[In the following review, Pindar offers a positive assessment of Awaiting Oblivion and evaluates the critical studies of Blanchot by critics Leslie Hill and Gerald Bruns.]

The lengthy trial and recent conviction of Maurice Papon marked a turning-point in France’s gradual acceptance of the Vichy regime’s complicity in the Holocaust. As one of the lawyers in the case argued, Papon did not have blood on his hands, but blood on his pen. After the verdict was announced, a representative of the Jewish deportees’ families said: “France now knows that the soulless pen-pushers, too, will be held to account.” In the 1930s, while Maurice Papon served in the Foreign Ministry, another Maurice, Maurice Blanchot, was an unlikely pen-pusher of a different sort; he was a political journalist. In recent years, he too has not escaped the charge of being a fascist sympathizer. As a young man, he regularly contributed to the right-wing nationalist Journal des débats and even became its rédacteur-en-chef. The Journal, as Leslie Hill explains in her excellent Blanchot: Extreme contemporary, was “a traditionalist, staunchly conservative evening daily”, in favour of “strong national government, economic stability, the free market, and law and order”. It does not sound like the sort of publication the Blanchot we have come to admire—the philosopher of refusal, of a transgressive limitlessness, of Otherness, the Outside and the neuter—would have been attracted to. But Blanchot the journalist is not, as Hill takes pains to point out, Blanchot the philosopher. Or is he?

It gets worse. Blanchot also wrote articles for a number of other publications, “on the further fringes of mainstream right-wing politics”, associated with the Jeune Droite, a loosely defined movement characterized by “virulent nationalism, hatred of Marxism, and contempt for parliamentary democracy”. In 1936, his name appeared on the front cover of an extremist nationalist monthly, Combat, co-founded by Thierry Maulnier. Maulnier has been described by one commentator, Zeev Sternhell, as belonging to a group of “fascistically-inclined intellectuals”, who nevertheless remained aloof from any party. It is the Combat texts that get Blanchot into the most trouble, and, by his own admission, deservedly so. In one he takes to task “unbridled Jews” who want to declare war on Hitler, and in another he refers to a prominent Jew as representing “a backward ideology, a decrepit mentality, a foreign breed”. According to Sternhell, Blanchot’s very last article for Combat, “On demande des dissidents”, is “a perfect definition of fascist thinking”. Tzvetan Todorov has tentatively called Blanchot a “spokesman for a certain [sic] anti-Semitism”, and Jeffrey Mehlman has called him a “propagandist for terrorism”. Hill disagrees. While she detects “a deep and worrying instability” in Blanchot’s anarchic journalism, she remains level-headed. Sternhell, she persuasively argues, has misrepresented Blanchot’s “radical dissidence”. He was not a fascist, not even a “nonaligned” one. In his vitriolic appeals for violent action and for some sort of revolutionary overthrow of everything, he is in fact calling into question “the whole principle of political representation”. Having drawn a line between the hot-headed hack and the philosopher, she cannot quite resist intellectualizing Blanchot’s early rebarbative articles as proto-philosophical statements. Perhaps they are.

Gerald L. Bruns, in his Maurice Blanchot: The refusal of philosophy, has less trouble accepting Sternhell’s thesis. An irresponsible, intellectual fascism was in the air in Paris during these difficult times; and Blanchot quite probably inhaled. It is a “fascism of the cafés and reviews”, a sort of fascism-Lite. Nevertheless, as Hill demonstrates, the argument for Blanchot the pro-fascist unravels as we reach 1940 and the Occupation, which affected him deeply. In his early nationalist articles, he was unequivocal in regarding Germany as a foe to France and indeed the rest of Europe. He despised Hitler, and dismissed National Socialism as “perverted”. During the Occupation, the Journal des débats continued under the auspices of the Vichy government. Blanchot withdrew his support. He only returned to it in 1944, eight days before the Liberation, largely for financial reasons, and then he would contribute nothing but book reviews. He had already retreated into literature. At this point, it is Bruns who most convincingly reconciles the journalist with the philosopher. “It is not difficult to see”, he writes, “that all that Blanchot henceforth has to say about language and writing presupposes the structure of Occupation—including the dialectical opposition of Collaboration and Resistance.”

Blanchot’s first collection of essays, Faux pas (1943), could not be more different in tone from his clamorous political journalism. Under the shadow of Occupation, nothing is possible: “the writer finds himself in this more and more comical condition—of having nothing to write, of having no means of writing it, and of being forced by an extreme necessity to keep writing it.” It is classic Blanchot (and, indeed, Bruns points out, classic Beckett, who was to say much the same thing almost word for word in conversation with Georges Duthuit six years later). We may never know what happened to Blanchot during the years of Occupation, but whatever it was, it was formative. Suddenly he appears, the familiar Blanchot, whom Bruns describes as “the disengaged, supposedly invisible post-Liberation literary man”. His post-war writing is characterized by disengagement, the politics of “refusal”, especially the refusal to speak; the lineaments of which might conceivably be traced back to the disappointed revolutionary, determined, as he was from the outset, to oppose or confound the regime, any regime. (His favourite moment during les événements of May 1968 was when the demonstrators shouted: “Nous sommes tous les juifs allemands!”) He does not deserve to join the ranks of those thinkers we read with suspicion, such as de Man or Heidegger or even the unwitting Nietzsche.

Hill and Bruns approach their quarry in a similar fashion: close textual analysis (especially Hill) and a broad, erudite knowledge of the many literary and intellectual lines of force which criss-cross Blanchot’s substantial oeuvre. He was, after all, a very close friend of Emmanuel Levinas (Blanchot helped to find a safe haven for Levinas’s wife and daughter during the Occupation), Georges Bataille and René Char (an active member of the Resistance); he has also influenced and, in turn, been influenced by a younger generation of thinkers: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, the list is long (and appears in Hill’s book). Hill has compiled what must be the closest thing to a comprehensive bibliography, but both books are insightful companion-pieces; although the Blanchot who emerges from them remains an enigma. As Bruns admits, “we know less about him than we would like”. In her conclusion, Hill begins to sound rather Blanchovian: “The more you try to reach the end, the more the end becomes impossible to reach.” But Blanchot is out there, somewhere. Born in 1907, he is still our extreme contemporary. Like the male protagonist in Awaiting Oblivion (L’Attente l’oubli). Blanchot appears to have “lost the idea of dying”. The title of his best-known fiction is a telling pun: L’Arrêt de mort—both a death sentence and the suspension of death.

Awaiting Oblivion is a sort of Waiting for Godot without the action. Beckett may well have drawn heavily on his claustrophobic, domestic banter with Suzanne for his dialogue, but at least he brought on Pozzo and Lucky. Blanchot offers us just a woman in a sparsely furnished hotel room and a man, “confined with her, in the great shifting circle of waiting”. John Gregg, who has provided a masterful translation, is perhaps a little too close to Blanchot’s language in his introduction to state an obvious point: Awaiting Oblivion is about relationships, specifically the heterosexual couple.

Many theorists, with more than a nod to the Marquis de Sade, have attempted to persuade us that homosexual desire is transgressively postmodern and that heterosexuality is best left to people who haven’t read any theory. Pierre Klossowski, for instance, has argued that (homosexual) sodomy is “the supreme form of the transgression of norms”, because it places the subject “outside of himself”. But, perhaps unfashionably (it was written in 1962), Blanchot in Awaiting Oblivion seems to be saying that heterosexuality is far more threatening to subjectivity. The dualism of man and woman (what Klossowski would dismiss as an institutional norm) remains rich territory for Blanchot. His paradox is that it is precisely this culturally condoned sexuality that threatens to destroy the male by casting him outside himself—and Blanchot’s female protagonist, as Gregg points out, is very much “the mysterious, unknowable, unseizable figure of the dehors, the outside”. Telling, in an earlier novel, Thomas l’obscur (the revised 1950 text), the protagonist, reading a book, suddenly finds himself “in the position of the male praying mantis about to be devoured by the female”. Homosexuality from this perspective looks rather tame, more like an attempt to avoid encountering a subject-splitting alterity. It is those aroused by difference who court destruction.

That said, there isn’t any sex in Awaiting Oblivion. It is about discourse rather than intercourse. What binds together and separates this man and this woman is a simultaneous dependency on, and distrust of, language itself. They can’t decide whether to collaborate or resist. She urges him to master language in order to make her real. He can’t. She attributes this to “an incomprehensible negligence”, and, indeed, the majority of their exchanges are incomprehensible; the reasoning is fallacious, paradoxical, oxymoronic, exactly as in real-life relationships. Like most couples, they bicker, but this is philosophical bickering:

“Why don’t you do everything that you could?”—“But what more could I do?”—“More than you are doing.”—“Yes, probably more, a little more”, he added lightheartedly. “I have often had this impression since I have known you.”—“Be sincere: why don’t you make use of this power that you know you have?”—“What kind of power? Why are you telling me this?” But she persisted with her calm obstinacy: “Acknowledge this power that belongs to you.”—“I do not know it, and it does not belong to me.”—“That proves that this power is part of you.”

Something is always already missing from their union, something irresolvable because they are man and woman and because language always leaves something unsaid. The unsayable is perhaps the fact that there is nothing keeping them together—or apart. They desperately search for a reason other than chance for being in that sparsely furnished hotel room. The room, of course is the relationship. They will always be in the room, whether they stay or go. “He would leave, but he would, nevertheless, stay. This was the truth around which she, too, was circling stealthily.” She is predatory but also strangely conventional. She wants her story told (“Story—what does she mean by that?”), she wants a detailed description of the room, and he, like some writerly Midas, is expected to touch everything with the power of words and make it real. He constantly sidesteps her desire for narrative development. He is a philosophical reworking of the man who can’t commit. What is a relationship, after all, if it isn’t in some sense a narrative that must be sustained?

They wait for love, but it never comes; there is only a sort of defeated tenderness. There is no way out once they have crossed the threshold and begun to speak and this explains their lugubrious, love-defeating hesitancy. “If something happened to you—even if it happens long after my disappearance—how can it not be unbearable as of now?” It is the alternative love of the always already rejected; not love at all, perhaps, but still there, a secret pain, unbearably borne before they have even parted. “How they suffocated together.”