Maurice blanchot biography

A Critical Biography

Description

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century.

As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the pub

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The Nothing Beyond Nothing

Either in spite or because of its disasters, the twentieth century produced an abundance of great writers and intellectuals. Maurice Blanchot was among the major ones. Born into a well-off French Catholic family in 1907, he suffered serious health problems for most of his life—as early as the 1940s he would alert friends that he was writing his final book or letter—yet he died in 2003 at the age of ninety-five. His mauvaise santé de fer (a French expression meaning “poor health of iron”) was only one of the many paradoxes that dominated his life and thought.

If Dante were able to update his Divine Comedy today, he most likely would place Blanchot in the sphere of Saturn, the remote, cold, and silent seventh heaven reserved for the contemplatives. Here a golden ladder stretches up into the abyss of ultimate mystery. Blanchot was a mystic without God who climbed that ladder into the most rarefied regions of verbal and conceptual abstraction, yet like the cardinal and monk Peter Damian, who devotes most of his speech in

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Maurice Blanchot

French writer

"Blanchot" redirects here. For the Chablis grand cru vineyard, see Chablis wine.

Maurice Blanchot (blahn-SHOH; French:[blɑ̃ʃo]; 22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist.^[4] His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Biography

Pre-1945

Blanchot was born in the village of Quain (Saône-et-Loire) on 22 September 1907.^[5][6][7]

Blanchot studied philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, where he became a close friend of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish phenomenologistEmmanuel Levinas. He then embarked on a career as a political journalist in Paris. From 1932 to 1940 he was editor of the mainstream conservative daily the Journal des débats. In 1930 he earned his DES (diplôme d'études supérieures), roughly equivalent to an M.A. at the Universi