The Absent Author
The Absent Author
Maurice Blanchot and the Subjection of Politics
This chapter analyzes the works of literary critic Maurice Blanchot. His youthful interwar writings helped shape a discourse of the nation, its substance and borders, haunted by the figure of an “other,” and articulated an obsession with the way the subject can emerge undivided and in harmony with the social body—concerns that far-right writers like Thierry Maulnier, Jean–Pierre Maxence, and Jean de Fabrègues also addressed. Politics and literature were the sites where Blanchot worked through his possible answer to the crisis of subjectivity, self, and nation, and his relation to the difference which became associated with Jewishness. Like the Young New Right intellectuals he was close to, Blanchot attempted to find a resolution to a seemingly untenable political situation, that of interwar France perceived to be in the throes of a cultural and moral crisis.
Keywords: Maurice Blanchot, literary critic, interwar writings, nation, subjectivity, social body, far-right writers, Jewishness, France
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