Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was a French novelist and critic. One of the outstanding intellectuals of postwar France, he wrote 11 novels and a series of essays, many of which also appeared in book form. None was bestsellers, and people were more fascinated by him than with his ideas.
Born in Devrouze, a commune in the Saône-et-Loire department in Bourgogne, Blanchot studied German and philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He was famously reclusive—he lived in isolated places, never appeared on radio or television, never spoke in public, and did not allow himself to be photographed.
Blanchot influenced such postmodernist thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes; he also supported new writers, including Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Though Blanchot wrote for right-wing journals before World War II, and, after the war, he opposed Algeria’s French occupation, and he joined the antigovernment demonstrations in 1968. He was associated with Jean-Paul Sartre on Les Temps Modernes. He wrote a monthly column for La Nouvelle Revue Française (1953–68.)
Blanchot’s essay collections include The Space of Literature (1982,) The Book to Come (2003,) and Friendship (1997.) His notable novels are Thomas the Obscure (1973,) Death Sentence (1978,) Aminadab (2002,) and The Most High (1996,) in addition to aphoristic works such as The Writing of the Disaster (1986.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Maurice Blanchot
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking—and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
—Maurice Blanchot
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
—Maurice Blanchot
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.
—Maurice Blanchot
Topics: Sleep
A writer who writes, “I am alone”… can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
—Maurice Blanchot
Topics: Solitude
Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.
—Maurice Blanchot
Topics: Style, Taste
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