During the decade between 1954 and 1964 Blanchot gradually replaces the lead vocalists in his theory of the récit. It is no longer the animal or the past that sing the récit’s destructively beautiful songs. What now opens a narrative void and depersonalizes the self is another human being. Although the score of the récit’s song remains the same, that is, blank, with the different singer the emptiness takes on a different quality. Indicative of Blanchot’s increasing interest in politics and ethics throughout the 1950s […] the récit’s emptiness becomes endowed with the ability to expose the self-enclosedness of the character, the writer, and the reader to the absolute otherness of the Other (other characters and other human beings). Blanchot turns away from the récit as a literary instrument of a self-involved kind of self-destruction and redefines it, similarly to Barthes’s notion of writing degree zero, as a privileged literary codification of intersubjectivity.

What is there to say, then, in a narrative that aspires to be faithful to the true vocation of literature, as Blanchot defines it? It is certainly not that there is nothing to be said. Words have to be spoken, but words that are slow and exhausted. For Blanchot, slowness and exhaustion are the necessary ingredients of a genuine narrative, writing, and conversation. Narratives must be strenuous, taxing, and in a certain sense even “impossible.” Similarly, dialogues, both in literature and in real life, as Blanchot points out in an essay on Marguerite Duras, “The Pain of Dialogue” (1956), must be difficult if they are to be real dialogues: “slow, but uninterrupted, never stopping for fear of not having enough time: one must speak now or never; but still without haste, patient and on the defensive, calm too, […] and deprived, to a painful degree, of the ease of chatter [facilité du bavardage].” What is genuinely dialogic is not the chatter of the novel. Turning Bakhtin upside down, Blanchot suggests that rather than the novel, with its polyphony and intricate plots, the minimalist, slow, and exhausted récit is dialogic, because it gives the other person a more important role than the self rather than an equal one. Against the disappearance of the other in the complexity and density of novelistic narration, the récit offers a figuration of the contentless present in which the immutable singularity of the other person comes to the fore. Slow, exhausted, and minimal story clears the space, so to speak, for the other

[…] But there is a price to be paid for Blanchot’s promotion of the genre of récit. The price is nothing less than erasure of history. If the uniqueness of the récit as a mode of writing and form of storytelling is the narrative purging of the story with the vision of literary exhaustion, slowness, and emptiness, the récit’s blanchissement de l’histoire is a bleaching and purging of both story and history. The transaction at stake is similar to that proposed by Barthes in Writing Degree Zero: a literary exposure of intersubjectivity and essential human togetherness in exchange for the erasure of descriptive and historical detail. […]

It seems as if Blanchot’s theory of the récit could not be more disconnected from history and with what lies outside the text. As the following chapter will show, however, Blanchot was painfully aware of the fact that the dehistoricizing tendency of bleaching the story and history in the récit is a delicate enterprise. When he nevertheless deemed it worth undertaking, it was because he believed that the récit’s silencing of historical detail, as a counterweight to the novelistic histoire toute humaine, holds the prospect of a more humane kind of both story and history. Unlike the novel, the récit is not attached to the narrative role of symbolically representing the monadic type of individuality. The notion of the récit […] is a historically, socially, politically, and ethically conditioned response to the novelistic representation of the self as separated from others. […] Blanchot theorizes the récit as a mode of writing that recovers the preindividual, and thus essentially interpersonal, experience of sharing language.

Daniel Just, Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France