Lars Iyer's Blog

By the 1970, our protagonists are now scattered. Duras, who is in her mid 50s, has three properties, and employs staff. As we shall see, Blanchot, in his early 60s, is debilitated by illness. Mascolo … I don’t know what he was up to. Antelme would also fall severely ill. But they would continue to follow paths that traversed rue Saint-Benoît.

Duras

In 1975, Duras starts drinking heavily again. She drinks cheap wine, coughs up blood and drinks more. This is at Neauphile. She is taken to hospital in 1976 for five weeks, but when she left, she started drinking again. She writes the play Eden Cinema in 1977. She travels to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, showing her films. But she is still drinking heavily. She makes films, makes short films from offprints of longer films …

In 1979, she meets Yann. Now something new begins. Another great leap, another stream of wonderful books. She is famous. Hundreds of letters arrive at Saint-Benoit. She reads but does not answer them. All except for those of a student at Caen. She began to wait for them. She gives a talk at Caen. At two in the morning, Yann introduces himself. Then she writes to him. It is now 1980. She is severly depressed and drinking heavily. She spends two months in hospital; she writes to Yann again when she returns to Neauphle. She stops drinking for 6 months. Now she has friends to stay again. In this period, Serge Daney records his conversations with her, she rewrites them, to produce a volume published as Green Eyes. Duras always writes great ‘occasional’ writings. I should also mention the splendid book of dialogues with Michelle Portre from 1976, called – what is it called? Then there is Practicalities, which is a book full of ittle essays, recipes, notes on incomplete projects, rather like a literary blog. The collected volume of journalism, Outside, is good too.

Yann telephones in September 1980. She gives him the surname Andréa. He is happy – full of laughter and talk. He is unassuming, patient, kind. She will tell the story of their meeting herself in Yann Andréa Steiner, published much later. He stays for days. Yann returns. He stays. She will write about the impossibility of loving. This is not by chance – Yann is homosexual. But they stay together, they drink heavily. He disappears from time to time, but returns. She writes to him in July 1982:

The passion that binds us will last as long as I love and for the length of the life that to you looks long. Nothing will be any good. We can expect nothing from one another, no children, no future … You are gay and we love each other … Nothing will be any good. There’s no point you going back to doing the rounds of the Tuileries, to back-rooms, to carriage entrances, to circling the place Saint-Martin. Nothing will be any good. You will llove me for the rest of your life. Because I shall be dead long before you, in a very few years, and because the huge age gap between us reassures you and neutralises your fear of facing a woman.

Mitterand, the friend who slept in the backroom at Saint-Benoit, is elected President of France in 1981. Duras is drinking, drinking. Yann looks after her. She drinks 6-8 litres of wine a day, and writes The Malady of Death. She drinks, vomits, drinks again. She goes for alcohol treatments. She hallucinates. She has visions. She looks like a tramp.

Adler:

Michelle Porte went to visit her. Physically she thought she looked well, but all she could talk about was the hallucinations she kept having, which were on the increase. She really could see things: monsters, mythical nimals – it was like hearing her innermost imagination speak. Each vision was an opportunity for embellishment, an abandonment to words she found beautiful ,Michelle Portre spent an afternoon listening to the story of a blue fish beached on the carpet.

But she is tough; the hallucinations cease. She corrects the proofs of The Malady of Death and plans a stage version. Peter Handke makes a film of it which she doesn’t like. Blanchot writes an extraordinary commentary on the text in The Unavowable Community, but she doesn’t like that either. It is in this text, though, that Blanchot celebrates the Manifesto of the 121, May 1968 … part of the text was written in response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay ‘The Workless Community’, in which Nancy argues that Blanchot, like Benjamin, was unable to sufficiently develop his notion of communism … Does that mean it is up to Nancy? No – Blanchot writes, The Unavowable Community. But it is an oblique, difficult text … is it developed? thematic? Then, in this period, there is an attack on Bataille’s reputation from Boris Souvarine, his former colleague from the radical left in the 1930s. Intellectuals in Question is a response to Bataille’s accusers, but also, like The Unavowable Community, to those who would take Blanchot’s friendship with Levinas too lightly. This, in the end, I think, is what separates him from the community at rue Saint-Benoît, and it is why a detour through the work of Levinas is necessary to follow the winding course of Blanchot’s own thought.

Perhaps Duras, too, feels Bataille is under attack. She claims in a television interview that Bataille and Blanchot are the writers she esteems most highly.

Duras’s friends are young men. She insults Yann in front of her friends. He is calm. He can take it. He retreats to listen to Schubert. He still disappears from time to time. How difficult it must be to be dependent on Duras!

She writes the beststeller, The Lover. A year later she discovers the diaries she wrote during the way, concerning Antelme’s deportation. Or did she? Here is what Paul Otchkosky-Laurens recalls:

One day she phoned me and said, ‘Come over, I’ve found something incredible’. Evidently extremely moved, she showed me an exercise book that was falling apart. The pages were covered in writing. But the pages were torn and the writing faded. Nothing has been changed since the end of the war.

But Duras had already published part of the diaries anonymously in 1976. When she publishes her account of life in the wake of her then-husband’s deportation and his return as La Douleur, she dedicates it, in part, to his son. Monique Antelme does not acknowledge the volume Duras sends her. The book is rejected by Antelme and others. Mascolo writes, ‘Many things described in La Douleur are true. Some of them are exaggerated’. Mitterand expresses reservations.

Yet more films … the Villemin scandal. Duras wins more awards, investing prize money in property. She is often on television. She is famous, famous. She is something of an egomaniac. She is rich, she has staff.

In 1990, the book only a famous author would be allowed to write: The Lover from North China. It was subjected to savage cuts by the publsiers.

Only a few years left. She waits calmly for death, according to Adler, who knew her well in this period.

What I remember most about her, apart from her writing [..] was the gentleness of her presence, the way she had of taking me in her arms, of saying, as I left, ‘Take care of yourself’.

I wasn’t feeling particularly relaxed as I rang at the door of the rue Saint-Benoit [I get the impression this was around 1986 – Lars]. Duras intimidated me. Her voice, her style, her outbursts, all had contributed to creating a Duras legend where a rather unhealthy interest in the person vied with admiration for the writer. I soon realised I had been quite wrong. The famous author opened the door, led me into the kitchen and made coffee. The first thing that struck me about her was the sparkle in her eyes and her tremendous laughing energy. That impression was to stay with me. Her closest friends from her different lives […] all said, when they talked about her, that what they most remembered of Marguerite was her laughter. That mischievous, childish laughter, that communicative laughter of friendship, that mocking, indeed sometimes spiteful laughter.

She writes (dictates) No More …

28th February 1995: Duras is dead. I bought Le Monde by chance that day. The first and last time I bought it. What did I discover? Duras was dead.

Blanchot

Between 1970 and 1973, Blanchot is in poor health, and is hospitalised. From 1970 onwards, he is no longer able to meet his friends regularly; he writes to tell them he will be unable to see them in January 1972. In 1972, he gives up his apartment in la rue Madame – he is no longer able to cope with the stairs – for a new apartment in rue Jean-Bart. He gives out his address and phone number only to a few friends. He spends a lot of time with his brother René and his sister-in-law Anna who live in a grand house near Versailles. Little by little, he will abandon his Paris residence altogether, moving into the house at Versailles.

Le Pas au-delà appears in 1973; The Writing of the Disaster in 1980. What can I write about these books? They are inexhaustible. We haven’t begun reading them.

1976 – Gramma devote a double issue to Blanchot. A complete bibliography reveals the extent of his prewar journalism. Blanchot’s early career is discussed in the articles. Michael Holland and Patrick Rousseau are the editors. In 1982, Jeffrey Mehlman’s article on Blanchot’s early journalism appears in Tel Quel. Accompanies Todorov’s slurs in an article, originally publised in 1979, but gathered in Critique of the Critics, published in 1982.

Blanchot remains extremely ill. His brother René dies of cancer in 1978. A few days later (January 23rd), Denise Rollin dies at 71.

In 1983, Antelme is rendered hemiplegic through a stroke during surgery. He will live until his death in a hospital, confined to bed, speaking only with great difficulty.

From 1983 onwards, Blanchot begins to correspond less, and to use the telephone less frequently. He is still ill – his eyesight is weakening, his hands tremble, he is losing his voice … sometimes, he is able to write. Short texts, denser, more allusive, issuing from arguments he has made elsewhere, they are inexhaustible. How difficult they are to get hold of!

1987, Farias’s book on Heidegger begins the ‘Heidegger Affair’. Blanchot writes a letter, ‘Thinking the Apocalypse’, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, which supports Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Art and Politics.

1989, Blanchot in a letter to Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘today I think of nothing other than Auschwitz’.

In 1993, Blanchot contributes ‘For Friendship’, a prologue to Mascolo’s A la recherché d’un communisme de pensée.

In 1994, Blanchot publishes ‘The Instant of my Death’. Derrida (poorly translated):

In the first words of the letter which accompanied the sending by The Instant of my death, July 20, 1994, marking the return or the repetition of the anniversaries: “July 20, fifty years since I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death. 25 years ago, we put our steps on the moon.”

Derrida also notes, in the same obituary:

Regularly, one or twice per year, I telephoned him and sent him a postcard of the village of Eze [the village where Blanchot lived during the 1950s – Lars]. However each time, I addressed an old postcard to him from before the war after having chosen it in a shop in the lanes of this old village of Eze where Blanchot, had remained and undoubtedly crossed the path of Nietzsche […] each time, therefore, as the years passed, I hardly dared to hope, while murmuring that I will still have time to send other postcards to him with same ritualistic enthusiasm, affectionately and a little superstitiously.

So many deaths. Antelme dies on the 26th October 1990.

Joe Downing:

I find that there is a noun missing from the French language. Robert was a voluptuary. This man, who had known every privation, the worst possible fears and humiliations, loved good cooking, great wines, conversation, friendship, travel. And he revered women[….] He loved to laugh and to make others laugh, and he didn’t hold back.

Robert would not have been Robert without Monique – who is a flame, as clear and transparent as crystal; like Robert, indignant at life’s many injustices; like Robert, lover of the good ,life, good company, a good table, good wine; like Robert, filled with a thirst to know, to understand, curious about everything. They had this loveliest gift of fate: perfect complicity as a couple.

Downing would visit Antelme in hospital, and take him, in his wheelchair, to the Rodin museum.

Blanchot’s little text on Antelme, ‘The Watched Over Night’ is the last piece, I believe, that he wrote.

In 1997, Mascolo dies.

In 2003, Blanchot dies.

Of the community, Monique Antelme remains. Denise Rollin’s son wrote a book in which he quoted letters from Blanchot in 1997. Presumably there’s more to come. Blanchot’s political writings, from 1958 onwards, are finally going to be published in one volume in France.

The continuing story of rue Saint-Benoît …

By the mid-60s, Duras has become famous. Her books sell tens of thousands of copies. She tours the country, giving talks to schoolchildren. She tells them about Henri Michaux, who was, apparently, a friend of hers back in the days after the war. She takes a holiday with the Vittorinis in Italy – but Elio will die in 1966, as will her lover Jarlot, who was only 43. Adler quotes Jarlot:

With madness we destroy time, in other words we kill death. The same can be said of poetry, love if need be, alcohol and drugs … with all of those things we kill death.

She herself wrote:

He was a wonderful man, in every sense of the word accomplished, evhsuated from always dying without it killing him, demanding as much from death as from passion.

Duras has been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. She tries to give up drinking.

Meanwhile, Duras is making films. Her son loves cinema. Jean Mascolo also assists Duras in making films. He will move out of Rue Saint Benoit in 1967, to move in with his wife Solange Leprince who will edit Duras’s film India Song. They have a daughter, Virginie.

I’ve never seen any of Duras’s films. I’ve read the scripts of some of them, and seen excerpts … what a shame. I’ve never seen many of Bergman’s films, either, which I know from scripts … The Passion of Anna, Shame, The Touch (a great script) …

Duras works on the radio, too. She is the envoy of RTL to the Canne Film festival in 1967 … in short, she is famous.

Adler notes that, throughout this period, Duras, Mascolo and Antelme meet often.

Blanchot, in this period, continues to publish great essay after essay. His work has become more avowedly political and ethical – that is, the political and ethical stakes of his discussions of the work of art came to the fore. He had already linked himself to some of the views expressed in the journal Arguments in an uncollected essay from 1959.

The publication of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity was a great moment for Blanchot (some of these texts are quoted in Godard’s film Forever Mozart in 1996). In 1963, he begins to correspond with Jacques Derrida, then in his early thirties, author of a dazzling sequence of essays. Derrida himself will note, in Resistances, the changes in Blanchot’s work in this period – it seems he foregrounded the word writing, and placed inverted commas around the word presence. This indicated the influence of Derrida – but then Derrida’s work is itself unthinkable without Blanchot.

On many occasions, as I understand it, from the ‘Beaufret affair’ onwards (1968), when the French Heideggerian Jean Beaufret, who was about to publish a text by Blanchot, revealed himself to be a Holocaust denier, Blanchot will visit Derrida in his office in the rue d’Ulm; they will often meet with Levinas, too. Alas now Derrida is dead, we will hear nothing more about such meetings!

Is Stein, in Duras’s Destroy, She Said, modelled on Blanchot? He is imposing and mysterious – haunted by the end of history, ill, insomniac …

See this post for an account of what the May 1968 Events meant to our protagonists.

May 1968 was where it was all leading, I suppose, for Rue Saint-Benoît. After the Events? Mascolo has remarried, Blanchot becomes ill, Duras becomes very famous. Mitterand becomes President; now, Rue Saint-Benoît will become the subject of reminiscences and biographies. People like me spend Saturday night writing about it (why?)

We’re back at Duras’s flat again, taking up the story from 1960 onwards.

Our protagonists:

Marguerite Duras (1914-1995). She is now a well-known and greatly respected author; she will begin to make films, too, and contributed a script for Resnais’s extraordinary Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Dionys Mascolo (1916-1997). The former lover of Duras and the father of her son. He still shares the flat with her. Author of Le Communisme, published 1953. I get the impression that Mascolo is a tremendously active and passionate man, whose energies are devoted to social change. He works as a reader for Gallimard. Must get his book Autour d’un effort de mémoire, in which Mascolo remembers the community at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, published in the late 1980s.

Robert Antelme (1917-1990). The former husband of Duras and a close friend of Mascolo. Author of The Human Race, published in 1947 and republished, to great acclaim, in 1957. He works on the Gallimard Encyclopeadia and is married to Monique. Antelme commands enormous respect from everyone. People remember him as a kind of saint, a gentle man who seems to embody responsibility and justice.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Blanchot appears from time to time at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, and is a close ally of Duras, Mascolo and Antelme. He returns to Paris in the late 1950s, having spent several years alone in a village between Nice and Monte-Carlo on the South coast. He already enjoys an enormous reputation as a literary critic and a writer of novels and tales (récits). During the 1960s, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze will all indicate their indebtedness to him. In this period, his relationship with Denise Rollin is ongoing. They live apart. Blanchot, like Antelme, is remembered by those around him (in this case Rollin) as resembling Prince Myshkin.

Mascolo, cited in The Blanchot Reader:

In 1958 de Gaulle seized power. With Jean Shuster – from the Surrealist group – I founded an anti-Gaullist journal with the title le 14 Julliet. As soon as the first number appeared, Maurice Blanchot, who since the war had not said a word politically, sent me a letter which I found stunning: “I want you to know that I am in agreement with you. I refuse all the past and accept nothing of the present”.

Le 14 Julliet exhibits fidelity to the notion of revolution, ongoing resistance to the Gaullists, and a refusal of political power. 19 signatures in the first edition, including Antelme, Breton, Duras, des Forêts, Lefort, Morin, Nadeau, Bruce Parain, Vittorini. For the signatories, the Gaullist regime set up in 1958 was analogous to that set up by Petain under the Occupation in 1940. The state was no longer answerable to its people; it was undemocratic.

25 October 1958, Blanchot’s text ‘Refusal’ appears in the second edition of Le 14 Julliet. Here’s an excerpt:

At a certain moment, in the face of public events, we know that we must refuse. The refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not argue, nor does it voice its reasons. This is why it is silent and solitary, even when it asserts itself, as it must, in broad daylight. Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. The time off joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been deprived., What they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No that keeps them unified and bound by solidarity.

That’s the first paragraph. The essay itself, although is 4 paragraphs long, is immense. It is from a book that seems as vast as all the libraries in the world: Friendship.

Hill comments of ‘Refusal’:

Importantly [the title ‘Refusal’] also mobilised, with undiminished virulence, but in the service of a different kind of political project, one of the few terms in Blanchot’s political lexicon to have survived from his pre-war activist past. This shows how far Blanchot’s return to political commitment, whatever some have charged, was not preimised on a cuplable repudiation of his pre-war involvements, which in any case remained largely unkown to the majority of his new political associates.

1960 … Duras, in this period, is in love with Gérard Jarlot, a journalist and novelist. He is accepted by the Antelmes and des Forêts, but Duras knows him to be a liar. Adler: ‘Jarlot didn’t care about anything – not truth, not love, not death – he respected only womanizers and writers’. Duras writes two screenplays with him.

In the same year, Blanchot writes yet more brilliant essays for La Nouvelle Revue Française: "Héraclite," "Albert Camus," "Entretien sur un changement d’epoque," "Le détour vers la simplicité," "La marche de l’écrevisse," "Reprises," "Oublieuse mémoire," "La question la plus profonde" (I).

I make this list because the essays are so profound. Notice, too, the changes in style and register from essay to essay. And, one presumes, he’s also writing L’Attente, l’oubli (published in 1962). But Blanchot is busy with the events that surround the drafting (with Jean Shuster and Mascolo)the "Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algerie", the so-called ‘Manifesto of the 121’.

Adler:

Before the Manifesto was drawn up, Marguerite and Dionys had aided and abetted those fighting for the cause of Algerian independence. They both hid FLN funds up the chimney in rue Saint-Benoît, carried suitcase and lodged people wanted by the police. The pro-FLN activist Madelaine Lafue-Veron, at the time a barrister practicing in Paris, under surveillance and for a long time accused of undermining national security, remembers that whenever she had a ‘favour’ to ask of Marguerite, this was promptly carried out. Her apartment was a crossroads. ‘We had a lot of funds in the rue Saint-Benoît, which had to be delivered around Paris. I was a porter. I remember the terror of being followed and searched’, Margeuirte told Luce Perrot.

Blanchot recalls that Laurence, Bataille’s daughter, was arrested as a ‘bag carrier’. Bataille himself was too ill to sign the Manifesto.

The third issue of Le 14 Julliet published the results of a questionnaire devised by Schuster, Breton, Blanchot and Mascolo which was sent out to intellectuals. It was really from this that the Manifesto grew, according to Adler.

De Gaulle’s militarism, his nationalism, his self-importance, his sense of authority, as well as those who accepted his ascendancy: this is what the writers linked to Le 14 Julliet vehemently refused. But as the campaign developed, it is a matter no merely of defending democracy and the constitution, but also of ending French colonialism in Algeria. This required resistance to the war the French Republic was prosecuting in Algeria, even as they denied there was such a war.

Hill commenting on the Manifesto:

In its opposition to the [Algerian] war, the Manifesto did not invoke a moral duty, based on a universalising code of laws, principles, values, and obligations. As Blanchot points out, it was this that distinguished it from an act of commitment in the Sartrian sense; indeed, it might be argued in this respect that the Manifesto was one of the first texts, in France, to contest and rethink the figure of the intellectual as universal conscience, as Foucault and others were to do increasingly after May 1968. Instead of appealing to morality, and thus necessarily to some institutionalised code that had disquieting similarities with the very authority of the state it sought to challenge, the Manifesto reaffirmed each signatory’s inalienable right of refusal, a right that was absolute to the extent that it logically preceded any form whatsoever of recognition of the power of the state and any complicity in its decisions.

The Manifesto itself was circulated in France and then all over Europe, being passed from person to person. Those who signed it did so at considerable risk: these so-called ‘propagandists of desertion’ were banned from the RTF, the French broadcasting service, and deprived of state funding for films and artworks. The Manifesto was supposed to disrupt the trial of Francis Jealson, who had set up a clandestine network providing the FLN with accommodation and financial assistance. The military tribunal drew great crowds. Sartre, Claude Roy, Sarraute and others were character witnesses.

Blanchot on the Manifesto:

What happened then (and took months to achieve) belonged to everyone; it was like what Victor Hugo says of maternal instinct: ‘Each has in it his or her own share, and everyone has it all in its entirety’. The responsibility was common to us all, and even those who refused to sign did so for reasons of substance, which were carefully thought out, explained at length in correspondence. At times, matters became very fraught.

As soon as the Manifesto was published (but only in two magazines, Nadeau’s Lettres nouvelles and Sartre’s Temps modernes, which were immediately banned, censored, silenced – it would therefore be more accurate to say that the Manifesto was published, but failed to appear), and as no newspaper, including the most prestigious, reproduced even the smallest extract from it (the risk was too great), we were prosecuted, accused, and charged without anyone knowing why.

Autumn: Blanchot interviewed by Madeleine Chapsal, who finds him ‘the most gentle of men’. The interview, published in early 1961, makes the stakes of the Manifesto clear.

… the right to Insubordination. I say right and not duty, a term that some people, in all ill-considered way, wished the Declaration to use, no doubt because they believe that the formulation of a duty goes further than that of a right. But that is not the case: an obligation depends upon a prior morality, that vouches for it, guarantees it and justifies it; when there is duty, all you have to do is close your eyes and carry it out blindly. In that case, everything is simple. A right, on the contrary, depends only on tiself, on the exercise of the freedom of which it is the expression. Right is a free power for which each person, for his part and in relation to himself, is responsible, and which binds him completely and freely: nothing is stronger, nothing is more solemn. That is why one must say: the right to insubordination; it is a matter of each person’s sovereign decision.

Le 14 Julliet led to the Manifesto of the 121; that, in turn would lead those who were associated with 5 rue Saint-Benoît to another venture. Perhaps this has something to do with an incident Blanchot recalls in ‘For Friendship’ (though Robbe-Grillet had already alluded to it). Writing of his clashes with the examining magistrate who had sought to prosecute him in the wake of the publication of the Manifesto, Blanchot recalls:

After I had finished giving my statement, the examining magistrate wanted to dictate it to the clerk of the court: ‘No, no’, I said, ‘you will not substitute your words for my own. I do not wish to question your good faith, but you have a manner of speaking that I cannot accept’. He insisted. ‘I will not sign’. – ‘We will do without your signature then, and the inquiry will resume in some other place’. Eventually he gave in and allowed me to restate the exact same words I had uttered earlier.

When Blanchot, the accused, speaks, what he says is different from what the examining magistrate would dictate to the clerk of the court not because of a difference in the content of what was said, but because of the place of each speaker within certain networks of power. We believe we are able to speak and to write, to listen and to read in our own name. And yet, as Blanchot shows, none of us can be said to possess language, making it do our bidding, allowing us to subordinate it as a vehicle for the transportation of meaning. We are each possessed by the field of forces and powers with which language is always associated. But we can also refuse to be so possessed. This refusal is linked to the practice of a fragmentary writing which, for Blanchot, was linked to a new form of collective writing, of writing in friendship.

Le 14 Julliet folded for lack of funding. But Blanchot, Mascolo and Vittorini had already begun to dream of a Revue Internationale, published in French, German and Italian editions. A list of some of the authors who agreed to participate:

Italy: Elio Vittorini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia;
Germany: Hans-Magnus Enzenberger, Martin Walser, Günter Grass and Ingeborg Bachmann;
France (in addition to our protagnosts): Louis René des Forêts, Maurice Nadeau, Roland Barthes, Michel Leiris.
Britain: Iris Murdoch was involved. Imagine!

Alas, the magazine appeared only once, in April 1964, as a supplement to the Italian review Il Menabò as a supplement. Blanchot’s texts ‘The Name Berlin’ and ‘The Conquest of Space’, written in 1961, as well as ‘Parole de fragment" and part of ‘La parole quotidienne’, appear in this supplement.

Here is what Blanchot remembers:

Who was the first to have the idea of an International Review? I think it was Vittori, the most enthusiastic and most experienced among us. But recently [Blanchot is writing in 1993) the periodical Lignes, thanks to Dionys Mascolo who had kept them, published some of the documents concerning this enterprise, which was not in vain even if it failed.

Blanchot remembers Roland Barthes took the failure of the journal very badly, and writes:

He would have liked to erect a monument and transform out disappointment into a work. If we refused, it was both in order to preserve the future and to avoid accusing some rather than others, thereby eluding the unhappy fate of groups that survive by the brilliance of their disputes.

Blanchot adds, in a footnote:

Responsibility lay with the building of the Berlin Wall, which was an event that affected us all, but overwhelmed our German friends. Enzenberger, who was closest to the project, and the most friendly, went to live in Norway; all went their separate ways. The review carried on, didn’t die, but solely faded away.

The Berlin Wall? Really? It took until 1965 for the dream of the Review to pass away entirely. But the Events of May 1968 were approaching …

What of Duras in these years? She works alongside the others in 14 Julliet and the Manifesto. She is also writing a string of books, screenplays, plays for theatre and continuing her career as a journalist.

In 1960, along with Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute and Roy, Duras sits on the panel for the prix Médicis. She is instrumental in rewarding Monique Wittig (she died this year) for her first novel.

Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night, another Duras novel appears. The critics are accusing her of repeating herself. The Sea Wall and The Sailor from Gibraltar are reprinted in paperback, selling 60,000 copies.

Next, The Afternoon of Mr Andesmas – An/telme, des/Forêts, Mas/colo. Duras, perhaps, satirises those from who she formerly sought advice about her writing.

Duras reads all of Henry James before adapting The Aspern Papers with Antelme. She then helps James Lord adapt ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, which was performed in 1962.

Duras is now extremely fashionable. Beckett attends the first night of her play The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise in 1963 – he is impressed; Duras wins an award.

In this period, she also writes a draft of what would become The Man Sitting in the Corridor, a violent, mysterious tale.

Duras awards the Médicis prize to Jarlot’s novel, written with her guidance. He, however, is tremendously jealous of her success.

Duras and Jarlot are drinking a lot. Jarlot is certainly not faithful….

In 1963, Duras writes The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein … what years!

We’re up to the mid 60s. 5 rue Saint-Benoît III to follow.

Here is a snapshot of Blanchot’s activities during the May 1968 Events, taken from Bident’s marvellous biography.

Blanchot links himself to the movement of the 22nd March, so called because of it was that day the administrative block was occupied at the university at Nanterre.

In late April, Blanchot visits Levinas who is rather unimpressed by the students’ revolt. Here is what he says much later, in an interview from 1984:

In 1968, I had the feeling that all values were being contested as bourgeois – this was quite impressive – all except for one: the other. Nobody ever said that the right of the other man – despite all the liberation of the spontaneous ego, despite all the license of language and contempt for the other as other – remained unpronounceable.

Interestingly, Levinas seems to have changed his mind on this point. In “Judaism and Revolution”, a commentary on the Tractate Baba Metsia delivered a year after the Events, he writes: “those who shouted, a few months ago, ‘We are all German Jews’ in the streets of Paris were after all not making themselves guilty of petit-bourgeois meanness” (Nine Talmudic Readings).

Levinas refers here to the spontaneous support that broke out during the demonstrators for one of the student leaders of the revolt, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was subject to anti-Semitic remarks on the part of the authorities.

Blanchot comments on the cry “We are all German Jews” in one of his anonymous writings published in Comité. He cites Blanchot as follows: “’Never’, he claims, ‘had this previously been said anywhere, never at any time: it was inaugural moment of speech, opening and overturning borders, opening, overthrowing the future’” (cited Hill, Extreme Contemporary, 219). The text in question, “Les Actions exemplaires”, was published anonymously in a short lived journal. However, Blanchot included a short essay entitled “War and Literature” in Friendship, published in 1971, originally a response to a Polish questionnaire, in which he recalls the spontaneous demonstration in question, commenting “this was to signify the relation of solidarity and fraternity with the victims” (109).

But I am getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it would be better to run through events more or less chronologically.

Early May … the first occupations, expulsions, condemnations, demonstrations … Blanchot is staying with the Antelmes.

On the 9th, Antelme, Nadeau, des Forêts, Duras, Jean Schuster, Leiris, Claude Roy, Mascolo, Klossowski, Sartre, Sarraute, Lefebvre signed a petition written by Blanchot and published in Le Monde supporting the students.

The first night of the barricades 10th-11th of May. Blanchot is there; he is profoundly shaken by the unfolding Events.

On the 13th, Mascolo, the Antelmes, Duras, Blanchot, des Forets, Nadeau, Schuster, Leiris take part in the biggest march seen in Paris since the protests surrounding the Algerian crisis and the assassination of protestors at the Charonne Metro Station, remembered by Blanchot in The Unavowable Community.

Bident notes Derrida, whom Blanchot had met for the first time recently, expressed some reservation about the ‘spontaneous fusion’ of the Events.

Roughly translated from the obituary Derrida wrote for Blanchot:

I have just marked the date of a first meeting, in May 68. Without pointing out the cause or the occasion of this personal meeting, which initially related a problem of an ethical and political nature between us, I underline only that at the same time, in May 68, Blanchot radically engaged, being, body and heart, in the street …

Perhaps these disagreements concern Derrida’s worry about spontaneism. Derrida also remembers ‘the softness of the smile [which] did not leave Blanchot’s face for a second during our meetings’.

At some point in the Events, Blanchot met Foucault, too, who had long admired the work of the older author. As Blanchot remembers in a text published in memory of Foucault, ‘Whatever the detractors of May might say, it was a splendid moment, when anyone could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another person’. This is why Blanchot emphasizes that he had no ‘personal relations’ with Foucault, even though they were both participants of the Events in which ‘anyone could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another person’

This point is worth underlining: what affirmed itself in the Events, for Blanchot, opened each participant to the Other without determining that relation. Protesters were able to come together before judging one other obscure or famous, young or old, rich or poor, and in which they refused to recognise the authority of those in power, at the same time refusing to allow their refusal to be transformed into the desire for a particular set of reforms. It was not a solution, the satisfaction of an aim, that was sought.

On the 27th, Blanchot, with the Antelmes, is present at Stade Charléty to hear Mendès-France giving his support to the Movement.

May 20th sees the creation of an Action Committee, the Comité d’action étudiants-écrivains. Participating: Butor, Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Faye as well as Mascolo, Antelme, Duras, Blanchot. Regular attendees at the Comité include Sarraute, Schuster, Nadeau, Roy … Blanchot and Mascolo will play a leading role in the group.

Adler:

In mid-May, [Duras] and Maurice Blanchot, her constant companion throughout that blissful month, were among the founding members of the students and writer’s Comité d’action. Committees were set up and a secretariat established. There were some sixty writers, journalists, students and television reporters in the room.

The next day they were down to twenty-five – the television reporters and journalists had disappeared. The debates were mess heated, more audible. Marguerite along with Blanchot, Antelme and Mascolo was there every day. The comité consisted of some twenty regulars and others – students and teachers – who’d drop in. Some listened and then, slamming the door behind them, left never to return, disgusted at the fuss the members made as word by word they pored over the contents of revolutionary tracts.

Some found the procedure quite exasperating. Marguerite persevered. She proved to be a skilled negotiator and was delighted by the contact with these brilliant young people who didn’t recognise her but who bullied and admonished her. She saw herself as a high priestess discovered the joy of being anonymous.

The comité kept on meeting until the end of August. Blanchot wrote many short pieces (some 18, which are available in The Blanchot Reader, but impossible, for the time being, to track down in French) in the journal of the group. They were not published under his own name. Mascolo wrote several too.

According to Mascolo, Duras came up with the slogans, ‘We don’t know where we’re going but that’s no reason not to go’ and ‘No prohibiting’.

Hill:

The political activity of the committee was essentially […] a linguistic or textual one; and what it placed highest on the political agenda, therefore […] beyond all economism, reformism, or concern with party political organisation, was the need to suspend the dialectical closure of representational politics, alongside the essential complicit bof government and legal opposition deriving from it, in order to affirm a different kind of politics, no longer dependent on the law of possibility, and […] beyond the reliance on received political concepts such as those of project or subject. This was why the anonymous production of texts, literary as well as non-, extra- and anti-literary, by doing away with such concepts, was such a crucial political touchstone.

In one piece, Blanchot makes a comparison between the Events and the Prague Spring. Hill writes, ‘Blanchot suggested that what was at stake in both movements was far more vital than a call for greater dialogue between government and governed’. Here is Blanchot:

Something quite different is at issue: a movement beyond measure, irrepressible, incessant, the impetus of outraged speech, speaking always beyond, transcending, overwhelming and thereby threatening all that confines and limits; the transgressive act of speech itself.

Adler:

Then the members were stuck in an attitude of political and metaphysical refusal. They had survived everything: the elections, the return to order, the summer doing nothing. Having been brought together by fate, they continued to debate philosophical issues from the ruins of a failed revolution, determined to pursue their dream of a world where Marxism was finally free of Stalinist crimes and where some of the aims of surrealism had at last been realised.

In a letter to Levinas reprinted in Nine Talmudic Readings, Blanchot explains his departure from the Comité group when its members began to question the legitimacy of Israel, writing,

I have always said that there was a limit beyond which I wouldn’t go, but now I’d like to ask myself for a minute … ask myself why these young people who are acting violently but also with generosity, felt they had to make such a choice, why they operated on thoughtlessness, on the usage of empty concepts (imperialism, colonisation) and also on the feeling that it is the Palestinians who are the weakest, and one must be on the side of the weak (as if Israel were not extremely, dreadfully vulnerable).

Later in 1968, Duras wrote to Henri Chatelain, a young friend:

The Events. I was there day and night. May will never come round again. I am suffering from angst and ennui. So much so that I am seriously thinking of leaving France. The tragedy of Prague killed me. [The Soviet invasion in August had put an end to Czech liberalisation]. I dream of a time when I won’t be writing.

Marguerite found the post-68 disillusionment difficult to deal with. For a year it was the dark night; she later said she felt she was suffocating, that she wouldn’t get over it, she wanted to die. Writing would once again save her from the void. ‘When I began to write again, I wrote against myself, I wrote without a routine, against Duras, because I couldn’t stand myself any more. Sometimes you have to take a risk, I’m in the dark’, she confessed in January 1970. (275)

It was in this period Destroy, She Said was written. I would like, another day, to copy out some of the pages from the long interview that forms a postscript to that book.

What did the failure of the Events mean to Blanchot? Hill cites a letter from Blanchot to Mascolo on the Action-Committees:

This is why they are nothing outside of the presence constituted by each meeting, a presence that is their whole existence, and in which it goes without saying that the Revolution, by that very fact, is present: in much the same way as in séances when a Spirit shows itself.

Hill:

As Blanchot’s letter went on to suggest, the limitations of the action committee as a mode of political activity were self-evident; but in themselves these were not important, for what such committees created, by their very existence, was potentially much more subversive than it seemed; for what they effected was a radical hiatus in the political order itself.

Blanchot mentions the events in many of his texts in the 80s and 90s; here, as with so many of these texts, he is concerned to defened the memory of the Events. I have already quoted from his text on Foucault, written in this period. In The Unavowable Community, published in 1983, after writing of

the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar,

he observes

May 1968 permitted a possibility to manifest itself, ‘the possibility – beyond any utilitarian gain – of a being-together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone.

A little further on, he writes of the committees as:

the circle of friends who disavowed their previous friendship in order to call upon friendship (camaraderie without preliminaries) vehiculated by the requirement of being there, not as a person or subject but as the demonstrators of a movement fraternally anonymous and impersonal.