Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot

Introduction: Philosophy and the Philosophical

1 INTRODUCTION PHILOSOPHY AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL Kevin Hart Speaking at Maurice Blanchot’s cremation at Guyancourt, outside Paris, on February 24, 2003, Jacques Derrida evoked his friend’s “récits, novels, fictions” that “we are scarcely beginning, it seems to me, to read,” and observed that their “future remains pretty much intact,” untouched by literary or philosophical criticism.1 He then went on to mention L’attente l’oubli (1962) and L’écriture du désastre (1980) as examples of works that “inseparably mix, in a still unprecedented way, philosophical meditation and poetic fiction” (45). Some years earlier, when introducing Parages (1986), a book of his essays and lectures on and around Blanchot, Derrida had noted that he had recently rediscovered the narrative part of his friend’s oeuvre. All of Blanchot’s narratives, not only L’attente l’oubli and L’écriture du désastre, query the usual distinctions between philosophy and literature, he had found, and he suggested that a whole new redistribution of distinctions was needed before we could talk of them. Doubtless one should not speak without caution of the “literary critical” and “philosophical ” works of Blanchot, Derrida wrote, for those labels are woefully inadequate to the singular texts they seek to describe. Yet the books by Blanchot that we conventionally recognize by those terms—from Faux pas (1943) to La communauté inavouable (1983)—belong to an “essential movement of thought” that Derrida had long acknowledged and had taken into 2 Kevin Hart account in his own writing.2 The “fictions,” as he called them, had remained inaccessible to him, however. Reading them, he said, was like being submerged “in a fog from which came to me only fascinating gleams, and sometimes, but at irregular intervals, the light of an invisible beacon on the coast” (11). In 1995, speaking about Blanchot’s last narrative , L’instant de ma mort (1994), Derrida once again noted the difficulty of classifying the work. “I do not know whether this text belongs, purely and properly and strictly and rigorously speaking, to the space of literature [l’espace de la littérature], whether it is a fiction or a testimony, and, above all, to what extent it calls these distinctions into question or causes them to tremble.”3 Derrida is right: we have yet to read Blanchot’s narratives with the openness to their ways of being that is needed, and a part of that intellectual labor is a rethinking of the relations between the philosophical and the literary in them. Derrida has jump-started this process with Parages (1986) and Demeure (1998), but, as he says, the future of Blanchot’s narratives has not yet been compromised, let alone programmed, by past or present criticism.4 I recall a comment he made to me in New York in 1997: “It will be centuries—centuries!—before we can read Blanchot’s fictions ,” quickly adding, “He has rethought so radically what it means to read and write that each page calls forth an immense commentary.” The thought of all those decades of close reading of Blanchot seemed to suffuse him with pleasure, and all the contributors to this collection will testify to the strange joy that comes from responding as fully as possible to Blanchot’s novels and récits. This collection of new essays seeks to take a modest step along the path of reading Blanchot well. All his narratives are commented upon: the early stories “Le dernier mot” (1935) and “L’idylle” (1936); Thomas l’obscur, mostly the récit (1950) but also the novel (1941); Aminadab (1942), Le Très-Haut (1948), L’arrêt de mort (1948), “La folie du jour” (1949), Au moment voulu (1951), Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (1953), Le dernier homme (1957), and L’instant de ma mort (1994).5 Of the “mixed” works, full attention is given to L’attente l’oubli (1962), although neither Le pas au-delà (1973) nor L’écriture du désastre (1980) is considered .6 To be sure, traces of a narrative can be discerned in each of these fragmentary texts but not enough, or not regularly enough, to call forth sustained commentary under the heading of “Philosophy in the Narra- Introduction 3 tives of Maurice Blanchot.” Another work that might be considered “mixed,” L’entretien infini (1969), begins with a “fictional” dialogue of considerable interest, and a chapter has been devoted to...