Labarthe et Nancy
soulignent).9 Et ce quon lit bien ici, cest la ncessit de dpasser le mou-
vement de la dialectique hglienne pour apprcier un vnement, celui de
lcriture romantique, qui la fois est et nest pas, prsente et ne reprsente
pas, fragmente et totalise: un art nouveau, crit Blanchot. Or, non seule-
ment le neutre est prsent en sous-main, mais le mot figure dans la phrase
finale de larticle qui prcde celui sur lAthenum, article qui sintitule
prcisment Ars nova. Ars nova est ma connaissance lunique article
de Blanchot traiter de musique et en lespce, de la musique allemande
dodcaphonique. cette musique, Blanchot attribue une violence neutre
(EI, 514). Elle dsigne dj un art qui irait vers labsence duvre, un livre
9 Cest ce que remarque galement quelques mois plus tard, mais dans une perspective
outrageusement critique, Tzvetan Todorov. Avec Genette, Todorov dirige la collection
Potique o vient de paratre LAbsolu littraire. Son article de la revue Potique, La
Rflexion sur la littrature dans la France contemporaine (38 (avril 1979), 13148),
apparat donc aussi comme une rponse au livre des deux philosophes. Todorov
dnonce linconstance des jugements de got et des attitudes critiques de Blanchot
lgard du romantisme allemand. Il ne relve ensuite le surgissement de la notion
de neutre que pour alimenter un triple procs: cette notion permettrait Blanchot
de rinterprter les thories du romantisme allemand, forces au profit de proccu-
pations strictement contemporaines qui tmoigneraient dun refus de ltranger. De
telles allgations, rapides et radicales, sont sans fondement. Mais elles tmoignent
au moins dune rflexion ncessaire sur les rapports de la notion de neutre au travail
de priodisation du temps.
qui irait vers labsence de livre. Cest toute la problmatique de LEntretien

infini que lon entend ici. La musique atonale, crit Blanchot, est celle
qui ne se construit pas autour dun centre: lide de centre et dunit est
comme repousse du champ de luvre ainsi rendue, la limite, infinie
(512). Cest, souligne-t-il, sa recherche la plus dcisive pour les autres arts
et pour la parole elle-mme (512). On comprend que latonal est une varia-
tion du neutre et quil faudrait donc ajouter, dans la liste que jvoquais
en commenant, quelques titres comme Le Neutre chez Berg ou Le Neutre
chez Schoenberg (notons encore que Blanchot parle ici de luvre de Klee,
qui rve un espace o lomission de tout centre devrait en mme temps
supprimer toute trace du vague ou de lindcis (513)). La musique atonale
sannonce donc comme laccomplissement le plus parfait des thories du
romantisme allemand.
Le mot neutre est absent de larticle sur lAthenum, mais il y trouve
cependant un trange synonyme: lironie.10 Pas si trange que cela en vrit.
Car lironie ici conue est celle qui disjoint la parole et fait de celle-ci un
sujet. Le je du pote, voil donc ce qui finalement importerait seul,
non plus luvre potique, mais lactivit, toujours suprieure louvrage
rel, et seulement cratrice lorsquelle se sait capable la fois dvoquer et
de rvoquer luvre dans le jeu souverain de lironie (EI, 524; Blanchot
souligne). Lironie, telle est la puissance de subjectivation propre les-
thtique romantique. Et telle est galement la puissance dinterruption
de luvre qui mane du jeu des fragments. Ce nest donc pas un hasard si
le chapitre qui suit celui sur lAthenum dans LEntretien infini est le seul
texte de Blanchot, ma connaissance, qui porte sur la mise en scne, car
il porte sur Leffet dtranget brechtien, cest--dire prcisment sur ce
que Benjamin prfrait nommer chez Brecht leffet dinterruption et que
10 Je rappellerai dailleurs que dans un texte prliminaire au Degr zro de lcriture,

publi par Maurice Nadeau, Barthes voit en lcriture de Voltaire le parangon dune
criture neutre
Brecht jugeait suprieur lironie romantique.11 On notera au passage le

sens de la composition propre Blanchot dans LEntretien infini.
Ainsi, dans ce survol rapide des devenirs du Blanchot romantique,
la lecture compare des articles des annes quarante et de larticle sur
lAthenum permet de distinguer une variable gnalogique, cest--dire,
je le rappelle, diffrentielle et gntique: et cest la notion de neutre.
11 Ce que commente sa faon Walter Benjamin dans la deuxime version de son article
Quest-ce que le thtre pique? (1939). Voir ses Essais sur Brecht, trad. par Philippe
Ivernel (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), p.46.
Yves Gilonne
LAuto-rflexivit du sublime
Dans les pages quil consacre lAthenum dans LEntretien infini (1969),
Blanchot semble accorder au premier romantisme allemand des frres
Schlegel une place centrale dans sa propre rflexion non seulement autour
de lautonomie de la littrature, de lexigence fragmentaire et du dsuvre-
ment mais aussi, de faon dterminante, travers lauto-production comme
moment absolu o la littrature devient thorie delle-mme, clairant ce
qui hante, encore aujourdhui, comme le remarquent Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy, notre demi-sommeil thorique et nos rveries
dcriture:1
Si lon voulait, tentative encore entreprendre, recevoir, comme neuf, ces pre-
miers assauts romantiques, peut-tre ce qui surprendrait, ce nest pas la glorification
de linstinct ou lexaltation du dlire, cest tout au contraire la passion de penser et
lexigence quasi abstraite, pose par la posie, de se rflchir et de saccomplir par sa
rflexion. [] Cest son essence dtre recherche et recherche delle-mme. (EI, 518;
Blanchot souligne)
Le rapport de Blanchot au romantisme qui sexprime ici semble se dvelop-

per autour dune syncope temporelle: limpossibilit de la prsentation du
romantisme en soi emporte la rflexion dans un mouvement rflchissant
sans fin. La rflexion sur le romantisme, loin de saccomplir dans le projet
den saisir lessence, est suspendue entre le pass jamais antrieur de son
origine (les premiers assauts) et le futur, postrieur son accomplissement,
de llan interprtatif lui-mme (comme neuf ). Si, comme le dit ici
Blanchot, la tentative [est] encore entreprendre, cest que lauthenticit de
1 Voir AL, quatrime de couverture.

94 Yves Gilonne
la dmarche rside paradoxalement dans limpossibilit de son achvement.

La notion mme de romantisme spuise alors chez Blanchot en tant que
signe passager dune recherche qui lexcde, qui ne peut tre (res)saisie dans
aucun prsent, qui tient en chec la pense tout en appelant une certaine
prsence de pense venir quil nous appartiendra de dterminer. Or cette
recherche impossible de la reprsentation soi non seulement sous-tend la
conception blanchotienne du romantisme mais offre le reflet de sa propre
dmarche critique selon le modle dune circularit de linterprtation que
Paul de Man a contribu rvler:
Le savoir de limpossibilit de savoir prcde lacte de la conscience qui cherche

latteindre. Cette structure est circulaire. Lhypothse prospective, qui est lavenir,
rejoint une ralit concrte qui lui est antrieure, et qui appartient donc au pass
de cet avenir: elle transforme lavenir en pass, dans le recommencement infini que
Blanchot appelle le ressassement, Mallarm linfrieur clapotis quelconque []
[] La philosophie connat cette circularit de la conscience qui caractrise toute
entit capable de mettre en question son tre propre. Bien que cette connaissance
complique infiniment sa tche, elle nen continue pas moins poursuivre son effort
de comprhension. Il en va de mme de la littrature.2
Limpossibilit de savoir dtermine la circularit du mouvement qui mne

du discours spculatif sur lessence du romantisme la dimension spculaire
de tout acte interprtatif. Mouvement sans cesse renouvel qui entrane
le logos dans la qute impossible de sa propre limite. Or ce mouvement
dpasse le simple cadre du romantisme, fut-ce celui dIna, pour pouser
chez Blanchot le mouvement de sa propre recherche et de sa critique; cest
le cas, par exemple, dans son analyse de Paulhan dans La Facilit de mourir
(1969): Je reprends lide dun rcit qui va de livre en livre, o celui qui
crit se raconte afin de se chercher, puis de chercher le mouvement de la
recherche, cest--dire comment il est possible de raconter, donc dcrire
(A, 174).
2 Paul de Man, La Circularit de linterprtation dans luvre critique de Maurice

Blanchot, Critique, 229 (juin 1966), 54760 (p.558).
Lobjet de notre tude sera de tenter de reconduire lanalyse de Blanchot

son propre commentaire en cherchant saisir le mouvement par lequel
celui-ci reprend lide et le rcit dun certain romantisme qui irait de livre
en livre, o finalement Blanchot se raconterait afin tout dabord de se cher-
cher, puis de chercher le mouvement de la recherche, cest--dire comment
il est possible de raconter, donc dcrire. Mouvement obsdant qui porte
sa rflexion en de ou au-del (sub-lime) de la question du romantisme,
du moins dans sa dimension historique qui semble dissoute dans le mou-
vement interprtatif mme en ne retenant que lternit, le toujours-dj
du principe dautorflexion lui-mme. Il sagit alors de comprendre com-
ment on passe chez Blanchot dune dmarche spculaire lautorflexion
de la critique au spculatif la thorie de lautoproduction de lcriture
que lon retrouve notamment dans la question du rcit que prsente Le
Livre venir (1959):
Cest l lune des trangets, disons lune des prtentions du rcit. Il ne relate que
lui-mme, et cette relation en mme temps quelle se fait, produit ce quelle raconte,
nest possible comme relation que si elle ralise ce qui se passe en cette relation, car
elle dtient alors le point ou le plan o la ralit que le rcit dcrit peut sans cesse
sunir sa ralit en tant que rcit, la garantir et y trouver sa garantie. (LV, 1415)
Le rcit critique que Blanchot nous propose du romantisme allemand

semble obir des rgles similaires: il produit ce quil raconte, il relate le
programme du romantisme allemand en le ralisant. Ainsi la critique blan-
chotienne dtient le point o la ralit dcrite lessence du romantisme
est dtre recherche et recherche delle-mme peut sans cesse sunir la
ralit en tant que rcit critique qui ne relate que lui-mme et ainsi garantir
le romantisme en y trouvant sa garantie.
Il faudrait peut-tre alors voir dans les jeux de miroir du spculatif et du
spculaire lorigine de cette fascination que suscitent les textes de Blanchot
et qui expose bien souvent la critique une forme insidieuse de paraphrase et
lusage abusif du paradoxe. On serait alors tent par le biais dune mise en
abme de la critique elle-mme, de renvoyer linterprtation blanchotienne
sa propre analyse de la critique de Caillois sur Lautramont:
96 Yves Gilonne
Roger Caillois dit trs bien en tte de son tude: Voici une uvre qui contient son
propre commentaire. Et il ajoute avec raison: Aussi est-il trs mal ais den parler.
Mais la troisime phrase donne rflchir: Tout ce quon pourrait en dire de plus
exact, lauteur la dit dj, et dans cette uvre mme. Peut-tre. Et cependant, si la
lucidit de Lautramont est si grande, si elle est admirable, elle ne peut pas igno-
rer que ce commentaire intrieur quelle nous propose [] ne peut servir la juger
ou la dfinir exactement, puisquil aide la former, quil la modifie par l et que
ce changement, cette transformation progressive quil provoque, change sa propre
porte et lui te tout pouvoir de nous rvler le caractre final dune uvre au sein
de laquelle il est pris. (LS, 60)
On serait donc tent de dire que luvre critique de Blanchot sur le roman-
tisme contient son propre commentaire, et quil est donc trs mal ais den
parler. Tout ce quon pourrait dire du romantisme ou de la circularit de lin-
terprtation blanchotienne, Blanchot la dit dj et dans cette uvre mme.
Et pourtant son commentaire seul ne peut nous servir le juger, puisque
le commentaire critique de Blanchot sur le romantisme aide le former.
La transformation progressive que le commentaire de Blanchot provoque
change sa porte; ainsi, le romantisme franais, celui de Vienne, Goethe
mme, cdent la place au premier romantisme dIna dans un mouvement
sans fin vers une origine qui excde le romantisme lui-mme.
Pour Blanchot, le romantisme ne peut en quelque sorte jamais tre
tout fait la hauteur de son projet: lauteur romantique choue deux fois,
puisquil ne russit pas disparatre vraiment [] et puisque les ouvrages par
lesquels il ne peut sempcher de prtendre saccomplir, restent, et comme
par intention, inaccomplis (EI, 517). Mais, premier trait sublime que nous
aborderons tout lheure, cet chec, cette peine, cette confrontation du
projet limpossibilit de la reprsentation de sa propre limite, entrane
un second mouvement: lextase de la prsentation de la destination de la
pense critique et de sa libert absolue. Cest ce que Blanchot exprime dans
un autre passage de son tude sur lAthenum:
Dans ces textes, nous trouvons exprimes lessence non romantique du romantisme
et toutes les principales questions que la nuit du langage va contribuer produire au
jour: qucrire, cest faire uvre de parole, mais que cette uvre est dsuvrement;
que parler potiquement, cest rendre possible une parole non transitive qui na pas
pour tche de dire les choses (de disparatre dans ce quelle signifie), mais de (se) dire
en (se) laissant dire, sans toutefois faire delle-mme le nouvel objet de ce langage
sans objet. (EI, 524)
Lessence non romantique du romantisme: on voit dans cette trange for-

mule la dmarche de soustraction quoprent lautorflexivit de la formule
et la dsarticulation des concepts qui nat de leur confrontation. Lessence
du romantisme na rien de romantique, cest--dire que pour tre fidle
lui-mme il doit tre lui-mme sans se ressembler, sans se replier sur soi. Le
romantisme, selon Blanchot, ne doit pas se retrancher dans une uvre, ou
dans un objet qui lui serait propre mais, tant lexcessif, doit tre toujours
en excs par rapport lui-mme. La marque de la flexion, du retour soi,
le se du rflexif est ainsi symboliquement mis entre parenthses dans le
texte de Blanchot: le romantisme doit (se) dire en (se) laissant dire, sans
toutefois faire de lui-mme le nouvel objet de ce langage. Le romantique
serait donc pris dun accs de romantisme, qui affecte celui qui souffre dune
auto-affection du sujet, qui est sujet se prendre pour objet romantique.
Danger quAntoine Berman relve dans Lpreuve de ltranger (1984):
Walter Benjamin a excellemment montr comment cette catgorie [la rflexion]
structure toute pense romantique, au point mme que F. Schlegel a pu crire: Lesprit
romantique semble avec grce se faire lui-mme objet de sa fantaisie. Mais cette
rflexion nest aucunement un mouvement psychologique, une manire dtre centr
narcissiquement sur soi du moins au sens vulgaire. Une telle proccupation de son
propre soi personnel parat mme totalement trangre aux premiers Romantiques.
La rflexion est plutt pense ici comme un processus spculaire pur, comme un
se-rflchir et non, comme le dit dprciativement F. Schlegel, une morne contem-
plation de son propre nez.3
Lessence du romantisme ne sintresse donc pas lui-mme, il ne se construit

pas comme uvre, il na pas pour tche de se dclarer romantique mais il
spuise dans le dsuvrement qui lui est propre, dans ce point insaisissa-
3 Antoine Berman, Lpreuve de ltranger: culture et traduction dans lAllemagne roman-

tique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp.12122.
98 Yves Gilonne
ble du surgissement de ce que Blanchot nomme [la] pure conscience dans

linstant (EI, 517): le point aveugle o la potique dans sa force dauto-
rvlation (520) concide avec la critique en tant quautocritique, pour
acqurir une dimension proprement thorique de pure contemplation.
La circularit de la rflexion est ce qui unit autour du premier romantisme
dIna, potique, pratique critique et thorie autour du mme projet de
lauto-nomie du littraire que Blanchot naura de cesse de saisir au travers
dune criture qui transcende les notions de genre. Cest ce que, dans LAbsolu
littraire (1978), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy dfinissent
en ces termes: le romantisme nest ni de la littrature (ils en inventent le
concept) ni mme, simplement, une thorie de la littrature (ancienne
et moderne), mais la thorie elle-mme comme littrature ou, cela revient
au mme, la littrature se produisant en produisant sa propre thorie (AL,
22; ils soulignent).
Ces remarques, consacres lAthenum, ne pourraient-elles pas cara-
ctriser luvre de Blanchot? En effet, celle-ci oscille entre critique et fic-
tion pour proposer la thorie elle-mme comme littrature, comme en
tmoigne notamment Le Chant des sirnes (1954) dans Le Livre venir.
Par ailleurs, le neutre, comme le rappelle Paul de Man citant Blanchot, se
caractrise par le caractre impersonnel, lespce dexistence indpendante
et absolue que Mallarm lui prte Ce langage ne suppose personne qui
lexprime, personne qui lentende: il se parle et il scrit. Il est une sorte de
conscience sans sujet.4 Blanchot conclut alors dans La Part du feu (1949):
Peut-tre est-ce l une imposture. Mais peut-tre cette supercherie est-elle
la vrit de toute chose crite (PF, 48).
Mais alors ne faut-il pas se demander si Blanchot, sous couvert de faire
de la fiction uvre de vrit et de la vrit une imposture, ne succombe pas
lui-mme une supercherie? Suffit-il de sabandonner la neutralit dune
parole sans sujet pour garantir lobjectivit de sa propre dmarche critique?
Puisque la recherche de Blanchot sur lessence du romantisme ralise le
projet romantique en tant que recherche et recherche delle-mme, la
4 Paul de Man, La Circularit de linterprtation, p.553.

critique blanchotienne ne court-elle pas le risque de tomber sous le coup

de la remarque dprciative de Schlegel lui-mme et de ne devenir que la
morne contemplation de son propre nez?
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy remarquent que le pre-
mier romantisme [] proposera [] la lecture ironique des uvres de ce
que lon pourrait appeler, en exploitant la quasi-tautologique, le romant-
isme romanesque (AL, 13; ils soulignent). Lessence non romantique du
romantisme reprsenterait en quelque sorte lantidote au pige spculaire
de la tautologie du romantisme romanesque. Mais Blanchot lui-mme
semble parfois, du moins au premier abord, courir le risque de cette auto-
affection du sujet. Ce romantisme romanesque de Blanchot se retrouverait,
par exemple, dans le lieu commun de lauto(bio)thanatographie. Ce motif
romanesque dune mort vcue est rcurrent dans luvre de Blanchot. Il
apparat notamment, dans le cadre du romantisme, dans un article impor-
tant du Journal des Dbats, De Jean-Paul Giraudoux (1944); Blanchot
y souligne ce quil nomme les circonstances remarquables de lirruption
de la richesse potique de Jean-Paul: il eut une nuit la rvlation de sa
mort, il se vit mort, il prit rellement la forme cadavrique []. ([] Il
mourut le jour anniversaire de sa vision, trente-cinq ans plus tard.) []
Cette rvlation, intellectuelle et imaginative, le jette dans une fivre cra-
trice extraordinaire (CL, 550).
On reconnatra ici les traits romanesques dun romantisme qui idalise
la confrontation la mort comme auto-rvlation et source de cration.
Cette mort atteindra sa forme majuscule dans la Terreur rvolutionnaire qui
saffirme, selon Blanchot, comme la mesure de lhistoire et le logos des temps
modernes (EI, 521) pour devenir autorvlation et source dinspiration du
mouvement romantique lui-mme. Ce romantisme romanesque, dans sa
dimension auto(bio)thanatographique, est aussi bien des gards la source
ou ressource de lcriture de Blanchot, qui ne cesse de ressaisir, travers la
littrature, linstant o il fit lexprience de sa propre mort. De (Une scne
primitive?) o est dcrite la circonstance fulgurante par laquelle lenfant
foudroy voit il en a le spectacle le meurtre heureux de lui-mme qui lui
donne le silence de la parole (ED, 177) LInstant de ma mort (1994) o
Blanchot rvle la mme fascination que Jean-Paul pour le jour anniversaire
100 Yves Gilonne
de sa vision au point de se tromper (volontairement ou non) dans les dates:

Sur la faade tait inscrite, comme un souvenir indestructible, la date de
1807. [] Lanne fameuse de Ina, lorsque Napolon [] passait sous les
fentres de Hegel (IM, 13) phrase par laquelle le romanesque de Blanchot
fait retour au romantisme dIna; autorflexion sur la mort qui trouve dans
LEspace littraire (1955), au travers cette fois de lauto(bio)thanatographie
de Rilke, sa formulation littraire:
Il faut que ma mort me devienne toujours plus intrieure: quelle soit comme ma
forme invisible, mon geste, le silence de mon secret le plus cach. Jai quelque chose
faire pour la faire, jai tout faire, elle doit tre mon uvre, mais cette uvre est
au del de moi, elle est cette partie de moi que je nclaire pas, que je natteins pas et
dont je ne suis pas matre. (EL, 160)
Cette idalisation de lauto(bio)thanatographie risquerait alors de recon-

duire la pense son auto-affection, au repli sur une intimit romance et
la pense critique de Blanchot sur le romantisme semblerait se refermer
sur le pige tautologique du romanesque. Mais cette uvre de la mort est
au-del de Blanchot, elle est cette partie quil nclaire pas, quil natteint pas
et dont il nest pas matre. Si la posie et la fiction initient le mouvement
de rflexion, elles sont aussi ce qui empche de ne jamais se saisir; mort
qui creuse lintimit, et paradoxalement la prive de toute subjectivit en
devenant toujours plus intrieure; mouvement de dpossession de soi que
Blanchot dcrit dans (Une scne primitive?): tant mort de ce pouvoir-
mourir qui lui donne joie et ravage, a-t-il survcu, ou plutt, que veut dire
alors survivre, sinon vivre dun acquiescement au refus, dans le tarissement
de lmoi, en retrait de lintressement soi, ds-intress, extenu jusquau
calme, nattendant rien? (ED, 179).
Exprience du Neutre, du dsintressement, de la fatigue, de lpuise-
ment, du passif de la passion, de la patience, termes cette fois proprement
blanchotiens qui tout en nous permettant de sortir du pige tautologique
du romanesque marquent, me semble-t-il, un pas au-del de lessence du
romantisme. Or, dans une note qui accompagne le texte sur Rilke, Blanchot
nous dit alors: Si lon comparait cette patience la dangereuse mobilit
de la pense romantique, elle en apparatrait comme lintimit, mais aussi
comme la pause intrieure (EL, 162). La patience, point daboutissement

de lintimit romanesque de Blanchot, tout en sopposant limpatience,
la fulgurance de la pense romantique, en constitue la fois lintimit et
linterruption (la pause intrieure). Cette patience infinie est ce qui inter-
rompt le repli subjectif dans le pige dune certaine intimit du romantisme.
Dans son article sur Jean-Paul, Blanchot nous dit cet effet:
Alors que pour la plupart des romantiques franais, lart est subjectif parce quil rvle
les mouvements intrieurs, exprime lintimit personnelle, pour le romantisme ou le
prromantisme des Hlderlin, des Jean-Paul, des Novalis, comme pour un Nerval
ou un Rimbaud, lart est subjectif parce quil met en cause ce que lartiste a de plus
profond, non plus pour lexprimer, mais pour le transformer. (CL, 549)
Si la patience laquelle appelle lexprience personnelle de la mort se perd

dans lexpression satisfaite de lintimit personnelle dun certain roman-
tisme franais, pour le pr-romantisme dIna, elle serait, au contraire, sa
pause intrieure, qui mettrait en cause ce que lartiste ou le critique a de
plus profond et le maintiendrait lcart de lui-mme. Toutefois, dans son
texte sur lAthenum, Blanchot semble parfois remettre en cause ce privilge
accord au romantisme allemand:
la vrit, et en particulier chez Fr. Schlegel, le fragment parat souvent un moyen

de sabandonner complaisamment soi-mme, plutt que la tentative dlaborer un
mode dcrire rigoureux. crire fragmentairement, cest alors simplement accueillir
son propre dsordre, se refermer sur son moi en un isolement satisfait et ainsi refuser
louverture que reprsente lexigence fragmentaire, laquelle nexclue pas, mais dpasse
la totalit. (EI, 526)
Lessence non romantique du romantisme, objet des recherches de

Blanchot, se manifeste par le rejet de la clture du subjectivisme absolu,
retranche derrire la perfection satisfaite dune forme acheve selon la cl-
bre image du hrisson quon retrouve au fragment 206 de lAthenum. Mais
ce dfaut du romantisme, nous dit Blanchot, ne sexplique pas par le simple
dfaut de personnalits trop subjectives ou trop impatientes dabsolu, il sex-
plique aussi [] par lorientation de lhistoire qui, devenue rvolutionnaire,
met au premier plan de son action le travail en vue du tout et la recherche
102 Yves Gilonne
dialectique de lunit (EI, 527). Au travers de la question essentielle de

labsolu et de la dialectique sannoncent alors les enjeux philosophiques du
romantisme et de la pense critique de Blanchot qui se dploient tous deux
dans lombre de Hegel pour qui, ainsi que Blanchot aime le rappeler, lart
est [] chose passe (EL, 284). Dans son texte sur lAthenum, Blanchot
nous dit de cette tendance suniversaliser historiquement, [Hegel] tire
des consquences dsastreuses, le jour o il dcide de nommer romantique
tout lart de toute lre chrtienne (EI, 522; Blanchot souligne). Or comme
le rappelle Vincent Descombes dans Le Mme et lautre (1979):
Dans le suspens de lart est en jeu la tche de la pense. Elle y est en jeu, cependant
de telle manire quelle ne prend pas le relais de lart qui se trouverait ainsi la fois
supprim et conserv dans une prsentation vraie de la vrit. Une telle pense du
relais, ou de la relve de lart par la philosophie forme la part la plus visible de la
pense hglienne de la fin de lart. Or lessentiel se concentre en ceci: lexigence du
sublime forme lexact revers de la relve de lart.5
Cest cette question des fins possible de lart que nous voudrions main-
tenant aborder autour de lenjeu de lopposition entre le beau et le sublime,
entre lAufhebung hglienne, et lanalytique du sublime kantien. Dans
Lcriture du dsastre (1980), Blanchot explique le non lieu auquel sexpose
toute pense qui tente de dpasser la question de labsolu hglien: Seule
lintensit de ce non-lieu, dans limpossibilit quil y en ait un, nous dispose
pour une mort mort de lecture, mort dcriture qui laisse Hegel vivant
dans limposture du Sens achev (Hegel est limposteur, cest ce qui le rend
invincible, fou de son srieux, faussaire de Vrit []) (ED, 79). Si Hegel
reprsente bien lhorizon indpassable de toute une poque, Blanchot tente
nanmoins dchapper son emprise en dlimitant lespace dexclusion de
limposture que constitue pour lui lillusion de lab-solvere de la raison dia-
lectique labsolu en tant quil parachve le sens. Blanchot remet alors en
question ladquation dune pense sa forme, selon la perfectio hglienne
5 Vincent Descombes, Le Mme et lautre: quarante-cinq ans de philosophie franaise,

19331978 (Paris: Minuit, 1979), p.41.
de la raison dialectique, pour retenir lexposition kojvienne de la terreur

et de cette folie o la pense se pense et arrive une conception pure. Cest
ce que rappelle encore Vincent Descombes:
Kojve voque un pisode dpressif de la vie de Hegel [], et il y voit leffet de la
rsistance de lindividu empirique nomm Hegel la menace du savoir absolu.
[] Ce moment de folie a vivement frapp les crivains franais. Georges Bataille
le mentionne et le commente dans LExprience intrieure. Toute une tradition de
la littrature franaise associe dailleurs la lecture de Hegel et lexprience de lim-
possibilit dcrire.6
On voit ici que Kojve, mettant au jour les excs de la raison hglienne,
ne dsigne pas seulement une raison excessive qui saffirmerait au travers de
la rsolution dialectique de la ngativit, mais aussi ce qui excde la raison,
ce qui la porte son impossibilit. Cette impossibilit est la menace dun
savoir qui, niant la personne de Hegel comme un moment dialectique de
sa propre pense, lrigerait en absolu. Cette exprience est aussi celle de
Mallarm, qui est souvent associ Hegel dans les textes de Blanchot:
Je viens de passer une anne effrayante: ma Pense sest pense, et est arrive une
Conception pure. Tout ce que, par contrecoup, mon tre a souffert, pendant cette
longue agonie, est innarrable, mais, heureusement, je suis parfaitement mort [].
Je suis maintenant impersonnel et non plus le Stphane que tu as connu, mais une
aptitude qua lUnivers se voir et se dvelopper travers ce qui fut moi.7
On retrouve ici le trait auto(bio)thanatographique qui marque luvre de

Blanchot. Le point de folie est alors la circularit dialectique dune pense
qui se pense et se ressaisit comme labsolu que lon reconnait ici de faon
explicite, sous une forme adjectivale: pure, parfaitement. La fascination
pour lexcs que lon retrouve dans le texte de Blanchot sur lAthenum: Le
romantisme est excessif, mais son premier excs est un excs de pense (EI,
518), le modle de lartiste vrai [] il pense plus encore quil ne peut (519)
6 Vincent Descombes, Le Mme et lautre, pp.5960.

7 Stphane Mallarm, lettre Henri Cazalis, 14 mai 1867, in Correspondance 18621871,
sous la dir. de Henri Mondor (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p.240.
104 Yves Gilonne
rpond alors lexigence dchapper au renfermement de la dialectique.

La folie de Hegel, pour Blanchot, est davoir fait de celle-ci le passage une
raison suprieure au lieu daccepter son propre dpassement. La folie de
Hegel serait aussi celle, comme le rappelle Blanchot dans Lautramont et
Sade (1949), qui menace le critique:
Le dlire dinterprtation auquel tout interprte certains moments succombe,
commence avec le besoin de rendre raison, par un principe unique ou par un systme
coordonn de causes, de tous les dtails []. [] [I]l faut bien y reconnatre cette
puissante systmatisation du dsir que lesprit essaie de comprendre sous le nom de
folie. (LS, 6869)
Le besoin de rendre raison, la puissance de systematisation est tenue en

chec par limpossibilit de contenir, de comprendre tous les dtails dun
texte qui lexcde tout comme dans le texte de Blanchot sur lAthenum,
le romantisme tenait en chec la prsence de pense du critique, dans le
suspens de ce moment de syncope entre lorigine dun pr-romantisme sans
cesse repouss et le futur de son criture venir. La pense critique dans
son mouvement auto-rflexif seffrondre alors sur elle-mme, fait lexpe-
rience de cette terreur proprement sub-lime qui est la confrontation sa
limite, que se soit le mythe auto(bio)thanatographique de sa propre mort
ou le moment hglien-mallarmen dune pense qui se pense et arrive
une conception pure. Exprience du sublime, comme le dit Jean-Franois
Lyotard dans Leons sur lAnalytique du sublime (1991):
La rflexion pousse lanalyse de ses propres conditions aussi loin quelle le peut, en
vertu de lexigence critique elle-mme. Elle touche ainsi labsolu de ces conditions,
qui nest autre que limpossibilit pour elle de poursuivre plus avant []. Il en rsulte
dans la pense une sorte de spasme et lanalytique du sublime est lpure de ce spasme.
La porte de cet appendice [lAnalytique du sublime dans luvre de Kant] excde
donc de beaucoup lexploration dun sentiment esthtique. Il expose ltat de la pense
critique quand elle touche sa limite extrme un tat spasmodique.8
8 Jean-Franois Lyotard, Leons sur lAnalytique du sublime (Paris: Galile, 1991),

p.76.
Ce principe de contamination qui puise le discours de la raison en expo-

sant la pense une vritable souffrance qui se manifeste par le spasme dun
discours en suspens (en souffrance) est lune des dimensions essentielles de
la rflexion critique de Blanchot qui se veut mise en demeure et jugement
toujours en instance. La syncope se retrouve notamment dans la position
centrale que Jacques Derrida et Ginette Michaud accordent la figure de
lanacoluthe dans le texte de Blanchot.9 Ce discours de la syncope est exa-
min par Nancy dans son livre ponyme et repris par Lyotard dans un essai
intitul Judicieux dans le diffrend, o ils exposent tous deux une maladie
dont Kant aurait souffert: une catarrhe pidmique accompagn de lour-
deur de tte (Kopfbedrckung)10 (Lyotard souligne), qui est un tat spasmo-
dique de lorgane de la pense (le cerveau), une sorte doppression.11 Cette
maladie sert alors de modle au sublime, cest--dire ce que Lyotard dcrit
comme limpossibilit, ou du moins lindcidabilit, dune prsentation
(dune Darstellung) proprement philosophique, dune prsentation de la
pense. Lyotard retranscrit alors en termes kantiens lanalyse de Nancy:
Il sensuit que, considre comme uvre sensible (littraire ou artistique), la Rede, le

discours philosophique, oral ou crit, se trouve en dfaut quant la prsence de len-
chanement qui assure la maintenance du systme, et quil est ainsi frapp lui-mme
dune condition morbide spasmodique. Le sentiment quil suscite en raison de cette
torturante distraction semble par consquent devoir tre un sentiment sublime.
Le lecteur ou lauditeur prouve loccasion de ce signe (faut-il dire symptme?)
quest la crampe discursive, la fois le plaisir qui procde de la capacit infinie de la
raison former une Ide (celle dun tout systmatique de la pense), la douleur ne
de limpuissance de la facult de prsentation fournir une intuition de cette Ide
9 Voir Ginette Michaud, Tenir au secret (Paris: Galile, 2006), pp.12526, ainsi que
Jacques Derrida, Le Parjure peut-tre (brusques sautes de syntaxe), tudes franaises,
38:12 (2002), 1557.
10 Jean-Franois Lyotard, Judicieux dans le diffrend, in Jacques Derrida et al., La
Facult de juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp.195236 (p.195).
11 Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope: I. Logodaedalus (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion,
1976), p.135.
106 Yves Gilonne
dans le discours (lexpos ou le livre) et le bienfait que ce drglage entre les facults
suscite.12
Nous voyons ici que cet tat spasmodique du discours est propre au sublime,
et quil provient de la confrontation de la pense limpossibilit de se saisir
comme tout. Cette impossibilit saccompagne de lalliance caractristique
du sublime du plaisir et de la peine qui est proprement neutre (ni lune ni
lautre) et par l mme indcidable. Ce spasme opre tous les niveaux,
dans la mesure o, non seulement il caractrise le discours sublime, mais il
expose aussi le lecteur lui-mme sa loi de contamination et la douleur
qui sensuit. Il sagira alors pour Blanchot de reproduire en quelque sorte ce
spasme de la pense au travers de son criture, dexposer le langage cette
pokh du sens en la portant vers son point dinertie: la pause apathique
du neutre tche proprement sublime au sens o la pense confronte
limpossibilit de la reprsentation de linfini seffondre avant de se ressaisir
comme limite.
Cest cette mme dynamique des facults dans lauto-production du
sublime que nous retrouvons dans le cadre de la pense critique de Blanchot
sur le romantisme. Le romantisme est prsent comme mouvement infini
de la pense critique: lentendement tente de saisir, dapprhender linfini et
den fournir une reprsentation. Or celui-ci nest pas reprsentable comme
tout, il ne peut tre parachev dans aucune uvre romanesque et lenten-
dement pouss la limite de sa comprhension, seffondre, provoquant le
sentiment de dplaisir que lon associe au premier temps du sublime. Mais
si cet infini romantique procure un dplaisir (car il nest pas reprsenta-
ble comme tout), il suscite aussi lexaltation, car il est pensable comme
tout et exprime la destination de la pense, sa libert infinie: uvre de
labsence duvre, [] libert sans ralisation, [] pure conscience dans
linstant (EI, 517).
12 Jean-Franois Lyotard, Judicieux dans le diffrend, pp.19697.

Legacies (II): Praxis
Michael Holland
Blanchot and Jean Paul
Je me souviens (ce nest quun souvenir, trompeur peut-tre) que jtais

tonnamment tranger la littrature environnante et ne connaissant
que la littrature dite classique, avec une ouverture cependant sur Valry,
Goethe et Jean Paul.
Maurice Blanchot, Aprs coup1
The milieu within which Maurice Blanchot emerged as a writer held

Romanticism to be the source of the ills unleashed by the Revolution,
and saw Germany as a direct threat to the cultural and political sovereignty
of France. Surprisingly therefore, when in 1937, seemingly from nowhere,
a Blanchot known almost exclusively for his lucid and sometimes violent
diatribes against the political regime of France began to sign articles of
literary criticism of equal lucidity and vigour,2 the similarities with the
writings of the German Romantics were unmistakable. This is particularly
the case in what he says about the novel.
At a superficial level, Blanchots assertions about what the novel is
or should be in 1937 can only ring familiar to anyone who has read what
Friedrich Schlegel in particular says about the genre at the end of the eight-
eenth century. Take for example his account of Thomas Manns Joseph et ses
frres in LInsurg of 14 April 1937. Such is the originality of Manns work,
Blanchot says, that le genre lui-mme [] semble puis dun coup par
1 In AC, 92.
2 From January to October 1937, Blanchot published a weekly article in LInsurg under
the heading Les lectures de LInsurg.
110 Michael Holland
le premier ouvrage qui le reprsente.3 Now compare Friedrich Schlegel

in 1797: Every novel is a genre in itself (KA XVIII, 24), and elsewhere:
Every poem is a genre in itself .4 Three weeks later, in a review of Drieu la
Rochelles Rveuse bourgeoisie (1937),5 Blanchot again identifies a generic
pattern which recalls the reflexive novel of German Romanticism. There
are, he says, deux romans qui se superposent in Drieus novel: un tableau
de murs containing a set of protagonistes puiss, and le roman dun
esprit [], la fiction dun tre qui cherche sexpliquer soi-mme [], une
pense qui sprouve dans un univers qui la rflchit. Both Schlegel and
Blanchot thus assert the existence of what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe describe in LAbsolu littraire (1978) as un genre capable
[] de relever la diffrence gnrique elle-mme (AL, 281). And when
Blanchot concludes his study of Mann with the assertion that the bleating
of Isaac retentit travers lhistoire comme le symbole mme du symbole,
and that Manns Joseph is essentially le roman du roman, the link is clear
with German Romanticism for which, as Walter Benjamin sums it up,
symbol consisted of reflexivity taken to an absolute, and the ultimate sym-
bolic form was der Roman.6 In short, it seems likely that the doctrine of
German Romanticism according to which the Novel is the absolute genre
of genres is one which the emergent writer Maurice Blanchot was aware
of, and with which he felt distinct affinities.7 And no doubt publications
3 Maurice Blanchot, Joseph et ses frres par Thomas Mann, LInsurg, 14 (14 April 1937),
5.
4 Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks: 17971801, ed. by Hans Eichner (London:
Athlone, 1957), p.116.
5 Maurice Blanchot, Rveuse bourgeoisie par Drieu la Rochelle, LInsurg, 17 (5 May
1937), 5.
6 Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (1919), in
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser,
7 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 197489), I: 1, p.99.
7 In Romanesques par Jacques Chardonne (LInsurg, 9 (10 March 1937), 6), Blanchot
evokes un genre unique qui nest pas destin [] clairer les profondes tnbres de
lhomme, [] mais former par des abstractions vraisemblables et souvent banales un
univers ferique et singulier o le lecteur ne doit porter quune trs pure rverie.
such as Albert Bguins Lme romantique et le rve in 1937,8 and the special
number devoted to German Romanticism by the Cahiers du sud in the
same year,9 confirmed this predisposition.
As Blanchots career as a critic develops over the next few years, the
concept of the Novel as the absolute single modern genre, of prose as the
writing that subsumes and supersedes even poetry, emerges more and more
distinctly.10 Indeed, a curve of development stretching from 1937 to 1943
may be observed in his criticism, provided at one end by the conclusion
to his review of C.-F. Ramuzs Garon Savoyard (1937), which evokes ce
que pourrait tre dans le roman le travail de quelque nouveau Mallarm;11
and at the other end by an article in the Journal des Dbats of 27 October
1943, then collected in Faux pas (1943): Mallarm et lart du roman, which
lays claim, for the novelist, to the same ambitions which drove Mallarm:
Son livre, comme le livre de Mallarm, doit tendre tre labsolu quil
convoite (FP, 194). As the overarching presence of Mallarm throughout
these six years indicates, however, once one has identified an affinity with
German Romanticism in Blanchot as he emerges as a critic, things have
only just begun. In Mallarm et lart du roman he does associate Novalis
and Hlderlin with the ideal he borrows from Mallarm.12 But in itself, this
complicates the idea of some possible influence of German Romanticism
on Blanchots notion of the Novel, or even of a shared heritage, since each
8 Albert Bguin, Lme romantique et le rve (Marseille: Cahiers du sud, 1937), re-edited
by Corti in 1939.
9 Le Romantisme allemand, ed. by Albert Bguin (Paris: 10/18, 1966). This is a re-edition
of a number of Les Cahiers du sud which appeared in 1949, and which was itself an
expanded version of a number which appeared in MayJune 1937 (no. 194).
10 In 1941 he writes the following: le caractre valable dun roman [cest] son degr de
fidlit non pas lgard du genre romanesque, mais lgard de lui-mme considr
comme reprsentant lui seul tout le genre du roman (CL, 118).
11 Maurice Blanchot, Le Garon savoyard, par. C.-F. Ramuz, LInsurg, 37 (22 September
1937), 6.
12 Il est presque inconcevable que le romancier naccepte pas, comme faites pour lui,
les considrations sur le langage auxquelles Mallarm, comme du reste Hlderlin,
Novalis et bien dautres, sest profondment heurt (FP, 194).
112 Michael Holland
in his way, Novalis and Hlderlin will diverge significantly from the ideal
of the Novel as formulated by Schlegel (see for example Novaliss volte-
face on the subject of Goethes Wilhelm Meister (179596), which he
ultimately dismisses as prosaic).13 And if we return to the extraordinarily
original texts which make up Les Lectures de LInsurg of 1937, it is clear
that the basic premise of a novel form divided between the contingencies
of individual novelists inventions and a single absolute genre, however
closely it appears to reflect what German Romanticism originally pro-
posed, coexists in Blanchots thinking, from the outset, with assertions
and categories drawn from a variety of other sources, which I can only
allude to here: Paul Valry, and the relation he establishes between art and
consciousness;14 Jacques Maritain and more generally the sthetics of Neo-
Thomist ontology, for which art is a means of reconciling being itself with
human action;15 a doctrine of tragedy considered as the essential condi-
tion of man, which is at one level a reflection of the anti-Romanticism of
Blanchots political milieu, at another an aspect of Neo-Thomist doctrine,16
but also, by its emphasis on absolute division, a clear gesture in the direction
13 Novalis, Briefe und Werke, vol. III (Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1943), p.279.
14 See for example the Valryesque opening of Maurice Blanchot, Les Plus beaux de
nos jours par Marcel Arland, LInsurg, 22 (9 June 1937), 5: Pour ceux qui aiment
dans les uvres non seulement luvre mme mais lopration dun art et ladresse
dun esprit [].
15 In Art et scolastique (1920) (Paris: Rouart, 1935), Jacques Maritain writes the follow-
ing, which recalls both the dualism of Schlegels doctrine and Blanchots assertions
in Les Lectures de LInsurg: Un philosophe, si son systme est faux, nest rien, car
alors il ne peut pas dire vrai, sinon par accident; un artiste, si son systme est faux,
peut tre quelque chose, et quelque chose de grand, car il peut crer beau malgr son
systme, et en dpit de linfriorit de la forme dart o il se tient (p.76; Maritains
italics).
16 See Lon Wencelius, La Philosophie de lart chez les no-scholastiques de langue franaise
(Paris: Alcan, 1932): La thorie thomiste du roman [] fournit aux jeunes anxieux
la voie vers un nouveau classicisme (p.150).
of Hlderlin.17 Add to this a strand of argument according to which myth

is pure creation;18 another for which symbol is a dialectic which abolishes
all image and ultimately itself,19 and it soon becomes evident that to iden-
tify a link between German Romanticism and Blanchots thinking on the
novel as it emerges, seemingly fully-formed, from 1937 onwards is not to
discover a source for that thinking. Rather, it is to encounter the doctrines
of German Romanticism as they relate to the novel cut loose from their
context and their history, adrift among numerous others and juxtaposed
with them in what is not so much an eclecticism as a syncretism. Seen
from within the perspective of critical reflection, this may well appear as
confusion where is this critical voice coming from in 1937? As I hope
to show, however, it displays an all-embracing consistency and coherence
when approached from the point of view which, by 1937, is becoming the
primary one for Blanchot: that of the Novel itself.
17 See Maurice Blanchot, Le Magasin des travestis par Georges Reyer, Zobain par
Raymond Gurin, LInsurg, 6 (17 February 1937), 5: faire du roman quelque chose
daussi pur quune tragdie; and Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette par Georges Bernanos,
LInsurg, 23 (16 June 1937), 5, which evokes un art conu pour reprsenter la terrible
tragdie dune rencontre entre Dieu et lhomme.
18 The review of Manns Joseph refers to la pure cration qui est la cration mythique
(p.5).
19 Il [le symbole] lui semble rarement ce quil doit tre, le foyer brlant dune dialec-
tique qui dvore ce quelle accomplit (Les Aventures de Sophie par Paul Claudel,
LInsurg, 25 (30 June 1937), 5); le seul de ce temps, [Bernanos] a eu la volont de
[] reprsenter [labsolu] directement, sans symbole, presque sans image (Nouvelle
histoire de Mouchette par Georges Bernanos, p.5); les symboles [] rvent dun
moment de feu et de lumire (La Pche miraculeuse par Guy de Pourtals, Camp
volant par Andr Fraigneau, LInsurg, 31 (11 August 1937), 5).
114 Michael Holland
Jean Paul
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, who signed himself Jean Paul in homage
to Rousseau, wrote a large number of large books, ostensibly novels, or at
least works of narrative, which both gave him a reputation that equalled
Goethes for a while, but also, because of their composite, heteroclite, and
what we would nowadays call polyphonic character, made of their author,
in the eyes of his contemporaries (for example Mme de Stal) a bizarre,
unqualifiable, and ultimately disconcerting quantity. In a letter to Schiller
(10 June 1795), Goethe famously called Hesperus, Jean Pauls first success-
ful novel, ein Tragelaph, a creature that is half deer, half goat, in other
words an unnatural hybrid, a bizarre mix. Shortly before Jean Paul moved
to Weimar in 1798, again to emphasize his bizarreness Goethe dubbed
him der Chinese in Rom, a Chinaman in Rome.20 For his part, Friedrich
Schlegel begins his Letter on the Novel (Brief ber den Roman) of 1800
by alluding to a disparaging dismissal of Jean Pauls novels by his partner
in dialogue as not Novels at all, but a gaudy rag-bag of sickly Witz (ein
buntes Allerlei von krnklichem Witz) before going on: Ill grant you your
gaudy rag-bag of sickly Witz, but Ill defend it as such, and boldly argue
that such grotesques and such confessions are as yet the only Romantic
productions of our unromantic age (Das bunte Allerlei von krnklichem
Witz gebe ich zu, aber ich nehme es in Schutz und behaupte dreist, dass solche
Grotesken und Bekenntnisse noch die einzigen romantischen Erzeugnisse
unsers unromantischen Zeitalters sind) (KS, 509).21 And in a letter to his
less enthusiastic brother in 1797 he had said: I consider it a very good sign
of the times that it should be this author [ Jean Paul] who is the publics
20 J. W. von Goethe, Der Chinese in Rom (1797), Berliner Ausgabe, ed. by Siegfried
Seidel, vol. I (Berlin: Aufbau, 1960), pp.36566.
21 All translations from the German are my own, unless stated otherwise.
favourite.22 However, while Athenum Fragment 125 also acknowledges

the grotesque talent of Jean Paul, it claims it is incomplete (KS, 42). And
Fragment 421 offers a truly double-edged account of Jean Pauls writing: he
is, it says, a true original (ein eignes Phnomen), yet at the same time, he is
an author who does not master even the rudiments of art, is incapable of
a bon mot or of telling a good story (ein Autor, der die Anfangsgrnde der
Kunst nicht in der Gewalt hat, nicht ein Bonmot rein ausdrcken, nicht eine
Geschichte gut erzhlen kann) (8081). On the one hand, the monotony
bordering on poverty of his imagination and his mind are striking (die an
Armut grenzende Monotonie seiner Phantasie [ist] am auffallendsten); on
the other, certain sections of his work, for example the grotesque China
figurines drummed up like horseguards of his metaphorical Witz ([die]
grotesken Porzellanfiguren seines wie Reichstruppen zusammen getrommelten
Bilderwitzes), mean that it is impossible not to acknowledge that he is a
great poet. This means, says Schlegel in his Letter on the Novel, that on
balance he places Jean Paul above Sterne, whose work inspired him. But
this is only because, in a sickly age, Jean Pauls imagination is much sicklier
and therefore much stranger and more fantastic (seine Phantaisie [ist] weit
krnklicher, also weit wunderlicher und phantastischer) (511). ( Just to show
how unstable a quantity Jean Paul appeared in his time, Hegel inverted
Schlegels hierarchy, placing Sterne above Jean Paul for his humour).23
Like Goethe therefore, Schlegel and the Romantics were highly ambiv-
alent about Jean Paul, who for his part got his own back, as it were, by dis-
missing them as nihilists (Poetische Nihilisten),24 and drafting a reply to
what Schlegel says in Athenum Fragment 421, dubbing him Fraischdorfer
(intentionally misreading the F. with which Schlegel signed the fragment),
and stating that the Schlegel brothers fragments are unworthy of their
22 Cited in Roger Ayrault, La Gense du romantisme allemand, 4 vols (Paris: Aubier-

Montaigne, 196176), III: 17971804 (1969), p.29.
23 Cited in Peter Szondi, Posie et potique du romantisme allemand (Paris: Gallimard,
1991), p.73, n. 103.
24 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Vorschule der sthetik (1804) (Munich: Hanser Verlag,
1963), pp.3134.
116 Michael Holland
earlier writing.25 The fact is that, partly because of his age younger than
Goethe, older than the Romantics (with us he should be able to be young
again, Schlegel said rather cheekily),26 but also for reasons which go to the
heart of this extraordinary period in European culture, Jean Paul appeared
to all who had to do with him as an oddity, an outsider, someone it was
impossible to place. At one level, this is a matter of epoch: he is an author
standing between two eras (ein zwischen den Zeiten stehender Autor),
according to one critic.27 Voisin des romantiques, wrote Jean-Christophe
Bailly, Jean Paul a ouvert une voie distance de tous.28 But this in-between-
ness or separateness is also internal to the new era he belongs to: as Nancy
and Lacoue-Labarthe point out, his resistance to classification lent itself
perfectly to an ambivalence at the very heart of the Romantic conception
of der Roman when it came to identifying how this ideal might be realized
in practice. Hence, Goethes Bildungsroman, which Schlegel, as we shall see,
held up as a model, offered [un] perptuel contre-modle de Jean Paul,
moins que ce ne ft linverse (AL, 85), and focussing more precisely on this
complex relation, they tellingly describe Jean Pauls Vorschule der sthetik
(1804), the only full-length doctrinal work of its type in the period, as un
document de laprs-coup ou de l-ct du romantisme (31).
This brings me back, in a convenient side-step, to the quotation from
Aprs coup (1983) which opens this piece: Je me souviens (ce nest quun
souvenir, trompeur peut-tre) que jtais tonnamment tranger la lit-
trature environnante et ne connaissant que la littrature dite classique,
avec une ouverture cependant sur Valry, Goethe et Jean Paul (AC, 92).
At a simple level, what Blanchot says here refers quite neatly back to what
is apparent in the Lectures de LInsurg of 1937: the role of Valry and of a
25 See Christian Helmreich, Jean Paul et le mtier littraire: thorie et pratique du roman
la fin du XVIIIe sicle allemand (Tusson: Du Lerot, 1999), p.27.
26 Cited in Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Lgende disperse: anthologie du romantisme
allemand (Paris: Bourgois, 2001), p.57.
27 Kurt Goldhammer, Paracelsus in der deutschen Romantik (Vienna: Verbund der
Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft sterreichs, 1980), p.69.
28 Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Lgende disperse, p.57.
Neo-Thomist version of classicism and tragedy. As for the Romantics, how-

ever, there is no mention of them here. Rather, it is onto what we have seen
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe identify as the unstable nexus within which
Schlegel sought to ground the idea of the Novel that Blanchots memory
opens, namely: Goethe and Jean Paul as what they term counter-models
for Schlegel, his hesitation between them providing the only practical cor-
relative to the absolute duality of the genre of the Novel as he conceived
it (he never effectively put his own theory into practice). In other words,
what Blanchot looks back on in 1983 as he recalls his own beginnings as a
novelist, is not simply the work of two major eighteenth-century German
novelists who may have influenced him. The ouverture sur Goethe et Jean
Paul which he places at the source of his own practice in the 1930s is in fact
an opening onto an opening: a reference back to the absolute duality that
lies at the heart of the Romantic genre of the novel, both in theory and in
practice. This is, as it were, gathered up into Blanchots critical writing in
the 1930s, before being handed on, in his own narrative, in a way that eluded
the Romantics and I would say: everyone since. In order to explore this
further, I need briefly to go over ground which I have covered elsewhere,
by evoking first the genre of the idyll, and second the figure of Nathalie in
the second part of LArrt de mort (1948).
The Idyll
It is doubtless no accident that Blanchot refers to Jean Paul in a re-edition

of a pair of stories, one of which is called LIdylle, since it is the challenge
posed by that genre at the end of the eighteenth century which gives rise
to Jean Pauls writing. Briefly:29 what was a genre belonging to another age
29 I deal with the question at greater length in An Idyll?, in After Blanchot: Literature,
Criticism, Philosophy, ed. by Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris Vardoulakis
118 Michael Holland
acquired a new lease of life with the appearance of Johann Heinrich Vosss
Luise in 1795, which is generally described as the first modern idyll. Its
appearance generated an intense debate about the relevance of the genre
to the modern era, where it could only appear as a means of ignoring the
political and social changes which Germany was undergoing. As a result,
there were those Hegel for example who simply condemned the idyll
genre as an irrelevancy.30 In others, however Goethe with Hermann und
Dorothea in 1797, but above all Jean Paul the idyll was transformed into
a critical genre, one conscious of its own limits, and of the impossibility of
remaining within those limits. Jean Paul famously described the idyll in
his Vorschule as portraying perfect happiness within limitation or confine-
ment (das Vollglck in der Beschrnkung).31 However, his novels dramatize
that idyllic state as unattainable, and it seems clear that Blanchots story
LIdylle, which is set in a hospice where a newcomer, ltranger, is con-
fined, and at the centre of which its director and his wife live in conjugal
harmony riven by absolute discord, is, as well as a version of Dostoievskys
House of the Dead (1862), a critical idyll of the sort that Jean Paul defined,
both in theory and through his novel practice.
Blanchots relation to the idyll does not end after the 1930s. Schillers
distinction between a nave idyll and a modern or sentimental one in
which the simple repose of the former is replaced by a calm (Ruhe) resulting
from the balancing out of violently opposed forces, would seem to find an
echo in Le Dernier homme (1957) and LAttente loubli (1962).32 Blanchots
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp.8099. See also, in the same volume,
Dimitris Vardoulakis, What Terrifying Complicity: Jean Paul as Collocutor in
Death Sentence, pp.16888.
30 G. W. F. Hegel, sthetik (1835), vol. I (Frankfurt: Europische Verlagsanstalt, 1966),
p.255.
31 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Vorschule der sthetik, p.260.
32 See An Idyll?, in After Blanchot, p.95. I would add that Blanchots category of le
calme also clearly refers to Heideggers category of die Ruhe, which itself recalls
Schillers. See for example The Origin of the Work of Art: Where rest [Ruhe]
includes motion, there can exist a repose [Ruhe] which is an inner concentration
of motion, hence a highest state of agitation []. Now the repose of the work that
opening onto Goethe and Jean Paul was thus first and foremost an open-
ing onto writing in which the genre of the idyll provided a locus for the
tension between limits and limitlessness that characterized the Romantic
genre of the novel. However, it is less relevant to my present argument
than the second aspect of Blanchots relation to Jean Paul which I have
examined elsewhere: the figure of Nathalie.
Before moving on to Nathalie, however, I would like to work gradually
back from Blanchots perspective in 1983 and briefly examine his earlier
references to Jean Paul, particularly in the years from 1940 to 1943, which
lie within what I have already suggested is a significant curve in the devel-
opment of his critical thinking. Not that there is no reference to Jean Paul
during the forty years that separate those two moments. One in particular
deserves mention, if only because it is easily lost sight of. In conclusion to
a long footnote at the end of LAthenum in the original NRF article of
1964 Blanchot writes:
Je voudrais signaler [] la traduction dun important roman de Jean-Paul, Siebenks
[]. Mais quel diteur voudra bien entreprendre de publier, aprs Hesperus traduit
par Albert Bguin, les autres uvres majeures de Jean-Paul, notamment La Loge
invisible et ce prodigieux Titan, jadis cest--dire il y a plus dun sicle, aimablement
mutil par Philarte Chasles? Nous sommes bien ignorants.33
The fact that Corti was about to publish a translation of La Loge invisible
seemed to have escaped Blanchot (it appeared in 1965),34 and this may
partly explain why the footnote is not included in LEntretien infini. But the
concluding sentence retains its resonance and its relevance: without trans-
lations of Jean Paul [n]ous sommes bien ignorants: even for the Blanchot
rests in itself is of this sort (Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p.48).
33 Maurice Blanchot, LAthenum, Nouvelle Revue franaise, 140 (August 1964), 30113
(p.313).
34 Jean Paul, La Loge invisible (1793), trans. by Genevive Bianquis (Paris: Corti,
1965).
120 Michael Holland
of 1964, to be deprived of access to Jean Pauls novels is to be ignorant of

something fundamental to the development of narrative as a genre.
References to Jean Paul prior to 1964 are few and far between. In
LItinraire de Hlderlin of 1955, which becomes Le Tournant in LEspace
littraire (1955), Blanchot writes: La pense ou la vision du retournement
catgorique, de ce trs dur moment o le temps en quelque sorte se retourne,
rpond ce que Jean Paul avait appel, annonce ce que plus tard, Nietzsche
[] appellera La Mort de Dieu (EL, 371). And in Du ct de Nietzsche
ten years earlier, the same theme is evoked:
[L]e thme de la Mort de Dieu ne peut tre lexpression dun savoir dfinitif ou
lesquisse dune proposition stable []. Le Dieu est mort est une nigme [variant:
qui () oscille infiniment autour dun axe invisible], affirmation ambigu par son
origine religieuse, sa forme dramatique, les mythes littraires auxquels elle fait suite
(celui de Jean Paul, de Hlderlin par exemple). (PF, 282)35
What these two quotations reveal very clearly, as we go back in time from
Blanchots backward look in 1983, is that if what the name Jean Paul opened
up for Blanchot, alongside that of Goethe, was a space which he initially
defined as one qui oscille infiniment autour dun axe invisible, in reality
that space remained confined neither within a specific genre, nor within
a particular historical moment. It is a space which could accommodate
both the Novel ( Jean Paul) and the Poem (Hlderlin), despite everything
which seemed to separate them at the time, before extending through time
in its historical form to Nietzsche and beyond, as what suspends time as
history: a space opening up in time, lying within yet outside of history and
taking the form of what, after Hlderlin, Blanchot calls le retournement
catgorique a space of infinite separation, with neither axis nor symme-
try (hence no doubt the omission of the trope), and which he in his turn
sought to approach in his narrative writing.
35 The variant can be found in Du ct de Nietzsche, LArche, 12 (December 1945January

1946), 10312.
And when we arrive at what is the most substantial discussion of

Jean Paul in Blanchots work, occurring in two moments: in 1940 with
Lautramont, in 1944 with De Jean Paul Giraudoux (precisely the
period of his most intense novel-writing), it is this original discontinuity, a
spatialization of time of a radically non-Bergsonian sort, which is brought
to the fore. Lautramont, writes Blanchot in 1940, introduces into the
novel for the first time (he repeats this) what should be its primary inven-
tive resource: la recherche des mtaphores [qui] aboutit la production
de mtamorphoses dont ltranget sexplique par la destruction de toute
image de passage, par le saut brusque dans la pense [] dans une ralit
stupfiante qui en est le lointain aboutissement (FP, 201). And he goes on
to specify further both this process and its outcome: [Lautramont] a su
[] suivre le cheminement de limage, la pousser le plus loin delle-mme
et, parvenu au terme, produire pour le lecteur pouvant la ralisation ter-
rifiante o elle se fixe. Entre le point de dpart et le point darrive, rien, plus
rien quun abme (202). He then concludes: Nous retrouvons l la mme
progression chez presque tous les crivains qui ont le sens de la cration
romanesque [], chez un Jean Paul comme chez un Jean Giraudoux (202).
Here we begin to see a much clearer configuration for the novel which,
from 1937 onwards, Blanchot evokes as an ideal in his critical writings. As
indicated earlier, both a notion of symbol broken free of image and an
experience of violent discontinuity coexist with what resembles a Romantic
idea of the Novel in the Lectures de LInsurg of 1937. And I suggested
that their presence alongside that Romantic idea as it were dislodges it as
a stable influence or source for Blanchots writing, by including it within
what I argued was, from a critical point of view, a sort of syncretism, a
motley mixed-bag of doctrines to which no clear focus seemed to give any
order at that early stage. Now, only a few years later (but Thomas lObscur
(1941) is complete and about to go to the printer), out of that seeming
confusion certain formal features are becoming established: in the novel,
image is the only reality as a 1941 article asserts: Suzanne et le pacifique
de Jean Giraudoux et Hesperus de Jean Paul sont des romans o tout est
fiction, rupture avec la vie et mme le trompe-lil (CL, 11617) , and
as such, its nature is metamorphic: it cannot be tied to an external object,
122 Michael Holland
and its ultimate goal or direction is the ralit stupfiante (lpouvante,

la terreur) of the very break with reality out of which it arises. Image thus
takes as its goal a break with image (which Blanchot calls symbol) in order
to reflect the break with reality which brings image into being. It is this
configuration of a break in relation to a break, this reflexivity of and as
separation, which inhabits Blanchots critical writing from 1937, bottled up
inside it as it were, and initially racking it from within (since it has as yet
no practical outlet), and so producing the syncretic effect I have referred
to. What the 1940 text on Lautramont shows is that three years later,
Blanchot has found a counterpart to this disruptive idea: in Lautramont
too, image as two-fold break is on the loose, not bottled up but outpoured,
and this rupture avec la vie is taken by him to its ultimate limit: Il sest jet
au plus loin de lui-mme. Et dans son avance foudroyante il lui est arriv de
sarracher sa propre forme et de se perdre dans une colre illusoire, dans
une vaine et fatale insurrection (FP, 202).
It is difficult not to hear in the words colre illusoire, vaine et fatale
insurrection, an echo of what Blanchot may well have said to himself by
1940 about the writing which appeared alongside Les Lectures de LInsurg
in 1937. But now, there is no question of simply transferring his own anger
and revolt into a domain of image which he has been transforming, since
1937, from one accessible only to a critical discourse which it disrupts from
within, into one which, replacing what he calls un monde en ruines (CL,
52731), he is deploying in a novel, Thomas lObscur. Rather, Blanchot
explicitly prefers to what he calls Lautramonts mouvement that of Jean
Paul and Giraudoux, in which, he says, lharmonie de la dialectique, le
dveloppement conscient des images, and le mouvement qui ne nglige
aucun intermdiaire give rise to a novel form which nous fait passer insen-
siblement, avec une autorit douce et terrible, par un progrs dont nous
nous apercevons peine, de la simple allgorie au symbole paradoxal et
irrcusable qui se brise devant la ralit o il nous a amens (FP, 202). This
final formulation is extremely important in my view. In the first instance, it
points in a detailed and systematic way to an ideal which the texts of 1937
could only gesture towards, and which even the Romantics conception
of the Novel failed effectively to capture: a novel which is nothing but la
transgression permanente de ses propres limites, as Jean-Marie Schaeffer

defines it limits which are limitless, since as a Novel it embraces every-
thing, but whose limitlessness it at the same time limits, by virtue of its
form.36 But in addition, Blanchot here acknowledges that image whose
sole goal is a break with image, in a reflection of the break with reality
out of which image arises an absolute reflexivity of image therefore , is
given no less free a rein in Jean Paul or Giraudoux than in Lautramont (le
mouvement, he says, ne nglige aucun intermdiaire: it is all-embracing).
However, when image is simply unleashed in language, it can merely pro-
duce the vaine insurrection of a Lautramont, or the romantisme int-
gral of those nineteenth-century Jeune France whom Blanchot calls in
1942 une force qui, en dtruisant tout ce quelle ne peut tolrer, nest plus
quimage de destruction (CL, 256), [un] monde frntique [qui] [] ne
prend pas seulement la place du monde rel []; tout en le dtruisant il
se dtruit lui-mme (256). In Jean Paul, by contrast, it is measured, har-
monized, made conscious in a triple development in which symbol, having
broken free from allegory and image, then breaks apart in its turn before
the reality Nothingness, labme which it encounters.
This development (allegory symbol break) is one that is repeat-
edly invoked in Blanchots critical writing at this time. Moreover, the triple
movement it refers to can only bring to mind the triple metamorphosis
which Hlderlin speaks of, and which provides one of the epigraphs of
La Part du feu in 1949. Yet whereas Blanchot discusses Hlderlin, a poet,
regularly and extensively throughout his career, he does not do the same
for Jean Paul, a novelist, even though as we saw, in 1955 and before that, in
1945, he associates Hlderlin and Jean Paul closely. What the triple meta-
morphosis presented here, with reference to Jean Paul and Giraudoux,
allows us to understand is that if Blanchot does not refer critically to it
in the years to come, whereas he does repeatedly invoke Hlderlin, it is
because its movement allegory-symbol-break provides the reality of the
36 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La Naissance de la littrature: la thorie esthtique du romant-

isme allemand (Paris: Presse de lcole normale suprieure, 1983), p.38.
124 Michael Holland
narrative writing which accompanies his critical writing. In short, he is

ultimately closer, as a writer, to the triple metamorphosis he finds in Jean
Paul and Giraudoux than to the one he focused on critically in Hlderlin.
And this is because, from the publication of Thomas lObscur onwards, the
novel as absolute self-reflexive genre, which the German Romantics located
practically somewhere between Goethe and Jean Paul, and which Blanchot
initially locates somewhere between Jean Paul and Giraudoux neither
ultimately succeeding in breaking the bounds of a literary idealism exists
in and as the narrative writing which bears Maurice Blanchots name. But
where has Goethe gone? That question brings me at last to Nathalie.
Nathalie
The triple movement allegory-symbol-break which Blanchot identifies in

both Jean Paul and Giraudoux can be easily mapped onto LArrt de mort.
In part one, the story of J., set within that of Munich and the defeat of
France, functions transparently as an allegory of the demise of a certain
type of historical self-in-the-world (Je), with obvious autobiographical
overtones. The Je who continues the story in the second part, beyond the
death of J. which allegorizes the death of a certain mode of Je can thus be
said to be symbolic: it is now without empirical reality, the world around
it is disappearing, its sole reality is thus provided by language. Epitomizing
that disappearing world is the figure of Nathalie, whom (which) the narra-
tive reduces, in a strict sense, by way of N(athalie) down to N, bracketing off
her individuality until all that is left is a pronoun, elle, signifying no more
than une pense (AM, 127). The narrative closes with the dix mots (8)
which constitute the narrators avowed goal: et elle, je dis ternellement
Viens, et ternellement, elle est l (127), words which amount to nothing
more than the endless recurrence of an absolute break within time itself,
located within the sole remaining reality for Je: language.
LArrt de mort, which breaks radically, between its first and its second
parts, with the novel as Blanchot has practised it so far, may thus be said to
do so by enacting programmatically the triple movement which Blanchot
has previously identified in the writing of Jean Paul and Giraudoux.
Confirmation of this would seem to lie in what I have argued elsewhere
is the origin of the name and figure of Nathalie.37 In what I still think
is a mysterious coincidence, both Goethe and Jean Paul give the name
Nathalie to a key figure in one of their novels: Goethes Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meisters Years of Apprenticeship) written between 1795
and 1797, Jean Pauls Siebenks, which appeared in 1796. Friedrich Schlegel
saw Goethes Meister as representing one of the three major tendencies of
the age, alongside the French Revolution and Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre
(Science of Knowledge).38 Meister appeared to him as the most perfect
incarnation of Goethes art, displaying all of the features he attributed
to his ideal Novel: it is a dual, double work (ein zweifaches, doppeltes
Werk) he wrote in 1800, composed in two stages (zweimal gemacht),
in two creative moments (in zwei schpferischen Momenten), out of two
Ideas (aus zwei Ideen). The first is simply that of an artistic novel (ein
Knstlerroman). Then, however, the novel is suddenly taken over by the
tendency inherent in its genre, and going far beyond its original intention,
acquires a doctrine of how to learn the art of living, which becomes the
genius of the whole work (KS, 52425). And in ber Goethes Meister
(On Goethes Meister) of 1798, Schlegel urges that Goethes work should
not be read as one in which characters and events are the ultimate goal
(459). Of the characters, he says their essence is more or less general or
allegorical [] they are toys, puppets. The true centre of the novel is the
secret society of pure reason (471). Consequently, Wilhelms story, the
initial Bildungsroman, is rounded off and expedited thanks to the figure
37 See Michael Holland, Nathalie ou le supplment du roman, in Luvre du fminin

dans lcriture de Maurice Blanchot, ed. by ric Hoppenot (Grignan: Complicits,
2004), pp.13356.
38 See Athenum Fragment 216, in KS, 48.
126 Michael Holland
of Nathalie, a nameless character glimpsed periodically during the novel,

and who emerges finally into Wilhelms life in her own name, functioning
at this point, says Schlegel, as no more than a supplement to the novel
(Supplement des Romans) (469).
In Wilhelm Meister as in LArrt de mort, therefore, the figure of Nathalie
serves both to close off narrative considered as a novel of Nathalies past
the narrator says peut-tre tout cela tait-il un roman (AM, 59) , and
open it out to the domain of la pense, of pure reason. In Siebenks the
same two-fold movement is to be found: the married life of its protagonist,
Firmin Siebenks, is a flawed idyll. One day, in a park allegorically named
die Fantaisie, he meets the beautiful Nathalie. They fall in love, but each
realizes that their love is impossible. And in a final kiss of death (Todes-
Kuss), they part.39 Henceforth, Firmins life with his wife Lenette appears
unliveable to him. He decides to swap identities with his friend, the signifi-
cantly named Leibgeber (body-giver), and thus undergoes an experience
of apparent death (Scheintod), whose moment, formally speaking, splits
the novel into two. However, as Firmin prepares to descend into what he
calls his fictive grave (Schein-Grab) and enter a new life, he sees his act as
merely a way of preceding Nathalie in death (Nathalien vorzusterben).40
Paradoxically therefore, as he turns towards the future of his new life, he
remains fixated on life as past, invoking eternity in a farewell letter to
Nathalie as the purely symbolic moment of their ultimate reunion (die
Ewigkeit bleibt mir und dir),41 lying beyond life considered both as reality
and as fiction and so constituting an unattainable ideal. But then comes
a second break. In a cemetery, he comes across the grave of his widow
Lenette, and then sees Nathalie weeping at his grave. His entire outlook
changes, and he resolves to turn round, and enter fully the new life which
followed his feigned death. He and Nathalie agree to love each other now:
39 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Siebenks, in Werke, ed. by Gustav Lohman, vol. II
(Munich: Hanser, 1959), pp.7565 (p.408).
40 Ibid., pp.439, 440.
41 Ibid., p.446.
in life and in death you will remain beside me, he says to her. To which
she replies: Ewig for all eternity.42 So ends the novel.
What I have argued elsewhere, in greater but still insufficient detail,
is that the triple development in Siebenks radicalizes what takes place in
Wilhelm Meister by introducing into thought what in the Vorschule Jean
Paul calls the spiritual abyss at the heart of the self.43 The supplementarity
of the figure of Goethes Nathalie, which according to Schlegel allows
Wilhelm Meister to exist as a dual, double novel, is thus radicalized in Jean
Pauls novel. His Nathalie-figure does not simply close off the idyllic first
novel from without, as Goethes does, it also introduces into the second,
true novel a further break: a passage from life to death which never hap-
pens, but is effective as if it had happened, and as such, draws eternity into
the time of the world in the form of a complex loop linking reality and the
imagination, life and death, across the abyss of the Self which it opens
up in Firmin.
If we return then to Blanchots retrospective reference, in 1983, to une
ouverture sur Goethe et Jean Paul, what I have said so far can be summed up
as follows: out of that ouverture, first within the language of critical analysis
between 1937 and 1943, then as an ideal recognizable in the narratives of cer-
tain others, and finally in his own narrative as it develops between Thomas
lObscur and LArrt de mort, a novel, un roman, ein Roman of the sort that
Schlegel and the Romantics took as their ideal, saw realized inadequately
by others but never produced themselves (so that for a realization of that
ideal the ideal of prose as poetry it is to Hlderlin that one must look,
as Benjamin suggests),44 such a novel emerges, bearing a name which, as in
Goethe, remains unspoken until beyond the end, but which also, as in Jean
Paul, once spoken, beyond the end, infinitizes the end, turning a simple
break into an endless break with itself: the name Nathalie.
42 Ibid., p.565.
43 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Vorschule der sthetik, p.45.
44 Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik, p.103.
Sergey Zenkin
Transformations of Romantic Love
My purpose is mostly to analyse a single text by Maurice Blanchot LArrt

de mort (1948) and more precisely, its first part. It stands out against
Blanchots other works because of something that one could call its real-
ism. In fact, whereas ordinarily the narratives of this author appear as vague,
phantasmal stories where one can hardly distinguish facts from feelings
and fantasies, the episode in question seems to display a detailed account
of some striking events, no doubt rare and exceptional, but presented as
dramatic reality. The verbal nexus of themes and details seems to be broken
through, as it were, giving way to something non-verbal and passionately
invested. Let me note from the outset that such textual effects of breaking
through appear when Blanchots narrative is interrupted by a visual image
(I will return to this point). In any case, the reader has an impression of
suddenly being struck by something heterogeneous to the narrative as a
whole. I will try to give an account of this impression and to demonstrate
that the heterogeneity results from inner dynamic tensions of the work,
in relationship with certain literary patterns, especially with the second-
hand topics of romantic love the term romantic being understood in
its narrowest historical sense.1
Naturally, critics tend (this is, after all, their job) to reduce this hetero-
geneity, to explain it; but they do so mostly by means of some extra-literary,
non-textual biographical facts. So, Christophe Bident in his excellent book
on Blanchot, advances just two hypotheses about the plot of LArrt de
1 Some ideas in this paper stem from discussions with my graduate student Alina
Polonskaya, who was preparing a PhD thesis on the stereotype of the Jewish femme
fatale.
130 Sergey Zenkin
mort: first, he points out its links with some details of Blanchots own life.
These details, amazingly, concern not the year 1938, by which the narra-
tor dates his story, but the precedent year, 1937, since the only precise date
provided by the narrator [l]a seule date dont je sois sr [] celle du 13
octobre, mercredi 13 octobre (AM, 11) occurred in fact in 1937, not in
1938.2 Second, Bident establishes, following in this another critic, Bernard
Nol, a not-insignificant relationship between the death of J., Blanchots
heroine, and the death of Georges Batailles partner Colette Peignot (Laure),
which occurred in November 1938 when Blanchot had not yet met Bataille
and knew nothing of Laure.3
From Bidents well-substantiated statements, we might infer that the
effect of realistic density produced by the text can be explained by a bio-
graphical background. I intend not to contest such a possibility as such,
but to show the over-determined character of Blanchots fiction, referring
at the same time to the authors (or his friends) personal experience and to
some literary traditions. The latter may even seem especially accentuated
by their collision with a true lived experience.
My analysis will be divided into three unequal parts: love and illness,
love and image, and love and emptiness.
Love and Illness
Although J.s mortal disease is never named in the text of Blanchots narra-
tive, we can easily guess what it is: the breathing troubles, the coughing, the
fever, the morbid redness of the cheeks, the long and progressive weakening
of the patient, all these symptoms obviously designate consumption. This
2 See Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ

Vallon, 1998), p.106.
3 Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible, pp.29193.
illness has powerful literary connotations: before being the real cause of
Colette Peignots death, it had been also a specifically Romantic disease.
Susan Sontag, in her book Illness as Metaphor (1977), pointed out an affinity
between Romanticism and consumption: The Romantics moralized death
in a new way: with the TB which dissolved the gross body, etherealized
the personality, expanded consciousness. [] Sickness was a way of making
people interesting which is how romantic was originally defined.4
Indeed, love and death have been associated since very ancient times; but
not love and illness! For the first time, the Romantics considered a person
suffering from consumption as interesting, attractive, sometimes sexually
attractive. This is also why a narrative of illness and death switches so easily
to a Romantic love story. In this way, Blanchots LArrt de mort refers to
even if it does not borrow from two different Romantic models of love
story, represented by very influential literary texts.
The first one, which may be called realistic, was exemplified by
Chateaubriands Mmoires doutre-tombe (184850), a text mentioned
more than once in Blanchots critical essays. On April 27, 1944 Blanchot
published in the Journal des Dbats a review of Louis Martin-Chauffiers
book on Chateaubriand, pointing out the exceptional importance of the
latters sepulchral memoirs: pour aucun crivain les Mmoires nont pris
limportance quont revtue pour Chateaubriand Les Mmoires doutre-
tombe (CL, 597); he remarks also that for Chateaubriand there is cette
seconde vie aprs la mort qui seule illumine les tres ses yeux et, par la
puret, les gale enfin au dsir (597). And, more curiously, commenting
in 1947 (in the same period he was writing LArrt de mort) on a work by
Michel Leiris, he entitled his review Regards doutre-tombe, returning once
again to his idea of a profound relationship between Chateaubriands
writing and death: Mais, vrai dire, dans ces Mmoires, ce nest pas la
mort qui parle, mais lexistence comme morte, comme ayant toujours
4 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978),
pp.1920 (p.30).
132 Sergey Zenkin
t, toujours rvolue, immobilise dans une vie grandiosement trangre

tout avenir et mme lavenir de la mort (PF, 239). We are here at the
heart of Blanchots intimate thinking on death, and Chateaubriands
book serves as a catalyst for reflection; this allows us to presume that Les
Mmoires doutre-tombe could be a source of Blanchots 1948 narrative.
Indeed, Chateaubriands work contains a well-known episode narrating
the death in November 1803 of a young woman, the narrators beloved
friend the countess Pauline de Beaumont, fading away, consumed, literally
in her lovers arms. A series of parallels can be drawn between this episode
and Blanchots narrative.
In both texts, the lovers meet again in autumn after a period of sepa-
ration, and a short time before the young womans death. In both texts,
and this fact seems particularly important, their last encounter takes place
at an anxious political moment, in an ephemeral period of peace before
a great war: the Napoleonic wars in Chateaubriand, and in Blanchot,
World War II which shortly followed the Munich Agreement. The prox-
imity of war and the political preoccupations of the two narrators (a
French diplomat and a political journalist) contribute to create a realistic
atmosphere in both episodes: we find ourselves not in a fictional but in
a historical world.
Other key parallels may be detected as well. Chateaubriand describes
his last promenade with Pauline de Beaumont in Rome (the place of his
diplomatic service), a promenade which precedes immediately the scene of
her agony; Blanchots narrator also mentions (not as a witness, but report-
ing what others have said) that le 5 ou le 6 octobre [i.e. several days before
the death of J.] elle se promena encore en voiture avec sa sur le long des
Champs-lyses (AM, 11). Both dying women, during their agony, seem to
search for some spectral figure which they believe to see nearby their bed:
Pauline de Beaumont faisait des signes quelquun quelle voyait au pied
de son lit,5 and in Blanchots narrative, J. considers her lover taking care of
5 Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand, Mmoires doutre-tombe, vol. I (Paris: Livre de

poche, 1973), p.589.
her as a mystical incarnation of death: sur un ton tranquille: Maintenant,

lui dit-elle, voyez donc la mort, et elle me montra du doigt (AM, 48).
Finally, both descriptions of the last instant of the dying person are alike;
the narrators feel their pulse weakening and then stopping:
Une de mes mains se trouvait appuye sur son cur qui touchait ses lgers osse-
ments; il palpitait avec rapidit comme une montre qui dvide sa chane brise. Oh!
moment dhorreur et deffroi, je le sentis sarrter!6
Deux ou trois minutes plus tard, son pouls se drgla, il frappa un coup violent,
sarrta, puis se remit battre lourdement pour sarrter nouveau, cela plusieurs
fois, enfin il devint extrmement rapide et minuscule, et sparpilla comme du
sable. (AM, 52)
However, although the realistic side of Blanchots fiction refers to

a Romantic literary tradition of sentimental descriptions of death, tied
to reality by many details, among others by a strictly outlined political
chronology, there is another aspect of his narrative which is linked to
another literary tradition, also a Romantic one, namely, the fantastic.
The author who personifies best that tradition is undoubtedly Edgar
Allan Poe, mentioned frequently in Blanchots critical essays. Christophe
Bident cites a curious review of LArrt de mort published in the Cahiers du
Sud: its author, Luc Decaunes, situated this text gale distance dEdgar
Poe et dAndr Breton;7 indeed, the plot of Blanchots rcit recalls three
famous horror short stories of young womens deaths, by Poe: Berenice
(1835), Morella (1835), and Ligeia (1838). Their resemblance concerns, of
course, the unexplained resurrection, the precarious return to life of J.,
6 Ibid.
7 Cf. Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible, p.298. The reference
to Andr Breton probably points to the heroine of his novel Nadja (1928), a strange
and sensitive young woman resembling the main heroine of the second part of LArrt
de mort, Nathalie. The characters names also have an affinity, not only phonetic
but also ethno-linguistic: both names (Nadja = Nadejda, and Nathalie = Natalia)
are widespread in Russia, and both authors expressly note the Slavic origins of their
heroines.
134 Sergey Zenkin
and her duplication in the person of N. (Nathalie), who half-consciously

repeats attitudes and gestures of the first heroine: somnambulistic intru-
sions into the narrators room, and then making a cast of her hands and
face. The same occurs in Poe: in Morella, the female protagonist resur-
rects in her posthumously born daughter, and in Ligeia, she is resuscitated
several times by her lovers appeals. Berenice, perhaps the most horrify-
ing of the three stories, bears a resemblance to Blanchots plot in its final
motif of the womans teeth, a fascinating fetish that the protagonist, in an
unconscious state, extracts from her supposedly dead (and in reality fallen
into a cataleptic sleep) body. Moreover, his horror, when awoken, at his
own deed is similar to the feeling of Blanchots narrator realizing that his
new partner Nathalie has made a cast of her hands and face, thus repeat-
ing the gesture he himself performed upon the dying J. He is saisi dun
pressentiment dpouvante (AM, 119) and tries hopelessly to dissuade her
from realizing her intention, which he does not know yet to be already
accomplished. Copying the forms of someones body opration trange
quand elle est faite sur des vivants, parfois dangereuse, surprenante, opra-
tion qui (AM, 120), this interruption thus making the fear to name
the awful thing palpable produces nearly the same anxious emotion
in Blanchots narrator as the extraction of teeth from a dead body does in
the hero of Berenice. In both cases, a kind of image or material substitute
is produced directly from a dead or moribund body: in Berenice by way
of synecdoche (the teeth standing for the whole corpse) and in LArrt de
mort by way of metaphor (the cast as an analogous copy). In both cases,
the image produces a frightening effect.
Love and Image
I have already noted above the effect of strangeness and heterogeneity pro-
duced in Blanchot both by the realistic representation and by the visual
image.8 Symptomatically, the text of LArrt de mort mentions extraordinary
images which, even if they do not represent dead or dying persons, possess
ltranget cadavrique discussed by Blanchot in Les Deux versions de
limaginaire (1951).9 The shady doctor treating the dying young woman
keeps in his office une admirable photographie du Saint-Suaire de Turin,
photographie o il reconnaissait la superposition de deux images, celle du
Christ, mais aussi celle de Vronique (AM, 19). This image of a suffering
and agonizing body, associated with a womans figure, may be considered
as an epitome of Blanchots plot, even if the roles are distributed there in
a different way. In any case, the narrators attempts to conserve a mechani-
cal replica of his beloveds body or to embalm this body after her death,
reveal a fascination with the corporeal image. Moreover, even before J.s
death, her body seems to become especially spectacular, to grow prettier,
to turn into a beautiful image of herself: the illness ne pouvait rien contre
lexpression parfaitement belle et juvnile, quoique assez dure, dont son
visage tait clair (AM, 28).10 This anticipates another transformation,
which according to Blanchots narrator occurs after someones death: Aprs
la mort, il est connu que les tres beaux redeviennent, un instant, jeunes
et beaux (AM, 28). Blanchot refers to the same phenomenon in his phi-
losophy of the image: ce moment o la prsence cadavrique est devant
nous celle de linconnu, cest alors aussi que le dfunt regrett commence
ressembler soi-mme (EL, 346; his italics). The image guarantees ones
8 On the latter phenomenon, see my Maurice Blanchot et limage visuelle, in Blanchot

dans son sicle, ed. by Monique Antelme et al. (Lyon: Parangon, 2009), pp.21427.
9 Limage, premire vue, ne ressemble pas au cadavre, mais il se pourrait que ltranget
cadavrique ft aussi celle de limage (EL, 344).
10 And, some pages further, the narrator repeats: Elle tait toujours trs belle (AM,
41).
136 Sergey Zenkin
identity, which becomes especially visible in agony and in death, when the
accidental human body meets its own essence.
Such an association of the image with the ill and/or dead body was
proper to Romantic sthetics. According to Susan Sontag, the romanti-
cizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern
activity, promoting the self as an image.11 And Denis de Rougemont, as
early as 1938, analyzed the European idea of passionate love and Romantic
love as its highest manifestation as a cult of impossible love, a love medi-
ated by distance, interposing between lovers an image whose function
was to attract and separate at the same time.12 Like Sontag, Rougemont
relates such a tendency to individualism, to the promulgation of the self ,
dispensing the Romantic lover from any responsible relationship with his
absolutely remote object of passion.
In LArrt de mort, Blanchot picks up certain characteristics of Romantic
love: its passionate nature (en ces instants je laimais tout fait, et le reste
ntait rien; AM, 38), as well as its connection with death and the fetish-
ist image. But, importantly, he treats them in a critical manner. First, he
multiplies the images of desire: after having lost J., the narrator has other
amorous adventures, with recurrent episodes where a living person turns
into a kind of image, a phantasmal figure: whence the scenes of a for-
tuitous nightly intrusion into someones room, or else of seeing another
person through a shop-window (AM, 7273, 79, 88, 98). An equivalence
is established between all those episodes and between their heroines, who
reflect one another as if they were themselves a series of images, affective
replicas of the first one. Some of them attempt intentionally to imitate the
latter, as for example Nathalie making a cast of her hands and face, much
like the narrator does with J. (a mimesis of another person by means of
11 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p.29.

12 Nous savons que Tristan naimait pas Yseult pour elle-mme, mais seulement pour
lamour de lAmour dont sa beaut lui offrait une image; Denis de Rougemont,
LAmour et lOccident (Paris: Union gnrale dditions, 1970), p.189. For Rougemont,
the legend of Tristan and Isolde was an archetype, an original myth of passionate
love.
auto-mimesis). And secondly, which is a more general and original effect,

erotic desire, distributed among several symbolically equivalent objects,
tends to shift from human beings to empty spaces between the subject
and the object(s) of love.
Love and Emptiness
Blanchot formulated such a conception of desire in LEntretien infini

(1969), in a chapter entitled Rflexions sur lenfer. A section of that chap-
ter entitled Orphe, Don Juan, Tristan refers to three mythical figures of
lovers, popular in Romantic culture; moreover, the first of them, Orpheus,
is a recurrent symbol in Blanchots own criticism, and his unsuccessful
attempt to save his dead wife from the underworld corresponds closely
to what the narrator of LArrt de mort has failed to do with his beloved J.
Desire, Blanchot maintains, nest pas llan capable de franchir lintervalle
et de passer par-dessus labsence, ft-ce celle de la mort. Le dsir est la spa-
ration elle-mme qui se fait attirante, est lintervalle qui devient sensible,
est labsence qui retourne la prsence (EI, 28081; his italics) Amorous
desire is not, in the final analysis, directed towards a person but towards
an absence. This goes some way to explaining the plot of LArrt de mort,
which moves towards a progressive de-realization of the world, evolving
from a passionately realistic scene of agony to an idealist declaration of
love, not to a living woman but to a thought (la pense)13 a plot which
expresses Blanchots philosophical notion of desire itself: desire as a pas-
sion for distance, nothingness, and emptiness.
Blanchot not only states the idealist character of desire, he also surpasses
its Romantic idealization, he makes it even more idealist. He discovers a
13 Car cette pense [] je lai aime et je nai aim quelle (AM, 127; Blanchots
italics).
138 Sergey Zenkin
possibility of going one step further, of outclassing Romanticism in ide-

alization by relating death and language. In La Littrature et le droit la
mort, Blanchots sthetic manifesto published in January 1948, the same
year as LArrt de mort, he speculates about languages ability to bring death
to anything it names Anything and first of all any human being, and
more particularly a lovely woman; that is at least what his example seems
to suggest:
Sans doute, mon langage ne tue personne. Cependant: quand je dis cette femme,
la mort relle est annonce et dj prsente dans mon langage []. [S]i cette femme
ntait pas rellement capable de mourir, si elle ntait pas chaque moment de sa vie
menace de la mort, lie et unie elle par un lien dessence, je ne pourrais pas accomplir
cette ngation idale, cet assassinat diffr quest mon langage. (PF, 313)
We are justified, I think, in seeing in this exemplary and abstract woman

an allusion to the mourned, deceased J. from LArrt de mort. It seems,
then, that the lien dessence between death and language might account,
among other things, for the narrators sorrowful confession: Je ne puis
dire quel malheur envahit lhomme qui une fois a pris la parole (AM, 57);
indeed, to narrate his beloveds death is to reiterate her assassinat diffr.14
Language kills, by a drastic idealization, by transforming into words, the
being to whom or which it refers.
As a result, the fundamental heterogeneity of LArrt de mort may be
accounted for on two levels, presenting two contradictory dynamic ele-
ments. On the textual or syntagmatic level, there is a conflictual interaction
between narration and images, the images break through the narrative
plot and impose themselves upon the readers attention as a non-fictional,
non-narrative reality. On the sthetic or paradigmatic level, there is a super-
position of Romantic love as fervent pursuit of the Other, and literary
language as a means of de-realization developing into an assassinat dif-
fr. In Blanchots narratives and essays, a dialectical critique a critique
14 The expression conveys also one of the meanings of the polysemic title LArrt de
mort: death sentence but also the stopping or halting of death.
by radicalization of the Romantic ideas of image, desire, and death, goes

together with an original experience of and reflection on the ambiguous
nature of language as an agent of ngation idale. The passionate charge
of Romantic love, close to death and resurrection in the image and making
up the content of the first part of LArrt de mort, gives way in the second
part to an erratic, multiplied desire of penses, until it sparpill[e] comme
du sable (AM, 52), like a dying persons pulse.
Jrmie Majorel
Au moment voulu: de mlancolie en mlancolie
Rappelons rapidement lintrigue pure de ce rcit: le narrateur revient

voir Judith, avec qui il a t intimement li autrefois, mais qui vit mainte-
nant avec une femme, Claudia. Le rcit ne sera que le dploiement de la
vie trois qui peu peu prend forme entre eux, puis se disloque, dans un
appartement baign par la neige: le narrateur et Claudia se rapprochent,
Judith disparat, puis ils sloignent, Judith rapparat, la fin commence
(MV, 146).
Au moment voulu (1951) est imprgn dune profonde et diffuse mlan-
colie lie la perte de lamour de lautre et qui dissout le sujet. Je voudrais
montrer quil ny a pas une mlancolie dans ce rcit, mais deux mlancolies
distinctes, et que ce ddoublement bouleverse la distinction entre deuil et
mlancolie et les interprtations qui en ont t faites.
La Premire mlancolie
La premire mlancolie est celle qui est provoque par la perte de lamour
de Judith. Claudia le rappelle frontalement au narrateur: Ce que vous
navez pas, ce que vous avez perdu, vous ne laurez plus jamais (MV, 47).
Lpreuve de ralit, la perte irrversible de lamour de lautre, au lieu davoir
dclench un travail de deuil, a donn lieu un dsuvrement du deuil, la
mlancolie. Le traumatisme que na pu rsorber un travail de deuil normal
se rveille ds le dbut du rcit, lorsque le narrateur, aprs avoir revu Judith
et lappartement, ce qui a chang et ce qui na pas chang, sengage dans le
142 Jrmie Majorel
couloir qui spare les deux chambres et ressent soudainement une douleur
abominable (13) qui semblait [l]atteindre travers une couche fabuleuse
de dure (14).
Cette mlancolie se manifeste par un symptme qui en fait par l
mme un leitmotiv du rcit: Au bout dun moment, je dus demander un
verre deau. Les mots: Donnez-moi un verre deau, me laissrent le senti-
ment dun froid terrible (MV, 12, voir aussi 37, 103). Leau de la mlancolie
environne le narrateur: tremp de sueur, il est rveill par un rve o il se
retrouvait couch dans leau de la baignoire (88), puis plus tard, [r]uis-
selant deau (101), Claudia essuie sa sueur avec un mouchoir, si bien que
rve et ralit se confondent. On lui donne du th mais ce nest pour lui
quun fade, sucr, amer, triste mlange (91). Le narrateur insiste aussi sur
la sensation de froid, prsente notamment chaque fois quil demande un
verre deau: Il est vrai, je souffrais du froid (98). Et un peu aprs: Il est
vrai je souffrais cruellement du froid (100). Labsence dlectricit dans le
chauffage de la salle de bains, le th, breuvage dsagrable, ou le feu, quil
faut toujours prendre soin dalimenter, sont de faibles remparts contre
ce froid. Lorsque le froid et leau sallient pour se cristalliser en neige, le
narrateur prouve une indisposition insupportable, rsiste faiblement
lternit dissolvante de la neige (85). On se souvient que dans lancienne
et trs labore thorie mdivale des quatre lments qui, combins entre
eux, donnent les quatre humeurs qui, leur tour, se combinent en quatre
tempraments, le microcosme du corps humain entretenant une srie de
correspondances avec le macrocosme de lunivers, la mlancolie tait le pro-
duit du refroidissement de lardente bile noire sous linfluence de Saturne.
Cest dun tel refroidissement humoral que souffre le narrateur, qui voit
dans une tempte de neige llment noir du vent (101).
Il subit galement des insomnies, un point tel que Claudia lui propose
un arsenal de produits pour dormir (MV, 37). Il fait des rves tranges qui
le rveillent dans un tat hallucin (par exemple, le rve dtre couch dans
leau de la baignoire). Son tat en vient mme parfois empirer en dlire:
Quand je me vis seul, je me troublai aussi. deux reprises, jappelai mon
frre, mais il ne vint pas (102). En dehors de lappartement o il demeure
confin, le monde extrieur ne fait que quelques timides perces. Le sort
rserv au monde extrieur est rgl ds le dbut du rcit: La fentre tant

ouverte, elle [ Judith] se leva pour aller la fermer. Jusque-l, je men rendis
compte, la rue avait continu passer par la chambre (11). Si le monde
extrieur est voqu, cest pour penser fugacement lventualit dun sui-
cide: Ouvrir la fentre, se jeter dehors (80).
Le narrateur est lucide sur la totalit de ces symptmes: il se sait au fond
de [s]a dpression (MV, 89). Il est pris dans laire de tous les symptmes
de la mlancolie que Freud oppose au travail de deuil normal, y compris
le caractre inconscient de la perte.1 En effet, le narrateur ne sait pas ce
quil a perdu dans la perte. Une question de Claudia revient plusieurs
reprises: Mais quavez-vous? Prcisment, rien. De mme, une question
que se pose le narrateur est tout autant rpte: ce qui se passe au juste?
Elle reste sans rponse. Claudia, dans la frontalit mme du rappel brutal
de la perte relle, ne pouvait faire lconomie de la priphrase: Ce que vous
navez pas, ce que vous avez perdu, vous ne laurez plus jamais (je souligne).
Cependant, aussi prouvante soit-elle, cette mlancolie ne touche que la
premire couche fabuleuse de dure du rcit. Elle en reste au stade de
lnonc, de la digse, de lhistoire raconte. Elle est marque du sceau de
la ngativit dpressive, de la nostalgie de la prsence pleine de lamour,
elle ne bouleverse pas le tableau clinique que Freud en dressait vis--vis du
deuil mais le confirme point par point.
La Deuxime mlancolie
La deuxime mlancolie se dclenche partir du dernier tiers du rcit, ici

mme: Je lui dis [ Claudia]: Venez avec moi dans le Sud. Elle secoua
la tte. Cela ne se peut pas. Venez! (MV, 130). Lorsquelle sloigne
1 Voir Sigmund Freud, Deuil et mlancolie (1915), in Mtapsychologie (Paris: Gallimard,

1968), pp.14571.
144 Jrmie Majorel
de lui, le narrateur remarque une grande et mlancolique dignit (130)

qui imprgne sa dmarche. La deuxime mlancolie apparat donc ici lit-
tralement, la premire restant au stade dune dpression. Claudia qui
se dtourne du narrateur lincarne ses yeux. Elle a beau lui demander:
Pourquoi ntes-vous pas satisfait de ce que vous avez? Le narrateur lui
rpond: Mais, dis-je, ce que jai, je ne lai pas (113). Comme si se rejouait
ici la mme perte de lamour quavec Judith.
La blessure pourtant semblait jusquici referme. En effet, Claudia, cest
celle qui a russi entre-temps sans le vouloir effacer Judith de la mmoire
du narrateur et mme de son prsent, comme dans cette scne o le narrateur
coute la toux de la cantatrice provoque par labsorption du th brlant
dans sa gorge fragile: Voyant que jcoutais cette toux, elle sortit. Judith
vint me dire: Elle a aval de travers. coutez! dis-je, jai dj entendu
un tel bruit. Elle prta attention. Est-il possible, remarqua-t-elle, que
? Mais dj je ne dsirais plus ni la voir ni lentendre (MV, 102). Je ne
veux plus te voir ni tentendre, telle est la formule radicale de lamour qui
est parti. Le narrateur ici a fait son deuil de Judith, au sens le plus trivial de
cette expression. Il avait pris conscience auparavant de son amour naissant
pour Claudia: Quand jeus dcouvert que le fait de ntre pas avec Claudia
se traduisait pas toujours il est vrai par les divers malaises dont jai parl,
[] eh bien, jallai au plus simple (66). Elle est lanti-dpresseur qui agit
sur son symptme li au froid. En effet, au contraire du narrateur, homme
du Sud qui souffre du froid, Claudia est une femme du Nord qui dgage
la chaleur du feu: Elle aimait le feu, elle tait trs capable en tout ce qui
concernait la vie du feu, cest une des tches qui lui taient rserves (65).
Elle rchauffe le narrateur et le narrateur la rafrachit. Ces moments, que
Jean Starobinski appellerait une thermodynamique des passions, quon
peut appeler chiasme des tempratures, sont les moments de jouissance
du rcit: lorsque Claudia prs du feu offre le contact brlant de sa hanche
la main du narrateur (6465), ou lorsquelle pose les mains froides du
narrateur sur sa gorge pour en apaiser la chaleur trop intense (122). Dans les
deux cas fulgurent une rapide condensation de la clart en feu, du feu en
un Oui, Oui, Oui brlant autour dun noyau froid, un essor, la rencontre
lun de lautre, dun jour glac et dun jour brlant (126). Ainsi les malaises
du narrateur lis au froid de la mlancolie dpressive disparaissaient-ils. L

aussi nous sommes proches dune vision de la gurison du mlancolique
telle que la mdecine mdivale pouvait la dcrire et les potes linvestir
avec leurs imaginaires.
Mais le refus de Claudia de laccompagner chez lui dans le Sud dclen-
che la deuxime mlancolie. partir de ce moment, le narrateur reste sous la
fascination de la grande et mlancolique dignit (MV, 130, 136) de Claudia,
de ses apparitions en contre-bas, le corps demi ploy, la tte incline vers
les genoux (38), le corps lgrement courb dans une attitude qui []
tait [] dune profonde et mlancolique dignit (139), femme assise prs
du mur, la tte lgrement penche vers ses mains (139), apparitions qui
ne cessent de se produire son regard. La mlancolie se manifeste ici en
reprenant un motif traditionnel de ses reprsentations picturales: la figure
penche. Lange de la mlancolie de Drer en est lemblme. Starobinski a
insist sur la reprise de ce motif chez Baudelaire.2 Il remarque lambigut
de cette attitude, entre la tristesse strile et la mditation fconde.3 Il
rappelle ltymologie commune pencher et penser par lintermdiaire
de pendere. Il montre galement que le personnage reprsent est souvent
pench soit sur le vide, soit sur linfini des lointains, soit sur des signes o
lesprit rencontre les traces dun autre esprit, soit sur des morts anciennes
indiquant prophtiquement la mort venir, soit sur des objets emblma-
tiques de lphmre, soit enfin sur sa propre image reflte.4 Blanchot
pure donc la mlancolie en la rduisant un de ses motifs essentiels de
reprsentation picturale et en rptant ce motif avec dinfimes variations.
Le narrateur insiste sur le fait que linstant de ces apparitions est chaque
fois le moment voulu (MV, 139). Un autre motif pictural de la mlancolie
apparat une fois vers la fin du rcit: les piliers du temps, rompus, soute-
naient leurs ruines (149).
2 Voir Les Figures penches: Le Cygne, in La Mlancolie au miroir: trois lectures de

Baudelaire (Paris: Julliard, 1989), pp.4778.
3 Ibid., p.48.
4 Ibid., pp.4950.
146 Jrmie Majorel
Claudia entre donc dans un devenir spectral aux yeux du narrateur:

cette deuxime mlancolie est avant tout reconnaissance de la part spec-
trale de lamour.
De mme, la deuxime mlancolie ne reste pas au plan de lnonc
mais contamine le plan de lnonciation, cest--dire le rcit proprement
dit, jusqu bouleverser la distinction entre ces deux plans. Le narrateur y
insiste ds le dbut: Ces moments furent les plus pnibles. Et il est bien
vrai quils valent encore pour maintenant (MV, 15), et [i]l est difficile
de revenir sur une impossibilit quand elle a t surmonte, plus difficile
encore, quand il nest pas sr que limpossible ne demeure (2021). De
mme, vers la fin: Je crois que cest l le moment absolument sombre
de cette intrigue, le point o elle retourne constamment au prsent, o
je ne puis plus ni oublier ni me souvenir, o les vnements humains,
autour dun centre aussi instable et immobile que moi-mme, construi-
sent indfiniment leur retour (165). Le rcit ne sera donc pass que de
mlancolie en mlancolie: Ainsi, tout le cycle recommenait (136).
Cest pourquoi il souvre trangement sur labsence de Claudia dont le
narrateur nest pas cense connatre lexistence au seuil de la digse,
mais que la mlancolie qui touche son nonciation ne pouvait pas ne
pas lui faire re-marquer: En labsence de lamie qui vivait avec elle, la
porte fut ouverte par Judith (7). Le paradoxe de cette deuxime mlan-
colie spectrale est quelle na rien de ngative, elle est lacceptation dune
dpersonnalisation qui toujours dj point lobjet du dsir et imprgne
le sujet. Ainsi le rcit peut-il scrire. La circularit du rcit est proche
du chant de Claudia la recherche de quelque chose qui ft le dbut,
lespoir de son propre chant (70).
Le Phnomne de la vitre
la lumire de la rsurgence dans Au moment voulu de motifs mlancoli-

ques mdivaux comme la bile noire, froide et sche qui assoiffe le narra-
teur ou le spectre dune figure penche sur le vide, on peut relire un autre
trait de ce rcit qui est commun avec LArrt de mort (1948) et Celui qui ne
maccompagnait pas (1953): le phnomne de la vitre (AM, 79; MV, 82).
Les personnages de ces rcits passent leur temps se regarder derrire des
fentres, des baies vitres, des vitres, ils nentrent en relation intime que
par la mdiation dune vitre qui les dralise. Le narrateur de ces rcits ne
peut jouir dune femme que si elle se trouve (comme) derrire une vitre. Je
vois dans ce phnomne, mme si beaucoup dautres interprtations sont
possibles, la ractualisation moderne du dispositif complexe qui permet-
tait aux potes de la finamor courtoise de distancier la femme aime, de
la mtamorphoser en fantasme, de considrer eros avant tout comme une
laboration imaginaire. Giorgio Agamben a reconstruit toutes les subtilits
de ce quil nomme la fantasmalogie mdivale, au carrefour des sciences,
de la mdecine, de la philosophie et de la posie, dans Stanze: parole et
fantasme dans la culture occidentale (1977). Il fait une citation dAverros
qui rsume la doctrine psycho-physiologique du processus qui va de la
sensation limagination, sur laquelle sappuie la posie courtoise pour
laborer sa vision de lamour:
Nous disons donc [] que par lintermdiaire de la lumire lair reoit le premier
la forme des choses, puis la mne la couche extrieure de lil; celle-ci la transmet
progressivement jusqu la dernire couche, au-del de laquelle se trouve le sens
commun. Au milieu la couche cristalline peroit la forme des choses: elle est comme
un miroir dont la nature est intermdiaire entre celle de lair et celle de leau. Cest
parce quelle est semblable un miroir quelle reoit les formes de lair; elle les trans-
met leau, parce que sa nature est commune lun et lautre. Leau, dont Aristote
dit quelle se trouve derrire lhumeur cristalline, est ce que Galien appelle lhumeur
vitreuse et se situe lextrmit de lil: cest travers elle que le sens commun voit
la forme. Ds que le sens commun voit la forme il la transmet la vertu imaginative,
qui la reoit sur un mode plus spirituel; cette forme appartient donc au troisime
148 Jrmie Majorel
ordre. Car les formes sont de trois ordres: le premier est corporel; le second est celui
de la forme dans le sens commun; il est spirituel; le troisime est celui de la forme
dans limagination; il est davantage spirituel. Et comme la forme est plus spirituelle
que dans le sens commun, limagination na pas besoin, pour la rendre prsente, de
la prsence de lobjet extrieur.5
Ce processus qui spiritualise de plus en plus le corporel, qui le fait passer

tout entier dans limaginaire et le fantasme, si bien que la prsence sabsente
au profit de la prsence dune absence, est mdiatis par lil, lui-mme
subdivis en air, en eau, en cristal et en vitre. Cest ce que la mlancolie du
rcit de Blanchot retrouve dans le phnomne de la vitre dont le regard
qui passe travers mtamorphose celle qui se trouve derrire en fantasme,
en prsence dune absence, et suscite un dsir dautant plus intense quil
a distanci son objet, la rendu inatteignable. La seule diffrence est que
Blanchot extriorise la vitre, alors quelle est partie intgrante de lil chez
les potes mdivaux.6
Se regarder sans se voir
Pour affiner la distinction entre les deux mlancolies, comparons louverture

du rcit entre Judith et le narrateur et la premire rencontre avec Claudia.
Un mme mouvement sy rpte: regarder sans voir celui quon regarde,
ne pas tre vu par le regard de lautre. Mais l aussi la signification change
de sens de Judith Claudia.
Lorsque le narrateur entre chez Judith aprs des annes dabsence, il la
regarde longuement, intensment, confrontant ses souvenirs sa perception
5 Averros cit dans Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: parole et fantasme dans la culture occi-
dentale, trad. par Yves Hersant (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1998), pp.13435.
6 Noublions pas que Blanchot a sans doute fait des tudes de mdecine et quil con-
naissait certainement trs bien son histoire multisculaire.
prsente. Elle aussi le regarde, mais sans rellement le voir: Elle me regardait
dune manire trange, spontane, vive et cependant de ct. Ce regard, je
ne sais pourquoi, me porta un coup au cur (MV, 9). Quand elle sen va
fermer la fentre de la pice puis revient vers lui, le narrateur prcise bien:
jeus le brusque sentiment quelle commenait seulement mapercevoir
(11). Le rcit suggre ici que le mouvement de cette femme avec qui jai t
si lie autrefois et qui me regarde maintenant sans mme me voir signifie
que cette femme ne maime plus, que jai perdu son amour de manire irr-
versible. Ainsi le cur du narrateur na-t-il plus qu se transir. Il est devenu
transparent aux yeux de Judith, il ne reprsente donc plus rien pour elle.
Le mme regard vide se produit lors de la premire rencontre avec
Claudia dans sa chambre:
Je voyais trs bien certains aspects de la chambre et celle-ci avait dj renou son
alliance avec moi, mais, elle, je ne la voyais pas. Jignore pourquoi. [] Eh bien,
elle, ce quelle me dit elle me voyait; elle se tenait debout justement devant le
fauteuil et elle navait pas perdu un de mes mouvements. [] Non, elle ne stonnait
pas de me voir si peu attentif sa prsence, parce quelle non plus, un tel moment,
ne se souciait nullement de savoir si elle tait prsente, parce quen plus, bien que le
fait dtre rejete dans lombre comporte des sacrifices, elle trouvait une satisfaction
infinie me regarder dans ma vrit, moi qui, ne la voyant pas et ne voyant personne,
me montrais dans la sincrit dun homme seul. (MV, 1720)
Du ct de Claudia, regarder sans voir ne provoque donc aucune raction

ngative, ce serait au contraire pour elle la vrit secrte du rapport le plus
authentique. Au moment voulu est une ducation sentimentale qui initie
le narrateur reconnatre la part spectrale, impersonnelle et solitaire de
lamour qui se produit entre deux tres libres. Voici, de ce point de vue,
lacm de la relation entre Claudia et le narrateur: Une partie de la matine
[] passait dans une joyeuse ngligence de la chambre la salle de bains,
mais elle ntait nullement gne dentrer aussi dans le studio, en apparence
aussi librement que si un garon, pour elle tranger, navait pas eu des yeux
pour la voir, libert qui ntait mme pas dans les habitudes de son amie
(MV, 7172). Telle est une des singularits de Claudia: aller nue dans une
pice comme si elle tait seule, et offrir cette nudit et cette solitude la
150 Jrmie Majorel
vue dun homme quelle ne connat qu peine. Telle est la vrit de lamour
dans ses moments simples et souverains.
Le rapprochement inattendu du narrateur avec Claudia relgue au
second plan Judith pendant les deux tiers du rcit. Que Judith revienne
ensuite profondment change au premier plan laisse supposer quentre
temps elle nest pas reste la mme, quelle aussi est entre dans la mlanco-
lie, sans doute provoque par la perte de Claudia. Lors de la rapparition
de Judith, le narrateur est frapp par son regard [] avide, nayant rien
(MV, 131). Dans une des scnes les plus bouleversantes du rcit, elle semble
si affecte par le vide quelle ne reconnat plus Claudia lorsque celle-ci
revient la voir dans leur chambre. Une parole biblique, surgissement de
larchaque, remonte dans sa bouche: Nescio vos, je ne sais qui vous tes
(137).7 Le narrateur la compare Abraham acceptant de sacrifier son fils
(MV, 147). Cest cette entre de Judith dans lexprience mlancolique
qui permet au narrateur, vers la fin du rcit, une nouvelle entente de leur
relation, analogue celle laquelle Claudia la initi:
Longtemps elle mavait regard, mais je ne la voyais pas. Jours souverains ses yeux.
Quelle ft ainsi ignore, ce ntait pas pour elle un malheur; et son regard ntait
pas modeste, mais avide: je lai dit, le plus avide qui ft, puisquil navait rien. [] Je
demeurai donc seul, je veux dire que je me retirai alors dans le fond, car pour devenir
visible son tour, il fallait sans doute quelle cesst de me voir. La faim, le froid, elle
vivait parmi de tels lments, mais si affame quelle ft, elle scartait ds que son
regard risquait dveiller le mien, et cela non par la timidit dune me molle, mais
parce que la sauvagerie tait son empire. (MV, 14951)
Judith runit donc en elle lexprience de la perte mlancolique propre au

narrateur et lexprience du rapport dinvisibilit nue ouvert par Claudia.
En ce sens, elle est finalement la vritable figure souveraine du rcit.
De mlancolie en mlancolie, il ny a donc pas rptition dune mme

mlancolie lie la perte de lamour de deux femmes diffrentes, mais
deux mlancolies qui diffrent fondamentalement lune de lautre: une
7 Cest une rfrence la parabole des dix vierges.

mlancolie comme dsuvrement du deuil rpond une mlancolie comme

dsuvrement de la mlancolie elle-mme. Sil y a une progression narrative
malgr la circularit du rcit, elle est l. De ces deux rponses contradictoi-
res un mme mouvement de se regarder sans se voir, perdre lamour ou
au contraire aimer la perte, dune mlancolie lautre, il y a donc un abme
qui bouleverse lopposition traditionnelle entre deuil et mlancolie, voire
mme son dplacement dconstructif. Le rcit de Blanchot donne penser
ce que Slavoj iek dveloppe thoriquement dans le chapitre IV, Deuil,
mlancolie et acte, de Vous avez dit totalitarisme? Cinq interventions sur
les (ms)usages dune notion (2001). iek commence par rappeler la thse
hermneutique de Freud: Freud opposait le deuil normal (lacceptation
russie de la perte) la mlancolie pathologique (le sujet persiste dans
son identification narcissique lobjet perdu).8 Ensuite, il rsume ce que
serait la thse dconstructive de Derrida:
Contre la thse de Freud il faut affirmer la supriorit conceptuelle et thique de

la mlancolie: dans le processus de perte, il y a toujours un reste qui ne peut tre
assimil par le travail de deuil, et la vritable fidlit consiste dans lattachement ce
reste. Le deuil est une sorte de trahison, une faon de tuer une seconde fois lobjet
(perdu), tandis que le sujet mlancolique lui reste fidle, et refuse de renoncer son
attachement lui [] On souligne gnralement laspect antihglien de cette
rvaluation de la mlancolie: le travail de deuil opre selon le principe du dpas-
sement [Aufhebung]: cest en perdant la ralit immdiate de lobjet que nous en
retenons lessence conceptuelle; au contraire, dans la mlancolie, lobjet rsiste son
dpassement conceptuel.9
Par-del ladversit de ces deux thses, iek en descelle le prsuppos

commun, qui reste dans laire du romantisme: le maintien dun objet qui a
une existence positive, mme sil est perdu, maintien d la confusion entre
8 Slavoj iek, Vous avez dit totalitarisme? Cinq interventions sur les (ms)usages dune
notion, trad. par Delphine Moreau et Jrme Vidal (Paris: Amsterdam, 2007),
p.146.
9 Ibid., pp.14647.
152 Jrmie Majorel
la perte et le manque.10 Dans une perspective qui sinspire de Lacan, iek

formule alors le point de rversion qui permettrait de repenser la mlancolie
de manire indite: Lobjet cause du dsir est originellement manquant et
cela de manire constitutive []. En un mot, ce que la mlancolie occulte,
cest le fait que lobjet manque depuis le dbut, que son apparition concide
avec son manque.11
Cest prcisment ce que donne penser Au moment voulu avec le
rapport entre Claudia et le narrateur. Rien nest perdu, puisque il ny aura
jamais eu dobjet positif du dsir, celui-ci tant toujours dj manquant,
Claudia ne se souciant pas dtre vu par le regard du narrateur ds leur
premire rencontre, celui-ci acceptant peu peu son tour de ne pas tre
vu par le regard de Claudia, tel point que prsence et absence concident.
Cependant, malgr cette rinterprtation de lobjet mlancolique, un trait
essentiel est rest indemne: lidentification narcissique, ft-ce celle une
absence dobjet. La dpersonnalisation du sujet opre dans Au moment
voulu reste lenvers de cette identification narcissique une absence dobjet.
Cest ce quoi va sattaquer Celui qui ne maccompagnait pas en brisant le
miroir du mlancolique.
Je finirai sur deux points. Tout dabord, une formule polysmique: Au moment
voulu est le rcit que Blanchot aurait crit sil avait t romantique.
Ensuite, mon propre panchement romantique: je nai pas crit ce
texte seulement en vue dun article. Sa ncessit men a t tout autant,
sinon plus, impose par une priode de ma vie non encore close, peut-
tre jamais, quon appelle trop facilement un deuil amoureux. Le rcit de
Blanchot en aura t le pharmakon. Voil pourquoi lire certains crivains
est parfois vital.
10 Ibid., p.148.
11 Ibid.
Twentieth-Century Conversations in Romanticism
Ian Maclachlan
Blanchot and the Romantic Imagination
I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that
to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No
part of Me. What, it will be Questiond, When the Sun rises, do you
not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no, no, I see an
Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy
is the Lord God Almighty. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative
Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning Sight. I look
thro it & not with it.
William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement1
William Blakes proclamation of a visionary faculty transcending physical

reality and issuing from an internal creative power that is independent of
the mere frame of sensible perception has become one of the touchstones
of the Romantic conception of the imagination. These lines are part of
the collection of manuscript notes that D. G. Rossetti first assembled and
entitled A Vision of the Last Judgement. Near the beginning of the same
fragment, Blake articulates an exemplary version of the extreme idealist
position that is generally held to characterize the Romantic imagination:
Mental Things are alone Real; what is calld Corporeal, Nobody Knows
of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture.2 In one
of the Chroniques de la vie intellectuelle that he devoted to Blake in the
Journal des dbats, Maurice Blanchot alludes to the particular expression
1 In William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1966), pp.60417 (p.617).
2 Ibid., p.617.
156 Ian Maclachlan
of the internal vision afforded by the imagination in the passage that we

began by citing, underlining what he calls the subjective origin of such
a vision, but at the same time describing its frankly idealist orientation
in terms that suggest a vision that is not above sensible reality, but other
than it, a transformative vision that purges the world of deceptive outward
appearances. He says of Blake:
Comme on lui demandait un jour o il voyait tout ce quil rapportait, Ici, rpondit-il
en se frappant le front. En mme temps, il ne croit pas au surnaturel. Ce quil voit
est de ce monde: cest le monde mme, dlivr de ses erreurs, des mensonges que nos
sens borns nous font tenir pour la ralit, alors quil sagit dapparences illusoires,
de la vrit dchue. Il faut regarder, comme il le dclare, non par lil, mais travers
lil, et ne pas plus consulter sa vue quon ne consulte une fentre sur lobjet quon
voit travers. (CL, 62829)
A few years later, Georges Bataille would advance a similar argument about
the status of Blakes poetic visions in an essay first published in two issues of
Critique in 1948, before being taken up nearly a decade later in La Littrature
et le mal.3 At the beginning of a section on La Souverainet de la posie,
arguing against a Jungian evaluation of Blake as an introvert, for whom
the images of introverted intuition would come to rival the perceptions
of external reality, Bataille insists on an understanding of poetic vision as
remaining dependent on an external world through which it nonetheless
seeks a transfigured, and not simply subjective reality:
La posie naccepte pas les donnes des sens dans leur tat de nudit, mais elle nest
pas toujours, et mme elle est rarement le mpris de lunivers extrieur. Ce sont plutt
les limites prcises des objets entre eux quelle rcuse, mais elle en admet le caractre
extrieur. Elle nie, et elle dtruit la proche ralit, parce quelle y voit lcran qui nous
dissimule la figure vritable du monde. La posie nen admet pas moins lextriorit
3 See Georges Bataille, La Littrature et le mal (1957), in uvres compltes, 12 vols

(Paris: Gallimard, 197088), IX (1979), pp.169316. The chapter on Blake was first
published as William Blake ou la vrit du mal in the September and November
1948 issues of Critique.
par rapport au moi des ustensiles ou des murs. Lenseignement de Blake se fonde
mme sur la valeur en soi extrieure au moi de la posie.4
Not surprisingly, we shall have cause to return later to the relations between
imagination and sense-perception, as well as to the notion of poetrys nega-
tion of reality.
A number of Blanchots other observations in his 1944 Chronique
about the nature of Blakes visionary imagination are worth mentioning
at this stage. Near the outset of his discussion, Blanchot suggests that the
abiding interest of Blakes visions stems from their relation to the political
context of the 1789 Revolution and its aftermath; Blakes works are said by
Blanchot to resist their time in order to look ahead of it, displaying une
imagination morale en rvolte, avec laquelle nous nous sentons toujours
en sympathie (CL, 628). When he then turns to the characteristics of the
imaginative vision evident in Blakes work, Blanchot ascribes its originality
to the intime union de pense et dimage, de sens et dimagination, and
further qualifies that union in terms, borrowed from Yeats, of a literalist
imagination: Cest W. B. Yeats qui a dit: Blake is a literalist of the imagi-
nation: il suit son imagination la lettre (CL, 628). Blanchot goes on to
examine the two poles that he says are unified in Blakes work thought
and image but in order now to lay emphasis on the double nature of
Blakes imagination, which has at once the transparency of theoretical
reflections and the opacity of figural visions: Autrement dit, ce que Blake
voit, cest aussi bien le sens que la figure, ce que signifie limage que limage
mme, la raison que lapparence, et ce quil appelle limagination est deux
ples: un double et constant change daffirmations thoriques et de visions
impntrables (CL, 629). It is in the light of this inextricable coexistence of
thought and image that we should view the final stage of Blanchots analysis,
where he insists that Blakes symbols are rarely amenable to an allegorical
interpretation, and that, for example, Blakes mythopoeic figures in The
Book of Urizen, Milton, or Vala repoussent constamment une traduction
4 Ibid., p.225 (Batailles italics).

158 Ian Maclachlan
ou mme une interprtation prcise, et les grandes figures mythiques y

sont comme des constellations de sens, des nbuleuses rayonnantes o tout
est poursuite, rencontre dastres, lumires en mouvement, clairs perdus,
ouragans blouis (CL, 631).
A couple of years earlier, Blanchot had already devoted one of his
Chroniques in the Journal des dbats to Blake, specifically to The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell (1790), and it is one of the essays he would go on to col-
lect in Faux pas (1943). Blanchots focus throughout this short piece is the
imagination, and especially its duality in Blake. In an opening paragraph
that places The Marriage of Heaven and Hell above Blakes other writings,
Blanchot evokes a double imagination at work in it, harnessing the two
imaginative poles of thought and figure that we have already encountered
in Blanchots article of 1944: Limagination morale et limagination po-
tique sy quilibrent dans la tension fivreuse de leurs doubles exigences. Les
proverbes y sont des figures, et les visions, dchires par lclair, souvrent
sur des penses lisibles (FP, 37). When he proceeds to elaborate on this
double imagination, it is in terms that do not seem to diverge appreciably
from a version of the fundamental duality that has persistently accompa-
nied Western accounts of the imagination and of cognate terms, namely
between the capacity to imagine as representational or as productive,
between mimesis and poiesis, or, in the visual metaphor used by M. H.
Abrams in respect of Romantic sthetics, and again borrowed from Yeats,
between the mirror and the lamp.5 Blanchot himself couches this dual-
5 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1953); the borrowing is from Yeatss introduction
to the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. For a summary of this duality in concep-
tions of the imagination, see Richard Kearneys indispensable survey, The Wake of
Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture (London: Hutchinson, 1988),
pp.1516. My understanding of philosophical approaches to the imagination is
deeply indebted to this work in particular, and also to Kearneys Poetics of Imagining:
Modern to Post-modern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, rev. edn 1998) and
Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1995).
ity in terms of an imagination that maintains a tension between seeing

and doing, a visionary power working in the interests of what he insists
we must consider to be systematic thought: Cest cette double dmarche
de son imagination, la fois instinctive et thorique, puissance de voir et
puissance de faire, suprme passivit et sommation magique, qui donne
ses uvres leur balancement quivoque et leur te leur quilibre (FP, 38).
With the appeal to a visionary power that is also an extreme passivity, we
may already be touching on the distinctive conception of the image that
will emerge in essays written over the next few years (and to which we will
turn shortly). That impression is underscored when Blanchot goes on to
argue that, in the Manichean thought that accompanies Blakes dualistic
imagination, Blake is seeking to maintain the marriage of heaven and
hell as a turbulent union, rather than reconciling contradictory impulses:
William Blake a conu une forme de synthse qui fait de lui ladversaire
anticip de Hegel et le modle de Kierkegaard et de Nietzsche. Il veut
runir en soi la contradiction, non pour la rsoudre ou la surmonter, mais
pour la maintenir dans sa tension constante (39). The closing words of
Blanchots essay offer a dense recapitulation of the peculiar inextricability
of thought and image in Blakes visionary writing, whereby ideas become
figural, but figural of a world that resists visualization: Telle est dans un
art symbolique la plus complte mtamorphose. Lide devient univers et
limage, pense de labme. La flche qui ouvre la nuit, cest finalement une
abstraction (41). In order to pursue the idea of a symbolic art in which the
imagination, no longer simply mirror nor lamp, casts a vertiginous shadow,
let us turn to the essay Le Langage de la fiction (1949).6
Le Langage de la fiction contains Blanchots first sustained and explicit
engagement with a conception of the imagination that would continue to
serve as a foil for his own subsequent accounts of the image and the imagi-
6 See PF, 7989. This is the only essay in La Part du feu (1949) that had not previously
been published in a journal.
160 Ian Maclachlan
nary, namely the one developed by Sartre in his 1940 study, LImaginaire.7
The opening gambit of Blanchots essay effectively serves to place the dis-
cussion of imagination that will follow under the sombre auspices of igno-
rance, indigence, and powerlessness. Contrasting our response to the phrase
the head clerk called (le chef de bureau a tlphon) as we might come
across it in an everyday context and our reading of it as we encounter it
in Kafkas Das Schloss (1926), Blanchot highlights the network of worldly
knowledge that immediately attends the phrase in the first case and the
lack of such a network, the ignorance, as he calls it, that characterizes our
relationship with the fictional world when we read the phrase in a novel.
Moreover, this ignorance is not an accidental or provisional feature, an
impoverished knowledge that might come to be enriched by descriptive
detail, Blanchot claims, car cette pauvret est lessence de la fiction qui est
de me rendre prsent ce qui la fait irrelle, accessible la seule lecture, inac-
cessible mon existence; et nulle richesse dimagination, aucune exactitude
dobservation ne saurait corriger une telle indigence (PF, 80). As for the
functioning of language in either case, whereas the words the head clerk
called tend to be immediately effaced in favour of their signification in
an everyday context, in a novel the same utterance retains that signifying
function but, in so far as it also furnishes the reader with the very world to
which it refers, it persists as a verbal reality that is not simply absorbed by
its signifying function: les mots ne peuvent plus se contenter de leur pure
valeur de signe [], et la fois prennent de limportance comme attirail
verbal et rendent sensible, matrialisent ce quils signifient (PF, 81). It is
on the basis of this combination of signifying transparency and residual,
material opacity in literary language, and the further distinction between
fictional modes of allegory, myth, and symbol that he goes on to make,
that Blanchot will give an account of imagination that invokes Sartres
7 Jean-Paul Sartre, LImaginaire: psychologie phnomnologique de limagination (Paris:

Gallimard, 1940). It is here that Sartre developed his original account of the imagi-
nation, whereas his earlier work on the subject, LImagination (Paris: Alcan, 1936),
had mainly been a work of critical path-clearing in respect of previous philosophical
accounts of the imagination.
conception, following it so closely that one could be mistaken in thinking

that he is simply endorsing it. Indeed, this could be described as Blanchots
characteristic strategy for resisting, without in turn being absorbed by,
dialectical modes of thinking.8
Blanchot designates allegory as a narrative which, taken in its entirety
as a story, aspires to the transparency of the linguistic sign in everyday lan-
guage. Myth, on the other hand, stands at the opposite pole, its meaning
inhering in, rather than being transparently signified by, the figures of the
narrative. With symbolic narrative, we come to a constitutively hesitant
third term that, Blanchot stipulates, is clearly not allegory, even though it
appears to deploy the signifying function attached to that mode. However,
the symbolic narrative seems to signify without any determinate signi-
fied, to have a global signification rather than any particular one. As Paul
Davies helpfully summarizes: The story persists in and with the sense of
its meaning more than it says, of there being more to it than the characters,
descriptions, and events it recounts, but it is a surplus that no particular
meaning can satisfy.9 It is at this point that Blanchot turns to Sartre, in
order to couch the relation between language and reality that obtains in
symbolic narrative in terms of the process of negation that Sartre associ-
ates with the work of the imagination. According to a phenomenological
model that sees modes of consciousness such as perception or imagination
as intentional acts, Sartre conceives of the act of imagining as a movement
of nantisation that works by a negation of reality in order to produce the
ideality of the image. Perception is also a work of negation, but whereas
the act of perception negates a particular object in favour of its percept,
8 For instance, the Hegelian account of language given in La Littrature et le droit

la mort (1948) works in a similar way; see especially PF, pp.31220.
9 Paul Davies, Blanchot, in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. by Simon
Critchley and William Schroeder (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp.30416 (p.311).
In addition to Daviess excellent summary, another very lucid account of Blanchots
distinction between allegory, myth, and symbol is given by Timothy Clark in Derrida,
Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derridas Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.7678.
162 Ian Maclachlan
imagination negates the real world as a totality in order to posit the unre-
ality of the imaginary.10 All of this accords precisely with Blanchots sum-
mary: Lacte mme dimaginer, comme la bien montr Sartre, suppose
quon slve au-dessus des objets rels particuliers et quon soriente vers la
ralit prise dans son ensemble, non, il est vrai, pour la concevoir et la vivre,
mais pour lcarter et, dans cet cart, trouver le jeu sans lequel il ny aurait
ni image, ni imagination, ni fiction (PF, 84). The proximity of Blanchot
and Sartre at this stage is not just confined to the explicit recapitulation
that Blanchot offers here of Sartres argument about a totalizing negation
effected by the act of imagining. Earlier in Le Langage de la fiction (PF, 83),
for example, Blanchot had provided a brief depiction of the readers experi-
ence of fascination in the face of the imaginary, anticipating his later, more
extended discussion of this experience in LEspace littraire (1955),11 but
also effectively echoing Sartres evocation of the readers fascination by the
unreal world of fiction in LImaginaire a fascination which for Sartre, by
comparison with the experience of dreaming, is always limited.12 Likewise,
the poverty which, for Blanchot, characterizes the readers knowledge in
relation to the imaginary world of fiction finds a counterpart in what Sartre
calls the pauvret essentielle of the image by comparison with the infinite
possibilities afforded by perception of the real world.13
However, as Blanchot continues his exposition of the imagination in
Le Langage de la fiction, what still resembles a summary of Sartres argu-
ment in fact begins to deviate just enough to open up a chasm between
them, precisely around the question of negation:
10 For Sartres summary of perception and imagination, see the section Image et per-
ception in LImaginaire, pp.15658. Helpful expositions are given by Kearney, in
The Wake of Imagination, pp.22429, and in more detail in Poetics of Imagining,
pp.5695, and by Christina Howells, in Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.914 and 11721.
11 See EL, pp.2532.
12 Cf. LImaginaire, pp.21722.
13 Jean-Paul Sartre, LImaginaire, p.20.
Cependant, limagination va plus loin. Elle ne se contente pas de se donner, dans

labsence dun objet en particulier, cet objet, cest--dire son image; son mouvement
est de poursuivre et dessayer de se donner cette absence mme en gnral et non plus,
dans labsence dune chose, cette chose, mais, travers cette chose absente, labsence
qui la constitue, le vide comme milieu de toute forme imagine et, exactement,
lexistence de linexistence, le monde de limaginaire, en tant quil est la ngation, le
renversement du monde rel dans son ensemble. (PF, 84)
This passage hesitates between exposition of the Sartrean imagination and

a quite different version of the imaginary towards which it gestures. The
totalizing negation that it describes remains Sartrean to the extent that it is
only by virtue of such totalization that imagination may be distinguished
from perception, which also operates by means of negation for Sartre, but
negation of a particular object. Imagination effects a kind of double nega-
tion, Sartre argues, in which the nantisation already effected by intentional
consciousness is applied to the totality of reality: Poser une image cest
constituer un objet en marge de la totalit du rel, cest donc tenir le rel
distance, sen affranchir, en un mot le nier.14 In Blanchots version, on the
other hand, it is as if this negation unleashed by the act of imagining knew
no limit, and that, rather than doubling itself to produce the fixed unre-
ality that is the image, it ceaselessly moved beyond the stable confines of
the image to attain the movement of negation itself, the imaginary as such
without that arrested negativity of the image which, in effect, converts to a
positivity. It is here that Blanchots radicalized version of imaginary nega-
tion rejoins his account of symbolic narrative as a movement of significa-
tion without determinate signified. The symbolic imagination, he suggests,
seeks absolute absence, the void of a purely imaginary realm: Il ny a pas de
symbole sans une telle exigence et cette exigence, en action derrire tous les
mouvements du rcit, lempche, par sa ngation perptuellement active,
de recevoir un sens dtermin, de devenir seulement significatif (PF, 84).
This characterization of the symbol, and indeed other expressions deployed
14 Ibid., p.233.
164 Ian Maclachlan
in the rest of the paragraph in which it occurs,15 clearly imply a movement

of imaginative negation that is never complete, that never therefore suc-
ceeds as such, always remaining as an impossibility. Blanchot goes on to
be quite explicit about this:
Le symbole est un rcit, la ngation de ce rcit, le rcit de cette ngation; et la nga-

tion, elle-mme, apparat tantt comme la condition de toute activit dart et de fic-
tion et, par consquent, celle de ce rcit, tantt comme la sentence qui en prononce
lchec et limpossibilit, car elle naccepte pas de se raliser dans un acte particulier
dimagination, dans la forme singulire dun rcit achev. (PF, 85)
Blanchots disabling of dialectical models, such as Sartres account of the

double negation of the imagination, is often helpfully glossed by commen-
tators, taking the lead from some of Blanchots own formulations, in terms
of a weakening of the negative, such as to cause dialectical sublation to
founder.16 The exposition of the imagination in Le Langage de la fiction
reminds us, however, that the weakness of the negative is at the same time
an exacerbation of the negative, negation as a restless, excessive, superabun-
dant force without force: an impossible hyper-negativity.
In light of this paradoxically hyperbolic but weakened negation, it
seems as if the poverty of the image in Blanchots conception of the imagi-
nation is of a quite different order to Sartres pauvret essentielle; whereas
for Sartre the image possesses what we might call a relative poverty, com-
pared with the infinite possibilities afforded by perception, for Blanchot
the image is characterized by a sort of absolute poverty. Thus, Blanchot
15 The paragraph begins thus, for example, with my italics emphasizing the expressions
of an incomplete process: [c]est dans ce mouvement que limagination devient sym-
bolique. Limage quelle cherche [] est comme immerge dans la totalit du monde
imaginaire: elle implique une absence absolue, un contre-monde qui serait comme
la ralisation, dans son ensemble, du fait dtre hors du rel. (PF, 84)
16 See, for example, Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille, and
Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), pp.20111. In LEntretien
infini (1969), Blanchot refers to the effect of Nietzsches Eternal Return on the
notion of nihilism in terms of limpuissance du nant (EI, 224).
goes on to declare that the failure of figure and thought to coincide in

the image is itself the very essence of the symbol, in the particular sense
given to the latter term in Le Langage de la fiction, such that the symbol
is always une exprience du nant, la recherche dun absolu ngatif, mais
cest une recherche qui naboutit pas, une exprience qui choue, sans que
pourtant cet chec puisse recevoir une valeur positive (PF, 86). To pursue
the contrast of Blanchots discussion of the image with Sartres model a little
further, it is not surprising therefore their conceptions of the image should
also diverge in relation to the notions of spontaneity and passivity. Having
adopted the terms conscience perceptive and conscience imageante to
underscore the idea that both perception and imagination are intentional
acts of consciousness, and further noting that these acts of consciousness
each comprise a reflexive dimension (how they appear to themselves), Sartre
argues that perceiving consciousness appears reflexively as passivity, whereas
imagining consciousness assumes the form of spontaneity: Une conscience
perceptive sapparat comme passivit. Au contraire, une conscience imag-
eante se donne elle-mme comme conscience imageante, cest--dire
comme une spontanit qui produit et conserve lobjet en image.17 By
contrast, the insatiable hyper-negativity of the imagination in Blanchots
conception seems always to push beyond the spontaneity of the imagining
consciousness, exerting its fascination in a mode that is rather experienced
as an extreme passivity. This will become even more evident as we turn to
the discussion of the image and the imaginary in LEspace littraire.18
17 Jean-Paul Sartre, LImaginaire, p.26.

18 See also the chapter on LImaginaire in Franoise Collin, Maurice Blanchot et
la question de lcriture (1971) (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp.16089; the chapter
Lcriture, exprience de limaginaire in Anne-Lise Schulte Nordholt, Maurice
Blanchot: lcriture comme exprience du dehors (Geneva: Droz, 1995), pp.193225;
the section on Fascination et spontanit: Blanchot et Sartre in Manola Antonioli,
Lcriture de Maurice Blanchot: fiction et thorie (Paris: Kim, 1999), pp.7076; and
for an account that draws parallels with Levinass conception of the image, the chapter
Encountering the Image in Alain Toumayan, Encountering the Other: the Artwork
and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
University Press, 2004), pp.11443.
166 Ian Maclachlan
An exploration of the imaginary acts as something of a frame for

LEspace littraire, as it quickly emerges as the central concern of the
books opening section on La Solitude essentielle (1953), and the essay
on Les Deux versions de limaginaire (1951) is the second of four Annexes
that close the volume.19 More precisely, the question [m]ais quest-ce que
limage? resonates across the book, as it closes an important footnote on
language and the image at the end of La Solitude essentielle, the footnote
referring the reader to the essay included in the Annexes, which itself opens
with that very question.20 Besides the strategic position that the question
of the image seems to occupy in LEspace littraire, it is also worth noting
that Blanchots discussion consistently revolves around the image and
the imaginary, rather than the category of the imagination that had quite
readily been invoked in his earlier essays. In so far as the notion of the
imagination connotes an active power of creation (a Romantic lamp) or
even simply, in phenomenological terms, an intentional act of conscious-
ness exercised in a particular modality, the gradual effacement of this term
from Blanchots critical vocabulary is in keeping with what we have just
seen in some of those earlier essays, where the imagination is characterized
in terms that equate to an absolute poverty and an extreme passivity. In
La Solitude essentielle, Blanchots discussion of what he calls la prhen-
sion perscutrice turns on the moment when the apparent mastery of the
writer gives way to the unmasterable experience of fascination, as the word
becomes image, a shadow of itself:
19 The significance of La Solitude essentielle is further emphasized by its initial appear-

ance as Blanchots contribution to the first issue of the relaunched Nouvelle Revue
franaise, 1 ( January 1953), 7590. Les Deux versions de limaginaire had already
appeared in the Cahiers de la Pliade, 12 (Spring-Summer 1951), 11525.
20 Cf. EL, 3132, n. 1, and 341. The very brief final paragraph on p.31 and its accompa-
nying footnote were additions to La Solitude essentielle as it appeared in LEspace
littraire. Discussion of the imaginary will again occupy a privileged position in
Blanchots next volume of criticism, as Le Livre venir (1959) opens with a chapter
devoted to La Rencontre de limaginaire (LV, 918).
Lcrivain semble matre de sa plume, il peut devenir capable dune grande matrise sur
les mots, sur ce quil dsire leur faire exprimer. Mais cette matrise russit seulement
le mettre, le maintenir en contact avec la passivit foncire o le mot, ntant plus
que son apparence et lombre dun mot, ne peut jamais tre matris ni mme saisi,
reste linsaisissable, lindsaisissable, le moment indcis de la fascination. (EL, 19)
To write in the grip of the imaginary is to be in the thrall of a vision that is

at once too close and too distant to be held as an object of perception, not
something which I can see, but something which I cannot not see: vision
qui nest plus possibilit de voir, mais impossibilit de ne pas voir (EL,
29). Not only is the imaginary outside of my power, but it is something
that affects me in what Blanchot describes as essential solitude, when Je
becomes an impersonal, anonymous Il, de sorte que ce qui marrive narrive
personne, est anonyme par le fait que cela me concerne, se rpte dans
un parpillement infini (31).
This conception of the imaginary is explored more fully in Les Deux
versions de limaginaire, notably in relation to the now celebrated example
of the corpse as an uncanny image of itself. The corpse as image is described
by Blanchot as constituting an absolute resemblance such that, in the terms
we invoked earlier as dominating Western accounts of the imagination,
we might say that it is a form of resemblance without mimesis, but also
other than poiesis: Et si le cadavre est si ressemblant, cest quil est, un
certain moment, la ressemblance par excellence, tout fait ressemblance,
et il nest aussi rien de plus. Il est le semblable, semblable un degr absolu,
bouleversant et merveilleux. Mais quoi ressemble-t-il? rien (EL, 347).
The status of the corpse in relation to deaths negation of life functions in
effect as a paradigm case of the hyperbolization and concomitant weaken-
ing of the negative that we have seen to be characteristic of the image, and
which Blanchot has already recalled earlier in this essay by observing that
the image speaks to us, propos de chaque chose, de moins que la chose,
mais de nous, et propos de nous, de moins que nous, de ce moins que rien
qui demeure, quand il ny a rien (EL, 341). This less than nothing that
persists, an exacerbated but ruined negativity, corresponds to one version
of the imaginary, the one that haunts us in the experience of fascination,
168 Ian Maclachlan
and which secretly subtends the more familiar, reassuring version of the
imaginary according to which the image comes after the thing it represents,
as its idealizing and stable negation. In a manner which is characteristic of
his accounts of the strange, faltering ontology of literature, Blanchot goes on
to suggest that these two versions of the imaginary are not entirely distinct,
the image as idealizing negation of the absent object always threatening to
draw us into the other dimension of the image which refers us
non plus la chose absente, mais labsence comme prsence, au double neutre de
lobjet en qui lappartenance au monde sest dissipe: cette duplicit nest pas telle
quon puisse la pacifier par un ou bien ou bien, capable dautoriser un choix et dter
du choix lambigut qui le rend possible. Cette duplicit renvoie elle-mme un
double sens toujours plus initial. (EL, 353)21
In light of this view of the imaginary as an abyssal ambiguity that

never quite resolves into the image as positive entity or as stable negativ-
ity and that cannot be harnessed actively or spontaneously, the absence
of reference to the imagination as such in these essays from LEspace lit-
traire is unsurprising, for, as Joseph Libertson observes, [t]he imaginary
in Blanchot is [a] configuration of intimate proximity and infinite dis-
tance [], and is not understandable in terms of traditional definitions
of imagination.22 It would seem that, far from inviting any parallels with
Romantic conceptions of the imagination, Blanchots conception of the
imaginary should rather lead us to abandon the term entirely. But I think
there may be something to be gained from retaining a reworked version of
the term, and from continuing to refer to the imagination, not in relation
to a spontaneous act of imagining in the power of a creative agent, but
to denote the arrival of something that never entirely comes to pass, and
that comes, not at the behest of my consciousness as creative subject, but
to quelquun, to that anonymity to which I am exposed in what Blanchot
21 This relationship between the two versions of the imaginary is analogous to that
between the two versants of literary language, as described by Blanchot in La
Littrature et le droit la mort; see PF, 31821.
22 Joseph Libertson, Proximity, pp.10910.
calls essential solitude. Certainly, the term imagination is only deployed

rarely in Blanchots critical writings of the 1950s and later, but it does not
disappear entirely. It features prominently in the 1959 essay Vaste comme la
nuit,23 for example, where its use does admittedly seem to be elicited by the
focus of Blanchots discussion, namely Gaston Bachelards account of the
poetic image and the imagination in Potique de lespace (1957). In the con-
clusion of Vaste comme la nuit, Blanchot evokes a dominant conception
of the imagination as a mirror: Image, imagination, nous avons longtemps,
subordonnant limage la perception, limagination la mmoire et faisant
de la conscience un petit monde refltant pauvrement le grand monde,
reprsent par ces mots le jeu de notre fantaisie imitatrice (EI, 476). He
then observes that Bachelards work on the image has contributed to a
movement away from that conception, such that now nous sentons bien
quimage, imaginaire, imagination ne dsignent pas seulement laptitude
aux phantasmes intrieurs, mais laccs la ralit propre de lirrel ( ce
quil y a en celui-ci de non-affirmation illimite, dinfinie position dans son
exigence ngative) et en mme temps la mesure recrante et renouvelante
du rel quest louverture de lirralit (EI, 47677). However, the final
lines of the essay take us back, in effect, to the question of the image that
framed LEspace littraire, since Blanchot goes on to suggest that even (or
especially) this new thinking of the image cannot but leave the image as a
question, lest the abyssal ambiguity of the image be betrayed by any single
resolution of the question that it always poses: chaque fois quil est ques-
tion de limage, cest la question que nous cherchons entendre, mais pas
encore limage, o pointe le neutre (EI, 477).
It is possible that this new thinking of the imagination is not so far
from the visionary imagination described in the early essays on which
we drew at the outset of our discussion, where the double imagination
23 The essay (EI, 46577) was first published in the Nouvelle Revue franaise, 76 (April
1959), 68495. For an excellent account of this essay, see Timothy Clark, The Poetics
of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the
later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp.10714.
170 Ian Maclachlan
Blanchot found in Blake was seen as maintaining an irreducible tension

between figure and thought, a literalistic imagination whose prophetic
mode ceaselessly promises a transformation of the external world. We might
align this reading with the view of a critic like Peter Otto who, contesting
the essentially Coleridgean, idealist account that he claims still dominates
critical approaches to the imagination in Blake, argues that, rather than
being the creative power of an effectively solipsistic agent, we should under-
stand Blakes prophetic imagination in terms of a vision that is linked not
solely with the ability to form a world, but with the capacity to be moved
by things which lie outside of the world formed by the self .24
More surprisingly, it may even be possible to trace a lineage of the
reconceived view of the imagination that emerges from Blanchots work
back to the foundations of the Romantic imagination in its apparently
most idealist guise, namely in Kants thought. Here, I do not primarily
have in mind the free play of the imagination that holds sway in sthetic
experience and that gives rise to the famous purposiveness without pur-
pose of Kants Analytic of the Beautiful in the Critique of Judgement
(1790). In Les Deux versions de limaginaire, Blanchot expressly distances
himself from that aspect of the Kantian sthetic when he asserts that
[v]ivre un vnement en image, ce nest pas se dgager de cet vnement,
sen dsintresser, comme le voudraient la version esthtique de limage
(EL, 352). Rather, I mean the account of the transcendental imagination
given by Kant in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in
the version that was so important for Heidegger.25 Kants earlier account
of the transcendental imagination points to a power of synthesis which
24 Peter Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the
Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), p.13. I am grateful to Sean Gaston for drawing Ottos study to my
attention.
25 In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), trans. by James Churchill (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1962). For a clear account, see Richard Kearney, The Wake of
Imagination, pp.18995, or for a little more detail, his Poetics of Imagining, pp.4655.
Antonioli is alert to the possible connections between Blanchots view of the imagi-
precedes and make possible the faculties of sensibility and understand-

ing. Its absolutely originary status makes this version of the transcendental
imagination a formative power of poiesis rather than one of merely repro-
ductive mimesis. However, Heideggers interpretation suggests that the
peculiar priority of the transcendental imagination in relation to sensibility
and understanding is such as to endow it with what we might call, after
Blanchot, a neutral status: This formative power [of the imagination] is
at one and the same time receptive and productive (spontaneous). In this
at one and the same time is to be found the true essence of the structure
of the imagination. However, if receptivity is identified with sensibility,
and spontaneity with the understanding, then the imagination falls in a
peculiar way between the two.26 Moreover, the priority of the imagination
is such that it precedes our conscious agency or power, as Kant indicates:
Synthesis in general [] is the mere result of the power of the imagination,
a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should
have no knowledge whatsoever, but of the existence of which we are scarce
ever conscious.27 Perhaps the imagination as such a blind, unconscious
power of synthesis, falling between sensibility and understanding even as
it founds them, resembles the restless form of synthesis as irreconcilable
contradiction that Blanchot glimpsed in Blake: a power without power,
something which comes to me in anonymity, an abyssal ambiguity or origi-
nary duplicity that could only ever appear as a question.
nary and Kants transcendental imagination, although she dwells more on the Critique
of Judgement; cf. Lcriture de Maurice Blanchot, pp.7780.
26 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p.136.
27 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Smith (Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, rev. 2nd edn 2007), p.112.
Jake Wadham
Blanchot, Benjamin, and the Absence of the Work
Of the numerous connections between the work of Maurice Blanchot and

Walter Benjamin, their engagement with Romanticism is perhaps the most
deep-seated. Their major statements on the movement come at different
stages in their respective careers: for Benjamin, right at the start, in his doc-
toral dissertation, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, submit-
ted to the University of Bern in 1919, when he was twenty-six, and published
as a monograph the following year (SW I, 116200); for Blanchot, in a
mature article, LAthenum, published in 1964 at the age of fifty-six and
included in LEntretien infini in 1969 (EI, 51527). Nonetheless, Benjamins
study establishes the conceptual ground for much of what will follow in
later years, while Blanchots piece presents in miniature many of the themes
to have been developed in his writing since the 1940s. The time and age
difference notwithstanding, there are two main reasons to adopt these
texts for comparative study. The first is the conception they each have of
their subject. The scale of their engagement is inversely determined by its
scope, that is to say, the size of the debt that Blanchot and Benjamin owe
Romanticism is registered by the clarity of focus by which they define the
movement. And in each case it is the same definition. As Benjamins title
suggests, Romanticism here is German; specifically, it resides in Jena. As
such, it is early Romanticism, or Jenaer Frhromantik. As Blanchots title
suggests, this has its nucleus in the bi-annual numbers of the Schlegels
short-lived journal, the Athenum, produced between 1798 and 1800.
For both writers, then, the Romantic movement is compressed to just six
numbers of a single review, and more narrowly still, to the fragmentary
writings of just two of its four contributors, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.
Indeed, they both portray this less as a movement than as a moment, and
174 Jake Wadham
yet one that forms in and of itself an epoch. No reference to Benjamin is

made by Blanchot, but the upshot is something of a joint claim, made by
two of the most important critical voices of the twentieth century, and
a claim whose double authority has since been raised to canonical status
by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in LAbsolu littraire
(1978). The particulars and consistency of this claim will constitute the
main object of enquiry here.
A second reason for the comparative approach lies with a concept at
the centre of Blanchots mature thinking, indexed in three of the chapter
headings of his 1955 volume, LEspace littraire: LEspace et lexigence de
luvre, Luvre et lespace de la mort, Luvre et la communication.
Within the sections and sub-sections of the volume, this centre is also dis-
located, as the work is given over to an internal movement of unworking,
le dsuvrement. In the texts that make up the later volume, LEntretien
infini, le dsuvrement becomes increasingly associated with another
formulation, labsence duvre. The article on the Athenum, included
in a section entitled LAbsence de livre, may be seen as a key element in
this schema, in the questioning of the work, the works unworking, and
the absence of (the) work. Benjamins dissertation will help to provide a
perspective from which to address the question in its Romantic form.1
Blanchots approach to the Athenum is telescopic, zooming in on his

subject from afar. To this effect, his article begins with an account of the
fractured political reception accorded to the Romantics over one and a half
centuries, and how this reflects tensions within the movement as a whole
in its combination of progressive and retrograde elements. Above all, the
contradiction inherent in Romanticism unfolds over time, as its revolu-
tionary instincts grow stagnant. The initial question for Blanchot, then, is
whether it is to be judged by its premises or its results. Friedrich Schlegel
1 For a wider discussion of the problematic, see Paul Davies, The work and the absence
of the work, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. by Carolyn Bailey
Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.91107.
is presented as the symbol of this dichotomy, going from the young, radi-
cal, atheist youth to the Catholic diplomat serving in the Austrian Foreign
Office under Metternich. O est le romantisme?, Blanchot asks. Ina
ou Vienne? L o il se manifeste, riche de projets? L o il steint, pauvre
duvres? (EI, 517)
Blanchots decision to focus on the Athenum period as the mani-
festation of Romanticism in its essence is his answer to this question, but
it is one which must always bear the memory of the movements demise:
promises unkept, works unwritten or incomplete. Le dernier Schlegel est-il
la vrit du premier? (EI, 517), he asks, as if to echo the saying of Novalis
in Heinrich von Ofterdingen that fate and character are two words for the
same idea.2 He even recalls the tragic fate of Novalis himself that leaves
this novel without an ending, and the grumblings of Goethe on absent or
unfinished works. But he also points to the possibility that what is in fact
offered by the Jena Romantics is a means of establishing between the work
and its absence a new mode of relation: luvre de labsence duvre (EI,
517). Furthermore, he says, it is a task still to undertake, to receive comme
neuf, ces premiers assauts romantiques (518).
Before pursuing Blanchots reading of Romanticism, I want to turn to
Benjamin, insofar as he appears to contest in advance the basis on which
such a task might be carried out. This can be seen most explicitly in the
esoteric Afterword that he appended to the dissertation as the undiluted
essence of his thinking.3 Here he disputes the paradigmatic opposition
between potential and fulfilment:
2 Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (ed. posth. 1802), ed. by Paul Kluckhohn (Stuttgart:
Port, 1949), p.204.
3 See The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 19101940, trans. by Manfred Jacobson
and Evelyn Jacobson, ed. by Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.141.
176 Jake Wadham
The lack of poetic productivity, with which people from time to time tax Friedrich
Schlegel in particular, does not belong in the strict sense to his image. For he did not
want primarily to be a poet in the sense of a creator of works. The absolutizing of the
created work, the critical activity, was for him the highest. (SW I, 185)
A major difference seems to emerge here between Blanchot and Benjamin,

and at the very least a difference of emphasis. This may be seen in the first
instance as a question of methodology. Benjamin approaches the German
Romantics from the other side to Blanchot, that is, he begins at Jena and
proceeds by tracing the formation of their thought. As such, it is only at
the end of his study, or after, that he addresses in the most general terms
their reception by people from time to time.
The reason for Benjamins approach lies at a philosophical level. The
Romantic ambition, as he presents it, was to unite the realms of poetry,
philosophy, and science. He locates the origins of this endeavour in the
divisions opened up in the Kantian subject through the differentiation
between its pure and practical spheres of activity, as well as to the turn to
sthetics in Kants third Critique as the site of their possible resolution.
Benjamins Jena narrative thus starts in 1794 with the attempt in the lectures
of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the Wissenschaftslehre or Science of Knowledge,
to remedy the perceived crisis in idealist thought. It is via the Romantics
highly equivocal response to Fichte that Benjamin seeks to establish their
theory of art, and by extension their concept of criticism. His wider objec-
tive is to wrest this theory from the Fichtean philosophy of reflection. Since
this, I think, lies at the heart of the apparent divergence with Blanchots
Romantics in particular the emphasis on critical activity I want to give
a summary of the principal stages involved.
Fichtes concept of reflection is intended to supply the first principle and

unconditioned condition of a systematic critical philosophy that would
bring together the faculties of reason and make good the claims of the ideal-
ist project over those of its dogmatic (or realist) rival by firmly grounding
the sense that the I has of the world in the sense that it has of itself. This
philosophy is therefore centred on the unity of consciousness and self-
consciousness. The Fichtean I exists purely by dint of its own self-positing.

It posits itself without difference or delay, and so without producing a new
object. In this form, but in this form alone, is established the indivisibility
of thinking with what is thought. Fichte thereby seeks to make the concept
of reflection absolute by limiting it. The I owes its existence not just the
certainty of that existence to a unique intransitive act (Tathandlung);
but also, this spontaneous self-positing is finitely circumscribed by the Is
determinate mental representations of the world, or not-I. This is the most
perplexing aspect of Fichtes thought, relying on the obscure doctrine of the
Ansto, or check, whereby the I comes by its experience of the world as a
resistance to its own infinite striving, explaining the world to itself through
this resistance. In subsequent published versions of his lectures, Fichte
would seek to revise and clarify the nature of the relationship between the
I and the not-I, but despite the apparent advances made by the system
on its Kantian and neo-Kantian model (the removal of the thing-in-itself
as an unnecessary obstacle to the subjects encounter with the world; the
re-formulation of the I, contra Reinhold, as act rather than fact), some
significant problems remained: the sense that Fichtes idealist foundations
were less than wholly secure, and the lingering suspicion, even against his
avowed intentions, that the world could here be said to have its source in
the phantasmal projections of the I.
The fundamental innovation of Benjamins Romantics is to release the
concept of reflection from the restriction that binds it to the self-reflecting
subject. In Fichtes slimmed-down cogito of I am I, they see a duplicity,
a mode of self-relation, and so a difference at the heart of self-presence.
Following from their conviction that the act of self-positing must occur
constantly, this difference then escalates. In Benjamins terms, the thinking
of thinking becomes the thinking of thinking of thinking, and so on. The
multiplication of reflective levels would thus appear to re-open the trap-
door to the kind of infinite regress argument from which Fichte had sought
to safeguard the subject. The Romantic move, however, is to abolish the
opposition between I and not-I, and to expand the concept of reflection
beyond the subject to everything that thinks and is thought. This means
178 Jake Wadham
that instead of infinite regress, an empty hall of mirrors, they see reality
fulfilled and unfolding in universal Zusammenhang, or connectedness.
It is from the rejection of Fichtes attempt to ground the subject-object
relation subjectively that Benjamins Romantics derive their epistemol-
ogy. This is also structurally complex: objects are not simply known and
they are not known simply. The knowledge of an object is understood in
the manner of a double genitive; it consists in the evocation of the self-
knowledge nascent in what is observed. All things are seen to participate
in the process of their being known, so although they are each known indi-
vidually, they also witness a common reflexivity according to the principle
of connectedness. Benjamin specifies:
[R]eality does not form an aggregate of monads locked up in themselves and unable
to enter into any real relations with one another. On the contrary, all unities in real-
ity, except for the absolute itself, are only relative unities. They are so far from being
shut up in themselves and free of relations that through the intensification of their
reflection (potentiation, romanticization) they can incorporate other beings, other
centres of reflection, more and more into their own self-knowledge. (SW I, 146)
In the agency attributed to all that is real, what is expressed here is a ver-
sion of what is perhaps more commonly known as Romantic pantheism.
More closely, it reveals an understanding of nature as organism rather than
mechanism, where the parts arrange themselves according to the idea of
the whole, and it sets human thinking within a single absolute conscious-
ness simultaneously comprising the natural world.4 For Benjamin, the
coalescence of the subjective and the objective marks their relation as an
absence of relation, while the observation of nature (perception and experi-
ment) is cast in Romantic terminology as an ironic observation, because
any act of knowing is equally one not knowing, and because determinate
4 For a reconstruction of this conception of nature in Frhromantik, foregrounding

the influence of Spinoza, see Frederick Beisner, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept
of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),
pp.13152; 17186.
inquiry is abandoned in favour of an attending upon the self-cognition

of the observed (SW I, 148).
The significance of the Romantic theory of knowledge for Benjamins
study lies in the process by which the spiritual attitude that character-
izes observation in the natural world is directed onto the products of the
human spirit, that is, to works of art. For Benjamin, an entirely new con-
cept of the work emerges at the point where it is considered as a centre of
reflection. Like natural entities, it is both individual and relative, but this
is specifically owing to its form, which imposes limits on the work and
at the same time exposes them, singling out the work within the totality
of possible art forms. What gives the work its essence here is also what
makes it essentially incomplete. It is from this concept of the work that is
then derived the Romantic concept of criticism, whose task is to fulfil the
work: to awaken its knowledge of itself and, in raising this knowledge to
a higher power, to suspend the works individual limitations and dissolve
it in the unity of art. Criticism also differs here in one important respect
from natural observation, in that its function is simultaneously one of
judgement. Again, though, this is seen as reflexively enabled by the works
own self-judgement. Criticism is possible only insofar as the work itself is
criticizable, and this can only be understood in a strong sense: works which
do not contain the seed of their critique are simply annihilated by the lat-
ters silence. Thus the principal characteristics of this criticism are that it is
immanent, because it brings out the inner kernel of the work rather than
subjecting it to external criteria; that it is universalizing, because it reveals
the works wider connectedness to all other works; and that it is posi-
tive, because it cannot both exist and denigrate (there are no diminishing
reflections; reflection can only potentiate). In this way, and in opposition
to modern notions that would have it as a negative court of judgment
(SW I, 152), the Romantics look to set the concept of criticism on a new
intellectual plane, investing it with the philosophical seriousness of the
Kantian Kritik from which it originally springs.
The concept of criticism thus expands immeasurably in the thought of
the Romantics, and furthermore expands beyond any usual demarcation
between the critical and the creative. The relation between the work and its
180 Jake Wadham
criticism is made infinite, as the latter calls forward further reflections that
are themselves ultimately dissolved in the universal idea of art, considered
as the continuum of forms. But the next step is perhaps the most radical.
In order to avoid seeing the universal as an abstraction from existing works,
it is to conceive of this infinite continuum as itself a work. The work may
be invisible but it is still intelligible as a work.
In this mystical notion Benjamin observes the influence of both the
Platonic theory of forms and the endeavour of Winckelmann to read all
ancient poetry as a single extended poem. But as he indicates, the one actual
form that this Work takes on in the imagination of the Romantics is the
novel. This, then, is the Roman in Romantik. It is structured, once more,
according to the organic principle in nature: a manifold of individually
self-limiting sections which at the same time enter into mutually escalat-
ing reflections, organized by the idea of the whole. If Benjamin first gives
the name criticism to this operation that always looks to relate the finite
and the infinite, the particular and the universal, in his discussion of the
Romantic novel he privileges another term carried over from the theory
of knowledge: irony. Crucially, for Benjamin, Romantic irony is not to be
understood in a material or subjectivist sense. It is not an attitude of the
artist towards his art but a process occurring objectively in the work.
Benjamins Romanticism, then, is theoretically fulfilled, the principle of

potentiation, or raising to a higher plane, preferred in its formal sense to
mere subjective potential. As such, art takes on the absolute form restricted
by Fichte to the self-reflecting I. This also calls for a qualification: the
concepts of the work, of criticism, and of the idea of art are drawn from
Romantic thought such as Benjamin reconstructs it at the time of the
Athenum period. However, secondary reference is also made to Schlegels
Windischmann lectures of 180406 (given in Paris and Cologne and
named after their editor). He addresses the problem directly, arguing for
a transition in Schlegels thought after 1800. In particular, he sees in the
mid-Schlegel (i.e. of the Windischmann period) a regressive preoccupation
with the Fichtean subject.5 Nonetheless, this only re-enforces Benjamins

original objective, to identify what is specific to Jena Romanticism as such,
and to isolate it from its two overweening attachments: one, to the popular
reputation of what he calls the boundless cult of creative power understood
as the mere expressive force of the creator (SW I, 154) and this he asso-
ciates in particular with Sturm und Drang; two, at a more philosophical
level, to the Fichtean model that would make art into a mere by-product
of subjectivity (154). Reflection without the I, he states, is a reflection
in the absolute of art (134).
Benjamins strict delimitation of his subject might thus invite the
following hypothesis: that wherever Romanticism is viewed primarily in
relation to the Fichtean I, it will tend to be regarded as vain and vacuous,
the empty yearnings of a dissolute subjectivity caught between its transcen-
dental aspirations and its worldly reality. This might apply at least to Hegels
judgement of Romantic art in his lectures on sthetics, compressed into the
figure of the ironist (or just irony) who is lord and master of everything,
and becomes so by making a semblance of everything that is real, creating
or destroying it at will or whim. Hegels attack places Schlegel under the
banner of the Fichte school, and constructs the Romantic subject as an
aggregate of them: the free and sovereign I set up against a contingent
reality which it views as its own invention, and which only has whatever
fleeting value is intuitively imparted to it, not true and genuine on its own
account or through itself .6 In effect, the Fichtean I is reconfigured here
as the artist holding sway over a world which correlatively functions as an
sthetic version of Fichtes not-I. Moreover, while Hegels reading of the
5 The basic definitions of that system which Schlegel propounded in the lectures as
the system of the absolute I have, in his earlier thinking, art as their object (SW
I, 134); The standpoint of these lectures is overall a compromise between the rich
thought of the youthful Schlegel, and the already incipient Restoration philosophy
of the eventual secretary to Metternich (131).
6 G. W. F. Hegel, sthetics (1835), trans. by Thomas Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), I, pp.6465. See also pp.15960; in addition, Hegels Philosophy of Mind,
trans. by William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p.301 ( 571).
182 Jake Wadham
Romantics is intended dialectically to fulfil empty striving and to put the

negative moment in their thought to work with regard to determinate
material content, that reading continues to exert tremendous influence even
on those of his philosophical successors who do not share the overarch-
ing ambition of the programme it serves. It makes its presence felt most
forcefully, perhaps, in the writing of the early Kierkegaard, whose 1841
dissertation, The Concept of Irony, displays a similar hostility. Kierkegaards
discussion of irony in its modern (non-Socratic) form is explicitly dictated
by Hegels use of the term in the lectures on sthetics as code for Romantic
(Romantic having been employed there to describe all post-classical art),
and is accordingly grounded in an account of the Fichtean I, presented
here as Fichte himself:
He has the infinite urge of the negative, its nissus formativus [formative impulse], but
possesses it as a fieriness that cannot get started; possesses it as a divine and absolute
impatience, as an infinite power that still accomplishes nothing because there is
nothing to which it can be applied. It is a potentiation, an exaltation as strong as a
god who can lift the whole world and yet has nothing to lift.7
Like Hegel, Kierkegaard locates Schlegel in particular within this template,

portraying Romantic subjectivity as shot through with an irresolvable ten-
sion between infinite I and worldly ego that renders it both omnipotent in
imagination and impotent in actuality: [I]rony now functioned as that for
which nothing was established, as that which was finished with everything,
and also as that which had the absolute power to do everything.8
It is possible now to look at what Benjamins defence of Frhromantik

might contribute towards a reading of Blanchots 1964 article. By com-
parison, the article is remarkably concise and accessible. Blanchot tackles
7 Sren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, together
with Notes of Schellings Berlin Lectures, ed. and trans. by Howard Hong and Edna
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp.27374. The section is
entitled Irony after Fichte.
8 Ibid., p.275.
the relationship between philosophy, science, and poetry in a single stroke,

with a series of citations from Novalis, Schlegel, and Schelling on the pro-
jected merging of the three disciplines. From this stated dedication to a
new and rigorous species of knowledge, Blanchot concludes: De l aussi
que, contrairement lide courante que nous nous faisons du romantisme,
celui-ci, du moins son premier ge, puisse tre une protestation contre
la turbulence gniale (EI, 519). With the important historical rider (du
moins son premier ge), this would second Benjamins dismissal of the
popular (but in this form not strictly Hegelian) version of Romanticism
as the outpourings of an overblown subjectivity. Indeed, just as Benjamin
goes on in his analysis to give a special place to the Romantic principle of
sobriety in art, Blanchot turns to the notion of artisanship as the particu-
lar mode of Romantic protest against the facility of genius. He finds this
expressed in Novalis but also in two distantly related sources:
Valry, en apparence fort loin de la conception des romantiques, ne semble pas savoir
quil partage avec eux ladmiration voue Lonard de Vinci, en qui les uns et les
autres reconnaissent le modle de lartiste vrai parce quil pense plus encore quil
ne peut et parce que cette supriorit de lintelligence sur le pouvoir dexcution est
le signe mme de lauthenticit. Grand et pur artiste qui poursuit toutes les exigen-
ces de lart avec lobstination de la science et la force du devoir. De mme, cest Don
Quichotte qui est le livre romantique par excellence, dans la mesure o le roman sy
rflchit et sans cesse sy retourne contre lui-mme, dans une mobilit agile, fantas-
tique, ironique et rayonnante, celle de la conscience o la plnitude se saisit comme
vide et saisit le vide comme linfini excs du chaos. (EI, 51920)
Perhaps the strangest part of this passage are the words de mme. They
bind what would normally be kept separate: the subject-based model of
Romantic art, conceived in terms of the artist, and the mind-based model
of the Romantic work, conceived formally in terms of reflection. The one
obvious explanation for the difference in treatment would be that the
Don Quixote example is essentially Blanchots paraphrase of the attitude
expressed by the Romantics themselves towards this novel, but obliquely
cross-stitched, it should be noted, with fragments of a fragment from the
184 Jake Wadham
Athenum on the subject of irony,9 whereas Valry is offered in passing as

a modern point of reference, a fellow admirer of da Vinci. But on wider
inspection, it seems that there is nothing incidental about the choice of
poet here. It is possible, in fact, to see how it constitutes for Blanchot a
paradigm of Romantic thinking that extends beyond his 1964 article in
two directions. Already in 1946, eighteen years earlier, in an article entitled
Valry et Faust and included in La Part du feu (1949), he observes: Tous
les hros de Valry se ressemblent en ce sens que, matres du possible, ils
nont plus rien faire. Leur uvre est de demeurer dsuvrs, au-del de
leur propre histoire (PF, 266). On the other side of LAthenum, nineteen
years later in Aprs coup (1983), he asks:
A-t-on remarqu que, son insu, Valry imaginant lutopie de Monsieur Teste fut le
plus romantique des hommes? Dans ses notes, il crit, ingnu: Ego Je rvais dun
tre qui et les plus grands dons pour nen rien faire, stant assur [comment?]
de les avoir. Jai dit ceci Mallarm, un dimanche sur le quai dOrsay. Or, quest-ce
que cet tre, musicien, philosophe, crivain ou artiste, ou Souverain, qui peut tout
et ne fait rien? Exactement, le gnie romantique, un Moi si suprieur lui-mme et
sa cration quil se dfend orgueilleusement de se manifester, un Dieu donc qui se
refuserait tre dmiurge, le Tout-Puissant infini qui ne saurait condescendre se
limiter par quelque uvre, ft-elle sublime. (AC, 87; Blanchots italics)
Blanchot here is not simply describing Valry, or describing Monsieur Teste,

but Valry imagining Teste (or his utopia). A composite being emerges,
taking in Valry himself including, perhaps, the period of his poetic
silence and his recurring fictional character from 1896, a figure of pure and
undirected intelligence, who, as Blanchot says in his 1946 essay, sabaisse
devenir Csar ou Dieu (PF, 266).10 Thus, as with Valrys Introduction la
9 The fragment in question reads: Ironie ist klares Bewusstsein der ewigen Agilitt, des
unendlich vollen Chaos (KS, 97). Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy give this as: Lironie
est la claire conscience de lternelle agilit, de la plnitude infinie du chaos (AL,
213).
10 Benjamin also brings together the figures of Teste and Leonardo in a 1931 essay
on Valry, without, though, seeing this as a Romantic phenomenon. See Walter
Benjamin, Paul Valry (1931), in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael Jennings et al.,
mthode de Leonard de Vinci of 1895, the essence of the poet is revealed in

the hero. But it is the consistency that Blanchots portrait of Valry achieves
over a forty-year period that is most striking here, and encourages a wider
association: Blanchots figure of the Romantic genius, for which Valry is
the symbol, is in essence Hegels fickle lord and Kierkegaards idle god. In
this way, it appears to accentuate the divergence between Blanchot and
Benjamin on the question of Romantic productivity. When Blanchot, in
1946, writes: Pouvoirs purs, vains pouvoirs [] toute la contradiction qui
anime Valry est l (PF, 267), this is an early version of the Romantic contra-
diction that he identifies in 1964 (riche de projets [] pauvre duvres).
However, this degree of consistency, the specifically Hegelian portrait
of the dissolute Romantic subject suspended between all and nothing,
means that it can be anything but unwitting. The portrayal of the Souverain
is surely as knowing and as lexically fine-tuned as the paraphrase given of
the Romantics conception of irony in the example of Don Quixote above.
But it is precisely this double inscription that is important. If only obliquely,
LAthenum as a whole reiterates a long-standing critical strategy on
Blanchots part of pursuing alternate lines of thought, two slopes or ver-
sions of a given phenomenon, and shuttling back and forth between them.
Where this involves Hegel, in essays such as La Littrature et le droit
la mort (1948) or, in part, Les Deux versions de limaginaire (1951), the
strategy is to track the Hegelian line of argument and expose it to what
it cannot contain. What stands out in LAthenum is the endeavour to
tackle the argument at source, that is, in Hegels attempted overcoming of
his Romantic contemporaries.11
4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19962003), vol. II: 19271934
(1999), pp.53135.
11 At the other extreme, there appears elsewhere in Blanchots writing mediated
through Batailles reading of Kojve another version of Hegels useless sovereign,
projected onto the future at the point of its dialectical accomplishment: the last man
of history, whose power has no longer anything to which it may apply itself because
there is nothing left to negate.
186 Jake Wadham
This process may be seen, in its two stages, through a short text by
Novalis, Monologue (1798), which Blanchot quotes at length towards the
end of the essay. Novalis develops a conception of language whose essence
lies in speaking not for the sake of things but for its own sake. In Blanchots
commentary, this means that rather than silently withdrawing into the
objects it signifies, it becomes its own mode of self-presentation, une parole
non transitive (EI, 524). The shift is marked out in a complicated formula:
crire, cest faire uvre de parole, mais [] cette uvre est dsuvrement
(524). If this writing appears to undo in advance the work of the Hegelian
negative, it also reconfigures Romantic idleness as an unworking now
mobilized as a declarative force existing in and as language.
In its self-determining intransitivity, language here assumes the abso-
lute status of the Fichtean I; in Blanchots terms: la parole est sujet (EI,
524). But as pure activity, unchecked by the formal constraints of any
actual work, it is rapidly reabsorbed in Blanchots analysis into a mode of
subjectivity that simply speaks to announce its freedom from the objective
and the particular. Blanchot concludes: Le je du pote, voil donc ce
qui finalement importerait seul, non plus luvre potique, mais lactivit,
toujours suprieure louvrage rel, et seulement cratrice lorsquelle se sait
capable la fois dvoquer et de rvoquer luvre dans le jeu souverain de
lironie (524; his italics). This is a variant of what Benjamin dismisses in
his reading of the Romantics as subjectivist or material irony: the author
who elevates himself above the materiality of the work by despising it
(SW I, 162).12 In this section of Blanchots essay, it appears in a distinctly
Hegelian light: the ensuing description of the irresolute and uncommitted
je whose character is poetized to the point of lacking character, and who
ends up merely living romantically, compresses into a few lines the judge-
ment of the ironist delivered in the lectures on sthetics.13
12 In La Littrature et le droit la mort, this contempt for the impurity of the work is
attributed to Monsieur Teste; see PF, 295.
13 See G. W. F. Hegel, sthetics, pp.65, 68. Cf. Kierkegaard on living poetically, in
The Concept of Irony, p.280.
What is at least, then, a strategic divergence comes into view. Where

Benjamin seeks to resolve the Romantic contradiction (rich yet poor)
by historically isolating the concept of criticism as the Romantics major
theoretical achievement, Blanchot looks to keep the contradiction in
play, moving between two versions of the Romantic imaginaire. Still, the
question remains for Blanchot (and begins to focus itself ): what kind of
work might the work of unworking yield? In what form can the work be
unworked?
Blanchot ends LAthenum with a final arrangement of the contradiction:

[L]art romantique qui concentre la vrit cratrice dans la libert du sujet, forme aussi
lambition dun livre total, sorte de Bible en perptuelle croissance qui ne reprsen-
tera pas le rel, mais le remplacera, car le tout ne saurait saffirmer que dans la sphre
inobjective de luvre. Le roman, disent tous les grands romantiques, sera ce Livre.
(EI, 525; Blanchots italics)
This is the Bible postulated in the Athenum journal and conceived on

the basis of a plurality (the multiple books of the Book) within an organic
whole.14 It marks the culmination of the process described by Benjamin
where not only is the work critically dissolved into the idea of art, the con-
tinuum of forms and totality of works, but this totality is itself conceived
as a work. However, it becomes apparent on a closer reading of Benjamins
study that this thesis all of art is a work is in fact what he finds most
suspect in Romantic theory, in both of the related aspects that figure in
Blanchots remarks above: the idea that successive levels of reflection can
progressively approximate to the absolute as an unfolding plenitude (en
perptuelle croissance); and the idea that the absolute can be framed within
the conceptual unity of the work, or Bible. This is not just a mystical notion
for Benjamin. As Rodolphe Gasch has shown, with attention also to the
footnotes and the esoteric Afterword, it is a kind of sacrilege, the mixing
14 See KS, 100.

188 Jake Wadham
of the absolute and the profane.15 The Romantic theory robs the absolute
of its transcendence by relativizing it, that is, by reducing it to being merely
the highest intensification of the individual reflections that it comprises.
Benjamins resolve, and in particular his theological resolve, to think in
terms of the absolute will henceforth be combined with a refusal to think
it in Romantic terms as a prosaic absolute. Beginning with The Origin of
German Tragic Drama (192425; published 1928), he will look to move
from the symbolic model of the Romantics (the universal in the singular)
towards an allegorical theory built on disjunction rather than unity. To
their holistic vision, he will oppose the discontinuous figure of the mosaic,
where the individual piece is related via separation to the whole, not
subordinated to it. And in place of both the concept of criticism as the
absolutizing of the work and the theory of the novel as the working of the
absolute, he will pursue a writing that conserves the absolute (as absolute)
by observing its own critical difference. From his engagement with Marxism
in the mid-1920s through to the fragmentary convolutes of the Arcades
Project (192740), this combined initiative will take the historical form
of a redemptive criticism that seeks to salvage from oblivion the ruins of
the past through the shock they impart in the present, once blasted out
of their temporal continuum.
Like Benjamin, Blanchot relates the Romantic Bible in the passage
cited to the novel; but in 1964, his response already bears the trace of past
readings and writings. It is hard here not to think of Mallarm and the
dream of le Livre, and of Blanchots 1943 article, Mallarm et lart du
roman (FP, 18996), where he sees the poet resigned to producing only a
fragment of the Book to show that it exists (189). But where in 1943, his
comments on le Livre are set within a series of reflections on the novel, and
implicitly determined by the parameters of his own novelistic enterprise
Thomas lObscur (1941), Aminadab (1942) , in 1964, his thoughts are
15 See Rodolphe Gasch, The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics,
in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. by David Ferris (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996), pp.5074.
turned towards a different mode of writing. In the later essay, he attributes

the Mallarmean insight to Novalis, specifically that the only way to realize
Heinrich von Ofterdingen would be to invent a new art form, that of the
fragment (EI, 525).
In its interruption of the idea of the whole, in the possibility it
announces for a plural, collective writing (witnessed in the multiple sig-
natures of the Athenum), the fragment renegotiates the Romantic con-
tradiction by converting incompletion into discontinuity. It is the form
of the fragment, or rather its fragmentary form, that makes the difference:
Forme discontinue: la seule qui convienne lironie romantique (EI, 526;
Blanchots italics). This is where Blanchots own voice emerges most clearly,
but not simply to promote the stated intentions of the Romantics but also,
like Benjamin, to contest them; specifically, to contest the famous defini-
tion of the fragment in the Athenum as a hedgehog turned in on itself
and isolated from its environment. Blanchots critique gives the definition
a strong subjectivist slant: un moyen de sabandonner complaisamment
soi-mme (526). Faithful to the letter of the fragment in question, it
passes over what the Romantics have to say in the journal about organism
and about limit.16 The self-enclosure of the fragment is threatened here
by the shadow of the Hegelian judgement: se refermer sur son moi en un
isolement satisfait (EI, 526). But what is most clear is that, in challenging
the fragments isolation, Blanchot does not aim (any more than Benjamin
would) to re-set it within the Romantic continuum from which it has here
lapsed. Rather, he wishes to expose it to a different mode of separation, and
to the interval obtaining within a collection of fragments that is temporal
as well as spatial attente et pause (527). If, in the final words of the arti-
cle he states that it is to the future that Romanticism has bequeathed its
inner question and essential task, la diffrence comme forme (527), it is
16 See for example Athenum Fragment 297 (Schlegel), cited by Benjamin: A work
is formed when it is everywhere sharply delimited, but within those limits is limit-
less, when it is wholly true to itself, is everywhere the same, yet elevated above
itself (SW I, 15758).
190 Jake Wadham
at the same time to the dialogic and to the fragmentary mode of writing
that increasingly comes to characterize his own later work, from LAttente
loubli (1962) to Lcriture du dsastre (1980).
It may be that the basic and original difference between Benjamin and
Blanchots outlook on the Romantics at this point in their respective itiner-
aries is that Benjamin thinks in one direction through Kant, and Blanchot
in the other through Hegel. Yet in their own way of thinking, they are each
turned towards the thinking of the fragmentary and the discontinuous,
in what for Blanchot will be, right up to his final text, a collection of his
writings on Henri Michaux, le refus de lenfermement.
Hector Kollias
Unworking Ironys Work:

Blanchot and de Man Reading Schlegel
Why is there a need, among writers one could loosely group under the
heading deconstruction, to approach and yet immediately or just a short
moment after, subtly yet sharply disassociate themselves from German
Romanticism? On the one hand, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-
Luc Nancy show, what was inaugurated in Jena in the last decade of the
eighteenth century is still with us: le romantisme est notre navet (AL,
27). On the other hand, la fragmentation nest donc pas une dissmina-
tion (70), and in a note: Au sens pris par ce mot chez J. Derrida (70,
n. 2). Derrida himself is curiously silent about the Jena Romantics, except
for scant references, and it is Rodolphe Gasch who has perhaps been at
the forefront of this attempt to demarcate the properly philosophical pro-
cedure of deconstruction from the Romantic dilettantism of F. Schlegel,
F. Hardenberg (Novalis) and co., insisting for example that the reserve of
the infrastructures [in Derridas work] as the medium of all possible dif-
ferentiation is also distinct from the Romantic medium of reflexivity, in
which everything communicates with everything within the full presence
of the soul of the world.1 Perhaps an important, though hardly the sole
reason for these cautious attempts at differentiation is the almost inevita-
ble telescoping of Early German Romanticism as a unified movement or
moment, coupled at the same time with the equally inexorable synecdo-
chic interpretation of a text by either Schlegel or Hardenberg/Novalis (or
1 Rodolphe Gasch, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.153.
192 Hector Kollias
others) under the umbrella term Romanticism:2 this is what happens in

the citation from LAbsolu littraire (1978) above, where Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy disassociate Hardenbergs Pollen from Derridas sterile notion of
dissemination. Whilst it may appear that this desire to be close yet decisively
differentiated from Romanticism is too complex and forbidding a space
in which to enter and trace out further distinctions and adumbrations, I
nevertheless want to concentrate on a specific case where this desire and
this gesture is certainly felt, and to try to show, with the help of a point of
comparison, that this approach and consequent disavowal of Romanticism
could probably, more often than not, be seen as strategic ruse, (not even)
surface irritation, rather than compelling and insurmountable rift.
The case I am referring to is Maurice Blanchot, and the compari-
son and counterpoint, Paul de Man. Summarily, my contention is that
Blanchots pronouncements on German Romanticism, and on Friedrich
Schlegel in particular, are exemplary of this disavowal whilst at the same
time his theory and practice of fragmentary writing can be successfully
re-attached to the Romantic project if certain conditions of reading and
understanding Romanticism are put in place. De Man offers an obvious
counterpoint not only in that it is impossible to detect disavowal in a body
of work that admittedly holds Friedrich Schlegel and his notion of irony
in particular at its conceptual centre, but also because reading de Man on
Schlegel allows us to see what these conditions of reading I just mentioned
are namely, and again summarily, that the very notion of understanding
be, if not wholly abandoned, at least thoroughly called into question. On
the one hand, Blanchots engagement with Romanticism itself, chiefly in the
essay LAthenum from LEntretien infini (1969) but also in some crucial
references within Le Pas au-del (1973) and Lcriture du dsastre (1980)
will be examined as demonstrating the disavowal I have been insisting on.
On the other hand, however, once de Mans own very different investment
in Schlegel is taken into account, Blanchots notions of fragmentariness,
2 Of course I am guilty of the same curious telescoping and the same synecdochic
gesture in attempting to group together writers on, or influenced by, Derrida.
systematicity, and singularity will come to be seen in a potentially different,

Romantic (Schlegelian) light.3 This is by no means to suggest that, in the
final analysis, Blanchot (and de Man, and perhaps Derrida, and decon-
struction as a whole) will come to be equated with Romanticism, such a
suggestion is both historically and conceptually absurd. Nevertheless, points
of convergence and divergence will be explored in the hope of showing not
only Blanchots affinity with Romanticism but also, more generally, the
affiliations between the Jena project and deconstruction, along the lines of
what Derrida refers to, in connection to the nexus deconstruction/Hegel
or diffrance/Aufhebung as un point de proximit presque absolue.4
Fragment, Fragmentariness, Dsuvrement
In his essay on the Athenum Blanchot is in line with the canonical recep-
tion of the Jena project as essentially a failure: Le romantisme finit mal, cest
vrai, mais cest quil est essentiellement ce qui commence, ce qui ne peut que
mal finir (EI, 517). This is a judgment which, as the preceding paragraphs of
the essay show, stems first from a historical, not to say biographical moment.
Romanticism ends badly because Hardenberg dies young, Schleiermacher
becomes a theologian, Schlegel converts to Catholicism and finds peace as
Metternichs personal secretary. It is also a judgment already comprehended
3 Although the perniciously totalizing umbrella term Romanticism will inexorably find
its way in what follows (and taking into account that Romanticism is only ever short-
hand for German Romanticism, and even more particularly, Jena Romanticism,
itself a subset of Early German Romanticism, i.e. the writers associated with the
Athenum, all this in a monstrous sequence which would be the opposite of a syn-
ecdoche), both de Man and, in what counts, Blanchot refer to Friedrich Schlegels
writings in particular. So from now on, unless otherwise indicated, it will always be
a question of Friedrich Schlegel.
4 Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p.60.
194 Hector Kollias
in perhaps the first and most influential (despite its occasional viciousness)
judgment on the Romantics: Hegels. It is Hegel who doesnt quite name
Hardenberg as the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
but who has almost uniformly been read as intending him;5 Hegel who
dismisses both Friedrich and Wilhelm August Schlegel for their miser-
able philosophic ingredients, proclaiming that neither of them can claim
a reputation for speculative thought;6 Hegel that denigrates the lofty
attitude and the subjective position of irony as obliteration of good and
evil, started perhaps by Fichte but deified by Friedrich von Schlegel.7
The fact that Hegel starts all this is no mere coincidence, and Blanchot,
despite his own much more complicated relationship with him, more or
less agrees with Hegels pronouncements.8 But Blanchots inflection of this
failure as a necessary failure, as the ending badly of that which can only end
badly because it is essentially a beginning with no anticipation of its own
bad ending represents an understanding of Romanticism as the necessary
unworking of what it puts to work: Et certes il est souvent sans uvre, mais
cest quil est luvre de labsence duvre (EI, 517). Thus Romanticism is
aligned with Blanchots own sustained concern with the essential dsu-
vrement at work in all writing, and its failure becomes akin to the essential
failure of literature as such. Throughout the essay, Blanchots readings of
Romantic texts, especially Hardenbergs extraordinary Monolog (1798) on
the autotelic and self-referential nature of language, all display the tentative
approach of appropriation, the absorption of the Jena idiom into language
5 See Ernst Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Seattle: Washington University
Press, 1990), p.86.
6 G. W. F. Hegel, sthetics (1835), trans. by Thomas Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), I, p.63.
7 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. by Thomas Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1952), p.258.
8 See ED, 79: On ne saurait lire Hegel, sauf ne pas le lire. Le lire, ne pas le lire, le
comprendre, le mconnatre, le refuser, cela tombe sous la dcision de Hegel ou cela
na pas lieu. See also Andrzej Warminski, Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel,
Yale French Studies, 69 (1988), 26775.
reminiscent of that used previously in La Littrature et le droit la mort

(1948): On peut bien dire que, dans ces textes, nous trouvons exprimes
lessence non romantique du romantisme et toutes les principales questions
que la nuit du langage va contribuer produire au jour: qucrire, cest faire
uvre de parole, mais que cette uvre est dsuvrement (EI, 524).
It is all the more surprising then, perhaps, that when it comes to the
Romantic legacy with which Blanchots name would be most readily at
least prima facie connected, the fragment, he becomes not just more
equivocal but openly hostile. On at least two poignant occasions in his
writings Blanchot attacks Schlegels famous fragment on the nature of the
fragment, the one comparing it to a hedgehog (un hrisson).9 In Lcriture
du dsastre, he writes: Je reviens sur le fragment: ntant jamais unique, il
na cependant pas de limite externe le dehors vers lequel il tombe nest
pas son limen, et en mme temps pas de limitation interne (ce nest pas le
hrisson, ferm sur soi) (ED, 78).
And in the end of the Athenum article he writes that when Schlegel
introduces the hedgehog simile, il reconduit le fragment vers laphorisme,
cest--dire vers la fermeture dune phrase parfaite (EI, 527). He then lists
his misgivings about Schlegels simile-conception:
Altration peut-tre invitable et qui revient: 1) considrer le fragment comme un
texte concentr, ayant son centre en lui-mme et non pas dans le champ que consti-
tuent avec lui les autres fragments; 2) ngliger lintervalle (attente et pause) qui
spare les fragments et fait de cette sparation le principe rythmique de luvre en
sa structure; 3) oublier que cette manire dcrire ne tend pas rendre plus difficile
une vue densemble ou plus lches les relations dunit, mais rendre possibles des
rapports nouveaux qui sexceptent de lunit, comme ils excdent lensemble. (EI,
527; Blanchots italics)
9 The fragment itself reads: A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely
isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine;
Athenum Fragment 206, in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. by
Peter Firchow, foreword by Rodolphe Gasch (Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press, 1991), p.45. Forthcoming references to Athenum Fragments refer to this
edition, but to the number of the fragment rather than the page.
196 Hector Kollias
Blanchot here makes the mistake of deriving a theory of the Schlegelian

fragment from the sole example of the hedgehog simile. Although it would
be difficult to claim that Schlegel develops a theory of the fragment, there
are several other fragments, which Blanchot curiously forgets, in which
the fragment is understood not merely in isolation but, as in the case of a
dialogue, as a garland of fragments (Athenum Fragment 77). Even the
allegory/simile of the hedgehog implicitly points towards a relation with the
outside, even if this relation is, precisely, that of a non-relation, as Blanchot
himself could have said. Moreover, reading other Schlegelian fragments as
well as the pause that separates the fragments from each other, we find at
least two direct references (22 and 77) where the fragment is rhetorically
equated with the idea of the individual, not in the sense of the person or,
even less, subjectivity, but in the sense of the Greek atom, entire unto itself
and cut off from the world like a hedgehog. And this insistence on the indi-
vidual becomes important only when read in conjunction with the other
idea Schlegel equates with the individual, which is the system: Arent all
systems individuals and all individuals systems? (242). In a posthumously
published fragment Schlegel makes the connection even clearer: even the
greatest system is merely a fragment.10 The paradoxical relations between
universal and particular that are rehearsed in Schlegels fragments point
to a singular conception of systematicity at work, a conception that needs
to be seen in almost absolute contradistinction with the systematicity of
specular Idealism, that is to say with Hegel. A system, etymologically a
compound of connected parts, an articulated gathering of broken pieces,
is not here the Hegelian vision of the True as the Whole. Rather, it is the
ruin, the fragment of the Whole, with every one of the connected parts a
ruin and the totality itself a fragment.
This is not simply an exercise in correcting a misreading (of Schlegel,
by Blanchot), although it certainly bears upon what I earlier signalled as the
conditions for reading Schlegel. I shall have to return to these conditions,
10 Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 17971801, ed. by Hans Eichner (Toronto:

Toronto University Press, 1957), Fragment 930.
asking to what degree Blanchots reading responds to them, as well as to

what Blanchot foregrounds in his attention to the rhythmic principle of
the work in its structure after I have introduced de Mans counterpoint to
the discussion. For now, I want to address the question of Blanchots own
concern with lexigence fragmentaire as in itself the paradoxical spacing
allowing fragments to be neither a particular instantiation of the universal,
a part of the whole, nor closed up on themselves like (Blanchots) Schlegels
hedgehog: Fragmentaire: ne voulant dire ni le fragment, partie dun tout,
ni le fragmentaire en soi (PAD, 62). There can be no doubt that, despite
initial misgivings about the hedgehog fragment, Blanchot still has Schlegel
in mind when, in Lcriture du dsastre, he explicitly links his insistence on
the fragmentary with the exigency of thinking differently about the notion
of system, with the necessity to un-work the system. He quotes Schlegels
infamous fragment on the system in its entirety, but he crucially alters the
translation. Schlegel (in Firchows translation) writes: It is equally fatal for
the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide
to combine the two (Athenum Fragment 53). Blanchot adds: Avoir
un systme, voil qui est mortel pour lesprit; nen avoir pas, voil aussi qui
est mortel. Do la necessit de soutenir, en les perdant, la fois les deux
exigences. (ED, 101; my italics) Blanchots version is more protracted,
clearer, less wilfully oxymoronic but crucially, Blanchot adds that the
mind should seek to combine the two antithetical tendencies towards
systematicity and its opposite by losing them both. The paradox is the same,
but it is now inflected negatively: where Schlegel thinks there can be a
possible synthesis of the antithetical tendencies of the mind, Blanchot
prescribes a dissolution, an annihilation of them both. This is without
question related, if not directly to Blanchots well-rehearsed language of
negativity from La Littrature et le droit la mort to LEspace littraire
(1955) and beyond, then at least to the inflection present in the fragment
about fragmentariness and systematicity that comes almost immediately
before the Schlegel citation:
198 Hector Kollias
Le fragment, en tant que fragments, tend dissoudre la totalit quil suppose et quil
emporte vers la dissolution do il ne se forme pas ( proprement parler), laquelle il
sexpose pour, disparaissant, et, avec lui, toute identit, se maintenir comme nergie
de disparatre, nergie rptitive, limite de linfini mortel ou uvre de labsence de
luvre (pour le redire et le taire en le redisant). De l que limposture du Systme
le Systme lev par lironie un absolu dabsolu est une faon pour le Systme
de simposer encore par le discrdit dont le crdite lexigence fragmentaire. (ED,
99100; Blanchots italics)
This highly complex text is also quite enigmatic in that, without naming
Romanticism or Schlegel, it seems to be talking about the fragment and
the system not to mention the crucial reference to irony in Schlegels
work. The ruin of the system is for Blanchot an imposture, a ruse whereby
the system imposes its own exigency even after the ruination brought by the
fragment in its wake. Is this a criticism of Schlegel, pointing out that the
way in which Schlegel theorizes the fragment allows for the system to get
back in through the back door, to re-impose itself ? Or is Blanchot trying,
like Schlegel, to launch a critique of the system, as evidenced in the next
fragments insistence that la critique juste du Systme [] consiste [] le
rendre invincible, incritiquable, ou, comme on dit, incontournable (ED,
100)? Which is to say, is Blanchot taking the incontournable relation
between system and fragment to inhere both in Schlegel and in what he,
Blanchot, is writing about? Perhaps this is why the Schlegel citation that
follows is inflected and supplemented as it is: Schlegels levelling of the
tendencies towards systematicity and its opposite can only be allowed if
it avoids the chance of a second-level synthesis, of an Aufhebung, in other
words if it is not a raising (to a higher power, the absolute of the absolute),
but a razing, a destruction.
Attempts to differentiate Romanticism from deconstruction often
take a similar direction, insisting on the difference between the elevation
of incompleteness and fragmentariness to a higher power, its dissolution
in the absolute of literature or thought, and the inherent destruction that
the fragmentary exigency brings to bear on the work, without the redemp-
tive hope of reflective raising. Such a distinction between elevation and
dissolution is also what Blanchots commentators insist on. Timothy Clark
exemplifies this in his attempt to demarcate Schlegel from Blanchot: For

Blanchot this is not a poiesis of poiesis but a fragmentary (self )-presenta-
tion of the work in its repeatedly affirmed failure to present itself in any
determinate form.11 Clark maintains that there is the most minute and
yet decisive difference between this affirmation of the work as transcend-
ing its finitude by ironic acknowledgment of it and Blanchots notion of a
works inherent incompletion.12 But this judgment relies rather too much
on Blanchots own interpretation of Schlegel and too little on a reading
of Schlegels texts themselves. More importantly, it repeats an age-old and
remarkably persistent misreading of what is perhaps, even more than the
fragment, the cardinal and most far-reaching of Schlegels theoretical lega-
cies: irony.
Irony at Work
That Schlegels notion of irony is misunderstood or misread, consistently

and repeatedly from Hegel to Kierkegaard down to Blanchot, Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy, and Clark in the citation above is no surprise. It is
the ways the misunderstanding or misreading happens that are interesting.
And it is here that the example of Paul de Mans notion of irony, which he
avowedly elaborates from Schlegels, becomes important, not because de
Man better understands Schlegelian/Romantic irony this is precisely the
point: irony functions as a block to understanding but because he is alert
to the ways in which irony is (mis)understood, and therefore incapacitated,
rendered powerless, as he puts it: defused. It would be fair to say that de
Mans later work partly relies on demonstrating such defusions of irony,
11 Timothy Clark, Modern Transformations of German Romanticism, Paragraph, 15:3

(1992), 23247 (p.238).
12 Ibid., p.237.
200 Hector Kollias
often touching on specific readings of Schlegel as he does in The Rhetoric

of Temporality (1969) with Peter Szondis interpretation, but also in his
magnum opus Allegories of Reading (1979), the penultimate sentence of
which runs: Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstruc-
tive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other
words, of understanding.13 Although this is de Mans (nearly) final word, it
can serve as the beginning of a discussion of his reading of Schlegels irony.
Before any approach to the rather forbidding formulation the deconstruc-
tive allegory of all tropological cognitions can be reached, let me simply
note that, as Avital Ronell puts it: irony is tied up with the impossibility
of understanding: irony is of understanding14 (her italics).
This may appear simple, but it bears repeating several times (as it has
been by de Man and by others), since the reception of Schlegels notion
often departs from such a reading. It is here that we encounter that age-
old misreading of irony that I mentioned earlier. Its source is, once again,
Hegel. Hegel understands irony explicitly as false and pernicious because
it is [o]nly a manner of talking against people. Except as directed against
persons the essential movement of thought is dialectic.15 (His italics) The
possibility of irony being the essential movement of thought should be,
for the moment, kept alive but to one side. What matters is that Hegel
13 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Rilke, Nietzsche,

and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p.301. See also Paul de Man,
The Rhetoric of Temporality (1969), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric
of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1983), pp.187
208. The essay that de Man critiques in this piece is Peter Szondi, Friedrich Schlegel
and Romantic Irony, trans. by Harvey Mendelsohn, in On Textual Understanding
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986). For an interesting discussion of the
Szondi-de Man debate which understands Schlegel, de Man and Romanticism in a dif-
ferent way from mine, see Jochen Schulte-Sasse, General Introduction: Romanticisms
Paradoxical Articulation of Desire, in Theory and Practice: a Critical Anthology of
Early German Romantic Writings, ed. by Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1997), pp.144.
14 Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2002), p.128.
15 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p.101.
repeatedly (also in the sthetics and the Encyclopdia) associates irony with
a certain type of overblown and perverse subjective position, evidenced in
the figure of the Romantic poet.16 And this is an idea that Blanchot seems
to take on as well in his assessment of the Athenum: Le je du pote,
voil donc ce qui finalement importerait seul, non plus luvre potique,
mais lactivit, toujours suprieure louvrage rel, et seulement cratrice
lorsquelle se sait capable la fois dvoquer et de rvoquer luvre dans le
jeu souverain de lironie (EI, 524; his italics). Blanchot here may well talk
about the poetic activity that leads to the sovereign game of irony, but the
language he uses to describe that activity, let alone his direct causal link
between the activity and the agent as the poetic I betray the Hegelian mis-
reading I have identified. It is the same misreading de Man picks up on as a
defusion of irony, the second of the three ways that irony can be dealt with
that he isolates: First, one reduces irony to an sthetic practice or artistic
device, a Kunstmittel [] [Second], irony can be [] defused, by reducing
it to a dialectic of the self as a reflexive structure, [and] [] the third way
of dealing with irony [] is to insert ironic moments or ironic structures
into a dialectic of history.17 Blanchot never treats irony as a mere trope or
device, but he does understand irony as an expression of poetic subjectiv-
ity, and he does also, at least tacitly, understand it as a historical moment
since, although the history invoked here is not the dialectical history of
Hegel or Kierkegaard, Blanchot unmistakably historicizes Romanticism.
This he does primarily by situating Romanticism within lorientation de
lhistoire [] devenue rvolutionnaire (EI, 527). This historicizing also
takes subtler guises, not only in the sentence that follows his invocation of
the sovereign game ([i]l en rsultera la reprise de la posie, non seulement
16 In the sthetics, Hegel explicitly defines the general meaning of the divine irony of
genius as this concentration of the ego into itself , which is then directly denigrated:
the ironical, as the individuality of genius, lies in the self-destruction of the noble,
great and excellent; sthetics, pp.66, 67.
17 Paul de Man, The Concept of Irony (1977), in sthetic Ideology, ed. by Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1996), pp. 16384
(pp.16970).
202 Hector Kollias
par la vie, mais mme par la biographie, par consquent le dsir de vivre
romantiquement (EI, 524), attesting at least to the power of misreading
irony as the subjectivity doomed to romantic failure) but also in the final
pronouncements of the Athenum essay on the futurity of Romanticism
and the question et tche que le romantisme allemand [] a [] dj claire-
ment proposes, avant de les remettre Nietzsche et, au-del de Nietzsche,
lavenir (EI, 527).
This is not to suggest that Blanchot suddenly becomes Hegelian,
after the cautious negotiations with the dialectic as essential movement
of thought that permeate his writings from the time of La Littrature et
le droit la mort onwards, not to mention the obvious radical rethink-
ing of the power of the system that takes place in Lcriture du dsastre.
It is, however, to suggest that, like others before and after him, and even
though he evidently brings out of Schlegel elements that are singularly
worthwhile to him, he falls prey to the Hegelian reading of Schlegel, and
of irony in particular. And this reading is nothing other than an under-
standing, a comprehending of irony and therefore a way to defuse it.
If irony is of the understanding, it is also most extensively theorized by
Schlegel in an essay called On Incomprehensibility (1800), in which
he defends the Athenum project against charges of incomprehensibil-
ity by wholly embracing the idea: But is incomprehensibility actually
something so completely reprehensible, so base? [] Indeed, you would
all be quite apprehensive if the whole world, as you demand it, were for
once to become entirely understandable.18 Irony is incomprehensible
because in its infinite reflexivity, its incessant raising of the understanding
to a higher level, it prevents understanding from ever reaching its end, it
infinitizes it by parasitizing it, by making understanding itself ironic. De
Man is highly attentive to this last ever text of the Athenum project, as
18 Friedrich Schlegel, On Incomprehensibility, in Theory and Practice, pp.11828

(p.126). De Mans reaction to this essay begins with the ironic provocation, [y]ou
will never understand so we can stop right here, and all go home; The Concept
of Irony, in sthetic Ideology, p.164.
he is to another definition of irony by Schlegel, as permanent parabasis

(KA XVIII, 85).19 De Man glosses this with the definition: irony is the
permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes [] The allegory of tropes
has its own narrative coherence, and it is that coherence, that systematicity,
which irony disrupts.20 What de Man calls allegory of tropes is in effect
the rhetorical systematicity and sense-organisation of narrative, or indeed
of any writing, and since irony is its permanent disruption it can be said to
respond to Blanchots concern about the rhythmic principle of the work
afforded by fragmentation.
A permanent parabasis is of course a monstrous figure, representing the
structural impossibility of the work ever achieving complete intelligibility,
and de Man has exactly this in mind when he refers to it as the systematic
undoing of understanding. In the end, beyond the Hegelian misreading
of irony as subjective form, what is really at stake in the defusion of irony
as de Man understands it is a misreading of the reflexive raising of irony,
what Schlegel often refers to as the irony of irony as another form of
Aufhebung, or as a raising to labsolu de labsolu. Irony points towards a
certain kind of infinity (irony is the epideixis [exhibition, demonstration,
Darstellung even] of infinity (KA XVIII, 76), writes Schlegel), and may
indeed point to a version of what Hegel calls the spurious [schlecht] infi-
nite but what it certainly does not do, according to de Mans reading, is
point to an infinity that would transcend finitude.21 Irony is by definition
19 De Man famously cites this in The Rhetoric of Temporality, in Blindness and Insight,
p.218, and also in Allegories of Reading, p.300.
20 Paul de Man, The Concept of Irony, in sthetic Ideology, p.179.
21 My hesitation as to what kind of infinity irony points to is warranted. It bears upon
the difference between de Mans treatment of irony and the various ways in which
irony has been associated, and thereby dismissed, with the Hegelian bad infinite.
This point merits much lengthier attention than what can be afforded me here, but
suffice it to say that by treating irony as always of the understanding and never as a
speculative tool with which one would (fail to) arrive at the totality of reason, de
Man stakes a claim for a structural condition of impossibility for the generation of
meaning, an aspect that was central in all his writings. Irony may perhaps make for
bad philosophy, but it retains its rhetorical power to disrupt fundamentally any good
204 Hector Kollias
double-sided, an irony of irony in Schlegels words which infinitizes its

reflexive doubling.22 But this infinitizing carries with it its double, the fini-
tizing of infinitude, and points just as well to the inherent incompletion
of the work, the permanent parabasis or permanent interruption of the
sense-giving process. The infinitized reflexive understanding that irony calls
forth is already a finite understanding, structurally limited by the inability
ever to reach the end of (failed) understanding. As Avital Ronell writes:
Is not the disruption that irony provokes another way of saying finitude?
Irony suspends the infinite project, its work of appropriating meaning to
itself permanently, which is to say: time and again.23 The Blanchot of the
Athenum essay (and, I would add, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy as well) is
too insistent on comprehending Romanticism as a movement, on putting
it in touch with lavenir and on understanding its vicissitudes in terms of
biography to allow irony any other role than that of the sovereign game,
not grasping that the very sovereignty of the game is what also makes it
deadly. De Man, in the last words of Allegories of Reading, captures the effect
that irony has on the system by insisting that permanent parabasis is not
merely a reflective gesture, but a repetition: far from closing off the tropo-
logical system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration.24 To return to
Timothy Clarks formulation, this affirmation of the work as transcending
its finitude by ironic acknowledgment of it as opposed to the inherent
incompletion of Blanchots fragmentary writing is, if we read Schlegel as
rigorously as de Man does, wide of the mark. The ironic acknowledgment
philosophy, be it Hegels or Derridas. For the opposite view, see Rodolphe Gasch,
Structural Infinity, in Inventions of Difference: on Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.12949.
22 See On Incomprehensibility: In general, the most basic irony of irony is indeed the
fact that one easily tires of irony if it is offered everywhere and time and time again.
But what we above all want to have understood by the irony of irony arises in more
ways than one; Theory and Practice, p.125.
23 Avital Ronell, Stupidity, p.144.
24 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, p.301.
of finitude cannot result in an affirmation but in the repetitive misfire of

permanent parabasis, a dsuvrement ad infinitum.
Touching Singularities
But Blanchot did not approach Schlegel only in that essay, but also in
his own fragmentary writings, most crucially Lcriture du dsastre. And
although he retains a basic ambivalence towards Schlegel, and is inimical to
the allegory of the fragment-hedgehog, he also presents, worked-through
in his own idiom, irony as more than a sovereign game, as an element
that is crucial for the dsuvrement of the system: Ce qui dborde le sys-
tme, cest limpossibilit de son chec, comme limpossibilit de la rus-
site: finalement on nen peut rien dire, et il y a une manire de se taire (le
silence lacunaire de lcriture) qui arrte le systme, le laissant dsuvr,
livr au srieux de lironie (ED, 7980). If irony is still a game, it is now
a serious one, and one in which the system finds itself dsuvr. Irony is
here almost the agent of dsuvrement, the cause of the systems double
failure to succeed and to fail, its dbordement reaching the ironic sense of
an excess that paralyzes, a raising that razes. Although Blanchot does not
name it here, I take this to be one of the many senses in which Blanchots
notion of dsastre is intended, and, although again unnamed, it is clear to
see that the overflowing excess of the system is the systems undoing by a
singularity that could never be comprehended within the system itself.
There is a thought at work here which surely goes beyond or against the
Hegelian dialectic as the essential movement of thought. As Leslie Hill
puts it, Blanchots theory and practice of fragmentary writing, his own
conception of literature (as opposed to philosophy) dedicates itself, not to
the resurrection embodied in conceptual thought, but to the unthinkable
206 Hector Kollias
singularity that precedes the concept as its simultaneous condition of both

possibility and impossibility.25
Without wanting to cancel out obvious differences of inflection and
filiation, both de Man and Schlegel also write in the name of a singularity
that exceeds thought. Schlegel raises incomprehensibility into the trans-
valued concept of an (ironic) understanding of understanding (understand-
ing itself will be understood),26 making it the singular point from which
any system of understanding is at once understood and undone. As Avital
Ronell remarks: The charge of incomprehensibility may be linked to sin-
gularity here. There is something unassimilable, incomparable, dissociated
about the Athenum.27 The work of irony is a disaster that is repeated as
permanent interruption of the work traversed by singularity. And de Mans
meticulous tracing of the inexorable process whereby even the deconstruc-
tive allegory of tropes gives way to the disaster of irony also attests, as
Rodolphe Gasch recognizes, to a destruction of philosophical difference,
of the difference philosophy makes by virtue of its claims to generality and
universality, a destruction that takes place in the name of a singularity so
radical that it cannot be termed empirical any more, a singularity that, in
its irreducible idiosyncrasy, seeks to thoroughly foreground the possibility
of intelligibility.28
It is hard to conceive of different singularities at work in such a way,
of the possibility of there being minute yet decisive differences between
different singularities, different in anything other than the necessary plural-
ity of denominations that the singularity of which it has always been ques-
tion necessarily allows and generates: dsuvrement, incomprehensibility,
irony, disaster. The conditions of reading Schlegel to which I appealed at
the outset are met not in attempting to show him up as a philosophical
25 Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), p.112.

26 Friedrich Schlegel, On Incomprehensibility, in Theory and Practice, pp.11828
(p.127).
27 Avital Ronell, Stupidity, p.160.
28 Rodolphe Gasch, The Wild Card of Reading: on Paul de Man (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1998), p.82.
dilettante and useless, bloated ironist, nor in attempting to incorporate

his thought in a ready-made historical dialectic, nor, in the end, in grasp-
ing the infinitizing thrust of irony as a botched or bastardized attempt at
a Hegelian Aufhebung to which is contrasted a (Heideggerian and quite
possibly out of place) insistence on finitude. They are met when Hegel
is no longer allowed to cast a shadow on Romanticisms reception, when
Schlegels ironic unworking of system and totality is grasped as tantamount
to an appeal to radical singularity. Schlegel demands to be read not as a
throwback to the philosophy of reflection but, with de Man, as a theorist
of the systematic undoing of understanding or finally with Blanchot,
as a writer of the singularity that is the disaster.
Romantic Fragmentations
Leslie Hill
A Fine Madness:
Translation, Quotation, the Fragmentary
Cest ici que traduire, cette folie, revient vers nous comme limpossible
ncessit. Traduire surtout lintraduisible: lorsque le texte ne transporte
pas seulement un sens autonome qui seul importerait, mais quand le son,
limage, la voix (le phonologique) et surtout la principaut du rythme
sont prdominants par rapport la signification ou bien font sens, de telle
manire que le sens toujours en acte, en formation ou ltat naissant
nest pas dissociable de ce qui, par soi-mme, nen a pas, nest pas rang
dans le smantique. Et cela, cest le pome. Assurment, nul traducteur,
nulle traduction ne fera passer celui-ci, intact, dune langue une autre,
ne permettra de le lire ou de lentendre comme sil tait transparent. Et
jajouterai: heureusement. Le pome, dans sa langue dorigine, est toujours
dj diffrent de cette langue, soit quil la restaure, soit quil linstaure, et
cest cette diffrence, cette altrit, dont le traducteur se saisit ou dont il
est saisi, modifiant son tour sa propre langue, la faisant dangereusement
bouger, lui retirant lidentit et la transparence qui la rduiraient au sens
commun, comme dit Valry.
Maurice Blanchot, La Parole ascendante ou Sommes-nous
encore dignes de la posie? (notes parses)1
Unlike his close friends Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas; unlike
such long-standing collaborators as Dominique Aury and Jean Paulhan;
unlike such substantial allies as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy; unlike such commanding presences
1 In Vadim Kozovo, Hors de la colline (Paris: Hermann, 1984), pp.12627.

212 Leslie Hill
as Hlderlin and Mallarm, Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, Maurice

Blanchot was not a published translator. And yet, from the outset, a con-
cern with translation traverses almost the entirety of Blanchots critical
writing, both as a general question about the relationship of the literary
work to itself and as a specific requirement bearing on the accessibility of
individual texts, not least by way of such emblematic names as Hlderlin,
Schlegel, Novalis, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, and Celan, all of whom Blanchot
read in the original German, and selections from whose work, as occasion
demanded, he was responsible for rendering into French.
Blanchots commitment to reading texts in their original language
was part of a calculated strategy (which also explains why he has relatively
little to say about work written in English, Italian, Russian, or Spanish). As
early as 1942, for instance, reviewing Charles Maurons controversial deci-
sion to devise French prose translations of Mallarms seemingly obscure
French poems, Blanchot was insistent that the work of any poet, in so far
as it was foundational rather than mimetic or expressive, was inseparable
from the exact words deployed. Le premier caractre de la signification
potique, cest quelle est lie, sans changement possible, au langage qui la
manifeste (FP, 127). The same conviction prevailed to the end. Jamais je
naurais parl de Hlderlin, Blanchot told Vadim Kozovo in 1981, si je ne
lavais lu dans sa langue de mme, Kafka. Lire Heidegger en allemand,
he observed in another letter to Kozovo, est relativement ais (plus facile
que de le lire en franais). Lire Hlderlin dans sa langue est une inpuis-
able exaltation.2
Implicit in this fidelity to the language of the work there was however
a Babelian conundrum. For if the singularity of the writing of Hlderlin
or Kafka was absolutely inseparable from the idiom of the work, how
might it be possible to speak to that work from within the confines of
another tongue, necessarily grounded on the implacable exclusion of the
original language? The question was not simply one of national or cultural
2 Maurice Blanchot, letters to Vadim Kozovo, 22 July 1981 and 22 April 1982, in Lettres
Vadim Kozovo, ed. by Denis Aucouturier (Houilles: Manucius, 2009), pp.51, 66.
boundaries. As the example of Mallarm showed, literature not only resisted

interlingual translation, it was irreducible to intralingual paraphrase too.
This was however only one side of the story. Just as no text could be writ-
ten without making itself available for reading, so no poem, story, novel,
or textual fragment could be composed without offering itself for trans-
lation. For a text to resist translation was by that token, then, already to
require it. Translation was perhaps an impossible task, it was nevertheless
an inevitable and necessary one. But like the act of criticism, it fell subject
to a strange double injunction: that of saying everything that could be
said about a work, yet only in so far as it was limited to saying what was
not already said by the work, required to repeat it from beginning to end,
in other words, not however as itself, but as always already different from
itself. Translation was not simply a matter of differences between languages,
but of difference in language. The translators task, wrote Blanchot, with a
nod of agreement to Benjamin, was accordingly to affirm that difference,
alluding to it, dissimulating it, sometimes revealing it and often accentuat-
ing it. Le traducteur, he continued,
est un crivain dune singulire originalit, prcisment l o il parat nen revendi-

quer aucune. Il est le matre secret de la diffrence des langues, non pas pour labolir,
mais pour lutiliser, afin dveiller, dans la sienne, par les changements violents ou
subtils quil lui apporte, une prsence de ce quil y a de diffrent, originellement,
dans loriginal.3
With the exception of two relatively brief articles explicitly devoted

to the question, alongside various other tangential or occasional remarks,
Blanchot in his writing seems notably discreet on the question of transla-
3 Maurice Blanchot, Reprises, Nouvelle Revue franaise, 93 (September 1960), 47583

(pp.476, 477); A, 71. Blanchot himself reprises these remarks, first written in response
to Maurice de Gandillacs translation of Benjamins uvres choisies (Paris: Julliard,
1959), in Cours des choses, one of the internal discussion documents for the ill-fated
Revue internationale, in EP, 6162. Le traducteur, declared Blanchot, sera, dune
certaine manire, le vritable crivain de la revue (EP, 61).
214 Leslie Hill
tion.4 The appearance is nevertheless deceptive. For at countless moments

of his own Blanchot was active precisely as a singular, subtle, and sometimes
violent translator. In what follows, it is this hitherto little-known dimension
of Blanchots writing that I would like to explore. In this, I shall be guided
by two questions that ask to be considered in close proximity: how does
Blanchot respond to his task as translator, and what are the implications
for his relationship to the texts he translates in so far as, like all writing,
they come not only from others, but from the Other?
I should begin however with a caveat. Translation for Blanchot was
arguably in the first instance an ancillary, even clandestine activity, the
ostensible purpose of which was to supplement the main business of criti-
cal commentary. There is as a result only limited information available in
Blanchots text about the translations used, how far these were already
in the public domain, how far they were silently modified by Blanchot,
or how far they were due to Blanchot himself. A degree of conjecture is
therefore inevitable. In some cases, all that can be said with confidence
is that the versions given by Blanchot diverge, sometimes slightly, some-
times significantly, from standard or generally available editions. At the
same time, however, in so far as the translations used by Blanchot are an
integral part of his own work, they may in some sense be deemed to have
been authorized by him. Whatever its provenance, in other words, every
translation cited by Blanchot may be thought to bear the imprint of the
writers signature or countersignature.
From 1945 onwards, of the many writers Blanchot had occasion to
quote by far the most enduring was Kafka, on whose diaries and letters
Blanchot comments at some length. Up to 1949, for the essays collected
in La Part du feu (1949), Blanchot seems mainly to have relied on Pierre
Klossowskis 1945 edition of Kafkas Journal intime, itself based on Max
Brods 1937 selection from the writers unpublished papers.5 Three years
4 See PF, 17387; A, 6973.

5 See Franz Kafka, Journal intime, suivi de: Esquisse dune autobiographie, Considrations
sur le pch, Mditations, trans. by Pierre Klossowski (Paris: Grasset, 1945).
later, on the evidence of Kafka et lexigence de luvre, from March 1952,

and La Mort possible, which appeared eight months later, both later form-
ing part of LEspace littraire (1955), Blanchot was drawing directly on
Max Brods complete German text of the Tagebcher that had appeared
the previous year. A parallel French edition, translated by Marthe Robert,
did not come out till 1954.6 Setting the two French versions side by side,
together with Kafkas original German, is instructive. Here for instance
is Blanchot in 1952, translating a crucial passage from Kafkas notebooks
from 13 December 1914, when the writer was hard at work on Der Prozess
(1925):
En revenant la maison, jai dit Max que sur mon lit de mort, condition que les
souffrances ne soient pas trop grandes, je serai trs content. Jai oubli dajouter, et plus
tard je lai omis dessein, que ce que jai crit de meilleur se fonde sur cette aptitude
pouvoir mourir content. Dans tous ces bons passages, fortement convaincants, il
sagit toujours de quelquun qui meurt et qui le trouve trs dur et y voit une injustice;
tout cela, du moins mon avis, est trs mouvant pour le lecteur. Mais, pour moi qui
crois pouvoir tre content sur mon lit de mort, de telles descriptions sont secrtement
un jeu, je me rjouis mme de mourir dans le mourant, jutilise donc dune manire
calcule lattention du lecteur ainsi rassemble sur la mort, je garde lesprit bien plus
clair que celui-ci dont je suppose quil se lamentera sur son lit de mort, ma lamentation
est donc aussi parfaite que possible, elle ne sinterrompt pas dune manire abrupte
comme une lamentation relle, mais elle suit son cours beau et pur.
Roberts 1954 attempt at the same passage runs as follows:
Au retour, je dis Max que, supposer que mes souffrances ne soient pas trop gran-
des, je serai trs satisfait de mourir. Joubliai dajouter et je lai omis dessein par
la suite que ce que jai crit de meilleur tient cette capacit que jai de mourir
content. Dans tous ces passages russis et fortement convaincants, il sagit toujours
de quelquun qui meurt, qui trouve trs dur de devoir mourir, qui voit l une injustice
ou tout le moins une rigueur exerce contre lui, de sorte que cela devient mouvant
6 See Maurice Blanchot, Kafka et lexigence de luvre, Critique, 58 (March 1952),

195221; La Mort possible, Critique, 66 (November 1952), 91533; EL, 63101, 10134;
Franz Kafka, Tagebcher 191023, ed. by Max Brod (1951) (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1967);
Journal 19101923, trans. by Marthe Robert (Paris: Grasset, 1954).
216 Leslie Hill
pour le lecteur, du moins mon sens. Mais pour moi, qui crois pouvoir tre satisfait
sur mon lit de mort, de telles descriptions sont secrtement un jeu, car je me rjouis
de mourir dans la personne du mourant, jexploite de faon bien calcule lattention
du lecteur concentre sur la mort et je suis bien plus lucide que lui, qui, je le suppose,
gmira sur son lit de mort; si bien que ma plainte est aussi parfaite que possible, elle
nest pas non plus interrompue brusquement comme pourrait ltre une plainte relle,
elle suit son cours dans lharmonie et la puret.
Here finally is Kafkas original text:
Auf dem Nachhauseweg sagte ich Max, dass ich auf dem Sterbebett, vorausgesetzt
dass die Schmerzen nicht so gross sind, sehr zufrieden sein werde. Ich vergass hinzu-
zufgen und habe es spter mit Absicht unterlassen, dass das Beste, was ich geschrie-
ben habe, in dieser Fhigkeit zufrieden sterben zu knnen, seinen Grund hat. An
allen diesen guten und stark berzeugenden Stellen handelt es sich immer darum,
dass jemand stirbt, dass es ihm sehr schwer wird, dass darin fr ihn ein Unrecht und
wenigstens eine Hrte liegt und dass das fr den Leser, wenigstens meiner Meinung
nach, rhrend wird. Fr mich aber, der ich glaube, auf dem Sterbebett zufrieden sein
zu knnen, sind solche Schilderungen im geheimen ein Spiel, ich freue mich ja in
dem Sterbenden zu sterben, ntze daher mit Berechnung die auf den Tod gesammelte
Aufmerksamkeit des Lesers aus, bin bei viel klarerem Verstande als er, von dem ich
annehme, dass er auf dem Sterbebett klagen wird, und meine Klage ist daher mg-
lichst vollkommen, bricht auch nicht etwa pltzlich ab wie wirkliche Klage, sondern
verluft schn und rein.7
Between the versions provided by Blanchot and by Robert, who refers

in her introduction to Blanchots March 1952 article, there is, one can see, a
large measure of consensus. There are nevertheless some notable differences.
Perhaps the most revealing has to do with the respective treatment of what
Kafka calls diese Fhigkeit zufrieden sterben zu knnen, this capacity to be
able to die content. Blanchot and Robert, naturally enough, both opt for
the expression, mourir content. They deploy it however differently. Robert
attributes what is at stake to a first-person singular self, and translates: cette
capacit que jai de mourir content (emphasis mine). Blanchot, on the
7 EL, 10910; Franz Kafka, Journal 19101923, pp.41011; Tagebcher 191023, pp.320
21. The entry does not feature in Klossowskis 1945 collection.
other hand, is more literal, more neutral too, and refrains from mention-
ing a personal subject. Blanchot does not psychologize Kafkas remarks, in
other words, but sensing the need for something less assertive, less heroic
even, refers instead, in the absolute, to cette aptitude pouvoir mourir
content. Similarly, where Robert is tempted to explicate Kafkas third sen-
tence by writing that il sagit toujours de quelquun qui meurt, qui trouve
trs dur de devoir mourir (emphasis mine), thereby adding an arguably
unwarranted charge of personal pathos, Blanchot follows Kafkas German
syntax more closely, and simply writes: il sagit toujours de quelquun qui
meurt et qui le trouve trs dur, in the process perhaps inadvertently omit-
ting Kafkas mitigating clause, and placing maximum stress on the idea
of injustice. Other translating decisions tend in a similar direction. For
klarerer Verstand, Blanchot has lesprit bien plus clair, while Robert has
plus lucide; for klagen, Blanchot puts se lamenter and Robert gmir; for
schn und rein, Blanchot prefers beau et pur, Robert dans lharmonie et
la puret. These are minor differences, each of which is more or less justi-
fied by the source text. In every case, however, it is apparent that Robert
displays greater willingness to force the tone, literary or psychological, of
Kafkas original. Blanchot on the other hand is less given to expansiveness,
attends more carefully to the philosophical or literary singularity of Kafkas
writing, and cleaves more closely to the letter of Kafkas text, even at the
risk of literalism verging on clumsiness.
Blanchots translating choices are not arbitrary ones. They are informed
by his critical reading of Kafkas text in just the same way as his interpreta-
tion is informed by those translating decisions. Translating and interpreting
go together. Witness his suggestive if incomplete version of the final sen-
tence in the opening paragraph of Das Schloss (1926), which, in Max Brods
edition, famously runs: Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrcke, die von der
Landstrasse zum Dorf fhrte, und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor,
which Alexandre Vialatte in his standard French text of 1938 renders as:
K. resta longtemps sur le pont de bois qui menait de la grandroute au vil-
lage, les yeux levs vers ces hauteurs qui semblaient vides. Unconvinced,
no doubt, as others have been, by the excessive theological implications of
Vialattes version, Blanchot in 1964, silently excising much of the sentence
218 Leslie Hill
for contextual reasons of his own (even as he suggests in passing that tout
le sens du livre [de Kafka] est dj port par le premier paragraphe), pro-
poses instead, more literally: K. demeura longtemps, les regards levs vers
lapparence vide (EI, 578, n. 1).8
Three aspects of Blanchots approach to Kafka in his capacity as occa-
sional translator should be noted. The first is the extent to which Blanchot
responds to the idiomatic texture of Kafkas writing. While producing a
version that is fluent and accurate, Blanchots aim is plainly to avoid natu-
ralizing Kafkas text by making it conform to prior literary, critical, philo-
sophical, or psychological assumptions. Sobriety, neutrality, literalism:
these are Blanchots guiding imperatives as translator (and as critic). The
second aspect worth emphasizing has to do with the literary critical context
in which Blanchots versions of Kafka appear. In so far as their purpose is
evidential or illustrative, they are not only inevitably fragmentary, they are
also explicitly staged as quotations. In both respects, they present themselves
at the same time as they present what they say. Their status is double: they
feature within Blanchots French text as part of the critics own exposition;
but they also serve as mute witnesses testifying to the German words of
another, not accessible as such, only present on the page in so far as they
are simultaneously absent from it. The effect is complex, and introduces
into Blanchots critical writing a strange distance without distance which,
detaching every finite quotation from itself, leaves it hanging as a kind of
provisional tribute to the infinite silence that inhabits or traverses it. The
effect is not limited to Blanchots criticism. Already in LArrt de mort
8 Compare Franz Kafka, Das Schloss (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983), p.7; Le Chteau, trans.
by Alexandre Vialatte (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), p.7. As fresh editions based on Kafkas
manuscripts rather than Brods sometimes over-cautious redaction became available,
so too revised French translations appeared. Blanchot remained unimpressed, remark-
ing in a letter to Kozovo (7 October 1983) that [m]alheureusement les nouvelles
traductions de Kafka ne valent gure mieux (Lettres Vadim Kozovo, p.108). On
Blanchots version of the phrase: Die Leibeskrfte reichen nur bis zu einer gewissen
Grenze from Das Schloss, quoted in EI, 556, see my Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot:
Writing at the Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.21921.
(1948) a sentence from Kafka, taken from Brods early biography and duly
translated into French ([s]i vous ne me tuez pas, vous me tuez), plays an
important structuring role, and it may be remembered, as Derrida points
out, how much the narrators liaison with Nathalie also turns on a differ-
ence between and within languages. La langue de lautre rend la parole
la parole, et oblige tenir parole. En ce sens, adds Derrida, il y a langue
de lautre chaque vnement de parole.9
The third important aspect of Blanchots translations of Kafka fol-
lows from this double structure of responsiveness and responsibility. Any
translator translating a text, in other words, necessarily countersigns that
text. Reading Blanchot translating Kafka, then, is not a matter of reading
Kafka through a glass darkly, but of simultaneously re-reading Kafkas text
and that glass itself. Some years ago, Christophe Bident drew attention in
an article to the special significance of certain dates in Kafkas diary, nota-
bly the night of 22 September 1912 (in the course of which Das Urteil
(1913) came to be written), for a critic to whose birthday that date almost
corresponded.10 Readers of that article will not be surprised to learn that,
in reviewing Kafkas correspondence with Felice in May 1968, translating
as he did so large stretches of the text himself, Blanchot mistranscribed
an important date, attributing Kafkas penultimate letter to Felice, not
to 30 September 1917, but to 20 September, ten days earlier. Two days
later, 22 September 1917, Kafkas diary entry consisted of a single word:
Nichts precisely what an older (or younger?) Blanchot would glimpse
through a window-pane.11 Blanchots error is trivial. And yet, in this text
entitled Le Tout Dernier Mot, devoted to Kafkas almost very last word,
9 Jacques Derrida, Parages (1985) (Paris: Galile, rev. edn 2003), p.179. On Kafka
in LArrt de mort, see my Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit,
pp.20613.
10 See Christophe Bident, LAnniversaire la chance, Revue des sciences humaines, 253:1
(1999), 17382.
11 See A, 311, n. 1. Compare Franz Kafka, Briefe an Felice, ed. by Erich Heller and
Jrgen Born (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1976), pp.75457; Tagebcher 191023, p.382. On
Blanchots window-pane or vitre, see ED, 117.
220 Leslie Hill
and constituting Blanchots own almost very last word as a contributor

to the Nouvelle Revue franaise (from which he withdrew five months
later, contributing only four more articles to the journal in the remain-
ing thirty-five years of his life), it is hard not to conclude that in reading
and translating Kafka Blanchot was not only decrypting the signature of
another, from whom he was separated by language, religion, history, and
much else besides, but also encrypting his own: as other than he was. It is
of course, as Blanchot probably knew, in such minor details as dates that
the unconscious speaks. No error, Freud maintained, ever occurs by chance,
only by dint of secret necessity.
Translation offered other opportunities for such signature effects. To
confront an existing translation while also having separate access to the
original is to be addressed stereophonically, so to speak, by a text and by
its double, and become all the more acutely aware of what does or does
not cross the divide that opens between them. The temptation is to rework
the translation, if only to overwrite it with a supplementary trace. Any
text can always be translated otherwise, not least, as Blanchot put it in his
prefatory note to the 1950 version of Thomas lObscur, in that [i]l y a, pour
tout ouvrage, une infinit de variantes possibles (TO, 7). When Blanchot
has recourse to a translation done by a third party, then, it is accordingly
relatively unusual for the text to remain unchanged, even though the modi-
fications involved may often seem insignificant. Take for instance this pas-
sage from Novalis as rendered by Armel Guerne in his 1956 anthology, Les
Romantiques allemands:
Il y a quelque chose de drle, vrai dire, dans le fait de parler et dcrire; une juste
conversation est un pur jeu de mots. Lerreur risible et toujours tonnante, cest que
les gens simaginent et croient parler en fonction des choses. Mais le propre du lan-
gage, savoir quil nest tout uniment occup que de soi-mme, tous lignorent. Cest
pourquoi le langage est un si merveilleux et fcond mystre: que quelquun parle tout
simplement pour parler, cest justement alors quil exprime les plus originales et les
plus magnifiques vrits. [] De mme en va-t-il galement du langage: seul celui
qui a le sentiment profond de la langue, qui la sent dans son application, son dli,
son rythme, son esprit musical; seul celui qui lentend dans sa nature intrieure et
saisit en soi son mouvement intime et subtil pour, daprs lui, commander sa plume
ou sa langue et les laisser aller: oui, celui-l seul est prophte.
Blanchot reprises this passage in his 1964 article on the Athenum, noting
as he does so that Armel Guerne qui a traduit ce texte (Les Romantiques
allemands []) et qui je lemprunte, en rappelle le titre: Monologue, quil
commente ainsi: Tout crit est, essentiellement, un monologue lintrieur
du langage. As silent proof perhaps that no monologue in language is
ever truly a monologue, Blanchot nevertheless ever so slightly reworks it,
so it now reads:
Il y a quelque chose dtrange dans le fait de parler et dcrire. Lerreur risible et ton-
nante des gens, cest quils croient parler en fonction des choses. Tous ignorent le
propre du langage: quil nest occup que de lui-mme. Cest pourquoi, il constitue un
fcond et splendide mystre. Lorsque quelquun parle tout simplement pour parler,
cest justement alors quil dit ce quil peut dire de plus original et de plus vrai Seul
celui qui a le sentiment profond de la langue, qui la sent dans son application, son
dli, son rythme, son esprit musical seul celui qui lentend dans sa nature intrieure
et saisit en soi son mouvement intime et subtil, oui, celui-l seul est prophte.
This was Novaliss original:
Es ist eigentlich um das Sprechen und Schreiben eine nrrische Sache; das rechte
Gesprch ist ein blosses Wortspiel. Der lcherliche Irrtum ist nur zu bewundern, dass
die Leute meinen sie sprchen um der Dinge willen. Gerade das Eigentmliche
der Sprache, dass sie sich bloss um sich selbst bekmmert, weiss keiner. Darum ist
sie ein so wunderbares und fruchtbares Geheimnis, dass wenn einer bloss spricht,
um zu sprechen, er gerade die herrlichsten, originellsten Wahrheiten ausspricht.
[] So ist es auch mit der Sprache wer ein feines Gefhl ihrer Applikatur, ihres
Takts, ihres musikalischen Geistes hat, wer in sich das zarte Wirken ihrer inneren
Natur vernimmt, und danach seine Zunge oder seine Hand bewegt, der wird ein
Prophet sein12
12 Novalis, Monologue, in Les Romantiques allemands, trans. by Armel Guerne (Paris:

Descle de Brouwer, 1956), pp.21819; Maurice Blanchot, LAthenum, Nouvelle
Revue franaise, 140 (August 1964), 30113 (pp.30809); in EI, 51527 (p.523). For
the original text, which Blanchot may also have encountered in Martin Heidegger,
Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p.241, see Novalis, Werke, ed. by
Gerhard Schulz (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1981), pp.42627. Blanchot returns
to the idea of a Sprachtrieb (or speech-drive) posited by Novalis in EI, xxvi, 336.
222 Leslie Hill
For seemingly idiosyncratic stylistic reasons, then, Blanchot abbreviates

Guernes text, rearranges word order (merveilleux et fcond, for instance,
becomes fcond et splendide), and simplifies its syntax. He adjusts its
vocabulary, admittedly at the expense of some accuracy (the substitution
of trange for drle reinforces the modernity of Novaliss text, but loses
the exact sense of nrrisch: mad, crazy, scatter-brained), and attenuates
its more explicitly metaphysical implications (replacing les plus originales
et les plus magnifiques vrits by ce quil peut dire de plus original et de
plus vrai). Blanchot, in a word, improves Guernes translation, in the sense
of both rectifying it and making it more readable (at an earlier stage in
his career, it may be remembered, Blanchot worked not only as a jobbing
reporter but also as an after-hours ghost writer). More importantly, as he
encounters this text dealing with the strangeness of language and the need
to be sensitive to languages inner movement, Blanchots strategy is to apply
to the text which he is retranslating the same principles as it sets out, with
the result that Novaliss prose is ever so slightly detached from itself, and
now prompted, or forced, to deliver more explicitly to its readers of 1964
the futural thinking it secretly carried.
Blanchots intervention into Novalis as rendered by Guerne is relatively
discreet, and more or less defensible on stylistic or philosophical grounds.
Elsewhere, this is less obviously the case. A more remarkable instance of
rewriting concerns a brief fragment from Hlderlin which Blanchot had
placed at the foot of the penultimate page of the first (and only) issue of
Comit in October 1968. For once, Blanchots responsibility for the transla-
tion, confirmed by Dionys Mascolo, is beyond question.13 The fragment is
in the form of a tribute to friendship, and reads as follows: La vie de lesprit
13 See the letter to Gilles Deleuze (28 September 1988) in which Mascolo quotes an
abbreviated version of the passage in Gilles Deleuze, Deux Rgimes de fous, textes et
entretiens 19751995, ed. by David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2003), pp.30809. In
a letter dated 18 April 1994, Mascolo confirmed to me Blanchots authorship of the
translation, writing: Il peut vous intresser de savoir que la traduction de ladmirable
posie de Hlderlin, lavant-dernire page du bulletin pense extraite de la lettre
de H. Bhlendorff (automne 1802) cette traduction, donc, est de Blanchot.
entre amis, la pense qui se forme dans lchange de parole par crit et de vive
voix, sont ncessaires ceux qui cherchent. Hors cela, nous sommes pour
nous-mmes sans pense. Penser appartient la figure sacre quensemble
nous figurons.14 Hlderlin specialists will, perhaps, just about recognize
these words, drawn from a famous letter to Bhlendorff written around
mid-December 1802, upon Hlderlins return from France, shortly after he
began seeking a publisher for his translations from Sophocles (a factor that
was far from indifferent to Blanchot, who, like Benjamin, whom he closely
followed, viewed Hlderlins Sophocles translations as an absolute limit,
proof, as he put it, que traduire est, en fin de compte, folie (A, 73)). Like an
earlier missive to Bhlendorff, Hlderlins letter speaks primarily of what,
in his notes to Antigone, the poet calls vaterlndische Umkehr, patriotic
reversal Blanchot in a 1955 essay translates retournement natal (EL, 365)
which reflects the paradoxical circumstance, as Hlderlin has it, that the
most difficult challenge is to learn the free use of what is most natural and
proper, which it is possible to grasp only by dint of a lengthy detour taking
the poet far from home to some foreign land (which in Hlderlins case was
southern France). Having mooted this, Hlderlins 1802 letter concluded
as follows: Die Psyche unter Freunden, das Entstehen des Gedankens im
Gesprch und Brief ist Knstlern ntig. Sonst haben wir keinen fr uns
selbst; sondern er gehret dem heiligen Bilde, das wir bilden. In her 1948
translation of Hlderlins letters, with which Blanchot was almost certainly
familiar, Denise Naville offers a rather different translation. She writes: La
Psych entre amis, la naissance de la pense la faveur dune conversation
ou dune lettre sont choses ncessaires aux artistes. Sinon elles nous font
14 Comit, 1 (October 1968), 31. Surprisingly, the quotation seems not to have been
included in subsequent republications of the Comit material. It is however men-
tioned under the heading Hlderlin in the list of contents annotated by Blanchot
reproduced in facsimile in crits politiques: 19531993, ed. by ric Hoppenot (Paris:
Gallimard, s. Les Cahiers de la NRF, 2008), p.256.
224 Leslie Hill
dfaut nous-mmes; alors quelles doivent faire partie de limage sacre

que nous faonnons.15
In Blanchots version, a number of features again stand out. First, in
place of Psyche, meaning: soul (Psyche in Roman myth was also Cupids
girlfriend, whom he visited only at night to avoid being seen), stands the
surprising choice of the phrase la vie de lesprit, with its strong Hegelian
overtones (as in the key proposition from the Phenomenology, much fre-
quented by Blanchot, that the life of Spirit (das Leben des Geistes) is not
the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation,
but rather the life that endures and maintains itself in it).16 Second, there is
the use of a plural rather than a singular verb, which alters the relationship
between Psyche and the birth of ideas, now treated as distinct items. Third,
there is the bold replacement of the word Knstler, artists, by the expres-
sion ceux qui cherchent, explicable enough in the aftermath of May 1968
but barely acceptable otherwise. Fourth, there is the division of Hlderlins
second two-part sentence into two separate sentences no longer bound
together hypotactically, but standing in loose paratactic juxtaposition.
Finally, faced with the relative obscurity of this second sentence (does the
adjective keinen qualify Gedanke, as Blanchot contends, or is it a refer-
ence to the twin subject of the previous sentence, as Naville assumes?), it
is noticeable that Blanchot opts for the more literal, and grammatically
more correct, of the two readings, albeit at the risk of some redundancy
in his final version, which repeats the word pense or penser three times
over, compared to Hlderlins one.
Between 1802 and 1968, between Nrtingen, Wrttemberg, and
Paris, France, between the final throes of the First French Republic and the
15 For the original text, see Friedrich Hlderlin, Werke und Briefe, ed. by Friedrich
Beissner and Jochen Schmidt, 3 vols (Frankfurt: Insel, 1969), II, p.946; Friedrich
Hlderlin, Correspondance complte, trans. by Denise Naville (Paris: Gallimard, 1948),
p.312. On vaterlndische Umkehr or retournement natal, see EL, 36574.
16 G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Michel, 20 vols (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970), III, p.36; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977), p.19.
convulsions of the Fifth, between Hlderlins fevered correspondence and

the charged meetings of the Comit daction tudiants-crivains, there were
for Blanchot many possible parallels, and it was these that his uprooting
and readdressing of Hlderlins words to Bhlendorff sought to emphasize.
Between these two series of historical events, however, there was also dis-
symmetry, underlined by the collision between epochs, languages, and con-
text brought about by Blanchots incongruous appeal to Hlderlin within
the pages of a semi-clandestine political magazine, and made starker still
by the idiosyncratic manner of his translation. That the effect was however
calculated by Blanchot is clear from the fact that the passage from Hlderlin
resonates decisively with another fragment, also translated from German,
most likely by Blanchot himself, which appeared some pages earlier at the
end of an unsigned piece entitled: Rupture du temps: rvolution, in which
there appeared these famous lines from Benjamin:
Le dsir conscient de rompre la continuit de lhistoire appartient aux classes rvo-

lutionnaires au moment de laction. Cest une telle conscience qui est affirme par
la rvolution de juillet. Dans la soire du premier jour de lutte, simultanment mais
par des initiatives indpendantes, plusieurs endroits, on tira des coups de feu sur
les horloges des tours de Paris. (EP, 127)
The quotation is taken, as readers will know, from possibly the very last text
in the form of a series of notes or fragments that Benjamin completed
before his death in summer 1940: the so-called theses On the Concept of
History. Published in German in New York in 1942, these first appeared
in French in a translation by Pierre Missac five years later, in the October
1947 issue of Les Temps Modernes, alongside an essay entitled la ren-
contre de Sade by none other than Blanchot. There is therefore every
reason to believe the writer had long been familiar with Benjamins text.
In Missacs 1947 version, the extract cited and retranslated by Blanchot
read as follows:
226 Leslie Hill
La conscience de faire voler en clats la continuit historique caractrise laction

des classes rvolutionnaires. [] Pendant la rvolution de Juillet stait produit un
incident o cette conscience sexprimait encore. Au soir du premier jour de lutte, en
plusieurs points de Paris, en mme temps et de faon spontane, des coups de feu
furent tirs contre les horloges.17
By autumn 1968, when Comit was assembled, Benjamins original text,

following publication of the two-volume Schriften in 1955, had of course
become more easily accessible, and it is this Blanchot clearly had before
him in 1968. It runs as follows:
Das Bewusstsein, das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen, ist den revolu-
tionren Klassen im Augenblick ihrer Aktion eigentmlich. [] Noch in der Juli-
Revolution hatte sich ein Zwischenfall zugetragen, in dem dieses Bewusstsein zu
seinem Recht gelangte. Als der Abend des ersten Kampftages gekommen war, ergab
es sich, dass an mehreren Stellen von Paris unabhngig von einander und gleichzeitig
nach den Turmuhren geschossen wurde.18
Revolution, Benjamin argued, was less a culmination of history than its

interruption, a moment in time outside of time, when time itself was bid
to stop, in order to leave a gap for the unforeseen. The historical materi-
alist, he wrote, cannot do without this notion of a present which is not
a transition, but in which time takes a stand (einsteht) and has come to a
standstill.19 For Blanchot too, who may also once have been, like Benjamin,
17 Walter Benjamin, Sur le concept dhistoire, trans. by Pierre Missac, Les Temps
Modernes, 25 (October 1947), 62334 (p.632); la rencontre de Sade appeared in
the same issue, 577612; occupying the intervening pages was a short story, Le Boa,
by Marguerite Duras, who would also have her part to play twenty-one years later
in the Comit daction tudiants-crivains.
18 Walter Benjamin, ber den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
197489), I: 2, pp.70102.
19 Walter Benjamin, ber den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, I: 2,
p.702; On the Concept of History, in Selected Writings, ed. Michael Jennings et
al., 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19962003), IV: 193840
(2003), p.395.
a reader of Carl Schmitt, politics was inseparable from the possibility of

its suspension: a csura, an interval, a vacuum or vacancy of power. (It is
remarkable that, reading Benjamins essay on the Critique of Violence,
as he surely did in de Gandillacs translation in autumn 1959, at a time of
violent political turmoil in France, Blanchot should have passed over it
in silence were it not perhaps that the lesson it gave, from Blanchots
point of view, was already a familiar one.) For his part, Benjamin thought
this moment inseparable from the possibility of redemption, a possibility
that in turn had to do with the chance of quotation. Nothing that has
ever happened, Benjamin wrote, should be regarded as lost to history.
Admittedly only to redeemed humanity is its past fully granted. Only for
redeemed humanity, in other words, has the past in each of its moments
become citable (zitierbar). Each lived moment becomes a citation lordre
du jour and that day is the Day of Judgement (der jngste).20 The Day
of Judgement, however, was not simply a time for the fragment and for
quotation; it was also a time for translating, whence, as Blanchot put it, in
a bold paraphrase of Benjamins own argument, un messianisme propre
chaque traducteur, si celui-ci travaille faire crotre les langues en direc-
tion de ce langage ultime, attest dj dans chaque langue prsente, en ce
quelle recle davenir et dont la traduction se saisit (A, 70).21 Alongside
a poetics of translation, then, there was then also a politics, informed by
Benjamin, finding expression in the drafts for the Revue internationale,
and, now by way of Hlderlin and Benjamin, similarly at work in the texts
contained in Comit.
Let me conclude by citing two final examples of Blanchot at work as
translator. The first is from LEntretien infini (1969), a book, which, even
before it properly begins, offers its reader no fewer than five epigraphs,
20 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I: 2, p.694; Selected Writings, IV, p.390;

translation modified. Blanchot comments on Kafkas use of the expression, der
Jngste Tag, in ED, 21617. On the relevance of Schmitt for an understanding of the
political in Blanchot, see my Not In Our Name: Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter,
Paragraph, 30:3 (November 2007), 14159.
21 Compare Walter Benjamin, uvres choisies, p.64.
228 Leslie Hill
the last of which, added only at proof stage, is taken from Nietzsches
Zarathustra, where, in the chapter entitled Der Genesende, it features
as part of the philosophers address to his totemic animals, the serpent
and the eagle, to whom he announces this most abyssal or abgrndlich
of thoughts: the thought of eternal return. Es ist eine schne Narrethei,
das Sprechen, runs Nietzsches text, damit tanzt der Mensch ber alle
Dinge. Or as LEntretien infini has Zarathustra explain: Cest une belle
folie: parler. Avec cela, lhomme danse sur et par-dessus toutes choses.
Once again, there are good reasons for believing this translation to be
Blanchots own. Genevive Bianquis, for instance, in her standard 1947
version of Zarathoustra, probably the one most familiar to Blanchot and
his readers, has, rather differently: Cest une douce folie que le langage:
en parlant lhomme danse sur toutes choses.22
As far as Blanchots version is concerned, two aspects are immediately
striking. The first is its verbal redundancy. True, one of the numerous dif-
ferences between German and French is that, in German, it is possible to
use prepositions of place with either the accusative or the dative to express
movement or rest. French, on the other hand, has to make do with an
uninflected noun system with the onus falling on the verb. In tackling
Zarathustras pronouncement, Blanchot is evidently concerned to empha-
size the movement implicit in Nietzsches use of ber + alle Dinge in the
accusative, which is why he resorts to the tactic of translating it not once,
but twice: first as sur (meaning: above), then as par-dessus (meaning:
over and beyond). In doing this, Blanchot also gives the phrase an abyssal
turn: for it now not only holds within itself the thought of eternal return,
springing over linear time by way of an endless circle, precisely because of
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by

Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols, 2nd edn (Berlin: de Gruyer/dtv,
1988), IV, p.272; EI, v; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, trans. by
Genevive Bianquis (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p.201. I am grateful to Duncan Large
for assistance in identifying the source of this quotation, and to John McKeane for
information about Blanchots page proofs for LEntretien infini held in the Houghton
Library, Harvard University, MS Fr 497.
its position as an epigraph, dominating and overstepping the whole text

of LEntretien infini like a vast epochal parenthesis; it also does precisely
what it says, which is to dance over all things, including notably Blanchots
already finished book, just about to be sent to the printer. In so doing,
the epigraph erodes and erases the difference between inside and outside,
undermines the closure of the book, and testifies to the infinity of writing,
a limitlessness it underwrites by showing precisely how no single trans-
lation suffices to convey what Zarathustra says, only a redoubled act of
translation that, like the thought of eternal return which it embodies and
countersigns, empties language of self-identity to affirm its unpredictable
futurity as always other than what it was.
My very last example consists of a fragment from Friedrich Schlegel,
one Blanchot first quoted in 1964, then again in 1969, and finally in 1980. It
will enable me to draw together some preliminary conclusions. First, here is
Schlegels original text, from the Athenum Fragments: Es ist gleich tdlich
fr den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also
wohl entschliessen mssen, beides zu verbinden. Armel Guerne in 1956 in
Les Romantiques allemands (perhaps misreading Schlegels verbinden: to
combine, as verlieren: to lose) translates as follows: Il est aussi mortel pour
lesprit davoir un systme et de nen point avoir. Il faudra donc bien quil
se rsolve perdre lun et lautre. Blanchot in his 1964 Athenum essay, in
which he elsewhere largely adopts Guernes versions of Schlegel as his own,
nevertheless rewords this particular fragment, as follows: Avoir un systme
est pour lesprit aussi mortel que de nen pas avoir: il faudra donc bien quil se
dcide perdre lune et lautre de ces tendances. Having repeated this version
unchanged in LEntretien infini in 1969, Blanchot had the opportunity, nine
years later, to compare his original 1964 amended version with the more
literal, more accurate reading provided by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and
Jean-Luc Nancy in their 1978 anthology, LAbsolu littraire, considerably
influenced by Blanchots essay, but where Schlegels Athenum Fragment
appears as follows: Il est aussi mortel pour lesprit davoir un systme que
de nen avoir aucun. Il faudra donc quil se dcide joindre les deux. None
of this, however, prevented Blanchot in Lcriture du dsastre (1980), two
years further on, from countersigning the following standalone fragment
230 Leslie Hill
which, like several others in the book, was itself also both a quotation and
a translation: Avoir un systme, voil qui est mortel pour lesprit; nen
avoir pas, voil aussi qui est mortel. Do la ncessit de soutenir, en les
perdant, la fois les deux exigences. (Fr. Schlegel).23
Blanchots reprise of Schlegel in 1980 corresponds to nothing less than
a concerted rewriting. He first redoubles the aporia implicit in the fragment
by replacing Schlegels original single clause ([e]s ist gleich tdlich) by
two evenly counterbalanced clauses, each negating the other. He then excises
from his version the notion that Geist (spirit), as the subject of the sentence,
is in the position of having to decide, all of which Blanchot overwrites with
a reference to impersonal necessity. Third, though its counterpart nowhere
figures in the original German, he maintains the word perdre: to lose or
to spoil, introduced probably in error by Guerne in 1956, the implications
of which are affirmed even more emphatically by Blanchot in 1980. Finally,
in the closing sentence, Blanchot sets aside Schlegels appeal to unification,
and reiterates the aporia with which the fragment began, suggesting now
that the deathly effects of both a system and an absence of system should
be affirmed, that is, simultaneously maintained and ruined. As the reader
at the end of Blanchots fragment encounters the name of Schlegel, it is
clear that this attribution, despite the presence of an authorial name, has
been neutralized, made impersonal and anonymous. For what one reads in
the fragment is no longer the Romantic according to Schlegel, but what,
refusing to impose any hierarchy between them, Blanchot in LEntretien
infini calls: le neutre le fragmentaire.
It could always be argued that here, if not elsewhere, Blanchot the
translator shows little respect for the words of others. The writer has long
been associated with what has sometimes been called an ethics of alterity,
which is often taken to consist of infinite regard for the Other. How, then, it
23 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, ed. by Ernst Behler and Hans
Eichner, 6 vols (Paderborn: Schningh, 1988), II, p.109; Les Romantiques allemands,
p.263; Maurice Blanchot, LAthenum, Nouvelle Revue franaise, 140 (August 1964),
312; EI, 526; AL, 104; ED, 101.
may be asked, can respect for Schlegels writing lead to such a strange, droll,
or even violent translation as that committed by Lcriture du dsastre? It is
worth remembering, however, that the messianic, whether in Benjamin or
in Blanchot, has little to do with obedience, piety, or other ethical or moral
norms. It has to do with the demand for justice, which infinitely divides.
Which means not only that there can never be one final, faithful, just
translation, but also that translation cannot but affirm in what it translates
the infinity without which it would not occur at all. All translation in this
sense and this is how Blanchots rewriting of Schlegel may perhaps best
be understood aspires to the status of an act of redemption. And if the
task of translation is infinite, what this implies in turn, as Levinas would
often put it, is that a text always contains far more than it can possibly
contain. It follows from this that the task of translation this impossible
necessity, as Blanchot calls it is to affirm within and beyond the letter of
a text the infinity secretly contained within it, never available as such, and
to which it is possible to bear witness only by an act of calculated infidel-
ity. Only in infidelity, in other words, is the chance of a just response to be
found. If so, this is no doubt the fine madness, the belle folie, invoked by
Zarathustra, to which translation, quotation, the fragmentary, similarly
but differently, owe their future.
Maebh Long
A Step Askew: Ironic Parabasis in Blanchot
Blanchots uvre presents a body of work exploring experimental forms of

writing that probe and play with interruption, discontinuity, and dissym-
metry. While always resistant to categorization, the diversity and alterity
of his texts are not reduced when described as a search for a writing of con-
tinuous interruption, a writing such that la continuit du mouvement de
lcriture puisse laisser intervenir fondamentalement linterruption comme
sens et la rupture comme forme (EI, 9). The importance of interruption for
Blanchot has been repeatedly emphasized by his commentators; in Maurice
Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (1997), Gerald Bruns writes that [i]f
one could assign a characteristic figure of speech to Blanchots thinking, it
would be the parenthesis: a figure of interruption.1 Timothy Clark notes
the continually self-interrupting movement2 within Blanchots works,
and Gary Mole sees in Blanchots writing a self-renewing interruption
interrupting itself at every turn, preventing affirmation and negation from
cancelling each other out.3 Fragmenting Blanchots texts is an incessant
interruption which both produces and performs the faltering, skewed
movement of a language beset by internal fissures, its endless, disruptive
self-exegesis generating a faintness faintly murmuring.
1 Gerald Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), p.8.
2 Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derridas Notion and Practice
of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.204, n. 6.
3 Gary Mole, Levinas, Blanchot, Jabs: Figures of Estrangement (Gainsville: University
Press of Florida, 1997), p.159.
234 Maebh Long
Blanchots essay Traces (1963) describes les puissances dinterruption

at work in the fragments that make up the poetry of Edmond Jabs, powers
which operate so that ce qui se propose lcriture (le murmure ininter-
rompu, cela qui ne sarrte pas), doit sinscrire en sinterrompant (A, 252).
The fracture that occurs is not only marque par la fragmentation potique
ses diffrents niveaux de sens, mais interroge et subie, puis ressaisie et
rendue parlante, toujours deux fois et chaque fois redouble: dans lhistoire
et dans lcriture en marge de lhistoire (252). From the anarchic rupture
inherent to language to the catastrophic ruptures of historical events, Jabss
and Blanchots interruption pertains to form and content, to literary
event and historical event, to the work and the exegesis of the work, to the
work and the unworking or worklessness of the work. There is an excess to
interruption, an overdetermination that multiplies and splits to produce
lacun. Exemplified by the endless alteration of pas (step/not) the
affirmative movement of the step is always haunted and disrupted by the
negative (non-)movement of the not interruption steps in throughout
Blanchots work. As Leslie Hill writes on La Folie du jour (1973), Blanchots
stumbling narrative leads narrator and reader into an experience where
each step forward is necessarily a step back.4 Each step forward is a step
back, but each step is also not a step at all, or a skewed step, a step always
interrupted. The step/not of interruption, a persistent interruption that
interrupts itself, is represented best, not by Brunss proposed figure of
parenthesis, but by Friedrich Schlegels permanent parabasis.
Parabasis exemplifies the movement of interruption as well as the
transgression and elliptical turning that results in the endless murmuring
of Blanchots works. The skewed step of parabasis is a permanent step,
which is an interrupted or failed step; a step that steps over itself. In step-
ping it steps away from stepping and thus turns away from itself, playing
on the double meaning of pas. As a permanent step there is both move-
ment and stasis in parabasis, and so it produces a fragmentary writing that
is [l]interruption de lincessant, whereby linterruption [a] en quelque
4 Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), p.194.

sorte le mme sens que cela qui ne cesse pas (ED, 40). Blanchots writing
performs Schlegels permanent parabasis, where as an anacoluthon the
work turns in and away from itself, disrupting discourse by conversing on
that discourse, a self-renewing and ceaseless interruption that fragments
the work with simultaneous dissymmetric voices. As Blanchot writes in
LEntretien infini (1969), la parole est tourne vers ce qui dtourne et se
dtourne. [] Elle est la plus franche en son travers, toujours persistant
dans linterruption, toujours en appelant au dtour (EI, 43). This turning
and detouring, this infinite interruption, is parabasis.
The term parabasis is derived from the Greek verb parabainein (to
step forward). It describes a dramatic device used in Greek Attic comedies
whereby the flow of the plays primary action was interrupted when the
chorus stepped out to speak directly to the audience. During the action of
the play proper the chorus watch the actors, but for parabasis they turn to
face the audience, and speak on a number of themes that do not directly
relate to the plot of the play itself. In the course of the seven sections of
parabasis, the fame and skill of the poet is lauded and defended, his rivals
attacked, the audience flattered or mocked, the gods and the muses praised,
humorous and satirical stories told and explanations given. Parabasis steps
back from the plays plot without being wholly removed from it; it breaks
the dramatic illusion of the play and introduces a sense of otherness and
estrangement. The chorus steps away from its role as spectator and becomes
a central spectacle, commenting on the play and the poet with an ambigu-
ous voice, as it presents opinions which are undecidably those of charac-
ters, performers, the poet or the public. The section which contains the
poets defence, often referred to as parabasis proper, is delivered in the first
or third person, and although some argue that it was spoken only by the
coryphus (the chorus leader), this is subject to debate. While a digression
and complete in itself, parabasis was also highly intertextual, referencing
other plays by the poet and his rivals. Parabasis was therefore a digression
or interruption of the plot by a voice or chorus of voices presenting a com-
mentary on the poet, play, and political situation from an undecidable point
of view. It was a monologue or soliloquy that in its engagement with past
236 Maebh Long
plays and themes was also a dialogue, which the involvement of multiple
voices rendered even when spoken by one a cacophonic polylogue.5
One of Friedrich Schlegels most famous definitions of irony reads:
irony is a permanent parabasis6 (KA XVIII, 85). This has often been
read as referring to the breaking of illusion associated with parabasis, and
hence German Romantic irony is understood to be that which calls atten-
tion to the work as unreal or fictive. However, reading the step of paraba-
sis as using reality to demonstrate the illusion of the work in Brechtian
fashion this is just a play is a misreading, both of Romantic irony and
of the role of parabasis within Greek comedy.7 Raymond Immerwahr
notes that Schlegel referred to the dissolution of illusion by the distinct
and separate name of arabesque,8 but even without this information it
should be clear that parabasis performs a more subtle role than simply
dividing reality from illusion. The interruption that takes place in para-
basis is scripted, and as such as fictional as the primary action. While the
5 For more on parabasis, see Gregory Sifakis, Parabasis and Animal Choruses:
A Contribution to the History of Attic Comedy (London: Athlone, 1971) and Thomas
Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
6 Here and henceforth, all translations from the German are my own, unless otherwise
stated.
7 Gregory Sifakis goes so far as to claim that parabasis could not have been an inter-
ruption of dramatic illusion as Greek audiences would have never been involved
in a dramatic illusion of reality as we understand it. He argues that Greek drama
did not attempt to realistically represent human life on stage and there was no urge
to understand actors to be the characters they portray. Since actors were only ever
understood as actors, there was no illusion that was broken when they dropped their
roles. Hubbard however disagrees with this reading; even when theatre is highly
stylized, audiences accept the actors as the people/gods/forces they portray. When
the characters drop masks to present themselves differently there is an undeniable
change in reception. Such playing with forms was, he feels, an important part of
Greek comedy; see Thomas Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy, p.28.
8 Raymond Immerwahr, The Practice of Irony in Early German Romanticism,
in Romantic Irony, ed. by Frederick Garber (Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad, 1988),
p.82.
chorus members may literally or metaphorically unmask themselves, and

speak as real people, that is, as actors or as the poet, what disturbs the fic-
tion of the drama is another fiction. The audience is recognized, but it is
recognized as audience, as a construct inherently complicit in the artifice
of theatre. The interruption is bound by the laws of the play, and as such
plays its own interruption. Thus parabasis does not serve to remind the
audience of the fiction of the play, and thereby highlight the reality of
that which lies beyond the play, but rather shows that the artistic fiction
of the play is a reflection on and of the artistic fiction of the world, which
has no more reality than that of the play. Hence the German Romantic
demand as voiced by Schlegel: we demand irony: we demand that events,
men, in short the play of life, be taken as play and be represented as such.9
Parabasis becomes an overstepping of the boundaries of fiction and reality,
a crossing or transgression of their limits that presents a strange or uncanny
version of life and of drama.
Schlegel saw the work as what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy call the sujet-uvre (AL, 203), where the work is the encyclop-
dia or entire spirit of the author to the extent of being the author-made-
work. In creating the work the subject creates herself, and at the moment
of the completion of the subject-work casts off this old subjectivity to
move beyond her old self and towards the infinite. Hence the permanent
becoming of the Romantic work, and the permanent becoming of the
Romantic subject; each moment of creation (of the subject-work) is a
moment of destruction (of the subject who created the subject-work). The
desire to create a work independent of the creator is an impossible desire;
the subject will step into the work to the point whereby the subject is the
work and the work is the subject. The subject-work is however expressed
through the objective form of language, which moves the subject beyond
herself into the universal symphilosophy. The subject-work is the subject,
9 Friedrich Schlegel, Rede ber Die Mythologie (1800), in Kritische Friedrich-

Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols (Munich: Schningh, 1958), II:
Charakteristiken und Kritiken I: 17961801 (1967), pp.31128 (p.323).
238 Maebh Long
but the subject self-presenting through a medium over which she has no
control. As such, the subject-work as a discourse of the subject and the
subjects desire is always interrupted or unworked by the subject-work as
discourse of language. The work, the subject, and language exist in a per-
manent parabatic interruption that renders them mutually contaminated
and lacking secure boundaries.
The parabatic relation between the work and the subject steps in a
different direction in Blanchot. The German Romantic subject-work is
inverted, so that prior to the act of writing the subject is a pure absence de
lui-mme (PF, 302). It is the act of writing that creates the writer. However
there can be no symmetry between the work and the subject, as lcrivain
appartient luvre, mais ce qui lui appartient, cest seulement un livre
(EL, 16). The writer desires the work, but never gets more than its substi-
tute, or shadow, the book. For Blanchot there is no subject moved towards
symphilosophy; the act of writing is in a sense an act of negative poiesis,
an unproduction or unworking. The subject who writes is interrupted by
the subject in and of the work, but parabatically interrupted to the extent
that the permanent digressions reveal only the absence of any initial plot,
subject or foundation from which to digress. The work creates the writer
by undoing or unworking him, by revealing him to be less than a subject.
The writer is therefore not an author in the classical sense, but a place of
passage, of the emission of a voice that captures the murmur and detaches
itself from it.10 Thus parabasis in Blanchots work is an interruption of the
work and writer, but the step taken is more radical than Schlegels. Hence
we see the interrupting step of parabasis can move in either direction,
reversing the active/passive polarity. The writer and the work step into
each other and disturb the space of the other, but the step is the reverse of
that taken by Schlegel.
10 Jean-Luc Nancy, in Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview

with Jacques Derrida, trans. by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Who Comes After
the Subject, ed. by Eduardo Cadava et al. (Routledge: New York, 1991), pp.96119
(p.99).
Originally, parabasis was a moment of self-conscious self-reflection

during which the performers or poet reflected on the play from within/
without the play. However, for Schlegel, parabasis was a complete inter-
ruption and cancellation of the play,11 a voluptuousness or potency that
he opposed to repetition and reflection.12 As Werner Hamacher writes,
parabasis interrupts self-reflection while allowing it to be; it is both the
step back that allows for reflection and the step of complete interruption
of representation and (self-)positing.13 Parabasis becomes an anti-form,
an anacoluthic interruption of subject that allows the subject to be, inter-
rupted. The Greek poet that reflected on himself in parabasis was not the
poet but an actor/character reciting scripted lines about a fictive repre-
sentation of the poet, and the reflection that occurred was not reflection
but a skewed presentation of a fiction. Even when the poet himself spoke
on stage as himself and under his own name, he played at being a poet of
the same name, and acted himself. As we learn from Le Pas au-del (1973),
when writing the only certainty is [l]a certitude quen crivant il [celui
que je ntais pas] mettait prcisment entre parenthses cette certitude, y
compris la certitude de lui-mme comme sujet dcrire (PAD, 9).
The step of parabasis is not the action of a strong subject, since to
write is to lose the power to say I. To start to write is to take the step that
deprives you of yourself, so, you become il/he/neuter. You become he. As
Blanchot writes, [i]l, cest moi-mme devenu personne, autrui devenu
lautre, cest que, l o je suis, je ne puisse plus madresser moi et que celui
11 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler et al.,

35 vols (Munich: Schningh, 1958), XI: Wissenschaft der europischen Literatur:
17951804 (1958), p.88.
12 Friedrich Schlegel, Fragment 2173, 17981801 Fragmente zur Poesie und Litteratur
II und Ideen zu Gedichten, in Literary Notebooks 17971801, ed. by Hans Eichner
(London: Athlone, 1957), p.215.
13 Werner Hamacher, Position Exposed: Friedrich Schlegels Poetological Transposition
of Fichtes Absolute Proposition, in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature
from Kant to Celan, trans. by Peter Fenves (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996), pp.22260.
240 Maebh Long
qui sadresse moi, ne dise pas Je, ne soit pas lui-mme (EL, 23). Language
is no longer the language of the self, as there is no I, but the language of
alterity, the language that no one speaks, that ne serait rien dautre quune
allusion au dtour initial que porte lcriture, qui la dporte et qui fait que,
crivant, nous nous livrons une sorte de dtournement perptuel (EI,
564). Identity is interrupted, the neutrality of the other, who now speaks,
means that les porteurs de paroles, les sujets daction ceux qui tenaient
lieu jadis de personnages tombent dans un rapport de non-identification
avec eux-mmes (564). The step of parabasis brings the subject into the
dark place of the neuter, where the subject becomes the murmuring chorus,
a passive plurality of the third person.
Parabasis is the point that steps between fiction and reality, between
work and subject, the subjective and the objective. Parabasis is the stepping
into supposedly separate spaces, the transgressing of limits and bounda-
ries that shows that each law, truth or reading exists only in relation to its
transgression-infraction, as il faut quil y ait franchissement pour quil y ait
limite, mais seule la limite, en tant quinfranchissable, appelle franchir,
affirme le dsir (le faux pas) qui a toujours dj, par le mouvement imprvis-
ible, franchi la ligne (PAD, 38). Transgression becomes a relation of non-
relation that does not, in crossing, give rise to another limit, but reveals that
the limit, already crossed, also remains uncrossable, and outside. Parabasis
is the impossible overstepping of the limits of limitation. This stepping
between frames is perfectly seen in Blanchots rcit La Folie du jour, where
the title steps into the text, as allusion to the title, as mention of the title, as
quotation of the title, all within the text itself. The intrusion of the outside
frame into the work causes it to turn in on itself, and undoes the illusion
of a static unit that complies with the legality of the system of work and
title. In Derridas essay on La Folie du jour, he notes how the rcit turns in
on itself, as the lines with which the rcit begins [j]e ne suis ni savant
ni ignorant (FJ, 9) are revealed to be the story the narrator is telling to
the doctors.14 The narrative tells itself telling the narrative, quotes itself,
steps into itself to turn in on itself, and disallows any notions of begin-
ning and ending. In a line that describes without naming this movement
of parabasis, Leslie Hill notes how the effects of this stumbling rhythm of
advance and return, reprise and interruption, perseverance and paralysis,
are everywhere to be found in Blanchots texts.15 Texts step into themselves,
interrupt themselves, and move between frames and registers in parabatic
disorder.
Paul de Man defines parabasis as the interruption of a discourse by a
shift in the rhetorical register.16 Parabasis permanently disrupts the narra-
tive line and disallows the existence of any primary or overt meaning; the
disruption occurs on all interpretative levels, and the play is dissolved, the
work unworked as infringement follows infringement. Infinite interrup-
tions unwork the work as infinite narrative readings exist simultaneously
and meaning is wholly indeterminate. These discourses become an infi-
nite conversation, whereby possible meanings do not interact, but follow
Blanchots understanding of conversation given in Lcriture du dsastre
(1980), where he writes:
Sentretenir, non seulement ce serait se dtourner de dire ce qui est par la parole le
prsent dune prsence , mais cest, maintenant la parole hors de toute unit, ft-ce
lunit de ce qui est, la dtourner delle-mme en la laissant diffrer, rpondant par
un toujours dj un jamais encore. (ED, 5960; Blanchots italics)
The multiple discourses of parabasis, voices which speak in monologue,

dialogue and polylogue, are conversations which step outside of language
as a tool for signification and the transparent transfer of meaning. Parabasis
as anacoluthon does not simply produce an excess of meaning by a shift in
the content, but can also function as a change in the very form of language.
14 Jacques Derrida, Living On: Border Lines, trans. by James Hulbert, in Deconstruction
and Criticism, ed. by Harold Bloom et al. (London: Continuum, 1979), pp.62142.
15 Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, p.190.
16 Paul de Man, The Concept of Irony, sthetic Ideology, ed. by Andrzej Warminski
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp.16384 (p.178).
242 Maebh Long
In LInterruption (comme sur une surface de Riemann) (1964), Blanchot

differentiates between two forms of interruption (EI, 10612). One mode
is a dialectic interruption that pertains to reason and understanding, and
which provides the space within conversation for the other to respond.
However, there also exists an interruption that presents a wholly other
relation, a relation of separation and distance that does not assimilate the
other into the space of the self. This interruption is, like Levinass, an inter-
ruption of being, an interruption that is not marked specifically by silence,
a blank or a gap, mais par un changement dans la forme ou la structure
du langage (lorsque parler, cest dabord crire) changement compara-
ble mtaphoriquement celui qui fit de la gomtrie dEuclide celle de
Riemann (EI, 109). A language of clear division and limits is parabatically
interrupted by a language of invagination, of curved surfaces turning and
stepping in on themselves, where language is a form of waiting which ne
parl[e] que pour sinterrompre et rendre possible limpossible interrup-
tion (EI, 112).
Blanchots work on Kafkas Das Schloss (1926) represents the anaco-
luthon of parabasis in the movement between the work as work and work
as discourse on that work. Each work is a self-exegesis which infinitely
repeats itself: luvre, pourtant dite une fois, parfaitement dite et inca-
pable dtre redite, tend irrsistiblement se redire (EI, 571). There is no
end to the silence, as the work, lacking a beginning, can never end, and so
commentary translates the works ambiguity with an even more ambiguous
exegesis. Commentary is inevitable; should there be no further exegetical
works the doubling and filling occurs within the work itself, closing gaps
with gaps even wider, as works that contain their own commentary call
for even more commentary, so that plus elle [luvre] entretient avec son
centre de rapports de rflexion (de redoublement), plus cause de cette
dualit elle se rend nigmatique (EI, 57273). The reflection that occurs
is a parabatic reflection, excessively interrupting itself. Blanchot sees the
essential aspect of Das Schloss, K.s traversing of the village in an attempt
to reach the elusive castle, as a movement from exegesis to exegesis, from
fragment to fragment. This unfolds as a dialectical interaction that Blanchot
likens to the Talmudic dialectic, although it could be equally likened to a
Socratic dialogue: circular and aporetic. Das Schloss does not consist of a
linked chain of events but a series of exegeses that parabatically interrupt
and step across each other, with each instance making the centre, the mean-
ing of (the) narrative, represented by the castle, recede further.
Traditionally the step of parabasis was accompanied by a step back;
the chorus stepped out, spoke, and stepped back. As such, the circular step
of parabasis can be likened to the movement of the Eternal Return, and in
fact, the movement that takes place throughout Lcriture du dsastre. The
place to which we return is the same but different, the step back is a reversal
that brings us to a point of no return, a continuation through discontinu-
ity. In moving back we return to the (different) point at which we began,
although by doing so we undo the possibility of beginnings. And hence
endings. The re- of the return also becomes an ex- as the return marks
an exodus from the subject and from the present. Terms of beginning and
ending, interiority and exteriority, stepping in and stepping out become
contaminated as the prefix ex- of exile dsigne lcart et la sparation
comme lorigine de toute valeur positive (EI, 187),17 while the stepping
back steps beyond, comme si le retour, loin dy mettre fin, marquait lexil,
le commencement en son recommencement de lexode (PAD, 49). This
eternally recurrent movement of parabasis, which undoes temporality by
placing us in a past yet to come and a future already transpired, is structur-
ally echoed in the syntactical reversals that occur in Lcriture du dsastre:
Dsir de lcriture, criture du dsir. Dsir du savoir, savoir du dsir (ED,
71). These reversals, as Blanchot writes, say nothing at all, and so show how
language has no firm place of meaning, but moves into itself, beyond itself
a moving transgression. The writing of the disaster is a writing of parabasis
that has stepped over itself and has stepped over all notions of limits and
limitation: Jappelle dsastre ce qui na pas lultime pour limite: ce qui
entrane lultime dans le dsastre (ED, 49). Thus the incessant interruption
that figures throughout Blanchots work can be figured by parenthesis, but
17 I am indebted to John McKeane for this point and for much other fruitful
discussion.
244 Maebh Long
it is the movement of parabasis, the step it takes beyond, the step it fails to
take, that is the characteristic, irregular, skewed figure of Blanchots work.
It is the figure of interrupted exceptions, the exemplary figure that is a rule
only as a rule transgressed.
Political Romanticism
Martin Crowley
Even now, now, very now
Le hiatus thorique est absolu; la coupure, de fait, dcisive. Entre le monde

libral-capitaliste, notre monde, et le prsent de lexigence communiste
(prsent sans prsence), il ny a que le trait dunion dun dsastre, dun
changement dastre.
Maurice Blanchot, Le Communisme sans hritage1
When might the revolution arrive?

I want to make a start by asking this question in this way, to avoid two
risks. First, the risk of the future tense (when will the revolution happen?),
with its appeal to an eschatological historiography and the attendant,
murderous economy of ends and means. Secondly, the risk of the past
tense (when did the revolution happen?): namely, the complacency of
our contemporary common sense, which consigns revolutions to a dark,
bloody age from which we would now have emerged, thankfully, into the
light of the eternal, post-ideological present and which thereby aligns
itself smilingly with the ideological distractions masking this moments
ongoing, bloody exploitation.2 Guarding against these risks, if possible,
I want to ask whether we can following Blanchot think of the time of
something like revolutionary activity (which we might also call revolt or
refusal) as escaping these two alternatives: that is to say, as neither the time of
Romantic messianism, nor a gap, a messianic interruption or turning-point
which would, happily, have always already receded. I want to suggest that,
1 In EP, 11315 (p.115).

2 On this, see Alain Badiou, Le Sicle (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005).
248 Martin Crowley
if there is of course much in Blanchot which emphasizes the importance

of the second of these two positions, precisely as the welcome ruination
of the first, we should nevertheless resist the temptation to see this second
position as the sum of his approach to this question. I want to argue, against
this temptation, that Blanchots approach here is in fact in keeping with his
consistent, rigorous doubling of the dialectic and its outside, of possibility
and impossibility; that is to say, that he finds a way to configure the revo-
lutionary moment as a welcome void, exorbitant and ungraspable, which
is also a possible site of collective, oppositional activity.
This is the day This is the hour This is this!
In the opening scene of Shakespeares Othello, Iago begins his plotting

against Othello by visiting Brabantio, Desdemonas father. Shouting from
outside Brabantios house, he exploits Venices racist unease at Othellos
grandeur by painting an enthusiastically animalizing picture of the sex he
wants Brabantio to believe Othello is at that very moment having with
Desdemona, including the following image:
Zounds, sir, youre robbd; for shame, put on your gown;

Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. (Othello, I, i, 8689)
The disaster in the racists fantasy of miscegenation is happening now,

right now; and this moment must be seized, immediately, if the disaster
is to be at least partially repelled. Except of course that the disaster is not
happening right now, to the extent that it is happening elsewhere; and
it may well not be happening at all, as the fantasy scenario in question is
generated solely for the purposes of Iagos plotting. Indeed, the tragic arc of
the play could well be described as the slow movement of the disaster into
the time and space of the stage, its awful realization in Othellos murder
of Desdemona and subsequent suicide. This doubling of the tragic out-
come shares the disaster across at least two moments; indeed, inasmuch as
the outcome unfolds from Iagos scheming, we might plot the disaster as
drawn out along the arc of the play as a whole. The fantasy of its presence
in a single moment is just that: only in fantasy might the disaster occupy a
moment which it might be possible to seize. But note: this does not mean
that this fantasy is inconsequential; nor that it is not already, in its way, a
form of action. The exorbitant moment obscure, off-stage, virtual is
worked, deployed, occupied; and strung out, intermittent, neither here nor
there. Even now, now, very now: but which one? Intensified, over-filled, the
moment is also dispersed.
For the Blanchot of December 1968, the revolution has already come
and gone, is already DERRIRE NOUS (EP, 147), as he puts it. Marx,
Lenin, Bakunin have drawn closer and again withdrawn. Strikingly,
however, contrary to appearances, this is not a lament: the absolute void
left by this movement might, for example, be affirmed as such, as a radical
rupture with even the assertive temporality of revolution.3 In any such
affirmation, it would be a matter of welcoming this void without taking
hold of it, of refusing to let it serve as the Romantic ground of fraternal
fusion and messianic historiography. A matter, somehow, of saying yes
to this moment out of time, without filling it in as Benjamin does, for
example as a charismatic moment of redemptive kairos, full of mystically-
summoned, Romantic Jetztzeit, reclaimed from the past by the historical
materialist to blast open the continuum of history.4 The failure of the
3 See Maurice Blanchot, Sur le mouvement (1968), in EP, 14147 (p.147). I will
return to this text, and others from 1968, in more detail below. See, on this ques-
tion, Michael Holland, Dun retour au tournant, in Blanchot dans son sicle, ed. by
Monique Antelme et al. (Lyon: Parangon, 2009), pp.31730.
4 See theses XIVXVI in Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
(1940), in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), pp.24555
(especially pp.25254; the phrase quoted comes at the end of Thesis XVI). Benjamin
will return below, to complicate this a little. On this question of Romantic messianism
250 Martin Crowley
revolution to effect a decisive break allows us to glimpse the absence of

such a decisive moment as itself the opening to an evacuated, extenuated
rupture.
Again, though: the possibility of this rupture is also being affirmed
here the possibility of an other rupture, a break with the continuum of
exploitation which might be experienced and, I will argue, practised oth-
erwise than as the ground of an act of appropriation. This other rupture
is also, for Blanchot, the site of an other kind of collective agency: not
fusional, not heroic, not vanguardist; but collective nonetheless, precisely
in the name of everything that cannot be gathered in the time of a collective
project, but which can only be affirmed and protected from the shores of
such a project, practised other than appropriatively. Accordingly, I want to
make a start here by examining the relation in some of Blanchots writings
from the 1950s and 1960s texts of the intact agency of the activist and the
utter destitution of the absolute victim, subjective instances respectively of
revolutionary moment and exhausted void. Given that the most destitute
are by definition deprived of the capacity for political action, Blanchot in
these key texts presents the moment of revolutionary action as entailing the
necessary sacrifice of these desolate figures in favour of the active, organ-
ized avant-garde; crucially, however, he also argues for a possible relation
between the active and the destitute which would not be simply sacrifi-
cial, but might comprise something like a helping hand into the dialectic
of historical action precisely in order that the exorbitant demand of the
momentary void might be affirmed.
(in the context of a discussion of Derrida, Blanchot, and the politics of friendship),
see Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and
Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), pp.25657. More generally, as
ideal introductions to the extensive literature on this topic, see Michael Lwy, Walter
Benjamin, avertissement dincendie: une lecture des thses Sur le concept dhistoire
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001), and Temps historique, temps mes-
sianique, Lignes, n. s., 27 (October 2008).
Killing Sisyphus
The starting-point, then, is necessarily in the midst of those whose utter

destitution expels them from any conceivable revolt. Writing on Camus
in 1954 (in a piece collected in 1969 in LEntretien infini), Blanchot thus
conjures up a figure of absolute desolation, in the person of: Lhomme
tout fait malheureux, lhomme rduit par labjection, la faim, la maladie,
la peur, devient ce qui na plus de rapport avec soi, ni avec qui que ce soit,
une neutralit vide, un fantme errant dans un espace o il narrive rien, un
vivant tomb au-dessous des besoins (EI, 258). Clearly, this non-relational
misery exiles its unfortunate non-subject (qui na plus de rapport avec soi)
from any collectivity, into something like a bad infinity of misfortune:
Il y a, dit-on, une communaut du malheur, mais il y a un point o ce qui est souffert

ensemble, ne rapproche pas, nisole pas, ne fait que rpter le mouvement dun malheur
anonyme, qui ne vous appartient pas, et ne vous fait pas appartenir un espoir, un
dsespoir communs. On parle de lgalit dans le malheur, mais cest une dissemblance
infinie, une oscillation sans niveau, une galit sans rien dgal. (EI, 258)
Explicitly, then (as Blanchot will write three years later), [l]e malheureux
tombe au-dessous de toute classe (EI, 174); as he emphasizes in 1962, dis-
cussing Antelmes LEspce humaine (1947):
Dans le malheur et, pour notre socit, le malheur est toujours dabord dchance
sociale , lhomme, frapp par les hommes, est radicalement altr, il nexiste plus
dans son identit personnelle, non seulement tomb au-dessous de la personne, mais
au-dessous de toute classe et de tout rapport collectif rel, en ce sens dj hors du
monde, tre sans horizon. (EI, 193)
Recalling that even Marxs definition of the proletariat depends on the

constitutive exclusion of the Lumpenproletariat, le proltaire en haillons,
[] lhomme tomb au-dessous des besoins (EI, 261), Blanchot connects
this exile from any class to the fall outside of the dialectic, in this case, that
of master and slave. Lhomme souffrant et lhomme malheureux ou soumis
252 Martin Crowley
la misre, he writes, sont devenus trangers aux rapports matre-esclave

qui constituent, au regard de leur situation, un statut presque prometteur
(259). This expulsion from the dialectic is, specifically, an exclusion from a
particular relation to time, a relation Blanchot frequently here calls hope:
namely, that existential, instrumental relation in which the future may
be grasped in anticipation as the space of a possible project even if this
project be no more than the apocalyptic realization of an end time:
Lextrme souffrance, physique dabord, parle autrement: quand elle appelle la mort,
cest quelle est encore supportable, car elle espre, elle espre en la fin, et cet espoir
signifie une alliance avec lavenir, une promesse du temps. Lhomme reste matre
de son destin, il reste libre den finir avec la souffrance: il la souffre et la supporte,
la domine par cette fin quil appelle. Mais il est une souffrance qui perd tout fait
le temps: elle est cela, lhorreur dune souffrance sans fin, que le temps ne peut plus
racheter, qui a chapp au temps, pour laquelle il ny a plus de recours; cest irrm-
diable. (EI, 257)
This endless suffering, fallen out of any collective identification and out
of any conceivable redemptive temporality, is identified by Blanchot with
the Camusian figure of Sisyphus (whom he opposes here to the alternative
figure of lhomme rvolt, against Camuss wish to derive the latter from
the former):
Sisyphe est cela, lapproche de cette rgion o mme celui qui se donne la mort par
un acte personnel et une volont dcide, se heurte la mort comme lpaisseur
quaucun acte ne traverse et que lon ne peut se proposer pour but. Rgion quannonce
lextrme souffrance, lextrme malheur, la dsolation des ombres, rgion dont sap-
prochent, dans la vie, tous ceux qui, ayant perdu le monde, sagitent entre ltre et le
nant; grouillement dinexistence, prolifration sans ralit, vermine du nihilisme:
nous-mmes. (EI, 26768; Blanchots italics)
The movement of this swarm (which we also are) gives rise, for Blanchot,
une affirmation qui est joie, qui dit silencieusement la joie et la force de
lhomme nu et dpouill (EI, 262); if this movement is, du moins par son
exigence, trs proche de celui du proltaire de Marx (262), it remains nec-
essary to recall the gulf separating this useless Sisyphean negativity from
any effective revolt: on ne peut passer, writes Blanchot, sans le survol dun
vritable abme, de lenfer vide, de lespace qui est celui de la dispersion, au
moment de la communaut relle et de la rvolte en premire personne
(263). Sisyphus is not the agent of any kind of revolution; exiled from
useful time, and from the dialectic of history, he is that is to say, in some
sense, we are no kind of activist. Blanchot expresses this at one point by
means of what is to say the least a striking opposition, in which he cap-
tures the abyssal distance between the hell of Sisyphus and the ferment of
actual revolt:
Ce nest pas Camus, cest Lnine qui remet la direction et linitiative lavant-garde
de la classe proltarienne, quil appelle aussi la forme suprieure du groupement de la
classe des proltaires, celle qui a la conscience, la matrise de soi, lesprit de sacrifice,
lhrosme, toutes qualits qui dpassent infiniment la limite de lhomme dpouill
(rduit). (EI, 27071)
Sisyphus is not merely incompatible with revolt, however: worse than

this, he is a positive obstacle. As such, he is the name of that part of our-
selves which we might also call la part maudite, no doubt which must be
sacrificed if we are to make a start on any effective revolution: Il faut donc
dune certaine manire tuer Sisyphe, il est la part de nous que nous devons
nier, si nous voulons commencer, devenir au moins esclaves, nous engager
dans la rvolte (EI, 271). Sisyphus is, as it were, the happy loss of any actual
insurrection; the absolute victim must also serve as victim of the dialectical
economy of revolt. (Whence the Leninist emphasis, quoted by Blanchot,
on the necessary esprit de sacrifice). In other words, the actualization,
in a present moment filled with messianic intensity, of justified, collective
revolt, requires the decision to sacrifice that unconditional exposure whose
unworkable negativity is the truth of our existence requires, that is, as
Nancy shows, the sacrifice of existence as such.5
5 See Jean-Luc Nancy, LInsacrifiable, in Une pense finie (Paris: Galile, 1990),
pp.65106.
254 Martin Crowley
Remis en situation de lutte dialectique
But: what does Blanchot think about this sacrifice? It all hangs on his si:
si nous voulons commencer, devenir au moins esclaves, nous engager dans
la rvolte. Do we want to do this? Do we want to begin, make a start, seize
the moment (now, for example), and force the dialectic of history? If we do,
we will have to sacrifice the absolute victim, jettison Sisyphus. Similarly: if
it is not possible to get from exposure to revolt sans le survol dun vritable
abme, is this transition thereby either impossible or undesirable?
Blanchots formulations are very careful here, and refuse quite to let us
conclude that he does not accept this economy. The weight of his thought,
however, the rigour, integrity, and care of its concern for the surpassing
weakness that falls outside any dialectic encourage, to say the least, a scep-
ticism before the notion that he might welcome this sacrifice; indeed, it is
hard not to read him as presenting something like a warning, bringing into
view the unacceptable strategic cost of any effective revolt. If we want to
make a start, we will have to kill Sisyphus; as Sisyphus names for Blanchot
that abyssal part of ourselves from which we receive something like the
rumour of the infinite distance and exposure of the human, it is hard to
imagine that he might be entertaining this as an acceptable proposition.
This reading is right. But it is also partial, in two senses. First, as I will
try to show, in that it excludes one wing of Blanchots thinking here, par-
ticularly during this period, in which, characteristically, he wants to main-
tain both the (sacrificial) order of time, possibility, history, activity, and the
exorbitant demand of everything which falls outside this order. Secondly: if
we often prefer to avert our gaze from this doubling, the lining of Blanchots
insistence on irrecuperable fragility with an emphasis on something like a
forceful articulation into action, this may simply be because the excessive
dimension of non-dialectical weakness is easier for us to embrace. This
ease is profoundly incoherent, of course: for the dimension in question is
defined as alien to all possibility. But, in this time of ours which is defined
in part by its loss or its refusal of any possibility of a moment out of
time, any blowing apart of a history of exploitation celebrated not merely

as continuum, but as destiny; in this time of ours, we are again, ironically
no doubt closer to the Blanchot of infinite, ahistorical distance than to
the Blanchot who works out a careful, effective relation of non-messianic
interruption between this infinite distance and the time of history.
In Le Dernier homme (1957), one of the torments suffered by the nar-
rator concerns his role as witness: specifically, the obligation under which
he finds himself placed by this role to intrude upon and exacerbate the
suffering of the eponymous figure. He writes:
Que pourrais-je? Essayer de parvenir jusqu lui pour lallger de lui-mme, pour
donner cette souffrance un visage, pour la tirer de son mutisme, la forcer sexpri-
mer, ft-ce en un cri auquel je succomberais? Et pourquoi aller le troubler, pourquoi
lobliger reconnatre sur moi, par mon approche, leffroyable souffrance quautrement
il supportait silencieusement? Pourquoi lui parler, faire parler cette souffrance? Il
y avait l quelque chose de ncessaire, mais de rvoltant auquel je rsistais par je ne
sais quelle partie de moi-mme. (DH, 94)
Or, to turn this double formula inside out: revolting, but also necessary.
Revolting, because this enforced proximity cannot but feel like exploita-
tion; necessary, because of the structural and ethical inseparability of silent,
overwhelming suffering and the language which this silence both exceeds
and demands. This is the doubling we have here been tracing in terms of
the relation between destitution and political agency; with reference to
this relation, we might perhaps now posit an analogous inseparability.
The suffering of the absolute victim may well fall outside of any dialectic
of history; but this is not the whole story. Defined as also needy, we who
are not destitute may think our relation to the absolute victim in terms of
a moment of possibility which is not simply murderous. This possibility
which is precisely the possibility of possibility itself as other than sacri-
ficial is developed most extensively by Blanchot in relation to Antelmes
LEspce humaine.
In Blanchots account of Antelmes testimony, the world of the concen-
tration camp is divided, absolutely, between destitution and possibility: le
camp ne renferme plus quun enchevtrement sans lien dhommes Autres,
256 Martin Crowley
un magma dautrui face la puissance du Moi tueur, lequel ne reprsente

rien que le pouvoir inlassable de tuer (EI, 198). Possibility, however, also
finds itself divided. Not solely the possession of the concentration camp
guards, it may and must, says Blanchot also be asserted by those third
parties not immediately involved in the situation. Us, in other words. The
literally self-less destitution of the absolute victim demands a response:
Pour quun tel mouvement commence saffirmer rellement, il faut quau-dehors
de ce moi que jai cess dtre, se restaure, dans la communaut anonyme, linstance
dun Moi-Sujet, et non plus comme pouvoir dominateur et oppresseur dress contre
autrui, mais comme ce qui peut accueillir linconnu et ltranger: laccueillir dans la
justice dune vraie parole. (EI, 197; Blanchots italics)
The Levinasian echoes underscore that Blanchot is here describing what

would perhaps best be termed an ethical response. (And we can rest easy,
in our ahistorical continuum of exploitation.) But he goes on:
Et il faut, en outre, qu partir de cette attention au malheur sans laquelle tout rapport
retombe dans la nuit, il faut quintervienne une autre possibilit, cest--dire quun
Moi, en dehors de moi, non seulement prenne conscience du malheur comme ma
place, mais le prenne en charge en y reconnaissant une injustice commise contre
tous, cest--dire y trouve le point de dpart dune revendication commune. (EI, 197;
Blanchots italics)
The malheureux is no longer solely excluded from any commonality and

we might perhaps rest less easy. The suffering which excludes its victim
from any collective agency demands to be universalized, says Blanchot,
and to serve as the starting point for collective action. Do we want to make
a start, to seize the moment? Perhaps we can do so without having to kill
Sisyphus, after all. Perhaps the dialectic does not have to be solely murder-
ous: perhaps it might be possible and necessary to articulate between its
economy and its outside:
En dautres termes, il faut que, par lintermdiaire dun Sujet extrieur, lequel saffirme
alors comme reprsentant dune structure collective (cest, par exemple, la conscience
de classe), le dpossd soit non seulement accueilli comme autrui dans la justice de
la parole, mais remis en situation de lutte dialectique, afin quil puisse se considrer
nouveau lui aussi comme une puissance, celle que dtient lhomme de besoin et
finalement le proltaire. Nous en revenons donc toujours lexigence du double
rapport. (EI, 19798)
Accomplir la rupture
There is, it would appear, a possible articulation between the subject of

history and the utterly destitute, a non-sacrificial relation in which these
latter may be brought into relation with the dialectic without thereby
being betrayed. Indeed, Blanchots argument here is that it is the failure
or refusal to enter into this relation which constitutes their betrayal: that
the exorbitant, extra-dialectical demand, the infinite distance of human
exposure can be affirmed only if we assume the responsibility of articulat-
ing a non-appropriative relation between the void of the absolute victim,
and the present historical moment. This double relation is especially clear
in Blanchots formulation in 1958 of radical political refusal. In the first
place, he emphasizes the distance between the friendship of refusal and
positive, fraternal commonality: precisely because the time of such collective
identification (that Romantic moment of mystical fusion) is absent: Les
hommes qui refusent et qui sont lis par la force du refus, he writes, savent
quils ne sont pas encore ensemble. Le temps de laffirmation commune leur
a prcisment t enlev (A, 130). Outside of the time of history, these
figures are not, however, exiled from something like a residual collective
oppositional agency: Ce qui leur reste, cest lirrductible refus, lamiti
de ce Non certain, inbranlable, rigoureux, qui les tient unis et solidaires
(130). This agency manages to avoid a sacrificial relation to those victims
unable to participate even in its residual collectivity, by conceiving of itself
in minimal terms, as something like a relay between these victims and the
world of history from which they are excluded: Quand nous refusons,
nous refusons par un mouvement sans mpris, sans exaltation, et anonyme,
258 Martin Crowley
autant quil se peut, car le pouvoir de refuser ne saccomplit pas partir

de nous-mmes, ni en notre seul nom, mais partir dun commencement
trs pauvre qui appartient dabord ceux qui ne peuvent pas parler (131).
And it is precisely this double movement, this articulation between history
and its interruption, between the dialectic and its outside, that Blanchot
affirms in the insurrection of 1968.
As mentioned briefly above, when Blanchot looks back at the end of
1968, it is the radical void left by the passing of something like the revolu-
tion that he most wants to affirm. This is how he formulates what he calls
the demand he wants to retain from la rvolution de Mai:
Prendre bien conscience, et toujours nouveau, que nous sommes la fin de lhis-
toire, de sorte que la plupart des notions hrites, commencer par celles de la
tradition rvolutionnaire, doivent tre rexamines et, telles quelles, rcuses. La
discontinuit que Mai a reprsente (non moins que produite) frappe galement le
langage et laction idologiques. Reconnaissons-le, Marx, Lnine, Bakounine se sont
rapprochs et ils se sont loigns. Il y a un vide absolu derrire nous et devant nous
et nous devons penser et agir sans assistance, sans autre soutien que la radicalit de
ce vide. Encore une fois, tout a chang. Mme linternationalisme est autre. Ne nous
laissons pas mystifier. Remettons tout en cause, y compris nos propres certitudes et
nos esprances verbales. LA RVOLUTION EST DERRIRE NOUS: objet dj
de consommation et parfois de jouissance. Mais ce qui est devant nous, et qui sera
terrible, na pas encore de nom. (EP, 147)
This apocalyptic note, on which the text ends, draws attention to the fact
that the void in question is not only, for Blanchot, retrospective: if it is
behind us (as the revolution in its historical and spectacular guise, objet
dj de consommation), it also remains ahead of us. Which is to say that
Blanchot has not yet given up on what was for him the decisive aspect of
that years insurrection: what a collective text published in Le Monde on
9 May called une puissance de refus capable, croyons-nous, douvrir un
avenir (EP, 84). In the one and only number of Comit (Bulletin publi
par le Comit daction tudiants-crivains au service du mouvement),
published in October 1968, this opening is retrospectively described in
plainly messianic terms: La nuit des barricades, loccupation de la Sorbonne,
le Non aux accords de Grenelle, les grves actives, Flins, furent entre
autres les moments o la possibilit rvolutionnaire non seulement fut

prsente, mais saffirma en une ngation qui, tout en faisant le vide et en
arrtant le temps, dsignait lavenir (124). Blanchots text from December
effectively persists with this Benjaminian messianism: the void is still also
ahead of us, as in some sense its own promise, the promise that a futural
opening might be possible again, on condition that we assume the radical-
ity of the void, the dereliction of all existing frames of reference.
In keeping with this Benjaminian dimension, it is important to observe
that throughout the texts published in Comit, Blanchot understands this
assumption of the radicality of the void as a moment of action. It is here
that we find again something like the double relation between the abso-
lute victim and the subject of history: the void has both to be seized, as
the disjunctive moment filled with explosive Jetztzeit and seized only
as void, pure interruption, futural opening. It is this paradoxical double
relation to the moment that Blanchot names as rupture. Defining the pos-
sible character of Comit itself (la publication), he writes: elle sefforcera
elle aussi daccomplir la rupture, cest--dire de laccomplir sur un mode
de rupture (EP, 97). Subsequently, the but ultime of the movement,
namely the imperative to affirmer la rupture, is defined as: lorganiser en
la rendant toujours plus relle et plus radicale (104). The fundamental
importance of street protests is that elles expriment le droit de tous tre
libres dans la rue, y tre librement des passants et pouvoir faire en sorte
quil sy passe quelque chose. Cest le premier droit (112). These state-
ments affirm not a nostalgic contemplation of or mystical longing for the
messianic moment out of time: they affirm the imperative to enter into
the double relation to this moment, characterized paradoxically as the
attempt to realize it as ungraspable. Accomplir la rupture means faire en
sorte quil sy passe quelque chose: the two are indissociable. Elsewhere in
Comit, in a text entitled Rupture du temps: rvolution, in which he quotes
Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, Blanchot writes that,
[l]e seul mode de prsence de la rvolution est sa possibilit relle. Alors, il
y a arrt, suspens. Dans cet arrt, la socit de part en part se dfait. La loi
seffondre. La transgression saccomplit: cest pour un instant linnocence;
lhistoire interrompue (127). Possibility here keeps the rupture from full
260 Martin Crowley
appropriation (maintains it as in some sense ungraspable); real affirms

this non-appropriative relation as an actual practice (in which, moreover,
la socit de part en part se dfait). That for Blanchot apocalypse never
quite happens as such, that it disappoints, as he puts it, never happens as
revelation,6 means both that the passing of the revolution is a relief (we
have been spared its tendency to sacrifice), and that this passing opens
the imperative to realize the messianic suspension of historical time in the
anti-appropriative, non-sacrificial rupture.
Blanchot is closer and more alive than we are to the time of the dis-
aster, and to the double relation to this time that he calls rupture. The
radical discontinuity of the revolution both removes it from the realm of
possibility, and removes it as possibility from the chronology of historical
time: Cela a eu lieu. La dcision dune DISCONTINUIT radicale et, lon
peut dire, absolue, est tombe, sparant, non pas deux priodes dhistoire,
mais lhistoire et une possibilit qui ne lui appartient dj plus directe-
ment (EP, 143). Now at an oblique angle to the line of historical time,
the rupture becomes that impossibility which, as in Benjamins Theses,
divides this history at every moment not into before and after, but into con-
tinuum and exorbitant interruption: toute la force doriginalit de cette
rvolution, writes Blanchot in December 1968, cest de ne fournir aucun
prcdent, aucune assise et pas mme celle de sa propre russite, puisquelle
sest rendue elle-mme impossible comme telle, ne laissant que cette trace
qui, la manire de lclair, divise tout, ciel et terre (145). The impossible
rupture demands, in Blanchots thinking, to be organized and realized as
such, just as the unworkable negativity of utter destitution demands to
be articulated into collective action: this is precisely what he means by
lexigence du double rapport. The task which is certainly exorbitant, if
not simply impossible is to orchestrate and to seize a moment which by
definition we must also miss. The kind of action required, for Blanchot,
is not simply assimilable to revolutionary activity: it is in this sense that
Marx, Lenin, and Bakunin are behind us. But nor is it simply assimilable
6 See A, 11827.
to the refusal or avoidance of action: it is in this sense that the void is still
ahead of us, dreadful in its impossible call to be realized now as beyond
realization, carefully:
Et sil arrive qu la question: Pour quand ta venue?, le Messie rponde: Pour

aujourdhui, la rponse est certes impressionnante: cest donc aujourdhui. Cest
maintenant et toujours maintenant. Il ny a pas attendre, bien que ce soit comme
une obligation dattendre. Et quand est-ce maintenant? un maintenant qui nappar-
tient pas au temps ordinaire, qui ncessairement le bouleverse, ne le maintient pas,
le dstabilise, surtout si lon se souvient que ce maintenant hors texte, dun rcit
de svre fiction, renvoie des textes qui le font nouveau dpendre de conditions
ralisables irralisables: Maintenant pour peu que tu me prtes attention, ou si tu
veux bien couter ma voix. (ED, 215)7
With this unworked, weakly messianic moment, Blanchot nearly frees us

from sacrificial politics, glimpsing the possibility of a non-fusional collectiv-
ity within political action. Thus: Nous ne sommes pas contemporains du
dsastre: cest l sa diffrence, et cette diffrence est sa menace fraternelle
(ED, 16). We are more alive to the threat than the fraternity (indeed, to the
threat of fraternity), no doubt. But Blanchot chooses his words carefully.
Mais la plainte que jentends tout coup: en moi? en toi? ternels, ternels; si nous
sommes ternels, comment lavoir t? comment ltre demain? (DH, 141)
7 Blanchot here cites the eleventh chapter of the tractate Sanhedrin (folio 98a of the
Babylonian Talmud, seder Nezikin), which itself quotes Psalms 95, vii: To day if ye
will hear his voice. On this, see Stphane Moss, Messianisme du temps prsent,
Lignes, n. s., 27 (October 2008), 3139.
Ian James
The Narrow Margin
Towards the beginning of La Communaut dsuvre (1983) Jean-Luc

Nancy describes the modern experience of community as being one of
absence, loss, rupture, and dislocation: La conscience de cette dislocation
est celle de Rousseau: la socit connue ou reconnue comme la perte ou
comme la dgradation dune intimit communautaire1 (Nancys italics).
Cette conscience, he continues, sera par la suite celle des Romantiques
[]. Jusqu nous, lhistoire aura t pense sur fond de communaut perdue
et retrouver ou reconstituer.2 Loss, absence, dislocation: the fate of
community in modernity, in the Romantic imagination, in the experience
of history: jusqu nous.
Certainly Nancys recent writing about the contemporary state of
globalization resonates with this. In his preface to an Italian translation
of Blanchots La Communaut inavouable (1983), published in French in
2001 as La Communaut affronte, he describes the contemporary world
as a world tearing itself apart, as a global community qui est spare et
affronte elle-mme.3 It is, he contends, a community which is divided,
separated and confronting itself over a gaping abyss. Or more precisely
still, it is a community which, when taken as a whole, is an abyss, a com-
munity which is bante ouverte bante sur son unit et sur son essence
absentes.4 The resonance of this formulation with Romantic conceptions
1 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaut dsuvre (1983) (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986),

p.29.
2 Ibid.
3 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaut affronte (Paris: Galile, 2001), p.17.
4 Ibid.
264 Ian James
of community is quite striking. One need only take a text like Novaliss
Christendom or Europe (Die Christenheit oder Europa) dating from
1799 to see certain similarities.
In this essay, Novalis imagines, mythically, and perhaps more rhetori-
cally than seriously, a golden age of medieval Catholic Europe where all life
was bound together in harmony under the sign of the Christian faith: these
were beautiful, splendid times (schne, glnzende Zeiten).5 Novalis views
the community of Christendom since the Reformation, however, as being
governed by division, anarchy, war, and internal dislocation, or what he calls
in German an innere grosse Spaltung.6 Spaltung here translates into English
easily as schism, yet it also has the meaning of division, fissure, or cleavage.
The only solution to this dislocation, Novalis affirms, would be a rebirth of
the religious spirit and a return to a Europe unified by the spiritual values
of a rejuvenated Christianity. This community of Christendom riven apart
in anarchy, dislocated and confronting itself over an absence of unity and
purpose appears very similar indeed to Nancys communaut affronte.
Of course, there is seemingly a key difference here. Where Novalis
imagines, mythically or rhetorically, a bygone era of plenitude and unity
and a future redemptive reinstatement of a unified Christian world, Nancy
articulates the bance, dislocation, and absence of contemporary global
community as its ultimate destination, or rather, the bance of commu-
nity is, precisely, an absence of destination itself: Ce qui nous arrive est un
puisement de la pense de lUn et dune destination unique du monde: cela
spuise dans une unique absence de destination. La bance qui se forme,
he adds, est celle du sens, de la vrit ou de la valeur.7 What we experience
today, then, is a world where it is impossible for the global community to
affirm a shared essence or goal by which it might define itself in terms of
5 Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa, Schriften, vol. III (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1960), pp.50724 (p.507); Christendom or Europe, Philosophical Writings, trans.
by Margaret Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York, 1997), pp.13752
(p.137).
6 Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa, p.509; Christendom or Europe, p.139.
7 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaut affronte, pp.12, 13.
identity or self-presence. Despite the similarities, Nancys understanding

of contemporary global community seems to be different in a decisive way
from Novalis call for a reinstalled Christendom: Nancys is not a com-
munaut perdue et retrouver ou reconstituer, rather, it is one whose
totality, essence, and ultimate destination are always already articulated as
dislocation, rupture, absence, and void.
Yet, as Blanchot points out in his essay on the Athenum in LEntretien
infini (1969), what may have been most essential to the enjeu politique
of Romanticism has been characterized in many different ways, both in
Germany and France.8 If, as Blanchot says, Romanticisms taste for religion
has been thought to be more contingent, its desire for revolt more funda-
mental, if the concern with the past is so often accompanied and offset by
a demand for the new in the future, then perhaps what is the most essential
characteristic of Romanticism is lexigence ou lexprience des contradic-
tions (EI, 516). Indeed, in this context, Novaliss call for a future return
to religion might be seen not so much as a reactionary return to the past:
he affirms clearly, for instance, that [t]rue anarchy is the element within
which religion is born,9 and envisages a future which would be something
very different from the past. To this extent, the bance of Nancys com-
munaut affronte and the innere grosse Spaltung of Novaliss modern
Europe articulate at a fundamental level the same apprehension of thought
or consciousness: a consciousness which, Blanchot tells us, is articulated
in Don Quixote, le livre romantique par excellence (EI, 519), namely: la
conscience o la plnitude se saisit comme vide et saisi le vide comme
linfini excs du chaos (520).
La Communaut affronte presents a critical retrospective upon, and
further contribution to, an exchange on the issue of community between
Blanchot and Nancy which at the time of its publication dated back
nearly twenty years. The exchange between the two has often been taken
8 See EI, 515.

9 Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa, p. 517; Christendom or Europe,
pp.14546.
266 Ian James
as indicative of key differences in the critical and philosophical positions

of each: differences with respect to the reading of Georges Batailles think-
ing about community in the 1930s, differences in relation to the legacy of
Heidegger, of ontology and the thought of finitude. Nancy, for his part,
professes never to have quite understood the substance of, nor the reasons
for, Blanchots critical response to La Communaut dsuvre: jtais saisi
par le fait que la rponse de Blanchot tait la fois un cho, une rsonance
et une rplique, voire quelque gard un reproche. [] Je nai jamais com-
pltement clair cette rserve ou ce reproche, ni dans un texte, ni pour
moi-mme, ni dans la correspondance avec Blanchot.10
Certainly Blanchots reproach, if reproach it was, does seem to be
related, at least in part, to Nancys account of Batailles fascination with the
question and possibility of sacred or sacrificial community in the 1930s; this
has been well documented. Where Nancy talks of Batailles fascination with
fascism, his nostalgia for a community of sacrificial communion, and his
residual attachment to a fusional logic of the subject and object, Blanchot
underlines, perhaps reproachfully, but certainly very clearly, that Bataille
always and specifically excluded what Nancy called laccomplissement
fusionnel dans quelque hypostase collective: Cela lui rpugne profond-
ment (CI, 18). Blanchots refusal of the language of ontology, which, as he
says, rduit toujours lAutre au Mme (73) also can be seen as a clear and
critical gesture by which he distances himself from Nancy and from his
Heideggerian language of finitude and being-with such as it is reworked
throughout the essays of La Communaut dsuvre.11
Yet if, in La Communaut dsuvre, Nancy does appear to be critical
of an unthought legacy of the subject in Bataille and of a certain moment
in the Bataillean account of sacrificial communion or fusion, he also clearly
indicates that, rather than criticizing or distancing himself from Bataillean
thought, he is engaging more in an attempt to communiquer avec son
10 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaut affronte, p.38.

11 On Nancys reworking of Bataille and Heidegger, see Ian James, On Interrupted
Myth, Journal of Cultural Research, 4:9 (October 2005), 33149.
exprience, or as he explains further: Au lieu o Bataille assignait le sujet,

cet endroit du sujet ou son envers , au lieu de la communication
et au lieu de communication, il y a bien quelque chose, et non pas rien:
notre limite est de navoir vraiment pas de nom pour ce quelque chose ou
pour ce quelquun12 (Nancys italics). Perhaps, then, the question posed
by Nancy in La Communaut dsuvre is not whether Batailles formula-
tions around the question of sacrificial community and the Nothing of
sovereignty brought him into a problematic proximity with fascism. Rather,
the question may be, precisely, how one might come to name or desig-
nate the Nothing of community, its vide, its bance, its absent essence
and internal dislocation, without returning it to a something, a subject, a
plenitude, a presence, or a communal fusion. This is a question that Nancy
poses very explicitly nearly twenty years later in La Communaut affronte:
Comment penser le nihil sans le retourner en monstruosit toute-puissante
et toute-prsente?13 (his italics).
If this question, comment penser le nihil sans le retourner en mon-
struosit?, is taken as a guiding thread, then it may appear that the think-
ing and writing about community of Bataille, Nancy, and Blanchot, share
something more fundamental than what sets them apart from each other
in their different choices of philosophical lexicon or idiom, by turns
Hegelian, Heideggerian, Levinasian, amongst others. What is shared
between them is precisely nothing, or rather the task of naming, or think-
ing the nothing, the absence, the vide of community. In La Communaut
affronte, Nancy puts this in the following terms: Il y a une tche, qui
est doser penser limpensable, linassignable, lintraitable de ltre-avec
sans le soumettre aucune hypostase. Ce nest pas une tche politique
ni conomique, cest plus grave encore et cela commande, terme, et le
politique et lconomique.14 The stakes then are indeed high, for, Nancy
claims, what has been bequeathed to us is the task of thinking the totality
12 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaut dsuvre, p.65.

14 Ibid., p.50.
268 Ian James
or unity of a community outside of any hypostasis, that is, outside of any

traditional metaphysical foundations, figures of identity, and outside of
any form of myth, or shared essence; it is, precisely, the task of thinking or
naming that totality or unity as nothing in such a way that it would then
commande, terme, et le politique et lconomique.
Blanchot, we know, chooses for his part to foreground the principe
dinsuffisance conceived by Bataille as the base de tout tre (CI, 19), and
as that which founds community, but does so only insofar as such insuf-
ficiency is an absence or withdrawal of foundation, the exposure of singu-
lar beings to each other in a common vnement premier et dernier qui
en chacun cesse de pouvoir ltre (naissance, mort) (22). Decisively this
insufficiency of existence is not a possibility of being, it can never take the
name of existence, strictly speaking it is not, but withdraws from existence
as lexcs dun manque qui sapprofondit mesure quil se comblerait (20).
To this extent, for Blanchot at least, Batailles secret society of Acphale
fut lexprience commune de ce qui ne pouvait pas tre mise en commun
[]. La communaut dAcphale ne pouvait pas exister comme telle (31).
Thus, as we know, community for Blanchot is necessarily unnameable,
unavowable, it is, like Batailles Acphale, avant dtre, it transcends toute
nomination dune transcendance (33).
In light of this, the fact that Nancy chooses to give the name of finite
existence, or tre-avec to the nothing of community is clearly enough in
itself, one might think, to earn a reproach from Blanchot. However much
Nancy might reform or reinscribe Mitsein, reworking and rethinking the
Heideggerian term on a more fundamental level than Heidegger in order
to think it as the primordial exposure of finite beings to a shared mortality
and a shared absence of essence, Blanchot cannot, will not, think or name
this nothing within a logic of being-with or a horizon of ontology, qui
rduit toujours lAutre au Mme (CI, 73). The stakes, it might be recalled,
and recalled particularly in relation to Heidegger, are to penser le nihil,
sans le retourner en monstruosit.
And yet, Nancy, of course, does not think or name the nothing of com-
munity with Heidegger alone. He thinks it with, amongst others, Georges
Bataille, not to criticize or reproach him, but to communiquer avec son
exprience. This crossing of terms, both Heideggerian and Bataillean, is

decisive for Nancy and it is precisely around the nothing of Bataillean
sovereignty that it can be felt most acutely. At one point in La Communaut
dsuvre, Nancy cites Bataille and poses again the question of the possible
linking of Bataillean sovereignty with community: La souverainet nest
RIEN, and continues:
Cest--dire que la souverainet est lexposition souveraine un excs ( une trans-
cendance) qui ne se prsente pas, ne se laisse pas approprier (ni simuler), qui ne se
donne mme pas mais quoi ltre est plutt abandonn. Lexcs auquel la sou-
verainet sexpose et nous expose nest pas, en un sens peut-tre proche de celui o
ltre heideggerien nest pas.15
Peut-tre. Despite the reference to Heidegger here, the terms Nancy uses
are strikingly reminiscent of those used by Blanchot to characterize the
absent community of Acphale, that is, as lexprience commune de ce
qui ne pouvait pas tre mis en commun, ni gard en propre, ni rserv pour
un abandon ultrieur (CI, 31). In both cases, the nothing in question is
withdrawn from being or presence, it is an excess, lexcs dun manque
(20), and an excess which cannot be appropriated or simulated. It is not
an excess reserved and then abandoned by being, but one to which being
is, as it were, always already abandoned. For both Nancy and Blanchot, the
nothing of community is withdrawn from existence as irreducible alter-
ity or excess. Given this proximity, it is perhaps not surprising that Nancy
might claim to be puzzled by Blanchots reproach.
Indeed the proximity of Nancys formulations to those of Blanchot is
affirmed even further when, elsewhere in La Communaut dsuvre, in
the context of a discussion of the rending apart or dislocation of singular
being, he interweaves the language of excess and of the nothing in with the
distinctly Blanchotian motif of le dehors: La dchirure ne consiste que
15 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaut dsuvre, p.49 (Nancys italics).

270 Ian James
dans lexposition au dehors: tout le dedans de ltre singulier est expos

au dehors []. Il y a dchirure de rien, davec rien.16
It might be clear from this that Nancy does not restrict himself exclu-
sively to a crossing of a Bataillean idiom with that of Heideggerian ontology
in his attempt to think the nothing, absence, or unworking of community
in La Communaut dsuvre. This nothing is named in a number of ways:
as sovereign excess (Bataille), as being-with exposed to an excess that is
not (Heidegger), but also as dsuvrement and as exposure to le dehors
(Blanchot), as finite transcendence (Lacoue-Labarthe), as dchirure, and
yet again elsewhere as clinamen, and as the unidentifiable.
One might conclude from this that Nancys gesture in La Communaut
dsuvre is not simply to repeat in a slightly reformed manner the
Heideggerian thinking of being-with by re-inscribing Mitsein as more
fundamental than Dasein on the one hand, and by bringing it into con-
tact with Batailles thinking about communication on the other. Rather,
he is engaging in a writerly strategy in which a range of different terms are
deployed and woven together in order to expose his thinking of commu-
nity to the nothing, to that nothing as an unnameable, unavowable excess,
as a withdrawal from all presence or presentation; in excess then also, of
course, of the language of being-with and exposed finite existence, with
which Nancy names that excess.
In a Note responding to Blanchot in the full-length edition of La
Communaut dsuvre, Nancy suggests that, taken together, his writ-
ing, that of Bataille, and that of Blanchot form a kind of community:
textes intercals, alterns, partags, comme tous les textes, offrant ce qui
nappartient personne et qui revient tous: la communaut de lcriture,
lcriture de la communaut (104).17 Perhaps, then, what is ultimately at
stake here is not any one single act of naming, or thinking the nothing of
community, not any one idiom or crossing of idioms, but rather the plural-
ity and multiplicity of idioms shared in a community of writing. Indeed
16 Ibid., p.76.
17 Ibid., p.104.
the nothing of community is named in La Communaut dsuvre in

just such an interweaving, alternating, and sharing of diverse terms. It is
a thinking which unfolds in a sharing of thought within a community of
writing in which, precisely, nothing is shared, or in which there is a shared
exposure to the nothing; this is a sharing of writing where the idioms of
the Hegelian subject, Heideggerian being-with, and Levinasian transcend-
ence are variably invoked, traced, and exposed each to the other, but also
one which can be gathered around a series of proper names: Bataille and
Blanchot of course, but also Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, and, amongst
others, Antelme and Derrida.
It could be suggested, then, that in these textes intercals or in this
communaut dcriture from which Nancys writing is woven, le rien, le
vide, lexcs, and le manque are named only in the space or the distance
between these a multiplicity of terms and idioms, rather than a logic of
continuity or sameness that would bind them together. In this multiple
naming, the nothing of community is at the same time placed in excess of
any name, it is avowed, as it were, only in the affirmation of its unmaster-
able excess, only in its very unavowability.
It is Blanchot, of course, who in La Communaut inavouable empha-
sizes that la communaut, dans son chec mme, a partie lie avec une cer-
taine sorte dcriture (CI, 26). If community cannot name itself, avow itself,
if, in the withdrawal of essence and identity, it cannot, strictly speaking,
exister comme telle (31), one might question whether in fact it is only in
writing, in a certain practice and community of writing that, as Nancy puts
it, limpensable, linassignable, lintraitable de ltre-avec can be thought
without being subjected to a form of hypostasis. The writing of community,
here, appears to be much like the cration littraire Blanchot describes in
La Littrature et le droit la mort, insofar as it encompasses the totality of
singular beings and les nomme partir du tout, partir de labsence de tout,
cest--dire de rien (PF, 307; Blanchots italics). The question that may be
posed by the nothing of community is whether writing would be the only
way to penser le nihil sans le retourner en monstruosit toute-puissante
272 Ian James
et toute-prsente.18 If this were so, then Nancy, Blanchot, Bataille, in their

writing of community and in the community of writing they share, are very
much, as Blanchot says of Romantic writers, poets and philosophers: lis
lacte dcrire comme un savoir nouveau quils apprennent ressaisir en en
devenant conscients (EI, 519). If the Romantic moment par excellence is,
as Blanchot again says, la conscience o la plnitude se saisit comme vide
(520), then, the task of thinking the nothing of community, the impensable
of tre-avec, remains an eminently Romantic task, a task inextricably bound
up with a certain practice of writing. Blanchot, Nancy, Bataille, and others,
tous romantiques, would find themselves tied to writing, insofar as it may
only be the movement of ceaseless inscription and effacement of writing
itself that allows the nothing to be named without a return to plenitude,
hypostasis, all-present and all-powerful monstrosity.
The writing of the nothing of community would then find itself
within a very narrow margin of affirmation; like the Romanticism of the
Athenum discussed by Blanchot in LEntretien infini, it would carry with
it le savoir le plus aigu de la marge troite o il peut saffirmer: ni dans le
monde, ni hors du monde, matre du tout, mais condition que le tout
ne contienne rien, soit la pure conscience sans contenu, la pure parole qui
ne peut rien dire (EI, 52223). This narrow margin would not suggest
that the only possible sphere of affirmation is that of writing, nor would
it dictate a narrow conception of literature and literary experience as set
against political engagement or action in the world. It would not suggest
that the worldly should be abjured in favour of the sthetic experience of
an institution called literature. It might suggest, however, that all affirma-
tion, all thought and action, and certainly all political or ethical articula-
tion of community, must pass through, or be exposed to, the experience
of a certain practice of writing, a practice that would name the nothing
outside of any figure of totality and, in turn, commande, terme, et le
politique et lconomique.19

19 Ibid., p.50.
Perhaps, to conclude, this question can be put in another fashion.

In La Bte de Lascaux (1958), Blanchot speaks once again of le savoir
impersonnel du livre and suggests that it is li au dveloppement de
la technique sous toutes les formes et il fait de la parole, de lcriture,
une technique (VV, 52). If writing is a technique, a technology, or form of
technicity, one which is linked to the development of technical prosthetics
sous toutes les formes, one might ask whether there are other forms of
technique, technicity, art or technology, which might allow the nothing,
the intraitable de ltre-avec, to be imagined, named, thought, shared,
and to be thought and shared in such a way as they might commande[r],
terme, et le politique et lconomique.
Both Blanchot and Nancy remind us that the ethical and political
stakes of thinking community in the wake of Romanticism, and in the
absence of any metaphysical ground, are always a matter of thinking com-
munity as vide, as manque, as absence. Perhaps, ultimately then, what the
enjeu politique of Romanticism has bequeathed to Bataille, to Blanchot,
to Nancy and indeed to the experience of history, jusqu nous, is the ques-
tion of that narrow margin of thought, that technique of writing, within
which community as absence may be affirmed. Ultimately, this question
can perhaps be posed as follows: beyond this narrow margin, what tekhn,
technique, art, or technical form might allow the totality of community
to be both affirmed and at the same time maintained as absence or as
absent essence? The question may take on some urgency if, as contemporary
thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler argue, we are passing from an epoch and
experience of history shaped by the letter and the technicity of writing to
an epoch shaped by numerical and digital communications technologies.20
Perhaps the question of community and its affirmation demands eternal
vigilance. For there is, arguably, a permanent risk, and it may be the risk
of all modernity jusqu nous, namely that, in practices of philosophy cer-
tainly, but also in the proliferation of new techniques, technologies, and
20 See Bernard Stiegler, La Technique et le temps 2. La Dsorientation (Paris: Galile,

1996).
274 Ian James
technocratic forms, community will once again come to affirm itself as a

monstruosit toute-puissante et toute-prsente. The question of the absent
community is one which is bequeathed to Bataille, Blanchot, and Nancy,
certainly, but it is one which has also been bequeathed to the present and
to a shared global and technological future.
Parham Shahrjerdi
crire la rvolution
Faut-il censurer luvre de Maurice Blanchot? La question se pose, elle

drange, elle dstabilise. Les rponses ne manquent pas. Explicites, impli-
cites. Le constat est celui-ci: toute pense juge douteuse est forcment
dstabilisatrice, ou pire, subversive, elle est tout de suite repre, encadre,
raye de la carte. Soit nous sommes du ct du bien, respectant une forme
de pense tablie, entretenant un rapport passif avec une pense unique,
soit nous ne le sommes pas; dun ct toujours autre, nous sommes.
Devant la position de De Gaulle en 1944 (il ny aura pas de Rvolution,
lheure en est passe), le Blanchot soixante-huitard nhsitait pas dsi-
gner le Gnral comme le nouvel ennemi, peine lancien cart (EP,
100). Aujourdhui, quarante ans aprs, suivant la ligne ractionnaire, nous
assistons des propositions combien courageuses: liquider lhritage de
68. Et on applaudit, et on vote et on gagne. Rgression immense.
Longtemps on a voulu diviser Blanchot en deux. Le bon et le mauvais,
linfrquentable et le frquentable, ne pas lire et lire, ne pas voquer
et voquer sans modration, taire et discuter. Il est peut-tre temps de
sortir de cette dualit, limite et limitante, daller vers une comprhension
plus vaste, ou plus ouverte: comprendre le contexte et comprendre luvre
dans son contexte, tracer une continuit, parfois apparente, parfois invisible,
qui change de faade, de prsentation ou de reprsentation, mais dont les
trames restent les mmes. En effet, il ny a quun seul Blanchot: celui qui
na cherch que la Rvolution.
Tout au long de sa vie, tout au long de son uvre, Maurice Blanchot
na cess dtre un rvolutionnaire, appelant la rvolution, linsoumis-
sion et au refus. Cela commence par des articles politiques publis au
cours des annes 30 (dans Le Rempart, Le Journal des dbats, La Revue
276 Parham Shahrjerdi
du vingtime sicle, LInsurg, Combat): nous sommes en prsence dune

rhtorique semblable celle de Robespierre. Viennent ensuite, bien plus
tard, la Dclaration des 121 sur le droit linsoumission dans la guerre
dAlgrie, et la Rvolte de mai 68. Avec, chaque fois, une forte participa-
tion de Blanchot, par lcriture, certes, mais aussi physiquement, signalant
un engagement au-del mme de lcriture. Hop! Hop! Hop!, cest ainsi
quon dcrit le Blanchot de mai 68, cet homme discret, solitaire, ayant une
vie voue la littrature et au silence qui lui est propre, capable en effet
davoir son propre silence.
Et il y a des sorties: sortir de tout systme, politique, littraire, social.
Et il y a des livres, avec une criture de plus en plus personnelle (criture
fragmentaire, plurielle, anonyme), surgie par ncessit, parce quil faut faire
quelque chose. Faire quelque chose cela signifie dj, en effet, faire autre
chose: reprendre les choses au point o elles sont arrtes, condamnes,
exiles, et cela malgr elles. Autrement dit, saccorder le droit encore de
remettre en question tout systme unifi ou unifiant, en somme, rejeter une
union arbitraire avec le nant ou le vide. Cela commence avec la pense
crite, avec lcriture, et une criture de lautrement qui se dsolidarise par
sa forme mais aussi par son contenu de lcriture dominante, de lcriture
qui ncrit pas.
Cette tude tente de rendre sensible la perptuelle exigence de Maurice

Blanchot vis--vis du monde, dans son rapport la littrature et au politique.
Toute une affaire de lettres et de murs quil faudrait rcrire. Chercher la
politique de la littrature (Rancire), l o, ici et maintenant, lune comme
lautre font dfaut. Une recherche qui passe par la langue, et qui passe son
tour par la peur. Blanchot en dira un jour: Cest tout le langage dorna-
vant qui a peur (PAD, 84). Peur daffronter des textes de Blanchot jugs
dangereux, suspects, ou subversifs. Ces territoires combien dfinis, enca-
drs et surveills de la pense et des lettres ne peuvent quaccentuer la peur.
Chaque dterritorialisation, chaque sortie par rapport une pense domi-
nante, vis--vis des formes et des contenus communs, accentue langoisse
ou la terreur, propres aux chappes. Il ne sagit pas pour nous deffacer la
peur, mais de laffronter pleinement, pour mieux la surmonter, peut-tre.
En tout cas, chercher une parole qui se permet la sortie, parfois, lexcs,
de temps en temps. Une parole dlie, dirait-on. Inventer un autre lieu,
sortir des lieux communs, de la pense et du langage, changer les rgimes
imaginaires, concevoir un nouvel espace littraire et ainsi rendre possible
une autre littrature, une autre criture, une pense autre.
Un sicle aprs sa naissance, on ne cesse de sintresser lhomme
comme luvre. Sintresser, certes, pour le clbrer, pour lattaquer, ou
encore, pour le rcuprer. Nous abandonnons aux autres le soin de ces dif-
frentes dmarches. Ce qui nous intresse, ici et maintenant, cest de lire
luvre de Maurice Blanchot. Tout simplement. Tout impossiblement. Lire
cette uvre, pour continuer partir de, pour ne pas en rester l (sociale-
ment, intellectuellement, politiquement, humainement).
Un Blanchot romantique?
Bien souvent, le romantisme est considr comme un mouvement artis-

tique. En feuilletant les pages de lhistoire, nous constatons une forme de
dpassement, une influence, et une efficacit. En effet, le romantisme a pu,
certains moments, se montrer comme une culture ou mme comme un
courant politique, ayant jusqu la capacit darriver au pouvoir. Il serait
particulirement intressant, cet gard, de mesurer limportance du roman-
tisme dans la belle rvolution de fvrier 1848.1
Si nous prenons en compte les critres qui souvent dfinissent le roman-
tisme, la rponse ( la question: Blanchot romantique?) pourrait tre posi-
tive. Voici quelques critres qui sans dfinir eux seuls le romantisme nous
permettraient de le situer comme culture politique:
1 Pour approfondir le rapport entre le romantisme, la rvolution, et la politique, voir

notamment Laurent Jenny, Je suis la rvolution (Paris: Belin, 2008).
1. Lexaltation du sentiment et le culte du moi: une certaine valori-

sation de lindividu et de son mal-tre (douleur, solitude, mlanco-
lie). Les romantiques sont insatisfaits de leurs crations, se sentent
incompris par une socit domine par les certitudes et le confor-
misme bourgeois.
2. La difficult accepter le prsent et le retour vers un pass idalis:
on redcouvre les racines culturelles et linguistiques des diffrents
peuples europens, notamment le patrimoine mdival au dtri-
ment de lAntiquit.
3. Le rejet des rgles acadmiques et la valorisation de la libert du
crateur: le rve et limagination sont privilgis, do une fasci-
nation pour les hros et les lgendes (en tmoigne lattrait exerc
par la lgende napolonienne chez les romantiques, accentu par
sa chute tragique et son exil), ainsi quun dsir fort dvasion.
Ces critres, sans tre une liste exhaustive pour dfinir le romantisme ou
le romantique, sont lisibles dans les crits du premier Blanchot, cest--
dire chez le jeune journaliste-critique des annes 30. En ralit, cet accent
romantique ne cesse de surgir, dune manire ou dune autre, dans les crits
de Blanchot. On peut noter la prsence des lgendes, le recours aux mythes,
et le rejet dun prsent qui nest pas la mesure du je qui crit (fragmen-
taire). On peut galement souligner lintrt de Blanchot pour luvre de
Maurice Barrs,2 dont le romantisme est palpable (Culte du Moi, natio-
nalisme, exaltations).
Il est difficile, voire impossible de parler de lpoque o le jeune Blanchot
commence crire ses premiers textes sans invoquer une affaire capitale qui
marqua jamais la vie intellectuelle et politique en France. En effet, nous
pouvons constater une certaine ressemblance entre le romantisme, qui est
une confrontation entre le classicisme et son dehors, et laffaire Dreyfus.
Affaire certes abusive, et qui en mme temps ouvre le chemin pour des
abus plus vastes, plus graves, plus cruels. Plus de cinquante ans aprs ses
2 Voir IQ, 2022.

premiers textes politiques, Blanchot nous rappelle limportance de cette

affaire: [L]affaire Dreyfus reste un sujet inpuisable de mditation (IQ,
19). Le monde se divise, il se positionne par rapport cette affaire. Le choc
de laffaire Dreyfus est lorigine du premier Congrs sioniste Ble en 1897.
Theodor Herzl, fondateur du mouvement sioniste, crit dans son journal:
Si je devais rsumer le Congrs de Ble en un mot, ce serait celui-ci: Ble
jai fond lEtat juif []. Peut-tre dans cinq ans et certainement dans cin-
quante ans, chacun le saura.3
LAction franaise, mouvement royaliste et nationaliste, est fond en
1898. La synthse de Charles Maurras sduit. Elle constate la dcadence
et la corruption en France et propose une solution comprenant lordre, la
raison et le classicisme. Dans ce contexte, laffaire Dreyfus peut tre consi-
dre comme un point de repre, lment dclencheur qui donne de plus
en plus de visibilit aux malaises de lpoque et invite, voire encourage les
intellectuels prendre position. Position qui dpasse largement cette affaire
et son poque et traduit en quelque sorte ltre au monde de lhomme dans
son temps. Le jeune Blanchot est encore le contemporain de cette affaire,
de tout ce quelle engage intellectuellement et politiquement. Sans tomber
dans une quelconque facilit, voyons maintenant quelques moments, quel-
ques clats, quelques reprsentations de lacte politique dans lcriture de
Maurice Blanchot.
Moment de La politique dabord
Questionner le rapport entre littrature et politique, le passage de lune

lautre, mettre lune au profit de lautre, cest lun des enseignements de
cette poque. Y aurait-il un certain rapport hirarchique entre lcriture
3 Cit dans Alain Gresh, Isral, Palestine: vrits sur le conflit (2001) (Paris: Fayard,
2007), p.72.
littraire et lcriture politique? La question se posait hier, elle se pose

encore aujourdhui. Pour certains, comme lacadmicien Maurras, cest
lengagement qui pousse lhomme se consacrer lcriture politique. Une
ncessit, donc, qui engage. Cest Charles Maurras lui-mme qui formule
ainsi cette ncessit de lpoque: La faute en est notre sicle. Si le sicle
tait lendroit, ce nest pas de la politique religieuse que jcrirais. Il ny
aurait pas lieu den crire.4 Cette criture, base sur limmdiat social et
politique, est lune des formes de sacrifice par lesquelles lhomme-crivain
est invit abandonner la grande criture littraire pour aller vers une
criture certes phmre mais ncessaire. Ainsi, on mesure lefficacit, le
pragmatisme et la porte de chaque criture. Le temps des critures est
rvolu. Il faut une criture du temps.
Lentre en matire du jeune Maurice Blanchot est fracassante. Publiant
un compte-rendu sur les Mmoires de Gandhi qui viennent dtre traduites
en franais, il remet en question loriginalit, lefficacit, mais aussi la sin-
crit de la pense de Mahatma Gandhi. Limage dessine est troublante:
On la compar Saint Franois dAssise, Mose guidant son peuple;
Romain Rolland lappelle le Christ Indien pesant fardeau pour ce petit
homme dbile que cette lourde adoration laquelle dautres peuples que
le sien sont requis de sassocier.5 Dans un monde devenu moderne, la
spiritualit est dsapprise. Chercher un chemin, une parole, un livre ou
un mot permettant de spiritualiser lme perdue, voil le programme que
Blanchot se fixe. Dcidment Gandhi doit:
Cette spiritualit qui a ses sources dans une pense purement laque, cette charit
qui se reconnat dabord dans le mysticisme sans Dieu dun Tolsto, toute cette vie
religieuse, forme, alimente par une idologie qui emprunte la raison son appareil
extrieur puis la dissout dans les effusions dune vague sensibilit morale, risquent
dtre la forme exotique dun modernisme que nous connaissons bien.6
4 Charles Maurras, La Politique religieuse (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie nationale, 1912),

p. ix.
5 Maurice Blanchot, Mahatma Gandhi, Les Cahiers mensuels, troisime srie, 7 (juillet
1931), 1017 (p.10).
6 Ibid., p.14.
Sous le signe du trouble
En parcourant les comptes rendus littraires de Maurice Blanchot, on peut

retenir un certain nombre dlments qui nous rvlent sa vision de lpoque.
Le livre de Henri Daniel-Rops, Deux hommes en moi (1930), fait lobjet dun
compte rendu publi en 1931. Blanchot met le doigt sur le malaise de lpo-
que, lisible travers les crits de Daniel-Rops. Le constat de Daniel-Rops
est terrible: Nous vivons intellectuellement sous le signe du trouble.7
Face la situation dcrite par Daniel-Rops, Blanchot voque sa vision du
monde, ou plutt, la ncessit den finir avec ce monde moderne, litt-
raire, imaginaire. Toute harmonie, tout sens, tout ordre est perdu. Quelle
est donc la solution pour sen sortir? [Pour] chercher le sens profond, le
vrai mouvement de lme perdue hors du rel et hors delle-mme [] il
faut des principes et des principes rationnels et [] la science des mys-
tiques est indispensable.8
Il est vrai qu cette poque, il y a une certaine ressemblance entre le
discours maurrassien et celui de Blanchot. Le monde moderne est le grand
coupable: lordre sest transform en dsordre, le spirituel en matriel, la
grandeur en mdiocrit, enfin, lme est perdue. Que faire, donc? Dune
part, dnoncer les tristes ralits de son poque, dautre part, la suite de
Maurras, proposer lhrosme et le sacrifice comme moyens daction.
Il faut rappeler qu cette poque, nous avons un mouvement anti-
conformiste qui porte le nom dOrdre nouveau, mouvement dinspiration
personnaliste qui recherche une troisime voie humaniste entre le capita-
lisme libral et le marxisme, et dont Daniel-Rops est une figure majeure.
Le programme de LOrdre nouveau est prsent ainsi: Contre le dsordre
capitaliste et loppression communiste, contre le nationalisme homicide et
linternationalisme impuissant, contre le parlementarisme et le fascisme,
7 Maurice Blanchot, Deux hommes en moi, par Daniel-Rops, La Revue universelle, 21

(1er fvrier 1931), 36768 (p.367).
8 Ibid.
LOrdre nouveau met les institutions au service de la personnalit et subor-

donne ltat lhomme.9
Les Non-conformistes des annes 30
Non-conformiste ou encore anticonformiste, cest peut-tre ladjectif ad-

quat pour dsigner le jeune Blanchot et un certain nombre de ses contem-
porains.10 Il arrive quon remette en question cette dsignation, pensant aux
valeurs (ou non-valeurs) tablies daujourdhui. Il est ais de dcrdibiliser
le mouvement anticonformiste dhier. Pourtant, il est parfois ncessaire de
reconstruire le contexte de lpoque pour rexaminer ensuite la position
des uns et des autres.
cette poque, parmi les publications de Blanchot dans le Journal
des dbats, nous trouvons un compte rendu du livre de Curzio Malaparte,
livre qui vient dtre publi (1931) en France chez Grasset. Malaparte, dans
Technique du coup dtat, dnonce la monte au pouvoir dAdolf Hitler et
des nazis. Il va payer sa libert dcrivain au prix fort; son livre est interdit
de publication en Italie et en Allemagne (o il est utilis par la campagne
lectorale socialiste contre Hitler). Blanchot y trouve des mthodes clai-
res pour se dbarrasser de ltat moderne. Il rapporte ainsi la recette de
Malaparte:
Lauteur, qui sinspire surtout de lhistoire politique de laprs-guerre, sest propos

de rechercher comment on sempare dun tat moderne. En tudiant principale-
ment la rvolution russe et la rvolution italienne, il montre quil y a une technique
9 Cf. Edmond Lipiansky et Bernard Rettenbach, Ordre et dmocratie. Deux socits

de pense: de lOrdre Nouveau au Club Jean-Moulin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1967), p.34.
10 Voir notamment Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes des annes 30: Une
tentative de renouvellement de la pense politique franaise (Paris: Le Seuil, 1969).
du coup dtat, sans laquelle la faveur de lopinion ou lexistence dune situation

rvolutionnaire est inefficace. Lessentiel est doccuper les points stratgiques, les
centrales lectriques, tlphoniques, tlgraphiques, les usines gaz, les rservoirs
deau, les gares; mais, pour les occuper, il nest pas besoin de soulever les masses,
une poigne dhommes suffit.11
Par ailleurs, Blanchot constate un certain refus de la part des crivains,

des intellectuels, du peuple, de prendre part la vie politique. Ce refus est
en quelque sorte justifi: Le dgot que leur inspiraient les combinaisons
politiciennes, la rpugnance quils montraient mler les ides aux intrts,
les exigences mmes de laction qui ne se conforme point aux proccupations
dune pense subtile et nuance, semblaient les justifier de ne pas prendre
part aux dbats.12 Blanchot revient ici sur un ensemble dessais runis
sous le titre Le Rajeunissement de la politique (1932) par Pierre dExideuil.
Si la politique choue, cest que la pense lui manque. Quel rle rserver
lintellectuel?
Si la faillite de ltat est trop certaine, cest que, trop souvent, le sentiment politique
a manqu aux individus. La politique a sans doute trahi lesprit. Mais lesprit a com-
menc par trahir la politique. M. Daniel-Rops rpond brillamment aux objections
quon peut lever au nom dune prtendue morale des clercs qui imposerait lintel-
lectuel de se dsintresser de la chose publique. Il peut lui arriver de sen dsintresser:
il lui arrivera difficilement de se soustraire aux conditions politiques que demande
lexercice dsintress de sa pense.13
Les crivains ont-ils le droit de se retirer de la scne, de la chose publique?

Peut-on faire de la littrature qui na de rapport ni avec lhomme ni avec le
monde? Blanchot formulait la situation ainsi:
11 Maurice Blanchot, Comment semparer du pouvoir, Journal des dbats, 18 aot

1931, 1.
12 Maurice Blanchot, Le Rajeunissement de la politique, Journal des dbats, 2 mai
1932, 1.
13 Ibid.
Les crivains doivent-ils se dsintresser de la politique et soustraire leur pense

une activit qui ne les concerne quindirectement et qui peut tre compromettante?
[] [] Pendant longtemps et surtout ces dernires annes, les crivains ont prouv
beaucoup de dgot pour la politique, et une grande crainte devant ses responsabili-
ts. [] La littrature na pas eu grand souci du monde extrieur, ni de lhomme, ni
mme du rel. Il est naturel que les littrateurs naient pas cherch intervenir dans
un monde quils ignoraient.14
Dans la ligne non-conformiste, nous avons galement La Revue franaise,

dirige alors par Antoine Redier. Jean-Pierre Maxence en sera le rdacteur
en chef de 1930 1933. Blanchot y publiera quelques articles importants.
Dans une introduction intitule Eux et nous, Redier souligne lexistence
dune jeunesse franaise qui scarte: Oui, ces garons-l sont un peu dsin-
voltes et il arrive souvent quils vous tonnent et vous scandalisent. Jai le
regret de vous dire que cest de votre faute15 Larrive dune nouvelle
gnration est annonce. Des enfants sans respect mais raisonnables, venus
aprs la guerre, avant la guerre, pour faire la guerre. Ces enfants rvolts se
lvent contre leurs pres guerriers:
Rappelez-vous le temps de la guerre. Nous nous battions avec lespoir que cette
preuve, que de ce sang, de ce feu, de cette boue, nous sortirions avec des mes fortes,
que nous offririons nos fils une France rgnre. La France sest au contraire abme;
car, de nos mains, elle a pass dans celles des personnages en veston qui font de la
politique et les affaires. Et nous avons courb la tte. Sans doute tions-nous las. Sans
doute avions-nous pens que notre tche hroque tait finie. Et, les uns par sotterie,
dautres par fatigue, nous avons laiss faire.16
Jean-Pierre Maxence parlait quant lui dun monde qui disparaissait:
De ce monde, nous ntions pas, nous ne sommes pas de ceux quil a dups [].
Il mentait mal []. Lorsquil parlait du progrs social et protgeait le seul argent,
lorsquil invoquait la culture et inclinait labtissement, lorsquil hypostasiait le
14 Maurice Blanchot, Les crivains et la politique, Journal des dbats, 27 juillet

1932,1.
15 Antoine Redier, Eux et nous, La Revue franaise, 4 (25 avril 1933), 48185.
16 Ibid., p.483.
nombre sans aimer les hommes, nous discernions limposture. Que pouvions-nous
avoir de commun avec lui? Ce refus ntait pas chez nous une attitude littraire, un
mouvement de jeunesse. Tout nous limposait, la raison comme la dignit.17
Un monde dsespr. Vou lchec. Cest le temps du dpassement. Il

faut donc tout dpasser, se lever contre toutes les ides reues, se dresser
contre la socit, toute la socit, cest contre la politique installe quil
faut se lever le nationalisme dsolant, le marxisme inefficace. Vient alors
le temps des souhaits et des rves, le temps des envies, le temps de passer
au-del, le temps des rvolutions.
Avant de descendre dans la rue
Larticle de Blanchot Le Marxisme contre la rvolution, publi en avril 1933,

est cet gard dune importance majeure. Blanchot y examine non seule-
ment la possibilit de laction rvolutionnaire mais donne aussi sa dfinition
du mot rvolution et de ce qui va de pair avec ce mot et ce mouvement,
commencer par la violence. Il nest point de rvolution sans violence:
La violence, la force mme est dconcertante. Quelle soit dirige par ltat contre la
rvolte illgitime de quelques-unes de ses parties, ou contre un tat malfaisant par une
juste rvolte elle est toujours la limite de lordre et de la confusion, elle participe de
la nature du dsordre contre lequel elle sexerce, elle suppose un tat de choses difficile
o beaucoup de biens sont abandonns: lquilibre, lharmonie, plusieurs vertus trs
louables et presque toutes les commodits de la civilisation.18
17 Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans (19271937) (Paris: Gallimard, 1939),

p.32.
18 Maurice Blanchot, Le Marxisme contre la rvolution, La Revue franaise, 4 (25 avril
1933), 50617, repris dans Gramma, 5 (1976), 5361 (p.53).
Une fois de plus, nous retrouvons la notion de sacrifice, sans quoi la rvo-
lution na pas lieu. La rvolution appelle passer au-del de tout ce qui
nest pas essentiel. Linessentiel a un nom: lhumanit, ou du moins une
part de celle-ci. Il faut [], pour sauver lhomme, sacrifier ce qui nest pas
essentiel, tout un luxe dhumanit, justement ce superflu qui nous semble le
plus ncessaire: nous naimons pas tre humains au plus juste.19 En effet, la
rvolution fait hsiter. Blanchot montre les raisons qui opposent la vie la
rvolution: La rvolution est contraire aux faits, puisquelle les contrarie;
[e]lle est oppose toute action. Ou encore:
La rvolution est contraire la vie, puisque la vie est un compromis et que la rvo-
lution est essentiellement la position dun absolu. [] Cest donc une vue de lesprit.
Cest par consquent aussi une aspiration dintellectuels peu capables dagir, le rve
didalistes incapables damnager le rel, qui trouvent plus commode de le redresser
par un coup de force.20
La rvolution en tant quexprience. Voil lultime point qui serait retenir.

Une exprience quon a tendance exclure: Enfin, pour toutes ces raisons,
et pour cette raison supplmentaire que la France a termin ses exprien-
ces et nen fera pas de nouvelle [] la rvolution est impossible.21 Mais
ce nest pas Blanchot qui sest transform en conservateur. Ces arguments
contre la rvolution sont attribus Robert Garric qui souhaite les effets de
la rvolution, mais estime, comme le dit Blanchot, que le meilleur moyen
de nous sauver dun monde perverti, cest de le servir.22
Ici, lun des moments cls dans lcriture politique de Blanchot est
en train de se construire. Un changement est ncessaire. Mais comment
le rendre possible? Tant quun rvolutionnaire fait un travail de critique
rvolutionnaire et nest pas descendu dans la rue, cest un intellectuel qui
na rien faire avec la rvolution.23 Blanchot en tire la consquence la
19 Ibid., p.53.
20 Ibid., p.54.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p.53.
23 Ibid., p.56.
plus radicale: Tant quune rvolution na pas russi, elle est impossible.
Conclusion embarrassante, ajoute Blanchot, conclusion qui implique en
effet une dfinition exacte de tout mouvement rvolutionnaire.24
Le Terrorisme, mthode de salut public
De cette poque, nous pouvons retenir linsistance de Blanchot sur un petit

groupe, un petit nombre qui devait intervenir pour mettre le mouvement
rvolutionnaire en marche. Dans le clbre texte Le Terrorisme, mthode
de salut public, publi en juillet 1936, Blanchot fait appel une poque ant-
rieure, il rend prsent le Comit de salut public, utilisant une rhtorique qui
frle parfois celle de Robespierre et de Saint-Just. Contre le gouvernement
de Lon Blum, il faut une mthode ferme et efficace. Le terrorisme parat
alors comme mthode rvolutionnaire. Le temps rvolutionnaire requiert
une transgression dans la forme, mais aussi dans lopposition.
Face au gouvernement de rien, cest--dire celui de Blum, le ton monte.
Se moquant de ce gouvernement rvolutionnaire, Blanchot nhsite pas
remettre en question lexistence mme de cet tat qui, dans le langage dun
Robespierre, est prsent comme un rgime malfaiteur. Le rgime de Blum
est considr comme une association, plus ou moins secrte de politiciens
sans courage qui font peur et de capitalistes sans capacit nationale qui
dfendent leurs profits.25 Selon Blanchot, certains moments, devant un
tel pouvoir, il faut passer outre, au-del ou en de; si ncessit il y a, il est
bon de se librer de tout systme moral ou lgal: Il serait absurde, dans ces
conditions, dattendre de lopposition lgale et traditionnelle quoi que ce
24 Ibid.
25 Maurice Blanchot, Le Terrorisme, mthode de salut public, Combat, 7 (juillet 1936),
106, repris dans Gramma, 5 (1976), 6163 (p.61).
soit de srieux contre un gouvernement qui, par lui-mme, nest rien, mais
qui reprsente beaucoup par les puissants intrts quil dfend.26
Ce qui apparat, cest peut-tre lide initiale dune communaut, com-
munaut sans commun, la communaut de ceux qui nont pas de commu-
naut, selon les mots de Georges Bataille, inavouable selon Blanchot, une
communaut qui na rien de commun avec le monde, avec la socit. La
communaut du ncessaire: Cette opposition, uvre de quelques-uns et de
quelques quipes, qui na besoin ni du nombre ni de largent, mais dides
fortes et justes et de grands sentiments, nous croyons quelle est aujourdhui
la plus ncessaire et la plus fconde.27
Les caractristiques dune terreur juste sont donc les suivantes:
Cette terreur qui leur donne [aux gens qui croient avoir tout pouvoir, qui usent
leur gr de la justice, des lois] quelque temps lapparence dtres amliors est la
seule raction salutaire quon puisse attendre deux. Elle suffirait mettre en une vive
lumire les bienfaits du terrorisme. [] Ce mot pourra scandaliser un grand nombre.
Cela na aucune importance, car il na justement pas besoin de ladhsion dun grand
nombre. Et la mthode quil signifie nest pas une mthode de propagande, mais
une mthode daction qui est rendue valable par limpossibilit dagir autrement
un moment o il est ncessaire dagir et qui est justifie par le bien quelle apporte
ce grand nombre qui la condamne. Il est vident que si nous sommes disposs
tout subir, nous pourrons critiquer loisir cette mthode. Mais il est sr aussi que si
nous reconnaissons la ncessit de faire un certain moment quelque chose, nous
devons tre prts du mme coup tout faire, par tous les moyens et dabord par la
violence. Nous ne sommes pas de ceux qui jugent prfrable de faire lconomie dune
rvolution ou qui parlent dune rvolution spirituelle, paisible. Cest une esprance
absurde et lche. Il est ncessaire quil y ait une rvolution, parce quon ne modifie
pas un rgime qui tient tout, qui a ses racines partout, on le supprime, on labat. Il
est ncessaire que cette rvolution soit violente, parce quon ne tire pas dun peuple
aussi aveuli que le ntre les forces et les passions propres une rnovation par des
mesures dcentes, mais par des secousses sanglantes, par un orage qui le boulever-
sera afin de lveiller. Cela nest pas de tout repos, mais justement il ne faut pas quil
26 Ibid., p.62.
27 Ibid.
y ait de repos. Cest pourquoi le terrorisme nous apparat actuellement comme une
mthode de salut public.28
Rfrence la Terreur, recours au terrorisme: tout cela nous rappelle, dans

un tout autre contexte, le discours de Robespierre qui dfinissait ainsi la
terreur et la vertu:
Si le ressort du gouvernement populaire dans la paix est la vertu, le ressort du gouver-

nement populaire en rvolution est la fois la vertu et la terreur: la vertu, sans laquelle
la terreur est funeste; la terreur, sans laquelle la vertu est impuissante. La terreur nest
autre chose que la justice prompte, svre, inflexible; elle est donc une manation
de la vertu; elle est moins un principe particulier, quune consquence du principe
gnral de la dmocratie, appliqu aux plus pressants besoins de la patrie.29
Moment de passage: du terrorisme la dissidence
Lavenir semble tre aux rengats.30 Peut-tre est-ce l le dbut de ce quon

appellera par la suite le refus en politique, le neutre en littrature? Avec
larticle On demande des dissidents, publi en dcembre 1937, nous assis-
tons une sorte de changement, dans le ton comme dans la pense. Qui
sont les dissidents qui intressent Blanchot? Ce sont ceux qui ont rsist
la chose enseigne. [] Ils se sont reconquis sur les ides toutes faites et
sur les formules complaisantes. Ils ont propos une extrme pense. Ils
28 Ibid., pp.6263.
29 Maximilien Robespierre, Discours de Robespierre la Convention nationale sur
les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans
ladministration intrieure de la Rpublique, 5 fvrier 1794, cit dans Slavoj iek,
Robespierre: entre vertu et terreur (Paris: Stock, 2008), p.232.
30 Maurice Blanchot, On demande des dissidents, Combat, 20 (dcembre 1937), 154,
repris dans Gramma, 5 (1976), 6364 (p.63).
ont refus ce quil y avait de facile dans la discipline et daccueillant dans

un programme.31
Par ailleurs, nous constatons une critique svre lgard de ceux quil
nomme les no-socialistes.32 En effet, il y a une diffrence majeure entre
le dissident et ce que Blanchot appelle lopportuniste. Le vrai dissident
comme le vritable rvolutionnaire ne fait aucun compromis. En revanche,
lopportuniste est prt tout pour un succs immdiat:
La vraie forme de dissidence est celle qui abandonne une position sans cesser dob-
server la mme hostilit lgard de la position contraire ou plutt qui labandonne
pour accentuer cette hostilit. Le vrai dissident communiste est celui qui quitte le
communisme, non pas pour se rapprocher des croyances capitalistes, mais pour dfi-
nir les vraies conditions de la lutte contre le capitalisme. De mme le vrai dissident
nationaliste est celui qui nglige les formules traditionnelles du nationalisme, non pas
pour se rapprocher de linternationalisme, mais pour combattre linternationalisme
sous toutes ses formes parmi lesquelles se trouvent lconomie de la nation mme.
Ces deux spcimens de dissidence nous semblent aussi utiles lun que lautre. Mais
ils nous semblent galement rares. On demande des dissidents.33
De la rvolution la littrature
la mme poque, en 1937, sous le titre De la rvolution la littrature,

Blanchot questionne le rapport quentretient la littrature avec la rvolution.
Ici, il ne sagit pas de faire lapologie dune certaine littrature facilement
engage, base sur des formes et des normes prtablies, mais de se demander
comment passer une littrature rvolutionnaire (ou: comment dpasser
une littrature rvolue?): par la forme, par le contenu? Toute luvre venir
de Blanchot pourrait tre examine sous cet angle:
31 Ibid., p.63.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., p.65.
Si ce quon appelle bassement la politique doit tre sans pouvoir sur lexamen dune
uvre qui tire son existence dautre chose que la politique, l sarrtent les prtentions
lindpendance. La critique qui chappe par principe aux infiltrations indlicates
de lesprit critique ne peut pas chapper une question qui lui est essentielle et qui
la conduit se demander si, dans un temps o la rvolution est souhaitable, il ny
a pas quelques affinits reconnatre entre la notion de rvolution et les valeurs
littraires.34
Communisme: valeurs et besoins
Il est intressant de comparer maintenant, dune part larticle de 1933, Le

Marxisme contre la rvolution, et dautre part, le compte rendu de Blanchot,
paru en 1953, du livre de Dionys Mascolo, Le Communisme, rvolution et
communication ou la dialectique des valeurs et des besoins (1953).35 Une guerre
est finie, ou pas. Lennemi extrieur est repouss, mais lennemi intrieur
prend forme. Entre la fin de la guerre et lclat des vnements de mai 68, cet
ennemi, ces ennemis internes, occupent toute la place. Le pouvoir gaulliste
est en effet lincarnation des normes et des valeurs qui le posent comme le
nouvel ennemi. Rappelons, titre dexemple, des textes comme En tat de
guerre, ou des prises de position qui comparent le pouvoir gaulliste avec
lOccupation de 194044.36
La publication du compte rendu de ce livre de Mascolo montre bien
lintrt intact de Blanchot pour lhomme, le monde, et pour un changement
vritable de lun et lautre. Il (re)dfinit donc le mouvement rvolutionnaire.
Le marxisme nest peut-tre plus contre la rvolution:
34 Maurice Blanchot, De la rvolution la littrature, LInsurg, 1 (13 janvier 1937), 3.

35 Voir Maurice Blanchot, Dionys Mascolo: Le Communisme, Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue
franaise, 12 (dcembre 1953), 109699, repris dans A, 10914.
36 Maurice Blanchot, En tat de guerre, Comit, 1 (octobre 1968), 34, repris dans EP,
10003.
Dionys Mascolo a cherch montrer que, pour une part, lessentiel du mouvement
rvolutionnaire est le mouvement de la satisfaction des besoins []. Les hommes,
privs de vrit, de valeurs, de fins, continuent de vivre et, vivant, continuent de
chercher donner satisfaction leurs besoins, continuant donc de faire exister le
mouvement de recherche en rapport avec cette satisfaction ncessaire. (A, 109)
Rendre ou rechercher ce qui est drob, vol ou attrap, cest une ncessit.
Il sagit de choses simples mais vitales: valeurs et besoins. [S]ils ne veu-
lent pas sexposer vivre dans des rapports dillusion, [les hommes] nont
apparemment dautre issue que de sen tenir la forme des besoins les plus
simples: il leur faut convertir toutes les valeurs en besoins (A, 11112).
Blanchot termine cet article en voquant lexprience artistique (114),
exprience qui indiquerait un moyen de transformer les valeurs en besoins.
Cette action serait selon Blanchot lcart de toute valeur ou repousse[rait]
toute valuation (113), cest--dire quelle ne peut pas tre value en fonc-
tion des valeurs dominantes. Cest contre ces valeurs dominantes et pour
les valeurs venir quon lutte.
Il est possible de lier cette exprience des actes (acte dcriture),
des arts (lart littraire), des adjectifs (essentielle, absolue), un temps
(lintempestif ), une politique (de rupture, de refus et de justesse), enfin,
un but ultime (si but il y a): lmancipation, autre nom de la rvolution.
crire serait peut-tre une certaine fidlit ces actes, ces arts et ces
principes Cette exprience qui na pas encore de nom se poursuit. Il
y a toujours Mascolo. La revue Le 14 Juillet, anime par Mascolo et Jean
Schuster, publie, en octobre 1958, Le Refus de Maurice Blanchot. Refuser
De Gaulle, son rgime, sa politique. Le refus est absolu.37
Et puis, il y a la guerre dAlgrie. Blanchot participe la rdaction de
la Dclaration sur le droit linsoumission dans la guerre dAlgrie. Nous
sommes en 1960. 121 noms. 121 penses. 121 signatures. Un nombre impor-
tant dcrivains, dartistes, dintellectuels se runit autour dune ide, dune
pense. Loccasion est rare. Se forme le projet de la Revue internationale, une
revue avec une parole plurielle. Les 121 ont donn naissance une forme
37 Voir Le Refus, Le 14 Juillet, 2 (25 octobre 1958), 3, repris dans A, 13031.

dcriture et daction collective, efficace et impersonnelle. Anonyme,

au nom de personne; ainsi un nouveau dpart regroupe les besoins. Mais
ce projet de revue, on le sait, ne se ralise pas. Arrive ensuite enfin ce
que Maurice Blanchot nommera la rvolution de mai 68. Terme peut-tre
trop fort, du moins, nous semble-t-il, dans laprs-coup: tour tour, on
lappellera la rvolte ou le mouvement de mai 68. Peu importe le nom.
Nous nous souvenons de ces mots: Tant quun rvolutionnaire fait un
travail de critique rvolutionnaire et nest pas descendu dans la rue, cest
un intellectuel qui na rien faire avec la rvolution. Il peut enfin descen-
dre dans la rue. Une nouvelle forme dcriture commence: crire dans la
rue, crire la rue, crire pour la rue. Qui crit? Celui qui crie. Qui crie,
crit. Cri qui serait une criture nouvelle. Ce cri crit se fait entendre par
le contenu qui cherche la rupture et larrt, exprime le malaise, voque le
mcontentement et la frustration, et dclare la guerre. Ces cris scrivaient
jadis sur de nouvelles pages: les murs. Puis sur dautres pages, sur dautres
livres, mais plus jamais comme avant.
Pour Blanchot, mai 68 serait lunique moment o la pense rejoint
lacte, o lacte rejoint lcriture. Aussi est-il important dtudier soigneu-
sement ce qui a prcd et ce qui succde cet vnement majeur.
En guise de conclusion
Aujourdhui, il est possible de lire Blanchot, de faon purement historique,

de faon strictement ractionnaire, ou encore, de faon mancipatrice. Nous
sommes persuads quviter la rdition des articles politiques de Blanchot
des annes 30 est loin dtre un honneur pour la vie intellectuelle. Aussi la
rcente rdition des crits politiques de Blanchot qui ne commence qu
partir de 1953 a-t-elle fait preuve dune certaine mdiocrit dans la prsen-
tation de la pense politique de celui qui na cess de penser la rvolution.38

Tout cela est bien dsolant.
Assumer lhritage dans un premier temps, voil ce qui devrait nous
proccuper aujourdhui. Ensuite, faire sa critique, selon nos propres critres,
est une tche essentielle qui nous appelle. Il faut le dire: il y a, dans luvre
politique et littraire de Blanchot, des moments de libration et dmanci-
pation. Mais il y a, aussi, des moments o la critique est ncessaire, et l o
elle est ncessaire, elle manque toujours. Rappelons simplement des faits
comme linvitation de Khomeini ze. Sans vouloir entrer dans le petit jeu
des dfenseurs ou des accusateurs dun ct ou de lautre, il est bon parfois
de se rfrer lhistoire contemporaine et de constater les dgts causs
par une forme dirresponsabilit due aux prises de position que lon peut
considrer comme consensuelle en dpit dune profonde rflexion intellec-
tuelle, historique ou juridique. Inviter Khomeini est un geste symbolique,
preuve dune ouverture, peut-tre. Lespoir quune communication puisse
tre tablie entre un crivain condamn par la terreur (dans ce cas, la terreur
que reprsente Khomeini) et un livre divin qui, selon ses porte-parole, se
prononcerait sur celui-ci? Cette rencontre na pas eu lieu. Limpossibilit
mme de cette rencontre est la vritable possibilit dune certaine terreur
contemporaine. Le livre, lcrit et lcrivain sont condamns au nom de
livres qui sont plus que des livres, des livres venant dau-del.
Une prcaution extrmement grande est requise pour ne pas tomber
dans des cercles vicieux: tantt loccupation, tantt la censure, tantt lin-
justice, tantt labsence de toute libert qui ne se limite pas une date,
une priode prcise de lhistoire mais qui va de gnration en gnration.
L, nous sommes confronts des problmatiques complexes, ouvrant,
tolrant peut-tre une forme de terreur que rien ne justifie, rien ne rachte.
Cest ce Blanchot-l aussi quil faut penser. ces erreurs, ces faux pas,
38 ce propos, voir notamment les principales erreurs releves dans louvrage crits
politiques: 19531993 (Paris: Gallimard, s. Les Cahiers de la NRF, 2008) sur le site
Espace Maurice Blanchot. Extrait le 31 mars 2010 du site <http://www.blanchot.
fr>.
qui ne cessent de venir et de revenir pour en appeler une terreur que rien,
absolument rien ne pourra, ne devrait justifier.
la fin des Intellectuels en question (1984), Blanchot citait un billet de
Ren Char crit en 1943. Le pote rappelait lenfer de la Seconde Guerre
mondiale:
Je ne veux jamais oublier que lon ma contraint devenir pour combien de temps?
un monstre de justice et dintolrance, un simplificateur claquemur, un personnage
arctique qui se dsintresse du sort de quiconque ne se ligue pas avec lui pour abattre
les chiens de lenfer. Les rafles dIsralites, les sances de scalp dans les commissariats,
les raids terroristes des polices hitlriennes sur les villages ahuris me soulvent de terre,
plaquent sur les gerures de mon visage une gifle de fonte rouge. (IQ, 59)
Cette description est terriblement contemporaine. Nous pensons cette

terreur contemporaine, terreur tatique qui sexerce un peu partout: en Iran,
avec sa fausse rpublique, avec sa religion meurtrire, avec ses prisons qui
enferment sa population; mais aussi, dans un autre contexte certes, mais un
contexte terriblement accablant, en France, avec ses multiples syndromes,
commencer par ce nom propre, Sarkozy, reprsentant dun extraordi-
naire abaissement politique et intellectuel droite comme gauche. La
liste est longue. Et cette forme de terreur est de lordre du quotidien, ici et
l, nous le constatons, peut-tre, nous loublions, souvent. Et cautionner
cela, aujourdhui encore? Cest contre ces terreurs perptres au nom dune
religion, dune idologie, dun communautarisme, quil faut se lever. Mme
si cela demande, parfois, de remettre en question radicalement la part de
la Terreur dans luvre dun certain Maurice Blanchot. En ralit, lecture
critique et lecture mancipatrice vont de pair. une poque o le besoin
se transforme en rve, puis en dsespoir et enfin, disparat, il serait bon
de savoir lire Blanchot mais sait-on vraiment lire? et de faire quelque
chose partir dune pense qui pourrait tre le dbut de quelque chose.
Commencer ou recommencer partir de.
Blanchot crit: Tout crivain qui, par le fait mme dcrire, nest pas
conduit penser: je suis la rvolution, en ralit ncrit pas (PF, 311). Ou
encore: LA RVOLUTION EST DERRIRE NOUS []. Mais ce qui
est devant nous, et qui sera terrible, na pas encore de nom (EP, 147). Voil
ce qui nous reste faire: crire-faire ce qui ne cherche pas un nom mais
un devenir: le devenir nest ni un ni deux, ni rapport de deux mais entre-
deux, frontire ou ligne de fuite.39 crire la rvolution, donc. Chercher les
devenirs possibles, et surtout et avant tout, lide mme dmancipation,
cest--dire crire pour manciper lcriture, rendre la libert lcrit. Crer
des lignes de fuite, possibiliser des entre-deux. Maintenant crier-crire.
39 Gilles Deleuze et Flix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrnie, tome 2: Mille plateaux

(Paris: Minuit, 1980), p.360.
Appendix
Maurice Blanchot, facsimile of proof, p.515 of LEntretien infini (1969), Houghton Library,
Harvard University, MS Fr 497, p.492. Reproduced with kind permission of Cidalia Da
Silva Blanchot, the Houghton Library (Harvard University), and ditions Gallimard.
Bibliography
With the exception of abbreviated titles, full references to works cited by the authors
of this volume are included in footnotes. In the following bibliography, we have lim-
ited ourselves to giving indications, without claiming to be exhaustive, of the various
engagements with Romanticism in Blanchots non-fictional uvre. This bibliography
is thus more akin to a reading list, containing items referred to in this volume, in
addition to other passages where Romanticism and related issues are addressed. For
a (nearly) exhaustive bibliography of Blanchots writings (including his fiction) and
for a regularly updated critical bibliography, we refer the reader to the online bibli-
ographies available at Espace Maurice Blanchot, <http://www.blanchot.fr> (accessed
31 March 2010).
Dates in parentheses following book or section titles indicate the time span
during which Blanchots articles, essays, fragmentary texts, letters, or portions of these,
were first published or composed. The material is listed chronologically, according to
the date of first publication or composition (and not necessarily according to their
place in the edition in which they were subsequently collected). Full bibliographical
details for books by Blanchot mentioned below may be found in the Abbreviations
list at the beginning of this volume.
Material collected in book form
from Chroniques littraires (ed. posth.) (194144):

Du Moyen ge au symbolisme (12126)
Le Plus beau livre du romantisme (22026)
Cette affaire infernale (22732)
Le Feu, leau et les rves (24046)
Les Inconnus du romantisme (25359)
Le Fantastique de Hoffmann (41016)
Kierkegaard et lesthtique (42430)
300 Bibliography
Une histoire de la littrature franaise (45560)

De Jean-Paul Giraudoux (54852)
Le Secret de Chateaubriand (59598)
William Blake (62731)
Lon Bloy (64449)
from Faux pas (194043):

Lautramont (197202)
Chaminadour (26265)
Le Secret de Melville (27177)
Goethe et Eckermann (30610)
Bergson et le symbolisme (13235)
La Posie de Mallarm est-elle obscure? (12631)
Le Mariage du ciel et de lenfer (3741)
Le Silence de Mallarm (11725)
Rflexions sur la jeune posie (14953)
Situation de Lamartine (17579)
Une dition des Fleurs du mal (23741)
Au sujet des Nourritures terrestres (33742)
Andr Gide et Goethe (31117)
Posie et langage (15762)
Aprs Rimbaud (16369)
Mallarm et lart du roman (18996)
Traduit du silence (24247)
from La Part du feu (194648):

Le Mystre dans les lettres (95111)
La Parole sacre de Hlderlin (11532)
Lchec de Baudelaire (13351)
Le Sommeil de Rimbaud (15259)
De Lautramont Miller (16072)
Traduit de (17677)
Valry et Faust (26277)
Regards doutre-tombe (23848)
La Littrature et le droit la mort (293331)
Bibliography 301
from Lautramont et Sade (194749):

La Raison de Sade (1749)
LExprience de Lautramont (53188)
from LEspace littraire (195155):

Les Deux versions de limaginaire (34155)
LEspace et lexigence de luvre (53101)
La Littrature et lexprience originelle (28488, 29396, 32733)
La Mort possible (10534)
La Solitude essentielle (1332)
LExprience dIgitur (13840)
La Communication (26375)
LItinraire de Hlderlin (36374)
from Le Livre venir (195358)

La Disparition de la littrature (26574)
La Rencontre de limaginaire (918)
H. H. (22751)
Ecce liber (30809)
Rousseau (5969)
Lchec du dmon: la vocation (13544)
from LEntretien infini (195469):

Orphe, Don Juan, Tristan (28088)
Rflexions sur le nihilisme (21213)
La Cruelle raison potique (43233)
Vaste comme la nuit (46577)
Sur un changement dpoque: lexigence du retour (394418)
Luvre finale (42131)
Ars nova (50614)
LInterruption (comme sur une surface de Riemann) (10612)
LAthenum (51527)
La Voix narrative (le il, le neutre) (55667)
LInsurrection, la folie dcrire (32342)
Nietzsche et lcriture fragmentaire (22755)
LAthisme et lcriture, lhumanisme et le cri (38588)
LAbsence de livre (62036)
302 Bibliography
from LAmiti (195668):

Combat avec lAnge (15052)
Lentes funrailles (98108)
Traduire (6973)
Traces (24658)
Le Tout dernier mot (30025)
from crits politiques 19581993 (ed. posth.) (196068):

[La Gravit du projet] (5069)
[Les Caractres possibles] (9799)
En tat de guerre (10003)
Affirmer la rupture (10406)
Rupture du temps: rvolution (127)
Pour le camarade Castro (12831)
Lire Marx (13639)
Sur le mouvement (14147)
from Le Pas au-del (197073):

Folie: supposons un langage (6566)
Lternel Retour du Mme (2122)
Le fragmentaire (6163)
crire, uvre de labsence duvre (7980)
Je refuse cette parole (15961)
from Lcriture du dsastre (197580)

Fichte: Dans la nature (55)
Schleiermacher: en produisant une uvre (18)
Laffirmation, souvent mal cite (5657)
Il nest dexplosion (19192)
Si Lacoue-Labarthe, dans des rflexions trs prcieuses (205)
Intensit, ce mot diffrent (94)
Lexigence fragmentaire, exigence extrme (9899)
Avoir un systme (101)
Ce que Schlegel dit de la philosophie (101)
crire dans lignorance et le rejet de lhorizon philosophique (160)
Les racines, inventions des grammariens (166)
Le mouvement spontan du romantisme (17071)
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Melville-Ren Char (175)
Schelling: Lme est le vrai divin dans lhomme (181)
Lisant dans R. B. ce que celui-ci ne dit pas (183)
from Aprs coup (1983):

A-t-on remarqu que, son insu, Valry (8792)
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Le Magasin des travestis par Georges Reyer, Zobain par Raymond Gurin, LInsurg,
6 (17 February 1937), 5.
Romanesques par Jacques Chardonne, LInsurg, 9 (10 March 1937), 6.
Joseph et ses frres par Thomas Mann, LInsurg, 14 (14 April 1937), 5.
Rveuse bourgeoisie par Drieu la Rochelle, LInsurg, 17 (5 May 1937), 5.
Les Plus beaux de nos jours par Marcel Arland, LInsurg, 22 (9 June 1937), 5.
Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette par Georges Bernanos, LInsurg, 23 (16 June 1937),
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Les Aventures de Sophie par Paul Claudel, LInsurg, 25 (30 June 1937), 5.
La Pche miraculeuse par Guy de Pourtals, Camp volant par Andr Fraigneau,
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Journal dun intellectuel en chmage, par Denis de Rougemont, LInsurg, 32 (18 August
1937), 4.
Lettres un jeune pote, par Rainer-Maria Rilke, Grard de Nerval, par Albert Bguin,
LInsurg, 33 (25 August 1937), 4.
On demande des dissidents, Combat, 20 (December 1937), 154, in Gramma, 5 (1976),
6364.
Un essai sur Grard de Nerval, Journal des dbats, 22 June 1939, 2.
LEnchantement de Melville, Paysage Dimanche, 27 (16 December 1945), 3
Quelques remarques sur Sade, Critique, 34 (AugustSeptember 1946), 23949.
Du merveilleux, LArche, 2728 (May 1947), 12033, in Maurice Blanchot:
Rcits critiques, ed. by Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar (Tours/Paris: Farrago/
Scheer, 2003), pp.3345.
Le Compagnon de route, LObservateur, 11 (22 June 1950), 17.
Hlderlin, LObservateur, 17 (3 August 1950), 19.
La Folie par excellence, Critique, 45 (February 1951), 99118; revised as the preface
to Karl Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, Swedenborg et Hlderlin (Paris: Minuit,
1970), pp.932.
toute extrmit, Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franaise, 26 (February 1955), 28593.
Ltrange et ltranger, Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue franaise, 70 (October 1958),
67383.
Nous travaillons dans les tnbres, Le Monde, 22 July 1983, 9.
La Parole ascendante, ou Sommes-nous encore dignes de la posie? (notes parses),
in Vadim Kozovo, Hors de la colline (Paris: Hermann, 1984), pp.11927.
Qui?, Cahiers Confrontation, 20 (Winter [February] 1989), 4951.
Correspondence (19811991)
Letter to Vadim Kozovo, 7 August 1981, in Lettres Vadim Kozovo, ed. by Denis
Aucouturier (Houilles: Manucius, 2009), p.52.
Letter to Vadim Kozovo, 26 July 1982, in Lettres Vadim Kozovo, p.78.
Letter to Vadim Kozovo, 24 November 1982, in Lettres Vadim Kozovo,
pp.9091.
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Letter to Vadim Kozovo, 25 February 1984, in Lettres Vadim Kozovo, pp.11516.
Letter to Ren Major, 3 April 1988, Cahiers Confrontations, 20 (Winter [February]
1989), 51.
Letter to Claire Nouvet, nigme, 1991, Yale French Studies, 79 (1991), 57.
Notes on Contributors
Gisle Berkman is directrice de programme at the Collge International

de Philosophie in Paris. Her research programme is entitled: La pense
luvre: critures de la pense, des Lumires lextrme contemporain. She
is also a member of the editorial committee of the review Po&sie (Belin).
She works on the relationship between the Enlightenment and literary
and philosophical modernity. She has published articles on Rousseau,
Derrida, Nancy, and Blanchot. Her most recent publications include an
edited issue entitled Clair/obscur (September 2009) of the review Rue
Descartes (PUF), and Archologie du moi, co-edited with Caroline Jacot
Grapa (Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2009).
Christophe Bident is matre de confrences at Universit de Paris VII

Denis Diderot. He is the author of Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible
(Champ Vallon, 1998) and Reconnaissances Antelme, Blanchot, Deleuze
(Calmann-Lvy, 2003). He has edited Blanchots Chroniques littraires du
Journal des dbats, 19411944 (Gallimard, 2007) and is currently editing
another collection of articles by Blanchot, La Condition critique (Gallimard,
2010). He also writes on contemporary theatre and will soon be publishing
an augmented edition of his first book on Kolts, Bernard-Marie Kolts,
Gnalogies, suivi de Le Sens du monde (Hermann, 2010). A number of his
articles on Blanchot have been translated into English, including: Blanchot,
Leiris: A Question of Age, Colloquy, 10 (November 2005); The Movements
of the Neuter, in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, ed. by
Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson and Dimitris Vardoulakis (University of Delaware
Press, 2005); R/M, 1953, Paragraph, 30:3 (November 2007).
308 Notes on Contributors
Martin Crowley is Senior Lecturer in French at Cambridge University

and a Fellow of Queens College. He works on modern and contemporary
thought and culture. His current research examines accounts of the visual
and plastic arts in the work of modern French thinkers. He is the author of
LHomme sans: Politiques de la finitude (Lignes, 2009) with an afterword
by Jean-Luc Nancy; The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French
Fiction and Film, co-authored with Victoria Best (Manchester University
Press, 2007); Robert Antelme: LHumanit irrductible (Lignes/ditions
Lo Scheer, 2004); Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony
(Legenda, 2003); and Duras, Writing, and the Ethical, Making the Broken
Whole (OUP, 2000). He is also the editor of Contact! The Art of Touch/
LArt du toucher (LEsprit Crateur, Fall 2007) and Dying Words: The Last
Moments of Writers and Philosophers (Rodopi, 2000).
Yves Gilonne is Lecturer in French at the University of Nottingham.

He is the author of several articles and a book on Blanchot entitled La
Rhtorique du sublime dans luvre de Maurice Blanchot (LHarmattan,
2008). Specializing in twentieth-century French thought and notably
Blanchot and his contemporaries, his current research looks at the role
played by translation in the development of philosophy. He is the co-editor
of a forthcoming Nottingham French Studies special number on Translating
Thought/Traduire la pense. He is also a member of the Nottingham-based
Science, Technology, and Culture Research Group and is currently work-
ing on Discourses and Representations of the Nuclear Age in France
(19451975).
Leslie Hill is Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick

and the author of, among others, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary
(Routledge, 1997); Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit
(Oxford University Press, 2001); and Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot,
Derrida, and the Future of Criticism (Notre Dame University Press, 2010).
He is currently completing a book on fragmentary writing in Blanchot.
Michael Holland is University Lecturer in French at Oxford University

and a Fellow of St Hughs College. He is the editor of The Blanchot Reader
(Blackwell, 1995), and the author of several essays on Blanchots work which
have appeared in journals and in collective volumes. He also recently co-
edited a special issue entitled Blanchots Epoch (November 2007) of the
review Paragraph. He is currently preparing a book on narrative and time
in Blanchots fiction.
Ian James is Lecturer in French at Cambridge University and a Fellow of

Downing College. He is the author of Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of
a Name (Legenda, 2000); The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to
the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford University Press, 2006); and
Paul Virilio (Routledge, 2007). He is also co-editor of Whispers of the
Flesh: Essays in Memory of Pierre Klossowski (Diacritics, Spring 2005); and
Exposures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy (Oxford Literary Review, vol.
27, 2005). He is currently working on a project which examines the way
in which the question of technology has been taken up in recent French
philosophy.
Hector Kollias received his PhD from the Philosophy Department at

the University of Warwick focusing on early German Romanticism and
its reception; his thesis was entitled Exposing Romanticism: Philosophy,
Literature, and the Incomplete Absolute. He is now Lecturer in French at
Kings College London. He has written articles on Blanchot, de Man,
Nancy, and Rancire among others. Apart from the theory of literature
stemming from early German Romanticism, his other key interest lies in
psychoanalysis, queer theory, and French queer writing, and he has pub-
lished articles on Genet and Dustan, as well as contributing a chapter on
psychoanalysis in the Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy
(2009). He is currently working on a project dealing with the psychoana-
lytic concept of perversion and its uses and abuses in queer theory.
310 Notes on Contributors
Maebh Long is a final year PhD student at Durham University, where she
is working under the supervision of Professor Timothy Clark. Her thesis
attempts to position Jacques Derrida within a lineage of thinkers work-
ing on the borders of literature and philosophy who exploit irony, a non-
propositional element of language, as a cognitive resource. Her theorizing
of irony moves away from traditional readings to refigure it in relation to
parabasis, parataxis, and the contaminated performative/constative. She is
Chief Editor of the postgraduate journal Kaleidoscope, and co-convenor of
both the Inventions of the Text seminar series and the English Departments
theory reading group at Durham. She has presented and published work
on Derrida, Blanchot, Schlegel, and Flann OBrien.
Ian Maclachlan is Lecturer in French at Oxford University and Tutorial

Fellow at Merton College. He is the author of Roger Laporte: The Orphic
Text (Legenda, 2000) and of a forthcoming study of temporalities of writ-
ing in the work of Beckett, Blanchot, Derrida, Des Forts, Klossowski,
and Laporte. As editor, he has published The Writer and Responsibility
(a special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2006), Jacques
Derrida: Critical Thought (Ashgate, 2004), and (with Michael Syrotinski)
Sensual Reading (Bucknell University Press, 2001). He is also an editor of
Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.
Jrmie Majorel is agrg de lettres modernes. A graduate assistant at

Universit de Paris VII Denis Diderot, he is currently completing his
third year of doctoral research under the supervision of Christophe Bident.
His thesis is entitled Chiasmes: Blanchot, hermneutique et dconstruction.
His most recent publications include: Starobinski et Derrida, critiques
de Blanchot?, Tracs, 13 (second semester 2007); Avital Ronell: French
Connexion, in Agenda de la pense contemporaine, 15 (Winter 2010); and
Ce monde nest pas en faveur de lamiti, Critique, 754 (March 2010).
Parham Shahrjerdi was born in 1980 in Tehran and lives in Paris. He

is the author of LOdysse de Bmdd (Caravan, 2003, 2nd edn 2009), Pass
compos de ma mort (Rapport dtape, 2006), and Risquer la posie/Risk of
Poetry (Poetrypub.info, 2009). He is also the founder of the website Espace

Maurice Blanchot (<http://www.blanchot.fr>) and of the multilingual
review Poetrymag (<http://www.poetrymag.ws>). As a translator, he has
published (in French) a collection of poems by Y. Roy entitled Le Pass
en je: signature (Caravan, 2003) and (in Persian) Blanchots La Folie du
jour (Vistr, 2007). His most recent publications include La Langue du
survivant, la langue survcue (Crosswords/Mots croiss, September 2008)
and Comment Blanchot serait-il possible?, in Blanchot dans son sicle
(Parangon, 2009), a collection of essays on Blanchot which he co-edited.
He is also the editor of a number of (censored) works in contemporary
Iranian literature and of Persian translations of works by Baudrillard, Butler,
Deleuze, and Bataille. As a photographer, he is working on La Photo
venir.
Jake Wadham is College Lecturer in French at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

His DPhil thesis, completed in 2005, is entitled The Novel and the Neuter:
The Inspiration and the Impact of Blanchots Thomas lObscur. His current
research interests focus on Blanchot, Levinas, and phenomenology.
Sergey Zenkin is a leading researcher at the Russian State University

for the Humanities (RGGU) in Moscow. His interests are intellectual his-
tory, literary theory, and French literature of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. He has published more than one hundred articles, some of them
on Blanchot, and three books: in French, Madame Bovary et loppression
raliste (Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 1996); in Russian, Works on
French Literature (Ural University Press, 1999); and French Romanticism
and the Idea of Culture (RGGU Press, 2002). He is soon to publish, in
Moscow, a book about the secular discourses of the sacred in modern
culture. He has also translated theoretical works from French and English
into Russian, including some of Blanchots essays.
Index
Abraham, 150 Berman, Antoine, 3, 52, 59, 66, 69, 97

Abrams, M. H., 158 Bertholin, Jean-Marie, 76
Adorno, Theodor, 65 Bident, Christophe, 78, 62, 12930, 133,
Agamben, Giorgio, 14748 219
Alloa, Emmanuel, 47 Bietlot, Mathieu, 40
Antelme, Robert, 9, 49, 7980, 251, 255, Bitsoris, Vanghlis, 25
271 Blake, William, 3, 6, 15559, 170, 171
Antonioli, Manola, 165, 170 Blum, Lon, 287
Arnim, Achim von, 15 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 35, 100, 132, 278
Artaud, Antonin, 68, 69 Borel, Ptrus, 8687
Aury, Dominique, 211 Bousquet, Jo, 59
Averroes, 14748 Brecht, Bertholt, 59, 79, 9091, 236
Ayrault, Roger, 3, 60 Brentano, Clemens, 14, 31
Breton, Andr, 133
Bachelard, Gaston, 169 Bruns, Gerald, 23334
Bailly, Jean-Christophe, 116 Butor, Michel, 9
Balibar, tienne, 25 Byron, G. G., 56
Bakunin, Mikhail, 249, 258, 260
Barrs, Maurice, 278 Caesar, Julius, 184
Barthes, Roland, 9, 76, 79, 90 Caillois, Roger, 9596
Bataille, Georges, 8, 40, 78, 82, 85, 103, Calvino, Italo, 9, 62
130, 15657, 185, 211, 26674, 288 Camus, Albert, 25153
Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 58, 145 Celan, Paul, 212
Beckett, Samuel, 76, 77, 212 Cervantes, Miguel de, 183, 185
Bguin, Albert, 3, 59, 62, 111, 119 Char, Ren, 4, 48, 60, 295
Behler, Ernst, 194 Chateaubriand, Franois-Ren de, 7,
Beisner, Frederick, 178 13132
Benjamin, Walter, 3, 4, 17, 25, 3334, Clark, Timothy, 29, 161, 169, 19899,
5152, 60, 61, 63, 9091, 97, 110, 204, 233
127, 17390, 213, 223, 22527, 231, Coleridge, S. T., 5, 170
249, 25960 Collin, Franoise, 165
Berg, Alban, 90 Craig, E. G., 77
Bergson, Henri, 121 Critchley, Simon, 3, 21, 250
314 Index
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 18384 Goldhammer, Kurt, 116

Daniel-Rops (Petiot), Henri, 281, 283 Grass, Gnter, 9
Davies, Paul, 161, 174 Gresh, Alain, 279
de Gaulle, Charles, 25, 275, 29192 Guattari, Flix, 79, 296
de Man, Paul, 3, 21, 34, 94, 98, 19293,
197, 199204, 20607, 241 Hamacher, Werner, 239
Decroux, tienne, 77 Hamann, J. G., 14, 174
Deleuze, Gilles, 79, 80, 81, 222, 296 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 6
Derrida, Jacques, 29, 32, 79, 105, 151, Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 15, 17, 3343, 44, 71, 73,
19193, 204, 211, 219, 24041, 8889, 100, 10204, 115, 118, 151,
250, 271 159, 161, 18182, 183, 18586, 189,
Descombes, Vincent, 10203 190, 19394, 196, 199205, 207,
Dreyfus, Alfred, 27879 224, 267, 271
Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 110 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 15, 29, 32, 59,
Dupin, Jacques, 77 6769, 74, 11819, 17071, 207,
Duras, Marguerite, 9, 76, 77, 79, 226 212, 221, 26671
Drer, Albrecht, 145 Heine, Heinrich, 15
Helmreich, Christian, 116
Enzensberger, H. M., 9 Heraclitus, 75
Exideuil, Pierre d, 283 Herder, J. G. von, 15
Herzl, Theodor, 279
Faulkner, William, 86 Hewson, Mark, 10
Fichte, J. G., 3, 15, 34, 125, 17678, 180 Hill, Leslie, 10, 40, 20506, 234, 241
82, 186, 194 Hitler, Adolf, 282, 295
Forts, Louis-Ren des, 9 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 14, 8386
Foucault, Michel, 3, 4, 32, 5354, 6768, Hlderlin, Friedrich, 3, 7, 910, 12, 14, 20,
79, 211 27, 40, 5859, 84, 101, 11113, 120,
Frank, Manfred, 72 12324, 127, 212, 22225, 227
Freud, Sigmund, 79, 143, 151, 220 Holland, Michael, 10, 22, 29, 33, 45,
249
Gandhi, M. K., 280 Howells, Christina, 162
Garric, Robert, 286 Hubbard, Thomas, 236
Gasch, Rodolphe, 18788, 191, 204, 206 Hugo, Victor, 4, 7, 58, 69, 87
Gautier, Thophile, 12, 87
Genette, Grard, 89 Immerwahr, Raymond, 236
Gide, Andr, 8, 27
Giraudoux, Jean, 8, 82, 12125 Jabs, Edmond, 234
Goethe, J. W. von, 4, 1415, 42, 86, 88, 96, Jarry, Alfred, 77
109, 112, 11420, 12425, 127, 175 Jenny, Laurent, 277
Index 315
Johnson, Uwe, 9 Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis, 282

Jung, C. G., 156 Lukcs, Gyrgy, 62, 87
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 10406
Kafka, Franz, 4, 8485, 160, 212, 21420,
227, 242 Major, Ren, 29
Kandinsky, Wassily, 76, 77 Majorel, Jrmie, 30
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 15, 34, 70, 72, 102, Malaparte, Curzio, 282
10405, 17071, 176, 177, 179, 190 Mallarm, Stphane, 8, 17, 38, 44, 58, 68,
Kearney, Richard, 158, 162, 170 77, 79, 94, 98, 103, 104, 111, 184,
Keats, John, 6 18889, 212, 213
Khomeini, Ruhollah, 294 Malraux, Andr, 86
Kierkegaard, Sren, 57, 159, 182, 185, 186, Mann, Thomas, 59, 10910, 113
199, 201 Maritain, Jacques, 112
Klee, Paul, 76, 77, 90 Marx, Karl, 87, 188, 249, 25152, 258, 260,
Kojve, Alexandre, 17, 40, 103, 185 281, 285, 291
Kolts, Bernard-Marie, 77 Mascolo, Dionys, 9, 80, 222, 29192
Kozovo, Vadim, 9, 15, 212, 218 Mauron, Charles, 212
Maurras, Charles, 81, 279, 280, 281
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 14, 11, 17, 25, Maxence (Godm), Jean-Pierre, 28485
29, 31, 33, 35, 3739, 4145, 51, 53, Melville, Herman, 6
59, 6971, 89, 93, 98, 99, 110, 116, Metternich, K. W. von, 175, 181, 193
117, 174, 184, 19192, 199, 204, Michaud, Ginette, 105
211, 229, 237, 270, 271 Michaux, Henri, 8, 85, 190
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 7, 8, 58, 87 Mole, G. D., 233
Laporte, Roger, 76 Moravia, Alberto, 9
Lautramont, Comte de (Ducasse, Mrike, Eduard, 15
Isidore), 8, 44, 82, 83, 9596, Musset, Alfred de, 7
12123
Lecoq, Jacques, 77 Nadeau, Maurice, 9, 90
Lefebvre, Henri, 49 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 25, 11, 29, 3133, 35, 39,
Leiris, Michel, 9, 131 4142, 4445, 51, 59, 6970, 79,
Lenin, V. I., 249, 253, 258, 260 89, 93, 98, 99, 105, 110, 116, 117,
Leonetti, Francesco, 9 174, 184, 19192, 199, 204, 211,
Lessing, G. E., 15 229, 237, 238, 253, 26374
Levinas, Emmanuel, 48, 49, 74, 78, 79, Nerval (Labrunie), Grard de, 78, 12, 58,
165, 211, 231, 242, 256, 267, 271 82, 84, 8687, 101
Libertson, Joseph, 164, 168 Newman, Barnett, 77
Lipiansky, Edmond, 282 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15, 29, 60, 61, 65, 68,
Lispector, Clarice, 76 120, 159, 164, 202, 212, 228
316 Index
Novalis (Hardenberg, G. P. F. von), 3, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 6, 20, 22, 24, 45, 47,
45, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 27, 31, 66, 16065
3334, 42, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, Savage, Robert, 10
57, 61, 63, 6567, 73, 84, 87, Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 3, 123
88, 101, 11112, 173, 175, 183, Schefer, Olivier, 3, 7172
186, 189, 19194, 212, 22022, Schiller, Friedrich von, 14, 41, 114, 118
26465 Schlegel, A. W., 3, 14, 37, 57, 61, 63, 66, 73,
87, 93, 115, 173
ONeddy (Dondey), Philothe, 87 Schlegel, Friedrich, 3, 11, 14, 15, 24, 30,
Otto, Peter, 170 32, 34, 37, 4243, 44, 46, 50, 57,
61, 63, 64, 7274, 87, 93, 97, 99,
Pasolini, P. P., 9 101, 109, 110, 111, 112, 11417, 125,
Paulhan, Jean, 82, 85, 94, 211 126, 127, 173, 17476, 18083, 189,
Peignot, Colette (Laure), 13031 191200, 20207, 212, 22931,
Plato, 50, 180 23439
Poe, Edgar Allan, 6, 86, 13334 Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 3, 14, 15, 57, 193
Proust, Marcel, 8 Schlemmer, Oskar, 77
Schmidt, Roman, 47
Racine, Jean, 75 Schmitt, Carl, 227
Ramuz, Charles-Ferdinand, 111 Schoenberg, Arnold, 59, 90
Rancire, Jacques, 17, 7273, 276 Schulte Nordholt, Anne-Lise, 165
Rapaport, Herman, 29 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 200
Rgy, Claude, 76 Schumann, Robert, 74, 81
Rettenbach, Bernard, 282 Shakespeare, William, 52, 66, 248
Richter, J. P. (Jean Paul), 3, 7, 9, 10, 14, Shelley, Mary, 40
27, 42, 44, 57, 8284, 99, 101, 109, Shelley, P. B., 6
11427 Sifakis, Gregory, 236
Rilke, R. M., 4, 59, 100, 212 Socrates, 182, 243
Rimbaud, Arthur, 78, 58, 84, 101 Solger, K. W. F., 15
Robespierre, Maximilien, 37, 276, 287, 289 Sontag, Susan, 131, 136
Ronell, Avital, 200, 204, 206 Spinoza, Baruch de, 178
Rossetti, D. G., 155 Starobinski, Jean, 14445
Rougemont, Denis de, 136 Sterne, Laurence, 42, 115
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7, 114, 263 Szondi, Peter, 200
Sade, D. A. F. (Marquis de Sade), 7, Tatah, Djamel, 77

2223, 25, 34, 35 Tpies, Antoine, 77
Saint-Just, L. A. L. de, 287 Thouard, Denis, 72
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 295 Tieck, J. L., 14
Index 317
Todorov, Tzvetan, 89 Warburg, Aby, 50

Toumayan, Alain, 165 Warminski, Andrzej, 21, 40, 194
Wencelius, Lon, 112
Valry, Paul, 15, 109, 112, 116, 18386, 211 Winckelmann, J. J., 180
Vardoulakis, Dimitris, 118 Wordsworth, William, 5
Vittorini, Elio, 9, 62
Voltaire (Arouet, Franois Marie), 90 Yeats, W. B., 15758
Wackenroder, W. H., 14 Zarathustra, 22829, 231

Waiblinger, Wilhelm, 15 iek, Slavoj, 15152
Le Romantisme et aprs en France
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est de publier des monographies ou des ouvrages de plus longue
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Romanticism and after in France is a series designed to publish

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Vol. 1: Alan Raitt: Flaubert et le thtre. 198 pp. 2e dition revue et corrige,
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Vol. 11: Alan Raitt: Gustavus Flaubertus Bourgeoisophobus: Flaubert and the
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Vol. 12: Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Patrick McGuinness (eds):

La Belgique entre deux sicles: laboratoire de la modernit 18801914.
272 pp. 2007.
Vol. 13: Vladimir Kapor: Local Colour: A Travelling Concept. 262 pp. 2009.
Vol. 14: Natasha Grigorian: European Symbolism: In Search of Myth

(18601910). 316 pp. 2009.
Vol. 15: Forthcoming
Vol. 16: Barbara Giraud: Lhrone goncourtienne: Entre hystrie et dissidence.

239 pp. 2009.
Vol. 17: John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (eds): Blanchot Romantique:
A Collection of Essays. 329 pp. 2011.
Vol. 18: Alan Raitt: Flauberts First Novel: A study of the 1845 ducation senti-
mentale. 142 pp. 2010.
Vol. 19: Loc P. Guyon: Les Martyrs de la Veuve: Romantisme et peine de mort.
266 pp. 2010.
Vol. 20: Forthcoming
Vol. 21: Kate Rees: Flaubert:Transportation, Progression, Progress. 202 pp. 2010.

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,E2OMANTISME

John McKeane and

(ANNES/PELZSTUDIEDIN,ONDON 0ARIS "OLOGNA AND#AMBRIDGE(ISCURRENT

a series founded by Alan Raitt

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Blanchot romantique : a collection of essays / [edited by] John McKeane

Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2011

All rights reserved.

HANNES OPELZ and JOHN McKEANE

Legacies (I): Theory 55

Legacies (II): Praxis 107

Twentieth-Century Conversations in Romanticism 153

Romantic Fragmentations 209

Political Romanticism 245

Notes on Contributors 307

Unless indicated otherwise, all references to the writings of Maurice

Works by Maurice Blanchot

A LAmiti (Gallimard, 1971).

FP Faux pas (Gallimard, 1943), n. edn 1971.

AL Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, LAbsolu lit-

Introduction: The Absolute, the Fragmentary

Pas au-del de la religion: de la Littrature et de la politique, et mme

Blanchot romantique? Our title could perhaps be greeted with surprise,

1 In Revue des sciences humaines, 253 ( JanuaryMarch 1999), 22729 (p.229).

2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Prsentation, Potique, 21 (1975), 12 (p.1).

4 This latter characteristic is forcefully underlined by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in

and fragmentary texts; it is addressed here with regard to both theme

perspective under an understanding of history, of art, of the philosophy

O est le romantisme? (EI, 517), asks Blanchot in a text which is central to

Shelley or Keats,8 a brief survey of Blanchots incursions into Romantic

For a Nerval or a Rimbaud.12 Readers familiar with Blanchot would

12 Nearly the same constellation of names (relating German Romanticism to one or

as, for example, Blanchots interpretation of the Athenum in the 1960s

16 As Michael Holland notes (pp.11416), a similar ambiguity arises, albeit in a different

de son histoire: commencer, par exemple, par la mort de Novalis ou par

18 Maurice Blanchot, Un essai sur Grard de Nerval, p.2.

sense, what Blanchot says of surrealism in a well-known essay collected in

The comparison with surrealism can be explored further,19 of course,

Solger, Arnim, Heine, Mrike, Waiblinger, etc.20 , not to mention a number

22 See, for example, EL, 279.

That this ontological institution or constitution is itself based on nothing-

Political Romanticism: un trs curieux change

Before addressing some of the ways in which Romanticism responds to this

lexigence ou lexprience des contradictions (516),27 his inaugural statement

La littrature (jentends lensemble des formes dexpression, cest--dire aussi forces

distinguish the specifically empirical dimension of politics, including any

31 Simon Critchley, Very Little Almost Nothing, p.91.

Jena Romanticisms assimilating absolutism and, more specifically, from its

most challenging, most discomforting responsibility) to what Blanchot calls

of history (p.249). Informed neither by the assertive precedence of past

The (Romantic) Subject of Literature

Without Blanchot, then, contemporary debate in emancipatory politics

37 The implications of treating irony here in relation to subjectivity are discussed by

is always there to be dissolved, lost, ruined, dispersed, negated, effaced,

Oui, la question du sujet reste aujourdhui encore la question de la question. Le

As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy remarked, nous ne sommes pas sortis

38 Maurice Blanchot, Qui?, Cahiers Confrontation, 20 (Winter [February] 1989), 4951

involves a redistribution of the scene in which thought and writing have

4666; as well as Jrmie Majorel, Derrida et Starobinski, critiques de Blanchot?,

the literary absolute: Il sagit den finir avec la partition et la division, la

they include a privileging of communitarian immanence embodied in the

self in [Romanticization])?51 How does such a response diverge not just

51 Novalis, quoted by Walter Benjamin in SW I, 133.

le motif dun romantisme essentiellement rebelle limprialisme de la Raison et

(ANNES/PELZSTUDIEDIN,ONDON0ARIS"OLOGNAAND#AMBRIDGE(ISCURRENT