Date: Thu, 02 Feb 1995 23:45:39 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: MB: Blanchot as Fascist?


Blanchot is well known to have been involved with Maurrasian politics in
the thirties, up till 1938.  Jeffrey Mehlman made very heavy weather with
this.  What is most troubling to people are two comments that appear over his
name, something to the effect of conspiracies of Bolsheviks and Jews to
ruin a certain ecstatic and ecstatically dissident idea of France--this
conspiracy embodied in Leon Blum.  Blanchot has since suggested that these
words were not his, but editorial additions in a polemical atmosphere.
Supporting this possibility is the fact of his friendship with Levinas, no
stooge, unbroken since 1929, when they were both students at Strassbourg.
(One of the few photos of Blanchot is of him and Levinas there.)  In 1948
Blanchot published his last novel (as opposed to recit), the amazing Le Tres
Haut, which tells the story of its Heideggerean narrator's (his name is 
Henri Sorge) disillusionment with something that looks very much like facism,
because it totalizes the law and leaves out those who are outside the law,
in the event, victims of a plague: this is an early Blanchotian version of
the unavowable community.  Unlike de Man, Blanchot was actively involved in
philosemitic and leftist politics after the war.  His writing from the thirties
is weird, to say the least, but not obviously awful (at least if he's telling
the truth about the additions).  During the war he was part of the resistance.
A friend of Paulhan's, to whose memory (as I recall) L'amitie is dedicated.

William Flesch