Here is a snapshot of Blanchot’s activities during the May 1968 Events, taken from Bident's marvellous biography.
Blanchot links himself to the movement of the 22nd March, so called because of it was that day the administrative block was occupied at the university at Nanterre.
In late April, Blanchot visits Levinas who is rather unimpressed by the students’ revolt. Here is what he says much later, in an interview from 1984:
In 1968, I had the feeling that all values were being contested as bourgeois – this was quite impressive – all except for one: the other. Nobody ever said that the right of the other man – despite all the liberation of the spontaneous ego, despite all the license of language and contempt for the other as other – remained unpronounceable.
Interestingly, Levinas seems to have changed his mind on this point. In “Judaism and Revolution”, a commentary on the Tractate Baba Metsia delivered a year after the Events, he writes: “those who shouted, a few months ago, ‘We are all German Jews’ in the streets of Paris were after all not making themselves guilty of petit-bourgeois meanness” (Nine Talmudic Readings).
Levinas refers here to the spontaneous support that broke out during the demonstrators for one of the student leaders of the revolt, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was subject to anti-Semitic remarks on the part of the authorities.
Blanchot comments on the cry “We are all German Jews” in one of his anonymous writings published in Comité. He cites Blanchot as follows: “’Never’, he claims, ‘had this previously been said anywhere, never at any time: it was inaugural moment of speech, opening and overturning borders, opening, overthrowing the future’” (cited Hill, Extreme Contemporary, 219). The text in question, “Les Actions exemplaires”, was published anonymously in a short lived journal. However, Blanchot included a short essay entitled “War and Literature” in Friendship, published in 1971, originally a response to a Polish questionnaire, in which he recalls the spontaneous demonstration in question, commenting “this was to signify the relation of solidarity and fraternity with the victims” (109).
But I am getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it would be better to run through events more or less chronologically.
Early May ... the first occupations, expulsions, condemnations, demonstrations … Blanchot is staying with the Antelmes.
On the 9th, Antelme, Nadeau, des Forêts, Duras, Jean Schuster, Leiris, Claude Roy, Mascolo, Klossowski, Sartre, Sarraute, Lefebvre signed a petition written by Blanchot and published in Le Monde supporting the students.
The first night of the barricades 10th-11th of May. Blanchot is there; he is profoundly shaken by the unfolding Events.
On the 13th, Mascolo, the Antelmes, Duras, Blanchot, des Forets, Nadeau, Schuster, Leiris take part in the biggest march seen in Paris since the protests surrounding the Algerian crisis and the assassination of protestors at the Charonne Metro Station, remembered by Blanchot in The Unavowable Community.
Bident notes Derrida, whom Blanchot had met for the first time recently, expressed some reservation about the ‘spontaneous fusion’ of the Events.
Roughly translated from the obituary Derrida wrote for Blanchot:
I have just marked the date of a first meeting, in May 68. Without pointing out the cause or the occasion of this personal meeting, which initially related a problem of an ethical and political nature between us, I underline only that at the same time, in May 68, Blanchot radically engaged, being, body and heart, in the street …
Perhaps these disagreements concern Derrida’s worry about spontaneism. Derrida also remembers ‘the softness of the smile [which] did not leave Blanchot’s face for a second during our meetings’.
At some point in the Events, Blanchot met Foucault, too, who had long admired the work of the older author. As Blanchot remembers in a text published in memory of Foucault, ‘Whatever the detractors of May might say, it was a splendid moment, when anyone could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another person’. This is why Blanchot emphasizes that he had no ‘personal relations’ with Foucault, even though they were both participants of the Events in which ‘anyone could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another person’
This point is worth underlining: what affirmed itself in the Events, for Blanchot, opened each participant to the Other without determining that relation. Protesters were able to come together before judging one other obscure or famous, young or old, rich or poor, and in which they refused to recognise the authority of those in power, at the same time refusing to allow their refusal to be transformed into the desire for a particular set of reforms. It was not a solution, the satisfaction of an aim, that was sought.
On the 27th, Blanchot, with the Antelmes, is present at Stade Charléty to hear Mendès-France giving his support to the Movement.
May 20th sees the creation of an Action Committee, the Comité d’action étudiants-écrivains. Participating: Butor, Jacques Roubaud, Jean-Pierre Faye as well as Mascolo, Antelme, Duras, Blanchot. Regular attendees at the Comité include Sarraute, Schuster, Nadeau, Roy … Blanchot and Mascolo will play a leading role in the group.
Adler:
In mid-May, [Duras] and Maurice Blanchot, her constant companion throughout that blissful month, were among the founding members of the students and writer’s Comité d’action. Committees were set up and a secretariat established. There were some sixty writers, journalists, students and television reporters in the room.
The next day they were down to twenty-five – the television reporters and journalists had disappeared. The debates were mess heated, more audible. Marguerite along with Blanchot, Antelme and Mascolo was there every day. The comité consisted of some twenty regulars and others – students and teachers – who’d drop in. Some listened and then, slamming the door behind them, left never to return, disgusted at the fuss the members made as word by word they pored over the contents of revolutionary tracts.
Some found the procedure quite exasperating. Marguerite persevered. She proved to be a skilled negotiator and was delighted by the contact with these brilliant young people who didn’t recognise her but who bullied and admonished her. She saw herself as a high priestess discovered the joy of being anonymous.
The comité kept on meeting until the end of August. Blanchot wrote many short pieces (some 18, which are available in The Blanchot Reader, but impossible, for the time being, to track down in French) in the journal of the group. They were not published under his own name. Mascolo wrote several too.
According to Mascolo, Duras came up with the slogans, ‘We don’t know where we’re going but that’s no reason not to go’ and ‘No prohibiting’.
Hill:
The political activity of the committee was essentially […] a linguistic or textual one; and what it placed highest on the political agenda, therefore […] beyond all economism, reformism, or concern with party political organisation, was the need to suspend the dialectical closure of representational politics, alongside the essential complicit bof government and legal opposition deriving from it, in order to affirm a different kind of politics, no longer dependent on the law of possibility, and […] beyond the reliance on received political concepts such as those of project or subject. This was why the anonymous production of texts, literary as well as non-, extra- and anti-literary, by doing away with such concepts, was such a crucial political touchstone.
In one piece, Blanchot makes a comparison between the Events and the Prague Spring. Hill writes, ‘Blanchot suggested that what was at stake in both movements was far more vital than a call for greater dialogue between government and governed'. Here is Blanchot:
Something quite different is at issue: a movement beyond measure, irrepressible, incessant, the impetus of outraged speech, speaking always beyond, transcending, overwhelming and thereby threatening all that confines and limits; the transgressive act of speech itself.
Adler:
Then the members were stuck in an attitude of political and metaphysical refusal. They had survived everything: the elections, the return to order, the summer doing nothing. Having been brought together by fate, they continued to debate philosophical issues from the ruins of a failed revolution, determined to pursue their dream of a world where Marxism was finally free of Stalinist crimes and where some of the aims of surrealism had at last been realised.
In a letter to Levinas reprinted in Nine Talmudic Readings, Blanchot explains his departure from the Comité group when its members began to question the legitimacy of Israel, writing,
I have always said that there was a limit beyond which I wouldn’t go, but now I’d like to ask myself for a minute ... ask myself why these young people who are acting violently but also with generosity, felt they had to make such a choice, why they operated on thoughtlessness, on the usage of empty concepts (imperialism, colonisation) and also on the feeling that it is the Palestinians who are the weakest, and one must be on the side of the weak (as if Israel were not extremely, dreadfully vulnerable).
Later in 1968, Duras wrote to Henri Chatelain, a young friend:
The Events. I was there day and night. May will never come round again. I am suffering from angst and ennui. So much so that I am seriously thinking of leaving France. The tragedy of Prague killed me. [The Soviet invasion in August had put an end to Czech liberalisation]. I dream of a time when I won’t be writing.
Marguerite found the post-68 disillusionment difficult to deal with. For a year it was the dark night; she later said she felt she was suffocating, that she wouldn’t get over it, she wanted to die. Writing would once again save her from the void. ‘When I began to write again, I wrote against myself, I wrote without a routine, against Duras, because I couldn’t stand myself any more. Sometimes you have to take a risk, I’m in the dark’, she confessed in January 1970. (275)
It was in this period Destroy, She Said was written. I would like, another day, to copy out some of the pages from the long interview that forms a postscript to that book.
What did the failure of the Events mean to Blanchot? Hill cites a letter from Blanchot to Mascolo on the Action-Committees:
This is why they are nothing outside of the presence constituted by each meeting, a presence that is their whole existence, and in which it goes without saying that the Revolution, by that very fact, is present: in much the same way as in séances when a Spirit shows itself.
Hill:
As Blanchot’s letter went on to suggest, the limitations of the action committee as a mode of political activity were self-evident; but in themselves these were not important, for what such committees created, by their very existence, was potentially much more subversive than it seemed; for what they effected was a radical hiatus in the political order itself.
Blanchot mentions the events in many of his texts in the 80s and 90s; here, as with so many of these texts, he is concerned to defened the memory of the Events. I have already quoted from his text on Foucault, written in this period. In The Unavowable Community, published in 1983, after writing of
the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar,
he observes
May 1968 permitted a possibility to manifest itself, ‘the possibility - beyond any utilitarian gain - of a being-together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone.
A little further on, he writes of the committees as:
the circle of friends who disavowed their previous friendship in order to call upon friendship (camaraderie without preliminaries) vehiculated by the requirement of being there, not as a person or subject but as the demonstrators of a movement fraternally anonymous and impersonal.
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