Description:
In certain key respects, 1943 marked a turning point in the war. Increasingly, victory seemed assured. However, the backdrop to this gradually improving situation was one of widespread and unremitting destruction.
In the essays from that year, Blanchot writes from a position of almost total detachment from day-to-day events, now that all of his projects and involvements have come to naught. As he explores and promotes works of literature and ideas, he privileges those with the capacity to sustain a human perspective that does not merely contemplate ruin and disaster but sees them as the occasion for a radical revision of what "human" is capable of signifying. Consigning all that the name "France" has hitherto meant to him to a past that is now in ruins, Blanchot begins to sketch out a counter-history that is international in nature, and whose human field is literature.Brief description: Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003)--writer, critic, and journalist--was one of the most important voices in twentieth-century literature and thought. His books include Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Unavowable Community.
Review Quotes: Maurice Blanchot's writings during the Vichy years (1941-44) may be the most crucial of his long career, particularly when read against his controversial political writings of the 1930s. Although to all appearances occasional pieces, these literary essays and reviews are also projects of self-transformation in which Blanchot becomes an increasingly distanced and even invisible observer of the disaster of Occupied France, as well as a writer whose critiques of the conventions of the novel look forward to his later experiments in fragmentary writing and the materializations of language.-----Gerald L. Bruns, University of Notre Dame