Maurice Blanchot
biography
I have very little biographical information on Blanchot. We know that Maurice Blanchot was born in 1907 and that he is a novelist and critic. He has written that "writing is a fearful spiritual weapon that negates the naive existence of what it names and must therefore do the same to itself. Literature runs the danger of denying its own desire for presence, although it cannot become anything else, philosophy for example. Hence writing is a self-disturbed activity: it knows itself to be, at once, trivial and apocalyptic, vain yet of the greatest consciousness-altering potential."
"It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a writer sitting at their table and forming letters on a piece of paper."
selected works in translation
Death Sentence translated by Lydia Davis (Station Hill, 1978)
The Gaze of Orpheus translated by Lydia Davis (Station Hill, 1981)
Madness of the Day translated by Lydia Davis (Station Hill, 1988)
Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him in Foucault - Blanchot translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (Zone Books, 1987)
The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me translated by Lydia Davis (Station Hill, 1993)
The Step Not Beyond translated by Lycette Nelson (SUNY Press, 1992)
Thomas the Obscure translated by Robert Lamberton (Station Hill, 1988)
The Unavowable Community translated by Pierre Joris (Station Hill, 1988)
When the Time Comes translated by Lydia Davis (Station Hill, 1985)
writing
excerpt from -thomas the obscure
Anne saw him coming without surprise, this inevitable being in whom she recognized the one she might try in vain to escape, but would meet again every day. Each time, he came straight to her, following with an inflexible pace a path laid straight over the sea, the forests, even the sky. Each time, when the world was emptied of everything but the sun and this motionlerss being standing at her side, Anne, enveloped in his silent immobility, carried away by this profound insensitivity which revealed her, feeling all the calm of the universe condensing in her through him, just as the sparkling chaos of the ultimate noon was resounding, mingled with the silence, pressed by the greatest peace, not daring to make a move or to have a thought, seeing herself burned, dying, her eyes, her cheeks aflame, mouth half-open exhaling, as a last breath, her obscure forms into the glare of the sun, perfectly transparent in death beside this opaque corpse which stood by, becoming ever more dense, and, more silent than silence, undermining the hours and deranged time. A just and sovereign death, inhuman and shameful moment which began anew each day, and from which she could not escape.
excerpt from -death sentence
These pages can end here, and nothing that follows what I have just written will make me add anything to it or take anything away from it. This remains, this will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and he would be my victim. In darkness, he would see me: my word would be his silence, and he would think he was holding sway over the world, but that sovereignity would still be mine, his nothingness mine, and he too would know that there is no end for a man who wants to end alone.
This should therefore be impressed upon anyone who might read these pages thinking they are infused with the thought of unhappiness. And what is more, let him try to imagine the hand that is writing them: if he saw it, then perhaps reading would become a serious task for him.
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