Maurice Blanchot ou l’autonomie littéraire by Hadrien Buclin (review)

various theories of temporality and the segmentation of time (Heraclitus, Bergson, Deleuze). In this way, many of the essays in this collection explore the nature of time and the way in which Guillevic asks and answers questions of continuity and individuation of moments. For example, Steven Winspur shows how Guillevic’s work opposes time as a succession of units to other cadences that we might conceive and impose. Along these lines, with temporality taken as a dominant trope of Guillevic’s work, there are essays that address primordial time, antiquity, and modernity in Guillevic’s work, with studies of classical materialism and the hic et nunc, as well as modern scientific theory and Guillevic’s use of the term ‘quanta’ for the fragments of such texts as Du domaine. Understood as an adverb, ‘maintenant’ amplifies the thematics of time, of course, but also inspires readings, such as Glenn Fetzer’s study that focus on the nowness of the poetic text, both with respect to its indexical function (as an embrayeur: by saying ‘now,’ the text orients the reader in time) and with respect to its performative force and the possibility that a poetic text operates not only within time but on time, so to speak, establishing the present moment even as it points to it and enacting utterance as a perpetuated moment. Similarly, as a verb, maintenant undescores Guillevic’s conviction that the poem, our ordinary and poetic gestures, and our time all require some maintenance, and more importantly perhaps, that this maintenance is the shared responsibility of reader and poetic text. This collection holds together firmly around its core word, and it is also as rich and varied as the function of that word in Guillevic’s poetry. Reed College (OR) Hugh Hochman Buclin, Hadrien. Maurice Blanchot ou l’autonomie littéraire. Lausanne: Antipodes, 2011. ISBN 978-2-88901-058-5. Pp. 125. 18 a. This study attempts to approach Blanchot, the figure and his work, within the framework of a “sociologie de la culture” (11) inspired by Bourdieu (whose Les règles de l’art is cited several times). Its primary objectives are to situate Blanchot within the literary field of post-war France, and to contextualize—historically, institutionally, and discursively—the work of a writer known for what Buclin calls a “posture du retrait” (10), while also providing readings of Blanchot’s criticism and fiction from this period, insofar as they appear to reflect Blanchot’s strategies for negotiating these contexts. Buclin starts with the notion that Blanchot’s work is animated by “l’exigence d’une ‘littérature pure’, la revendication d’une autonomie radicale de la littérature face aux contextes biographique, sociale et historique” (9). The equivalence between Blanchot and this attitude, expressed in the book’s title, demands to be called into question— not least by Blanchot’s own writing,which often problematizes the autonomy it appears to vindicate. One would be grateful for a careful, rigorous, and non-reductive reading 222 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 223 of Blanchot and his context that would analyze the complex relationship between a writer’s work and his historical circumstances, and that would do justice to a corpus so deliberately paradoxical and self-contradictory as Blanchot’s. Buclin’s study fails to do this. Its virtues lie rather in its presentation of the post-war literary scene in Paris and of the “rapports de force” (13) that determined the landscape in which Blanchot found himself confronted with a delicate situation. The focus on the 1940s brings into relief Blanchot’s shifting political and literary positions, as he moves from right-wing journalism of the 1930s into literary criticism, and as accounts are settled in postOccupation Paris. Blanchot was not among the most compromised writers then, but he did write for a collaborationist journal, and his pre-war stances and alliances on the right were well known. Buclin explains how Blanchot, as a representative of ‘autonomie littéraire,’ had to negotiate the suspicions falling on such a position in the age of ‘engagement’espoused by Sartre and Beauvoir in Les Temps Modernes, while nonetheless vindicating this position, in part, as a way to disengage from his...