Nous sommes tous la pègre: les années 68 de Blanchot by Jean-François Hamel (review)

Jean-François Hamel's book is neither a commemoration of the events of 1968 nor an exaltation of the role played throughout the upheavals by Maurice Blanchot (as a central figure within the Comité d'action étudiants-écrivains). The book, drawing on the interaction between politics and literature, explores the politics of literature. Its strength lies in the way it unveils the continuing significance of May'68 inasmuch as it brings about 'une révolution de la révolution' (in Blanchot's insightful formulation). In parallel, tracing affinities between Blanchot's texts and some fundamental concerns of young Marx, Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, and, of course, Dionys Mascolo (as the notes of the Blanchot archive at Harvard attest), Hamel makes a strong case for Blanchot as a radical political thinker. In this respect, not only will the book be an invaluable resource to a circle of devoted Blanchotians or to those engaged in the legacy of May'68, but it will also be of interest to those working on political theory, intellectual history, and contemporary French thought. In ten brief chapters, the itinerary of the Comité d'action étudiants-écrivains, in its short period of existence, is skilfully and meticulously narrated. The Comité joins and defends the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist call as put forth by the protesters, since its founding members, following a process of disidentification and dispossession, recognize themselves in, and identify with, what was dismissed and segregated by the authorities as 'la pègre'. At the same time, Hamel draws attention to the way in which, through the slogans, mural inscriptions, and leaflets of the Comité, an oppositional public space emerges in which the production, circulation, and control of discourse is contested. Enacting the Blanchotian conception of a 'communisme d'écriture', the members of the Comité engender a practice of anti-authoritative, anti-authorial (unsigned, collective), and fragmentary writing that echoes the oppositional force, and disperses itself into the anonymity, of the masses. More crucially, Hamel demonstrates how Blanchot's space of literature merges into the open space of politics, namely how the metaphysical romanticism of L'Espace littéraire (1955, defending the autonomy of writing and the solitude of the writer) turns into a revolutionary romanticism. Affirming a turning point in Blanchot's thinking and political initiatives throughout the 1960s (his opposition to Gaullism; his alliance with the Algerian people), Hamel shows how the Blanchotian key terms of 'désœuvrement' and 'l'anonymat' (which render the experience of the writer an unfoundational moment of profound refusal) become politicized and are thereby also encountered (and sustained) in the experience of protesters. For, as Hamel elucidates, the 1968 riots, reversing a long-established revolutionary tradition, do not aspire to institute a new order but, in their absolute immanence, act as a pure contestation, an irreconcilable negativity, an intense rupture (of time, history, power, and the law) that outsteps dialectical synthesis. The epigraph to Hamel's book, a fragment of Blanchot's La Communauté inavouable (1983), condenses the contemporaneity of 1968, its success and failure as well as the key importance of Blanchot's thinking: 'On se sépara par la même nécessité qui avait rassemblé l'innombrable.'