[In the following review, Conley discusses the main themes of Friendship.]

In an August 1997 review of Maurice Blanchot’s Friendship in Library Journal (122.13, p. 90), Robert T. Ivey expressed his perplexity at the regard with which Blanchot is increasingly held among literary theorists and philosophers. Giving Blanchot’s text a grade of “C,” he wrote that those seeking commentaries on friendship such as Montaigne offered readers will be disappointed by these “rambling, disjointed essays …” I agree. Without reservation. It is true that such expectations would only be disappointed by these pages. But perhaps such a reader should be first referred to Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, which carefully elaborates a shared mourning for the friend that characterizes both Blanchot and Montaigne. The contemporary political stakes that Derrida unravels in his extended engagements with classical texts on friendship are illuminated in lightning flashes of brilliance in the literary, cultural, and philosophical essays gathered together in Blanchot’s Friendship. Many of the essays are immediate responses to other texts, although several, less identifiably related to other writings, examine, among other subjects, translation, war, literature and transgression. While these writings testify to an amazing erudition, what consistently brings them together is the generosity of Blanchot’s thought and the elegance of his expression. I will not try to speak directly of each essay from this book—an attempt that would greatly exceed the limitations of a book review—but rather will focus on a few that punctuate the currents of thought that run throughout the various pieces.

The text opens with lines borrowed from Georges Bataille: “my complicitous friendship …” he writes. Amicable collusion marks each of these essays. The writings gathered together here, ranging from responses to Lascaux, the atomic bomb, Kafka, Leiris, Lévi-Strauss, and Bataille (to name only a few), are loosely tied together. Perhaps more accurately I should write they are brought into a common space by the dispersal of Blanchot’s thought into complicitous relation with these other writers, these other texts. It is the rhythm and cadence of Blanchot’s generous language offered in response to other texts that performs a community of friendship in the twenty-nine essays that compose the book. This collection is neither Blanchot’s confessions or meditations, nor is it his examined presentation of a theme. It is, as he writes, a record of exposure that cannot be addressed with the razor precision of calculated relations:

And to speak coolly of the works of friends, ignoring the shadow that has withdrawn into them and that they throw on us, would be a movement without truth, and moreover beyond our power … it is the manner in which they are close to us, the pain that proximity introduces in our thought every time that, in turning toward them, we come up against the presence of resistance that is proper to a work already closing itself up, and we cannot help it to close itself up (or to undo itself) by valuing it or by putting it in the service of an intellectual strategy.

(188–89)

Georges Bataille, his death, writings, and friendship, haunt this text. From the opening pages to one of the most beautiful essays in the middle, to final thoughts that achingly confess their own poverty of expression, Blanchot’s book most poignantly responds to the thought of friendship in relation to his contemporary. In the short opening paragraph of “Idle Speech,” Blanchot writes of a conversation he and Bataille were having shortly before Bataille’s death. The discussion addressed their common sense of being overwhelmed by Louis René des Forêts’ Le Bavard. Bataille, we are told, having lost his desire to write, asks Blanchot if he would speak of this text some day. The essay opens with Blanchot’s acceptance of this task: “I kept the silence. It is to this silence, common to us today, but that I alone remember, that I must try to respond by giving as it were, a continuation to this conversation” (117).

Understanding friendship as relation, not as an object to be analyzed, Blanchot writes within the silence that ties him to even as it separates him from a community of friends (we could call this a community of thinkers, writers, thoughts, language) in the language of a conversation continued. The act of writing therefore becomes a discussion or a response that survives those who might be identified as friends. The “life” of this book is a curious parallel to the thought of friendship as mourning and of writing as survival, in that the text predates several of Blanchot’s texts that have previously been translated, among them Writing of the Disaster and the now sadly out of print The Unavowable Community. In fact, this text was originally published in France in 1971, a date that leaves its mark on several of the essays. The quality of being slightly out of their time only adds to the essays’ strengths. A conversation continued and the survival of a friendship beyond friends serve as lessons in reading for those would turn to this book (which is late in being translated into English, albeit with Elizabeth Rottenberg’s admirable skill).

Addressing fears of a world seemingly past, Blanchot writes in “The apocalypse is disappointing” on the Karl Jaspers’ text, La Bombe Atomique et L’avenir de l’homme: conscience politique de notre temps. Jaspers argued for a necessary shift in human conscience in the face of potential nuclear holocaust, to which Blanchot offers a timely response. He questions the very human conscience that Jaspers assumes: “we are not in control of ourselves because this humanity, capable of being totally destroyed, does not yet exist as a whole” (106). While the giddy end to the Cold War seems to have moved the nuclear threat off the front page of historical anxieties, Blanchot’s criticism remains timely in that what has replaced bipolar geopolitics is the smiling humanitarianism of UN-helmeted interventions. Again, or perhaps still and always, something like humanity seems to be assumed even as it is at stake.

Like the atomic bomb, communism has faced a hasty dismissal in popular speech since the advent of the “New World Order.” However, when Blanchot addresses Dionys Mascolo’s work (reminiscent of other attempts at reconfiguring and re-engaging the meaning of communism), “communism”—that recently disparaged and recently invigorated term—enters a kaleidoscope and shifts brilliantly before one’s eyes, dancing into new formations and unexpected constellations. This spectacle continues in an essay responding to Henri Lefebvre, and later in “Marx’s Three Voices,” with a quiet and concise exploration of multiple forms.

Some of his most biting critique concerns the idols of culture: art, museum, literature. It is in “The Great Reducers,” however, that Blanchot treats his readers to a piercing analysis of the role of culture and cultural critics as the guards dogs to a system that neutralizes literature. “We understand everything,” Blanchot asserts, but the task of literature and poetry is to forge a space and time beyond reductionist comprehension for “an experience such that we are put to the test of the absolutely other, of that which escapes unity” (63). Literature offers an experience that resists this understanding of everything, resists the reduction to unity and identity, but what he terms the “consciousness industry” (an ambiguous term that apparently includes the majority of literary critics, publishers and readers), demonstrates a remarkable ability to tame texts by welcoming their unruliness. “By disseminating texts that are aesthetically rebellious, one gives oneself the appearance of being without prejudice, as is proper for the important patrons of culture; one secures oneself the collaboration of the intellectuals of the opposition whose untimely political declarations one would refuse, but whose literary cooperation is always harmless” (66). Culture, as that everything which delineates what will be excluded and what included, is poetry’s enabling and vanquishing border. Embracing everything within the arms of unification and identification, culture neutralizes through acceptance. Only a midnight glimmer flashes outside this embrace; a poetic refusal that disregards even its own victory. Blanchot’s text is such a critical ember. It is a writing that writes away from itself, whose force of expression survives in these conversations continued. This is the generosity of thought that carries through Blanchot’s essays and brings these works and these writers of whom he speaks to their borders.

Blanchot’s ability to tiptoe into the depths of philosophical questioning allows him to present thought gently, without either crushing it or forcing it to conform to popular modes of expression. Blanchot reminds us that if we can refer to something as “cultural criticism” or engaged thinking—refer to our work or the work of our colleagues as such—then this work should understand its risks as located in a fundamental questioning that approaches the fixed borders of expression. And this task, when undertaken in the complicity of friendship that elicits its response, unbalances the ease of thinking. Following in a line of truly remarkable, although singularly male-authored, texts published under Stanford’s Meridian Crossings Aesthetics series, Blanchot’s Friendship is a welcome addition for any readers who also consider themselves thinkers: both those who have long followed his writings, as well as those for whom he lingers in obscurity.