Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust

10. Maurice Blanchot: Fighting Spirit

The problem caused by writers who helped to create a murderous climate that contributed to the Holocaust is verbal as well as moral: can the abused words be restored to a kind of innocence or neutrality? “No word tinged from on high,” Adorno wrote, not even a theological one, can be justified, untransformed, after Auschwitz.1 Sublime yet rabid utterances , motivated by a self-styled Christian or post-Christian “spiritual revolution,” had justified persecution and genocide. Difficult as the transformation is that Adorno calls for, to keep silent because of skepticism or despair is not a way out. The silences of speech always occur within the context of speech and, like a joker, remain part of the pack. I have described Blanchot’s dilemma too. He began his career before the war as a contributor to extreme right-wing journals. These articles were often characterized by a crude, as if visceral, anti-Semitism, but more significantly by what Charles Maurras distinguished as antisemitisme de raison, supposedly not a blind but a reasoned hatred, in reality a mixture of age-long Christian contempt, ignorant clichés about the Jews, and political opportunism. (The claim of rationality, in fact, helped hatred to turn deliberate and systematic.) In 1938 Blanchot gave 221 10 Maurice Blanchot Fighting Spirit geoffrey hartman up much of his political journalism—until a brief return (during his retrait littéraire) between 1958 and 1969—and sometime after that his attitude toward Judaism underwent a marked change.2 Blanchot has remained silent about his early journalism. Given the complexities of the ideological picture in the 1930s, even a sustained memoir might falsify the past. It is tempting, though, to link his retreat (into literary theory) or refusal (of a certain kind of politics)3 to an increasingly exigent style that seems devised to dismantle fascism’s mot d’ordre, its decisionist use of language. The refusal refers to Blanchot’s rejection of the return of de Gaulle; but it leads me to wonder whether something like it also occurred in 1938. His article “Le refus,” published first in 1958, begins: “At a certain moment, faced with public events, we know we must refuse.” This seems to differ radically from the prototype of the “great refusal” (a refusal of death, that is, of death as unredeemable ) Blanchot ascribes to Hegel’s systematic quest for permanence and totality, and which must be reaffirmed although we know it to be an illusion .4 By refusing a certain kind of political action, fixated on the “now” and verging on apocalyptic or heroic expectation—on hope in a future brought into being by terror, by an absolute disruption—Blanchot could be said to refuse this violently redemptive refusal of human limits.5 The question persists, however: why is Blanchot’s new style accompanied by referential vagueness and impersonal drift? Does the author occlude uncomfortable facts? Or is his reticence the result of a deeper understanding of acts of writing that are not journalistically engaged and so challenge the parade of a firm and consistent personal identity?6 Blanchot as literary critic develops an impersonality theory as radical as Mallarmé’s. He sharpens the paradox whereby the self produced by the work also disappears into it: the author, he claims, has no more of an independent existence than an actor does, “that ephemeral personality who is born and dies every evening, having exposed himself excessively to view, killed by spectacle.”7 The recession of the self, rather than self-fashioning, receives major emphasis; in accord with what Martin Jay has characterized as “down-cast eyes” in modern French thought, Blanchot asserts that “to speak is not to see” and that the writer has no secrets, no intimacy to espy.8 There is no way to reconcile those two obligations, which elicit different idioms that cannot both be contained by thought. Ethics, says Blanchot , falls into contradiction or goes mad. And though one of these idioms is post-Hegelian—that is, historical, dialectical, and expressionistic, 222 hartman 222 hartman prefigurative of total secular fulfillment—it is, surprisingly, the other, which takes passivity to be a task, that gradually but surely dominates Blanchot’s postwar writing. Indeed, the very concept of agency disappears behind a “disaster,” which is the subject of L’Écriture du desastre (1980). Blanchot never gives a precise historical location to the disaster, the story of...