Book review | Philosopher Maurice Blanchot appeared as a forgotten hermit during his lifetime, but the afterlife is not ready to forget him

Nonfiction book

Maurice Blanchot: The Writing of Destruction (L’Écriture du Désastre). Finnish Viljami Hukka. Researchers’ Association. 184 pp.

When French philosopher-writer by Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) The writing of destruction held its release party on Leap Day, not everyone who wanted to fit inside the 90-seat hall of Teksti’s house in Helsinki.

Considering the starting points, the popularity can be considered surprising – translated books are usually published in Finland in complete silence, and the late hero of the celebration cannot really be described as a showman.

Maurice Blanchot himself hardly celebrated the publication of his books when he was alive, at least with a very large party. Only a few photos of him were published during his lifetime, one of which was taken by a literary paparazzi – so there have been some! – in the supermarket parking lot.

For most of his life, Blanchot was a reclusive figure who lived aloof from Paris and academic institutions, submitting his high-flying articles to literary magazines. So he participated in the conversation of his contemporaries from a visible place – in a way that is probably only possible in France.

Blanchot was impressed greatly to continental thinking and thereby also to Anglo-American literary studies in the 20th century, especially to the understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy. For him, literature was speech that could cross the boundaries of the individual and make a silent resistance to the conceptual thinking that takes over reality.

Thinking, for Blanchot, is constantly in danger of doing violence to the world, and yet it is the responsibility of the thinker to avoid this as far as possible. This is where poetry helps, which is important but ultimately cannot be understood, i.e. taken over.

“Philosophy questions everything but struggles with poetry, because poetry is a question that philosophy cannot grasp”, writes Blanchot Destruction in writing.

Especially the one published in Finnish in 2003 Literary space (Fin. Susanne Lindberg) has been an important book for numerous Finnish writers of the 21st century, which should at least be looked for in the catalogs of Teos and Poesia publishing houses. Laajiten is perhaps impressed by Blanchot Markku Paasonenwhose last year Everything is destroyed– the prose work seemed foreboding I will destroy the writing from Finnish.

I wish Blanchot’s passivity and weak power could be seen in other art forms as well, for example Pentti Otto Koskinen in performance art.

New Finnish translation the interest aroused can be connected with the publisher Tutkijaliitto, which mobilizes younger generations to work with philosophy, which has previously succeeded in creating posthumous buzz by, for example, Blanchot’s contemporaries Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) around.

The rather disparate trio is united by pushing the limits of thinking, reaching beyond the reach of everyday language and creating their own concepts. Destruction in writing such a concept is especially destruction, in French disasterfrom which Blanchot squeezes all the juices out by talking, for example, about a night without stars (astre ).

Blanchot’s thinking is characterized by operating on many levels at the same time.

Thus, in the same sentence, destruction can refer to the breakdown of written language, which I will destroy the writing the fragmented form reflects, to the loss and oblivion of culture, to the eternally approaching death of man aware of his transience – and equally well to entropy, the increase of disorder in the world.

In the past Finnish-language Blanchot literature disaster is sometimes also translated as catastrophe, which is, however, more closely equivalent in French la catastrophe. The word referring to a sudden event does not do justice to the slow nature of Blanchot’s thinking anyway.

In his excellent, sometimes even suspiciously clear translation Viljami Hukka has made the right choice: although destruction itself is mute and impersonal as a word, the nuanced translation style illuminates well the multidimensionality of the concept.

Blanchot is a good idol for today’s self-aware youth because it is impossible to lump him into a clear identity category, an easy villain or hero. Politically, he was first and foremost an anarchist who was forever suspicious of those in power.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Blanchot also publicly regretted his misjudgments. In the 1930s, he was a far-right, albeit anti-Nazi, political journalist, and during the Nazi occupation of the 1940s, he was active in the resistance movement – albeit also assisting some publications that supported the Vichy government.

Ultimately, his opposition to the Algerian War (1954–1962) made Blanchot an anti-Gaullist leftist, as was the majority of the French intelligentsia. Blanchot left this movement as well, when the left allied itself with the Palestinian cause. For Blanchot, who drew on Jewish messianic thought, Israel was a necessity on which he was not ready to compromise.

The matter was probably also influenced by the friendship between the Lithuanian-born philosopher that began in the 1920s as a student in Strasbourg by Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) with. Levinas was a Jew whose entire family died in extermination camps in the 1940s.

Blanchot and Levinas tend to shift the focus of thinking from ontology, i.e. the structure of the world, to ethics. The ethical turn was influenced by the events of the Second World War, in which they saw complicity, as did their teachers Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) with totalizing thinking that did not leave enough room for respecting the unknown.

For Blanchot, as for Levinas, the individual, the subject of his own life, is incomparably more important than his responsibility to another person. The second, also often capitalized by Blanchot, is something that you are never allowed to think of as being the same as yourself.

Blanchot is similarly alien to death, which according to him an individual cannot directly experience – when he dies, he no longer exists. So death is outside of time, forever coming, always already happened.

Destruction in writing Blanchot quotes one of his gentiles, the poet Paul Celania: “Poetry, ladies and gentlemen, is the speech of the infinite, the speech of pointless death and the only Nothing.”

According to Blanchot, even death and mortality are in danger of becoming a ready-made identity for a person and a source of pride, i.e. just pathos and big words. As an antidote to such, poetry is needed – preferably poor, modest, forgettable.