Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was one of the most important writers of the French 20th century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence over writers, artists, and philosophers (not least those associated with deconstruction). As a journalist and political activist, he had a public side that matched his secret and mysterious side as someone who refused to be interviewed or photographed.
Maurice Blanchot: a Critical Biography, the only full-length account of Blanchot's itinerary, therefore attempts to carry out an impossible bio-graphy. It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer's very close friends. Beyond this, it is also a theoretical work following the genealogy of a thinking that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend of philosophy. It is a historical work, unpacking the 'transformation of convictions' of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. And it is of course a biography, showing the strong links between the author's life and an oeuvre which nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In these ways, this book claims that Blanchot's is a life that has become the oeuvre, become a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly (even if they are what drives it). Blanchot's oeuvre is reconstituted in all its contexts, at a time when the critics who attack it, just like those who elevate it in unthinking fascination, often produce one-dimensional readings.
Synopsis
Maurice Blanchot has long inspired writers, artists, and philosophers with some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. Bident's magisterial biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot's itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and interviews with the writer's close friends, while also providing a sophisticated genealogy of his thought.
A journalist and activist, but also inclined to secrecy, Blanchot lived public and private lives that converged at some of the century's most momentous occasions: He was nearly executed during the Occupation, participated prominently in the May '68 revolution in Paris, and, more controversially, wrote for the far right in the '30s. Even-handed throughout, Bident offers a much-needed fleshing out of a life too easily sensationalized.
Synopsis
Maurice Blanchot: a Critical Biography attempts a critical and theoretical biography by drawing on unpublished documents and interviews with those close to the writer. It tracks the life and work of one of the most important novelists and critics of the twentieth century, who influenced many writers, artists, and philosophers, not least those of French theory.