Blanchot Collabo

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was best known for his pathbreaking forays in literary criticism: dense meditations on the abyss of literary meaning, culminating in his radical insight concerning the ontological impossibility of writing or écriture. Accordingly, Blanchot was justly canonized by luminaries of French Theory such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as an indispensable precursor of their influential prognostications concerning la mort de l'auteur and le degré zéro l’écriture. At the same time, circa 1980, rumors began to circulate concerning what Michel Surya has denominated l'autre Blanchot: the right-wing political journalist of the 1930s, who enthusiastically embraced the neo-Maurrassian adage, Plutôt Hitler que Blum. Could it be that one of the reasons that, later in life, Blanchot was attracted to such hermetic theories of textuality and signification—écriture blanche—was to escape the trammels of his ignominious political past?