Putting the World and the Self in Parentheses

Maurice Blanchot, trans. Michael Holland, The World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943

Fordham University Press, 320pp, $39.00, ISBN 9780823267262

reviewed by Calum Watt

Maurice Blanchot (1907 – 2003) was one of the most remarkable French writers of the 20th century. A reclusive figure much admired and regarded as an authority by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as a close friend of Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas, it is difficult to underestimate Blanchot’s importance for the development of post-war French deconstructive philosophy and, by extension, much of the work being done in the humanities today the world over. In addition to writing a number of incomparably strange and unsettling fiction texts, Blanchot was responsible for seminal critical essays on literary and philosophical topics. Much of his writing has only been made available in English in the last 15 years. Blanchot originally published essays in journals like La Nouvelle Revue Française and Bataille’s Critique, and his classic critical volumes – notably The Work of Fire (1949), The Book to Come (1959), The Infinite Conversation (1969), and Friendship (1971) – are collections of such articles.

From 1941 to 1944 Blanchot wrote a weekly column reviewing books in the newspaper Journal des débats, which was pro-Vichy during the Occupation of France and closed with the Liberation of Paris. A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943 is the third of four volumes assembling these previously uncollected articles, following on from the publications Into Disaster and Desperate Clarity (both published in 2013), which contain the articles of 1941 and 1942 respectively. The articles have been carefully translated and edited by the leading Blanchot scholar Michael Holland. The book has been beautifully prepared by Fordham University Press, who are responsible for several recent publications on Blanchot.

As Holland explains in his introduction, 1943 represented a turning point in the Second World War. The Nazis were becoming increasingly overstretched, while in France the Resistance was becoming coordinated. Nevertheless in France culture continued under the German occupation, and while Blanchot was no collaborator he maintained a public profile as a writer. Indeed, his articles constituted a guarded form of opposition. Blanchot lived in Paris in the occupied zone but sent his articles to the free zone ‘through special channels.’

What emerges in these articles is that, while they appear withdrawn from political events, they are in fact the site of a refracted meditation on the nature of history. In the 1930s, Blanchot had been ideologically committed to France, and defeat by Germany in 1940 and the establishment of the Vichy regime meant for him that France as a concept was finished. In the articles in A World in Ruins, history is conceived of as a movement of ineluctable ruination; elsewhere in his writings he will describe human experience as a ‘disaster.’ In the final article, which gives the book its title, Blanchot describes how the idea of catastrophe is being used by contemporary novelists, writing that this should be acknowledged ‘not just as a revelation about where literature is tending, but as one that concerns the meaning of our world.’

While many of these review articles discuss texts that have been long forgotten, this serves all the more to underscore for the contemporary reader how a book review can be a form through which a particular, perhaps distant history and personality can emerge. The chronological format of the collection allows one to gain a sense of the writer’s mood over the course of a year as his thought develops. Yet if Blanchot’s time and mind can be said to ‘emerge’ in the form of the book review, it is also a space in which he withdraws into a kind of anonymity. Literature is here not so much a sphere of consolation or retreat, but rather a way of putting the world and the self in parentheses. It is through withdrawal into literature that Blanchot continues to come to terms with the disaster of history and finds a means with which to construct a highly original aesthetic theory.

Blanchot was so widely versed on literary and philosophical topics that he sometimes reads like a mind roving through all of Western civilisation. Reading A World in Ruins, we move pleasurably from Nicholas of Cusa to Madame de La Fayette, from Machiavelli to Simone de Beauvoir among others. However, what makes Blanchot’s critical essays so important is the depth of his engagement with writing as a concept and the experience of writing fiction that he brings to the task. An essential Blanchotian theme treated in this volume, as throughout his work, is the ambiguity of literary language. Blanchot conceives of literature as having a unique power to put language itself in question, exposing the reader or writer to what lies beyond meaning, knowledge, and all familiar relations. In its strongest iteration, Blanchot will come to argue, through a critical engagement with Heidegger, that literature opens us to the groundlessness of being. It is in meditating on this in his book reviews that they can transcend themselves to amount to philosophical reflections.

A major topic in the book, which recurs throughout several of the 39 articles, is the development of the novel as an art form. As a critic, Blanchot repeatedly attacks novelists’ ‘incurable penchant for realism’. In one of the highlights of the collection, ‘The Pure Novel,’ Blanchot outlines his conception of a novel that, unlike the 19th-century realist novel associated with Balzac, would no longer be concerned with verisimilitude but would follow its own internal logic. He writes that a novel is pure ‘to the extent that its ambition is to create, if necessary, a system that is absolute, complete, indifferent to the usual circumstances in which things exist, constituted by intrinsic relations and capable of sustaining itself without drawing on anything external to it.’ Loosely thinking of the 19th-century poet Lautréamont, Blanchot considers the pure novel as that which is ‘in search of the unknown.’ In this, as in allusions to the notion of ‘inner experience’ and ‘non-knowledge’ in the discussion of medieval mystic texts, one can detect the influence of Bataille, whom Blanchot had met in 1940. Again Blanchot’s preoccupation is what he theorises as a strange, fascinated experience that literature opens us to. Literature for Blanchot always implies an experience with the unknown that, through language and paradox, causes one’s sense of self to be put under erasure. So much writing about the ‘decentred’ or ‘deconstructed’ subject that we know today in the discourse of the humanities finds its origin here.

In his introduction to the previous volume, Holland writes that Blanchot’s writing can be seen not simply as the work of an individual, but as ‘the site of a huge and fundamental change in Western values themselves (which is how successors like Foucault and Derrida approached it).’ During the Occupation Blanchot withdraws from the events of the time, but this becomes ‘a falling away that affects everything: the world, the work, and the subject who seeks through language to bring them into relation […] it disrupts the basic convergence of the discourses of thought, literature and politics within a single value system, and the assumption that a unitary human ideal governs everything.’ Holland writes that it is ‘this catastrophe that will turn the historical moment of France’s defeat into a turning point for the very idea of history and the worldview it underpins.’ As well as being sumptuous examples of critical writing in their own right, the articles in A World in Ruins form an historical document from which one can get a sense of the epochal change that French intellectuals read in them. They are also a testament to how a cultural mind can survive during a period of historical disaster and come to change as a result. Holland has rendered readers a service by stressing the importance of historical context in interpreting Blanchot’s writings, and by extension 20th-century French thought, more generally.
Calum Watt is a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at Sorbonne Nouvelle, University of Paris.