Beyond Commitment: Intellectual Engagement in Politics in Postwar France, 1944-1962 
 
 
 
 
A DISSERTATION 
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA 
BY 
 
 
 
 
Eric William Richtmyer 
 
 
 
 
 
 
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS 
FOR THE DEGREE OF 
DOCTOR OFPHILOSOPHY 
 
 
 
Advised By: Thomas Wolfe 
 
 
 
 
May 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Eric William Richtmyer 2010 
 
   i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
This dissertation was conceived and realized at two very different stages of my 
graduate student career.  I had the idea for this project in 2005, when, after a brief hiatus 
in my studies, it became clear to me that if I were actually to complete a dissertation, it 
would have to be about Maurice Blanchot.  It was his subtlety, perspicacity, intellectual 
dexterity, and above all, his fundamental dignity which made the value of the life of the 
mind clear to me, and which remain models to which I will forever aspire.  The actual 
writing of this dissertation took place in the wake of the 2007-2008 race for the 
democratic presidential nomination, which was a period of increased political activity 
among the graduate students at the University of Minnesota.  This dissertation’s efforts to 
understand the ethics of intellectual engagement in postwar French politics are largely 
motivated by my own struggles with political engagement in the contemporary United 
States.   
I am thankful to the many faculty from whom I have received my education at the 
University of Minnesota.  Thomas Wolfe and JB Shank have seen me through my entire 
graduate student career, and of the many things they have been kind enough to share with 
me, it is for their generosity – which I am now able to recognize as the gift of a truly 
great teacher – that I am most grateful.  I have learned much more from them than just 
history.  I am thankful to Bruno Chaouat, Stuart McLean, and Ajay Skaria for their kind 
service and advice.  I would also like to thank Thomas Pepper and James Tracy, who, in 
very different ways, taught me how to read.   
   ii
I am grateful to have been able to share my years in graduate school with many 
friends.  I wish to thank, first of all, Michael Sizer.  His friendship is the real footnote to 
every page of this dissertation.  I thank Christopher Freeman, Meredith Gill, Isaac 
Kamola, Garnet Kindervater, Serena Laws, Arnold Lelis, Michael Ryan, Timothy Smit, 
Andrew Urban, and Aaron Windel for providing the community that I was looking for 
when I first applied to graduate school.  I thank Zen Dochterman and Devin McIntyre for 
their friendship, and for generously boarding me when I needed to escape to Los Angeles, 
or to New York.  
My graduate studies have benefited from David and Mary Good, who provided a 
fellowship at the University of Minnesota in 2007.  Thanks to Karine Cantin for teaching 
me how to speak French, and, without realizing it, serving as my therapist.  Additionally, 
I would like to thank the students of the Institute for Global Studies and the Department 
of History at the University of Minnesota, who should know how much I have learned 
from the privilege of being their teacher.   
I would never have been able to complete this project without the support of those 
closest to me.  I thank Caley Horan for her love and companionship, for her kindness and 
her intelligence.  She taught me the most important lesson of my entire graduate career: 
that the real name for what we call reality is make-believe.  I thank my grandmother, 
Cecilia Ellis, whose assistance with Saint Thomas Aquinas I will always appreciate.  
While it will never be  enough to express my gratitude for everything that they have done 
for me, I wish to thank my parents, David and Pamela Richtmyer, ultimately, for being 
proud of me.   
   iii 
ABSTRACT 
 This dissertation is a study of the way that French intellectuals engaged in major 
political debates in the years immediately after World War II.  It examines three moments 
in particular: the purge of writers and intellectuals who collaborated during World War II, 
the Algerian war of independence, and the emergence of structuralism in the early 1960s.  
Initially, the mode of engagement developed by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, called 
commitment, dominated the political debate over the postwar purge between 1945 and 
1948.  At the same time, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Jean Paulhan critiqued 
Sartrean commitment for its philosophical inadequacy, its political inefficacy, and its 
moral ambiguity.  As a result, they developed their own mode of engagement, based on 
the articulation of political arguments through unlikely means, such as literature and 
philosophy, which achieved prominence by the end of the war in Algeria in 1962.  This 
dissertation concludes with an examination of the mode of discursive, or textual analysis 
developed in an exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault at the 
beginning of the 1960s.  This exchange reveals that their version of textual analysis itself 
served as a mode of engagement in politics, and was rooted in the critique of Sartrean 
commitment articulated during the postwar purge, and the war in Algeria.   
This dissertation has the additional significance of redefining how the body of 
thought known in the United States as French theory is conceived.  Ultimately, the move 
away from existentialism and its mode of political commitment was one of the main 
factors that contributed to French theory’s growth in the 1960s.  By historicizing French 
theory within the culture and politics of postwar France, this dissertation shows that 
   iv
French theory must be understood as a large and synthetic intellectual community, rather 
than as a description of a particular kind of philosophical or literary thought.  The 
relations which obtained within this community affected, and sometimes even determined 
the generation of theoretical ideas and texts.  This dissertation shows that French theory 
has continued utility for contemporary scholarship when it is taken to indicate the 
relations of this intellectual community.  
   v
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 
 
Introduction: Intellectual Engagement in Postwar France                          1 
 
 The History of Intellectual Engagement in France                                 28 
 
  
Chapter 1: Death Is Loose in the World: Revolution and Repetition 
in the Épuration                         42 
 
 The Print Culture of French Intellectuals             59 
 The Politics of the Purge               71 
 Why This Woman?                                    103 
 
 
Chapter 2: Beyond Commitment: The Ethics of Engagement during  
the War in Algeria                   138 
 
 Blanchot and Camus during the 1950s           145 
 The Ethics of Commitment                                              161 
The Refusal of the War in Algeria            209 
 
 
Chapter 3: Words Rent by Lightning: Origins after Structuralism                   224 
 
 Two Generations of French Intellectuals                                 238 
 The Unlikely Origin              247 
 The Need to Forget              285 
    
 
Conclusion                                      301 
 
 
Bibliography                310 
   1
INTRODUCTION 
Intellectual Engagement in Postwar France 
 
 On March 28, 1962, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno gave a radio 
address titled “Commitment,” in which he stated that “Since Sartre’s essay Qu’est-ce que 
la littérature? [published in 1948] there has been less theoretical debate about committed 
and autonomous literature.  Nevertheless, the controversy over commitment remains 
urgent.”1  To Adorno, who had just witnessed the closing of the border between East and 
West Germany and the erection of the Berlin Wall seven months earlier, this was a 
travesty of epic proportions.  The intensification of the Cold War – “the freezing of 
historical relations which nowhere seem ready to melt,” as Adorno put it, heightened the 
urgency of finding new means of intellectual engagement in politics.2  Looking across the 
border to France, Adorno bemoaned what seemed like the comfortable distance into 
which the proponents of committed literature – littérature engagé – and the proponents of 
autonomous literature had settled from each other.  Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist 
version of commitment seemed, lamentably to Adorno’s way of thinking, to have become 
the orthodoxy purely by default. 
 Yet, the debate over committed literature had in fact continued without abating.  
In 1962, Sartrean commitment – the idea that each individual was responsible for 
changing the world because of the simple fact that he or she existed in the reality of the 
                                                 
1 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Adorno et al. Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh 
(London: Verso, 1980), 177.  See Adorno, “Zur Dialektik des Engagements.” Die Neue Rundschau 73, no. 
1 (1962): 93-110. 
2 Ibid. 194. 
   2
world, and that this change could be achieved through literature – was by no means the 
only accepted way for intellectuals to engage in politics in France.3  Since the Dreyfus 
Affair, the exigency of political engagement had been so deeply embedded in the identity 
of French intellectuals that a vigorous debate over the best way to pursue that 
engagement raged throughout the postwar years.  After the fall of the Vichy regime, the 
ousting of the German occupation forces, and the thorough discrediting of the right, 
French intellectuals saw the reconstruction as an opportunity to remake the political and 
social organization of France according to radical leftist ideals.  In the years following 
World War II, the question of committed versus autonomous literature was of paramount 
importance to French intellectuals, for the precise reason that what was at stake was not 
simply literature, but the very possibility of ideas affecting politics, and the possibility of 
theory being put into practice.  French intellectuals were not simply concerned with 
literature, or even the literary.  Rather, they were concerned with the possibility of 
affecting leftist, egalitarian political change through intellectual activity.  For this reason, 
many French intellectuals were unwilling to concede hegemony to Sartre’s concept of 
commitment without putting up a fight. 
Adorno can hardly be blamed for having missed the many different arguments 
made about commitment in France.  The debate had shifted context in the decade and a 
half since Qu’est-ce que la littérature? was published in 1948.  It had moved from the 
highly visible mediasphere in which Sartre operated, to the small, literary and 
                                                 
3 On the concept of commitment and its genesis before and during World War II, see David Schalk, The 
Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 1979).  For an interesting – if fundamentally theoretical and ahistorical – reinvigoration of 
the category of commitment, see Suzanne Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature: The Myth of Prose 
and the Practice of Reading.” Modern Langauge Notes 108, no. 5 (December 1993): 805-824. 
   3
philosophical journals that were the lifeblood of avant-garde French intellectual culture.  
In fact, this was where the debate had always taken place, as French intellectuals 
communicated with each other primarily through the medium of the journal article.  Even 
Qu’est-ce que la littérature? itself originally appeared as a series of essays in Les Temps 
modernes, the journal that Sartre edited.  Further obscuring the debate over commitment, 
French intellectuals often responded to and argued against commitment in terms that 
could scarcely be recognized as theoretical reflections on the need for intellectual 
engagement in politics.  In the particular idiom in which French intellectuals 
communicated, alternatives to commitment might be posed in esoteric debates over the 
nature of language and literature, over the nature of reality, even over something so 
seemingly far afield as the myth of Orpheus.  In this world, superstar public intellectuals 
like Sartre and Albert Camus existed side by side with elite, but relatively unknown 
literary figures like Jean Paulhan and Maurice Blanchot.  This world also encompassed a 
wide range of academics, including the literary critic Roland Barthes, the philosopher 
Jacques Derrida, and the historian Michel Foucault, each of whom has since become 
influential in the United States.  In this world of French intellectual culture, commitment 
was critiqued, challenged, and replaced by other modes of intellectual engagement in 
politics.  As Adorno sensed, commitment no longer received the same attention in 1962 
that it had when Sartre originally articulated it in 1948.  But this was not because the 
debate over commitment had come to an end, as Adorno feared.  Rather, it was because 
the only committed intellectuals remaining were the existentialists gathered around 
Sartre, while others had found alternatives to commitment.   
   4
The use of the word commitment requires explanation.  Sartre used the French 
word engagement, which is a cognate for the English word engagement, but which can 
also mean commitment.  Adorno did not translate the French engagement into German, 
preferring instead to keep the original French term.   His radio address was called 
“Engagement,” and when it was published as an essay later in 1962, he retitled it “Zur 
dialektik des Engagements.”  In scholarship written in English, it is conventional both to 
use the cognate for the French, engagement, and to translate it with the word 
commitment.  Yet, during the 1940s and 1950s, Sartre meant something very specific by 
the term engagement intellectuel.  This difference is explored in Chapter One of this 
dissertation.  It is necessary here to distinguish Sartre’s version of intellectual 
engagement, from the general concept of intellectual engagement.  For the sake of 
avoiding any possible confusion, I have chosen to use the term commitment solely in 
reference to Sartre’s theory, while using the phrase intellectual engagement to indicate 
the practice of intellectuals taking action in politics more generally.   
This dissertation at first began as an intellectual history of the thought of 
Blanchot, who was enormously influential figure in the closed circle of French 
intellectual culture, despite his lack of renown in the wider world.4  Both Derrida and 
                                                 
4 A measure of Blanchot’s anonymity beyond elite literary circles is the lack of attention his work has 
garnered among historians.  The only historical treatments of Blanchot and his work that exist have been 
written by literary scholars, though none have yet produced a book-length study.  See particularly, the work 
of Michael Holland, including, “‘A Wound to Thought,’” in Carolyn Bailey Gill, ed., Maurice Blanchot: 
The Demand of Writing (London: Routledge, 1996), 174-189; “Qui est l’Aminadab de Blanchot?” Revue 
des sciences humaines 253, no.1, (1999): 21-42; “Bataille, Blanchot and the ‘Last Man,’” Paragraph, 27, 
no. 1, (2004): 50-63; “An Event Without Witness: Contestation between Blanchot and Bataille,” in Kevin 
Hart & Geoffrey Hartman, eds., The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot (Baltimore, 
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 27-45; and Rabaté, “The Critical Turn: Blanchot Reads des 
Forêts,” trans. Thomas Pepper, Yale French Studies, 93 (1998): 69-80; Philip Watts, “Blanchot: Rebuttals,” 
in Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to Postwar Trials of Writers an Intellectuals in 
   5
Foucault, for instance, cited Blanchot as an important influence on their own work.  Who 
was Maurice Blanchot?  Blanchot was a literary critic and theorist who inhabited the 
avant-garde intellectual circles of postwar Paris.5  He was born 1907, in the rural town of 
Quain, in the department of Saône-et-Loire, in the southeast quarter of Burgundy.  A 
contemporary of the existentialists Sartre and Camus, Blanchot’s career as a writer began 
in the 1930s and lasted through the 1980s.  With such longevity, Blanchot was able to 
converse not just with the existentialists, but also with structuralists and post-
structuralists like Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault.   Blanchot’s closest friends however, 
were those peculiar figures that bridged the gap between the pre and postwar eras, such as 
Georges Bataille, and Emmanuel Levinas.  Like his existentialist peers, Blanchot worked 
in both philosophical and literary genres.  He published several novels and short works of 
fiction, in addition to numerous critical and theoretical essays on literature, and 
                                                                                                                                                 
France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 1998), 83-105.  Christophe Bident’s biography especially 
provides an invaluable resource for the historian of Blanchot: Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: 
partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998); see also Bident, Reconnaissances: Antelme, Blanchot, 
Deleuze (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2003). 
5 Blanchot’s reception in among contemporary scholars in France and the United States has been confined 
to the disciplines of literary criticism and philosophy, where his influence has been considerable.  Indeed, 
literary reflection on Blanchot has grown to such an extent that Michael Holland is compelled to proclaim 
the existence of something like “Blanchot Studies.”  See Holland, “État Présent: Maurice Blanchot,” 
French Studies 58, no. 4 (2004): 533-538.  Examples of Blanchot Studies include Gerald Bruns, Maurice 
Blanchot: Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Françoise Collin, 
Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); Gill, ed., Maurice Blanchot: The 
Demand of Writing; John Gregg, Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton, NJ: 
Princeton University Press, 1994); Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Hart & Hartman, eds., The Power of Contestation: 
Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot; Hartman, “Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist,” in Beyond 
Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970): 93-110; Leslie 
Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997); Philippe Mesnard, Maurice Blanchot: 
Le sujet d’engagement (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996); J. Hillis Miller, “Death Mask: Blanchot’s L’arrêt de 
mort,” in Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990): 179-210; Thomas 
Pepper, “Because the Nights: Blanchot’s Celui ne m’accompagnait pas,” in Singularities: Extremes of 
Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 173-226; Pepper, ed., 
The Place of Maurice Blanchot, Special Issue of Yale French Studies 93 (1998);  Ann Smock, What Is 
There to Say? (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); Marlène Zarader, L’être et le neutre, à 
partir de Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Verdier, 2001). 
   6
philosophy.  And like the structuralists and post-structuralists who followed him, 
Blanchot was dedicated to finding news ways of philosophizing that broke with the 
Enlightenment tradition that they held responsible for the atrocities of World War II.  
Although Blanchot’s work never gained a significant audience beyond the elite 
intellectual circles of Paris, his influence within them was considerable. 
As the dissertation on Blanchot progressed however, it quickly became apparent 
that Blanchot’s thought did not develop in isolation, but rather in perpetual conversation 
with other thinkers and ideas.  It was obvious that in order to understand Blanchot, it was 
necessary to study the intellectual culture around him.  Studying Blanchot in relation to 
others made it clear just how much of his literary theory and philosophy was also a 
response to Sartrean commitment.  In this way, Blanchot’s relations with the other 
members of French intellectual culture provide an ideal lens through which to view the 
debates over intellectual engagement, and the move beyond commitment.  On the one 
hand, Blanchot was himself at the very center of that culture.  As a regular contributor to, 
and editor of the journals Critique, and La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, Blanchot 
was part of the central nervous system of French intellectual culture.  From this position 
he was able to participate in all aspects of the debate over commitment directly.  On the 
other hand, Blanchot’s thought epitomized the obliquity with which French intellectuals 
attacked the notion of commitment.  Indeed, it was Blanchot who was responsible for 
perhaps the most oblique contribution to the debate over commitment, a re-telling of the 
Orpheus myth that posited the linguistic nature of reality.  Thus, Blanchot was central to 
the move beyond commitment both because of his affiliation with the institutions of 
   7
French intellectual culture, and also because his work epitomized the multifaceted way 
that French theory could be literary and political, philosophy and ethical, all at the same 
time. 
Using Blanchot as a red thread holding French intellectual culture together, this 
dissertation examines the debates over commitment that occurred in France from the end 
of World War II to the end of the war in Algeria in 1962, as they occurred in the often 
hermetic language of French intellectual culture.  This dissertation considers three central 
questions.  First, what motivated French intellectuals to critique, abandon, and replace 
commitment in the decade and a half between 1944 and 1962?  Second, what political, 
ethical, and philosophical arguments did French intellectuals make in their critiques of 
commitment?  Finally, what alternatives to commitment were posed, and how did they 
relate to the French theory of the 1960s and 1970s that has been so influential in the 
United States?6  This dissertation argues that French intellectuals critiqued, abandoned, 
and replaced commitment as a means of intellectual engagement in response to the 
political crises that France experienced after World War II.  Commitment was found 
inadequate to meet the political challenges of the postwar years, and French intellectuals 
developed new ways of creating politically engaged thought and literature in response to 
this inadequacy.  The consequence of the move beyond commitment was that all postwar 
French thought, from existentialism to structuralism and post-structuralism, contained an 
                                                 
6 Sande Cohen and Sylvère Lotringer argue that French theory, which is known simply as “la pensée” in 
France, is an Anglo-American invention.  However, one of this dissertation’s key interventions is against 
the truncation of French theory in its Anglo-American reception, so it has seemed useful to retain that term, 
even when no philosophe would self-apply it.  While Cohen and Lotringer see French theory as an 
American object, this dissertation argues that it is a French object, and that it must be understood within the 
context of French – and not just American intellectual history.  See Cohen & Lontringer, “Introduction” in 
Cohen & Lotringer, French Theory in America (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1-13. 
   8
implicit – and sometimes explicit – political register that must be recovered if it is to be 
understood in all its valences.  The title phrase of this dissertation, “beyond commitment” 
thus refers not just to the critique and abandonment of Sartrean commitment, but also to 
the mode of intellectual engagement in politics that came after commitment. 
The move beyond commitment occurred in three distinct stages.  The first stage, 
examined in Chapter One of this dissertation, was a political critique of commitment 
made during the postwar purge, in which writers and intellectuals were put on trial and 
executed for having committed “intellectual collaboration” with the Nazi forces, or the 
Vichy regime during the occupation.  This purge became the occasion for a debate over 
commitment, in which Jean Paulhan, the editor of the journal, Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, 
and Maurice Blanchot critiqued committed literature’s ability to produce viable political 
change on the grounds that it rested on an deficient understanding of the nature of 
language itself.  In this way, the debate over commitment was marked by what Henri 
Rousso calls the Vichy Syndrome, the tendency for French culture and politics to be 
circumscribed within debates about the memory of the war, the occupation, and the 
resistance.  French theory was not exempt from the Vichy Syndrome, as positions both 
for and against commitment were staked on the experience of the war, and the postwar 
purge.7   
The second stage of the move beyond commitment, examined in Chapter Two, 
was the ethical abandonment of commitment during the war in Algeria, which lasted 
from 1954 to 1962.  During the war in Algeria, French intellectuals developed a new 
                                                 
7 See Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, trans. Arthur 
Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 
   9
ethics of intellectual engagement in politics, building on Albert Camus’ critique of the 
ethics of commitment in his 1951 book, L’Homme révolté, on the grounds that the 
imperative to change reality no longer served as an adequate justification for intervening 
in politics.  Camus showed that commitment hypocritically advocated the killing of 
others, or was willing to allow others to be killed in the name of leftist political change, 
while at the same time claiming that the historical necessity of political change 
exculpated them of any guilt for this killing.  As a consequence of this ethical critique, 
French intellectuals largely abandoned commitment by the end of the war, in favor of the 
exigency to create a new ethics that did not hypocritically proclaim its own innocence.  
This ethics was achieved by the important manifesto, the “Déclaration sur le droit à 
l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie,” co-written by Blanchot, Dionys Mascolo and 
Jean Schuster. 
The third, and final stage in the move beyond commitment, examined in Chapter 
Three of this dissertation, was the replacement of commitment with a new mode of 
intellectual engagement in politics, which intervened at the level of the textual and the 
linguistic.  What lay beyond commitment was the strategy of engagement in the text that 
has been so influential in the American academy.  But the version of textual engagement 
practiced in the United States – the most widely recognized examples of which are 
discourse analysis and deconstruction – is a domesticated and sanitized version of what 
Blanchot and Foucault pioneered.  Their notion of textual engagement did not seek 
simply to correct injustices, or to expose hidden oppression.  Rather, Blanchot and 
Foucault’s textual engagement was built on the political critique, the ethical 
   10
abandonment, and the theoretical replacement of Sartre’s commitment, and as such it was 
intended to re-arrange the very fabric of reality.  
It is necessary to pause at this moment in order to explain what is meant by 
textual engagement, and illustrate its historical implications, as well as its significance for 
contemporary intellectual engagement.  In postwar France, Blanchot and Foucault were 
among the first French intellectuals to adopt the notion that the world is experienced only 
through the languages with which it is apprehended and described.  These languages, 
commonly referred to as discourse, posed a serious problem for intellectuals who wished 
to engage in politics.  The linguistic construction of reality was equivocal: it led both to 
the possibility that political change could be achieved through language, but also to the 
danger that material political changes might not be possible at all. 
In postwar France Jean-Paul Sartre embraced the optimistic voluntarism of the 
former understanding of textual reality in his notion of committed literature.  A 
linguistically constructed reality – which is to say, a textual reality – seemed to offer the 
possibility for reality to be rewritten.  After all, if one experiences reality through 
language, could reality not be remade simply by altering the language one used?  Sartre 
believed that language was constructive of reality insofar as language was the medium in 
which the self and the other became conscious of each other, and reflexively, of 
themselves.  Sartre proposed to reorganize the world by disseminating committed 
literature into the vast pool of language, where it would help people achieve a more 
egalitarian sense of self-consciousness.8  
                                                 
8 The linguistic aspects of Sartrean commitment are considered in detail in Chapter One of this dissertation. 
   11
To others however, a linguistic or textual reality seemed to put the material reality 
of things like politics, social relations, and economics – in short, all the real stuff with 
which intellectuals wished to engage – at an inaccessible distance.  How could one affect 
social relations based in the material realm simply by rewording them?  This charge was 
given its most pointed articulation in a slogan scrawled by student demonstrators on the 
walls of the Sorbonne during May 68.  Flush with enthusiasm for the revolution they had 
made, and tired of what they saw as the arid structuralism of their professors, the students 
exclaimed, “structures don’t march in the street.”  For the students, wholesale societal 
change depended not on the language with which society was represented.  Rather it 
depended precisely on what they were doing: seizing political power by placing their 
bodies in the street.9 
This debate over the political ramifications of the linguistic construction of reality 
survives to this day in Anglo-American scholarship, with proponents of one side or the 
other occupying a large portion of all theoretically-informed work.  The Sartrean position 
is continued by those who advocate combating social oppression through appropriating 
and performatively playing with social and political categories, such as Judith Butler.10  
The students’ position, by contrast, has been championed by Marxist scholars, who give 
priority to economic processes over linguistic constructions in their analyses of late 
                                                 
9 For a dramatic example of the confrontation between the students and their professors, see Jacques Lacan, 
“L’impromptu de Vincennes,” Le Magazine littéraire 121 (February 1977): 21-25.  For Lacan’s immediate 
reaction to the slogan “structures don’t march in the street,” see his comments in Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-
ce qu’un auteur?” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 63 (July-September 1969): 104. 
10 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 
1990); and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).  For 
Butler’s analysis of her own relationship to Sartrean thought via Simone de Beauvoir, see “Variations on 
Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault,” in Seyla Benhabib & Drucilla Cornell, eds. Feminism As 
Critique: On the Politics of Gender (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 128-142. 
   12
capitalism.  The students’ position has also been adopted by those such as Alan Sokal, 
who resist linguistic  theory in all its forms.  
This debate rages on, continuing to determine the contours of scholarship in the 
humanities and the social sciences to this day.  Yet it does so often without taking its own 
history into account.  The history of the move beyond commitment in postwar France 
was also the history of the acceptance of the linguistic construction of reality.  Sartrean 
commitment was politically inadequate in Blanchot’s eyes because it failed to follow the 
consequences of the linguistic construction of reality to their full conclusion.  To 
Blanchot, Sartre’s acceptance of a linguistic reality and his desire to affect change 
through language were a step in the right direction.  Where Blanchot thought that Sartre’s 
commitment was undone however, was in the latter’s insistence the subject’s sovereignty, 
the subject’s ability to control the affect that his words had.  To Blanchot it did not make 
sense that the subject continued to exert control over language with a consciousness 
anterior or exterior to language, while at the same time existing in a linguistically 
constructed reality.  In the debates over the postwar purge, and the war in Algeria, 
Blanchot saw this logical contradiction in Sartrean commitment at work.  During the 
postwar purge of writers and intellectuals, Sartre and his allies issued calls for writers 
who had written for collaborationist publications to be tried and executed, but sought to 
withhold their own writing from similar scrutiny.  Likewise, during the Algerian war of 
independence, Sartrean commitment made an ethical condemnation of the French army’s 
killing in Algeria on the grounds that killing was a moral wrong, while exonerating itself 
for calling for others to be killed in the name of the proletarian revolution.  In these 
   13
reservations and exemptions, Blanchot saw Sartrean commitment’s failure to fully adhere 
to the consequences of the linguistic construction of reality, for if one called for sweeping 
political change in and through language, and if language genuinely determined the 
experience of reality, one must be prepared for that change to sweep oneself away as 
well.  Likewise, if one called for an end to killing, and established an ethical law 
prohibiting killing, one could not also exculpate oneself for advocating for the killing of 
others, however righteous and just the cause might be.  These self-exemptions made 
Sartrean commitment ineffective, as members of the French intelligentsia, and French 
society at large quickly recognized its hypocrisy and dismissed its calls for political 
change.   
In the latter half of the 1950s, and the early 1960s, Blanchot and Foucault posed a 
solution to the problem of how to engage in the politics of the world, while at the same 
time recognizing the world’s linguistic construction.  In doing so, Blanchot and Foucault 
used textual engagement to explicitly intervene in the political crises of postwar France.  
The problem, as Blanchot and Foucault saw it, with a linguistically constructed reality 
was not that it lacked materiality – it was, rather, that people mistook linguistic reality for 
material reality.  People lived their lives as if the linguistic constructions with which they 
interacted were in fact naturally occurring material realities.  The discursive institutions 
of literature and mental illness, the linguistic constructions with which Blanchot and 
Foucault respectively engaged, were believed to have a natural, material basis, when in 
fact they were nothing more than linguistic constructions.  Blanchot and Foucault’s 
textual engagement recognized that the world was linguistically constructed, and so it did 
   14
not seek to alter any material reality beyond the linguistic construction.  Such an 
engagement was impossible.  Rather, they sought simply to expose the linguistic 
construction of reality for what it was, so that people could take a different stance toward 
linguistic reality.   
To Blanchot, a naturalist approach to the discourse of literature was a problem 
because it led people to believe that books were verisimilar representations of natural 
reality, or genuine reflections of an author’s experience.  Yet literature was, Blanchot 
argued, no more and no less than a series of words strung together.  By treating literature 
as if it were verisimilar, readers erroneously believed that what they read was natural 
truth, while writers erroneously believed that what they wrote was reality.  This led to 
positions such as Sartre’s, who argued that the representation of political problems in 
literature would automatically lead readers to recognize those problems in the material 
world, and adopt the correct political stance.  Blanchot, by contrast, sought to intervene 
not in the textual reality of literature itself, but in the way that people related to literature.   
In order to make this intervention, Blanchot rewrote the foundational myth of 
literature itself.  Instead of arguing that literature was created by an author’s genius – that 
is, by some privileged person whose access to nature and ability to describe it allows 
them to communicate the natural world through fiction – Blanchot located the origin of 
literature in a rewriting of the myth of Orpheus (the classical Greek myth in which 
Orpheus descends into Hades to recover his dead wife, Eurydice).  To Blanchot, fiction 
was nothing more and nothing less than fiction.  An author simply made it up.  It required 
no greater explanation than that, and certainly it required no elaborate recourse to an 
   15
author’s privileged subjectivity as justification.  By locating the origin of literature in the 
myth of Orpheus, Blanchot disavowed the notion of the privileged author, while at the 
same time casting those origins into the domain of the mythic. Blanchot’s notion of 
mythic origins was designed to impress upon people the way that literature has no 
rational explanation, to help them realize that a story was just a story, and that authors 
simply created them.  By locating the origins of literature in the myth of Orpheus, 
Blanchot’s goal was not to change literature itself.  After all, fiction was just fiction, and 
it would always be that way no matter what literary theory Blanchot advanced.  Rather, 
Blanchot sought only to change the way that people related to literature.   
To Foucault, who applied Blanchot’s literary insights to the discourse of mental 
illness, a similar problem existed in the way that people related to mental illness.  Like 
literature, the discourse of mental illness was nothing more and nothing less than a 
profusion of words strung together.  Foucault’s analysis of the history of mental illness in 
Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique led him to the conclusion that the 
discourse of mental illness developed by medical science was also contained within a 
linguistically constructed reality.  What psychiatry and psychology portrayed as the 
scientific discovery of natural realities was really just the product of people thinking and 
writing about madness.  This is not to say that Foucault wanted to deny that madness was 
real.  To the contrary, it was the language that psychiatrists and psychologists used to 
describe madness with which Foucault wished to contend, not madness itself.  From his 
early days as a student, Foucault was always a harsh critic of the way that the discourse 
of mental illness was allowed to label, medicate, and incarcerate people with society’s 
   16
tacit acquiescence.  By treating the discourse of mental illness propagated by 
psychiatrists and psychologists as if it were natural reality rather than a profusion of 
words, people ceded to it too much authority over then own lives and minds.  The point 
of Foucault’s textual engagement in the linguistic construct of mental illness was not that 
people should abandon the institution of psychiatry altogether.  Foucault’s point was, 
rather, for people to stop treating psychiatry as if it emanated from natural reality, and 
thereby be able to interact with psychiatrists on equal footing.   
Like Blanchot, Foucault made his textual intervention in the discourse of mental 
illness by rewriting its origin myth.  Instead of agreeing that mental illness had its origin 
in medical science, with its experiments and observations, Foucault suggested that the 
discourse of mental illness had its roots in the myth of the ship of fools.  The ship of fools 
was a fifteenth century literary convention, in which poets and chroniclers claimed that 
the mad floated up and down the Rhine river on rafts, expelled from each city at which 
they arrived, and sent floating along to the next.  From this, Foucault argued, came the 
sequestering and the incarceration of the mad that characterizes modern medicine’s 
practices toward the mentally ill.  By locating the origins of the discourse of mental 
illness in the myth of the ship of fools, Foucault intended to show that the language with 
which modern psychiatry labels and describes madness was essentially a literary, 
linguistic, and textual black box.  Such labels did not possess any ontological power to 
describe a person’s inner essence.  As Blanchot had no wish to alter the discourse of 
literature, neither did Foucault wish to affect the discourse of mental illness directly.  
   17
Rather, he desired only to change the way that people related to the discourse of mental 
illness. 
To Blanchot and Foucault, one could engage in the textual construction of reality 
and also have a real affect on the material world, only if one submitted to textuality 
absolutely.  This required limiting oneself to changing the way that people related to 
linguistic constructions, and abandoning any residual temptation to directly affect the 
material world with linguistic constructions, or affecting those linguistic constructions 
themselves.  In theory, this meant that one could, as an engaged intellectual, have an 
affect on politics by reading and writing about texts.  In practice, this meant that one had 
to acknowledge the limitations of working within linguistically constructed reality.  
Textual engagement, for Blanchot and Foucault, was a way of exposing the institutions 
that dominated the world by demonstrating that they were indeed constructed 
linguistically.  Textual engagement was a way of helping people establish a different 
mode of relating to linguistic constructions, in order to combat the ideological abuse to 
which linguistic constructions were submitted, whether by Satrean commitment, or the 
discourse of mental illness.   
Blanchot and Foucault’s notion of textual engagement emerged directly out of the 
political crises of postwar French history.  It was formed through the political and ethical 
critique and abandonment of Sartrean commitment during the postwar purge of writers 
and intellectuals, and the protest of the war in Algeria.  In the debate that accompanied 
the postwar purge, Blanchot and Paulhan, another advocate of the linguistic construction 
of the world, argued against Sartrean commitment, and its desire to affect the material 
   18
world through language.  During the war in Algeria, the critique of Sartrean commitment 
was taken a step further by Blanchot and Camus, who critiqued commitment’s ethics.  It 
was during the war in Algeria that Blanchot, while attempting to forge a new way of 
making ethical demands that avoided commitment’s hypocrisy, first developed the notion 
of acknowledging, and restricting oneself to acting within the limitations imposed on the 
subject by the linguistic experience of the world.  Textual engagement emerged in its 
mature form, as a fully developed alternative to commitment, through an intellectual 
exchange between Blanchot and Foucault in the early 1960s.  In their hands, textual 
engagement became a way to intervene not just in specific political crises, but also the 
experience of reality itself.  
The prevailing narrative of the abandonment of commitment, suggested by Tony 
Judt in Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, does not account for the way 
that French intellectuals actively critiqued and replaced commitment with alternative 
means of intellectual engagement in politics.11  For Judt, commitment was always closely 
associated with the practice of fellow travelling, the support of the Soviet Union and the 
proletarian revolution by men and women who lived in liberal societies.  Judt argues that 
intellectuals abandoned commitment as a means of intellectual engagement in politics 
because they grew disillusioned with communism when the atrocities committed by the 
Soviet Union became generally known, especially after the repression of the Hungarian 
Revolution in 1956.  In Judt’s narrative, French intellectuals realized that they had made 
a mistake, and they abandoned commitment in order to correct that mistake.  This 
                                                 
11 Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley, CA: University of California 
Press, 1992). 
   19
argument relies however, on an implicit understanding of the innate superiority of liberal 
democracy over communism.  For this reason, Judt arrives at the teleological conclusion 
that French intellectuals were fated to realize the error of aligning themselves with a 
regime as reprehensible as the Soviet Union.12  While disillusion certainly was a factor, 
particularly in the case of Camus, French intellectuals moved beyond commitment not 
because they realized the virtue of liberalism, but because they realized the political, 
ethical, and philosophical inadequacy of commitment.  Moreover, they came to this 
realization not because of international events, but in the face of local, political crises in 
France.  They were active in their critique of commitment, rather than reactive to 
liberalism. 
More recent accounts of the intellectual history of French theory, such as Julian 
Bourg’s From Revolution to Ethics: May ’68 and Contemporary French Thought, and 
Michael Scott Christofferson’s French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-
Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s argue that French intellectual politics were shaped by, 
and responded to May ’68.13  For Christofferson, the narrative of postwar French theory 
is one of radicalization, starting with the period immediately after the war, and 
culminating with the uprising of May ’68.  With the failure of May ‘68, French 
                                                 
12 Judt is not alone in his presumption of the supremacy of liberalism.  Samuel Moyn argues that in the last 
two decades, French intellectual history has undergone a liberal turn that is symmetrical to the linguistic 
turn of the 1980s.  See Moyn, “Intellectual History after the Liberal Turn,” unpublished lecture.  For 
examples of the liberal turn, see Luc Ferry & Alain Renaut, La Pensée 68: Essai sur l’anti-humanisme 
contemporain (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1985); Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics 
(New York: New York Review of Books, 2001); Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The 
Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 2004). 
13 Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May ’68 and Contemporary French Thought (Montréal, CA: 
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the 
Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn, 2003).   
   20
intellectuals became disenchanted with the totalizing demands of revolutionary 
engagement, and engaged in political affairs through anti-totalitarianism.  Similarly, 
Bourg’s narrative is also one of radicalization up to May ’68, after which French 
intellectuals transferred their efforts from political engagement, to an emphasis on ethical 
reflection.  While they have differing interpretations of French thought in the 1970s – as 
Christofferson emphasizes its liberalism, and Bourg its ethics – both agree that it was the 
failure of May ’68 to produce meaningful and lasting political change that pushed 
intellectuals away from commitment.  This dissertation argues that the crucial move away 
from commitment occurred not from 1968 onwards, but between 1944 and 1962, during 
the purge of writers and intellectuals immediately after World War II, and the war in 
Algeria during the 1950s.  Furthermore, it was not the failure of May ’68 that spurred the 
move beyond commitment, it was rather, the critique of commitment’s inadequacy in the 
face of political events, its ethical corruption and hypocrisy, and its philosophical 
superficiality that pushed French intellectuals to move beyond commitment. 
Other philosophers and historians, such as Judith Butler, Vincent Descombes, 
Michael Roth, and Jean-Michel Rabaté, have asserted that the introduction of Hegel into 
French philosophy in the postwar years motivated the transition from existentialism to 
structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and by extension, the move beyond 
commitment.14  For Butler, Descombes, Roth, and Rabaté, French thought shifted after 
Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojève began to lead seminars on Hegelian philosophy 
                                                 
14 See Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 1987); Vincent Descombes, Le même et l’autre (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 
1979); Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Future of Theory (London: Blackwell, 2002); Michael Roth, Knowing and 
History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 
1988).  
   21
and history.  Prior to these seminars, there was relatively little knowledge of Hegel or 
Hegelian thought in France, or indeed the rich tradition of German philosophy in the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Kojève and Hyppolite brought Hegel into the 
mainstream, and revolutionized French thought in the process.  Rather than arguing 
against Butler, Descombes, Roth, and Rabaté, this dissertation supplements their purely 
philosophical explanations for this shift away from existentialism, by providing an 
examination of the way that French intellectuals formulated many of their theories in the 
context of major political crises.  This dissertation argues that French theory was always 
engaged in politics, and that it always had a political valence, which co-existed with its 
philosophical and theoretical import.15 
French theory has a history, and this history had a significant influence on the 
theory itself.  By examining this history, this dissertation contributes to a new, and 
growing body of historical scholarship that seeks to historicize the work of those thinkers 
grouped under the portmanteau of “French theory,” whose history remains largely 
                                                 
15 It is one of the vagaries of French intellectual history – and historiography – that comparatively few of 
histories of twentieth-century French thought have been written by French historians.  This is due in part to 
the fact that in France, the history of philosophy has tended to be written by philosophers rather than 
historians.  It is also due to the dominance in France of the Annales school of historiography, which treats 
intellectual history under the wider rubric of the history of mentalités.  Lastly, in the wake of the work of 
Raymond Aron and Pierre Bourdieu, intellectual history has been studied primarily as the history of 
intellectuals.  For this reason however, analyses of post-World War II French intellectual history have 
tended to ignore the political valence of French thought itself, preferring instead to separate the study of the 
thought from the study of politics.  For a helpful discussion of this puzzling situation, see François Dosse, 
“Afterword: For Intellectual History,” trans. Julian Bourg and Arline Cravens, in Bourg, ed., After the 
Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham, MD: 
Lexington Books, 2004), 353-365.  A representative example of French history of philosophy is Vincent 
Descombes’, Le même et l’autre: quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978) (Paris: Éditions 
de Minuit, 1979).  For intellectual history as the history of intellectuals, see Jean-François Sirinelli and 
Pascal Ory, Les Intellectuels en France: de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986); 
Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle: khâgneux et normalien dans l’entre-duex-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 1988); 
Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises; manifestes et petitions au XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990); 
Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997).  An invaluable exception to this 
rule is Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, 2 vols. (Paris: Découverte, 1991-1992). 
   22
unwritten.16  This is distressing, considering the sizeable role that French theory has had 
in shaping academic inquiry in the humanities and social sciences in both France and the 
United States since the 1960s.  Its concepts and vocabulary have become commonplace: 
discourse, deconstruction, power, the other, the gaze, etc.  It has structured the questions 
that can be asked, it has opened new topics for study, it has even had a hand in the 
creation of entire disciplines.  Yet, French theory is rarely ever encountered as a 
comprehensive entity.  As Jonathan Culler notes, when people say French theory, 
typically what they mean is a collection of individual, unrelated theorists.17  All too often 
contemporary scholars consider French theorists in isolation from each other.  The 
methods and theory courses taught in history, English, and cultural studies departments 
present French theorists as though their ideas developed in a vacuum.  Each theorist is 
offered like a piece of African art in a fashionable, modernist gallery, utterly stripped of 
the context in which it was formed, on display and for sale.18  Yet, French theorists were 
all members of the same intellectual culture, they worked at the same publishing houses 
and in the same university departments, they lived in the same neighborhoods of Paris.  
Their ideas were forged in the relations that they had with each other, when they engaged 
in debates and intellectual exchanges.  In order to fully understand French theory, it is 
                                                 
16 For useful overviews of this scholarship and its motivations, see the introductory essay Bourg, ed., After 
the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France.  In addition to 
the works by Bourg and Christofferson mentioned above, additional monographic treatments include, 
Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 2007); Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-
1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Samuel Moyn, The Origins of the Other: Emmanuel 
Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 
17 Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Brief Insight (New York: Sterling, 2009, Rev. Ed.), 1-2. 
18 See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed The 
Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 
2008).    
   23
necessary to return to its source, to the debates and exchanges that were the context in 
which it was formed.   
This dissertation contributes to the understanding of French theory by tracing its 
history through its debates and exchanges.  Often, this dissertation was able to arrive at a 
complete understanding of a particular debate or exchange only by transgressing 
disciplinary boundaries. Each debate studied in this dissertation included voices from 
philosophy, from literary theory, from mythology, and sometimes from literature and 
poetry itself.  This has not necessitated the combination of history and philosophy, or 
history and literary theory.  Rather, it has required the development of a methodology 
whereby philosophy, literary theory, mythology, literature and poetry could be read as 
historical documents side by side with more traditional historical materials such as letters, 
diaries, and newspaper articles.  This dissertation shows that an essay on intellectual 
engagement in politics could come in the form of an inquiry on the linguistic nature of 
reality, which might also be a reconsideration of the myth of Orpheus.  Reading French 
theory requires that the reader be alive to all of these aspects of a text, which can only be 
brought out contextually, and historically.  This dissertation redefines French theory in 
order to show how French theorists existed in a synthetic intellectual culture, rather than 
as a collection of isolated individuals.  
In arguing for a historical understanding of French theory, this dissertation 
contradicts several normative paradigms.  The first paradigm has to do with the definition 
of theory itself.  Fredric Jameson suggests that, “theory begins to supplant philosophy 
(and other disciplines as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or 
   24
material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.”19  
Jameson’s definition differentiates theory from philosophy, claiming that theory’s 
fundamental principle is the separation of language from things, while philosophy has 
always dealt with things themselves.  This definition is useful for understanding one of 
the signal advances of twentieth century thought, but unhelpful to the scholar who wishes 
to understand the history of French theory.  In this definition, every thinker and every text 
that does not adhere to the norm of the separation of the word from the thing is excluded 
from the category of theory.  Yet this dissertation shows that French theory was a cultural 
phenomenon in which many different kinds of thought co-existed.  The members of that 
culture did not draw lines of inclusion and exclusion based on the kind of thought one 
produced.  Rather, they considered each other participants in a single culture, with many 
different debates and conversations.  While it is common today to separate Sartre and 
Camus from Derrida and Foucault, this is a normative distinction that would not have 
made sense at the time.  Derrida and Foucault existed on the same plane with Sartre and 
Camus, they were understood to occupy the same sphere.  If French theory is to be 
understood historically, one must see the connections between different thinkers and 
different modes of thought, rather than separating them into a neat, but ahistorical 
taxonomy.       
The second normative paradigm against which this dissertation intervenes is a 
historical definition of theory, but according to strictly philosophical criteria.  Jeffrey 
Mehlman argues that theory is an inadequate term by which to set a definition, since 
                                                 
19 Fredric Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 
403. 
   25
theory’s “fundamental proposition is the ultimate fictionality (or “textuality”) of 
philosophy or “theory” itself.”  Instead, Mehlman suggests, “if one had to characterize 
the domain better it might be as the vicissitudes of a series of French readings of German-
language texts (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud).”20  Mehlman’s argument provides a better 
sense of the transnational influences that made French thought in the twentieth century so 
fertile, but it does little to explain what was French about French theory.  Furthermore, by 
reducing French theory to its German influences, Mehlman’s normative definition 
negates the conversations, debates, and connections that were such a large part of the 
history of French intellectual culture.  This dissertation argues that French theory must be 
understood not just in terms of the transnational migration of ideas from Germany to 
France, but also in terms of the indigenous intellectual culture in which their ideas were 
received.   
Embedded in the argument of this dissertation is an implicit appeal for the 
continued relevance of French theory, and the concept of intellectual engagement in 
particular.  French theory has not only shaped the nature of academic inquiry in the 
United States, it has engendered political battles within the academy no less vicious than 
those of postwar France, for having been bloodless.  The academic culture wars were one 
of the consequences of the introduction of French theory into the United States.  Stanley 
Fish summarizes the effect of French theory on the American academy well in the post 
titled “French Theory in America,” on his blog “Think Again,” hosted by the New York 
Times website: “Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs 
                                                 
20 Jeffrey Mehlman, “On Literature and the Occupation of France: Blanchot vs. Drieu,” SubStance 27, no. 
3 (1998): 6. 
   26
turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media 
attacks, the whole ball of wax.”21  The contemporary landscape of the American academy 
was shaped by the culture wars.  To be sure, the intellectual battles of the culture wars 
were the result of the collision of many different social and political forces, but French 
theory was prominent among them.  It was singled out particularly by the American right, 
which was offended by French theory’s challenge to traditional western, humanist values.  
Yet this debate, and its consequences bore a striking resemblance to the battles over 
commitment that animated French intellectual culture during the late 1940s to the early 
1960s.  When French theory was imported into the United States it carried with it the 
political baggage of the debates over commitment.  It should come as no surprise then, 
that many Americans saw French theory as a challenge to their values, for it was 
designed precisely to destroy the old political order, and replace it with a new one.  
French theory developed in response to political events, and the history of the way 
that politics shaped theory can provide a new perspective on the theory itself.  Other 
historians have made this suggestion with regard to the concept of the other.  James Le 
Sueur shows how the concept of the other currently used in the humanities in the United 
States – which was partially, though by no means exclusively, created by French theory – 
developed in the context of the Algerian war of independence.22  Le Sueur argues that the 
war forced French intellectuals to confront their own assumptions about identity and 
universality, and to question the legitimacy of speaking in the name of those who were 
                                                 
21 Stanley Fish, “French Theory in America,” New York Times, April 6, 2008.  http://fish.blogs 
.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/ (accessed November 15, 2009). 
22 See James Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of 
Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 
   27
racially, ethnically, or culturally other.  At stake in the concept of the other is, then, much 
more than the liberal notion of respect, or tolerance.23  Le Sueur’s history shows that 
what is at stake in the concept of other is the acknowledgement of culpability for all the 
death and damage wrought by the colonial regime, and an exigency of extreme self-
reflexivity with regard to the ethics of acting and intervening in the other’s name.  
Intellectual engagement, then, was crucial to the notion of the other developed during the 
war in Algeria.  This dissertation shows that it is necessary to treat intellectual 
engagement as an equally serious French theoretical concept, alongside others like 
deconstruction, discourse, or biopower.  To the self-reflexivity that inhered in the concept 
of the other, this dissertation adds the humility at the heart of the move beyond 
commitment as a mode of intellectual engagement.  French intellectuals saw commitment 
as an over-reaching attempt to accomplish what could not, and should not be done: the 
turning of thought into a force of violence for political change.  For Blanchot and Camus 
especially, there was hubris in commitment’s desire to fix the world by force of ideas.  
The concept of intellectual engagement that they developed to replace commitment was 
designed specifically in recognition of their limits.  This did not mean that they restricted 
themselves to the intellectual sphere, and left “real” politics to the politicians.  Rather, the 
humility on which the later mode of intellectual engagement was based, demanded that 
each intellectual confront the irresolvable aporia of the need for change, and the 
inadequacy of all means of creating change, on the ability to recognize injustice, and the 
inability to do anything about it. 
                                                 
23 On the critique of tolerance, see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity 
and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 
   28
The History of Intellectual Engagement in France 
 In what follows, this introduction will place the postwar debates over commitment 
in the larger history of intellectual engagement in France.  Sartre’s theory of commitment 
did not come of out nowhere.  Rather, it was one in a long line of modes of intellectual 
engagement in politics that dated back to the philosophes of the Enlightenment.  In this 
sense, Voltaire was perhaps the first engaged intellectual in the modern sense of the 
word, as distinct from other categories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like 
homme des lettres, or simply, écrivain.24  While he did not possess all of the publicity, or 
share in the intellectual community that Sartre, Camus, or Blanchot did, Voltaire’s name 
continued to serve as a kind of primordial point of reference throughout the history of the 
engaged intellectual.  During the war in Algeria, General de Gaulle indicated such a 
continuity himself, when, upon being asked if Sartre would come under censure for his 
criticism of the war, he famously proclaimed, “One does not jail Voltaire.”   
The social category of the intellectual came into being in the 1890s.25  It is typical 
to date the birth of the intellectual to the Dreyfus affair, when the novelist Émile Zola 
published his infamous “J’Accuse!” in the newspaper, L’Aurore.  Venita Datta argues 
however, that the Dreyfus affair was but one of several forces at work in the 1890s, all of 
which produced the category of the intellectual together.26  It was at this point that the 
intellectual emerged as an identity category distinct from that of writer, or poet – even 
                                                 
24 See Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre, 3-25. 
25 On the figure of the intellectual, see Lawrence Kritzman, “The Intellectual,” in Kritzman, ed. The 
Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 
363-374. 
26 Venita Datta, The Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual 
in France (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).  
   29
though intellectuals made their livings as writers and disseminated their ideas in 
writing.27  For Datta, the birth of the intellectual was fundamentally intertwined with the 
emergence of the modern, democratic nation-state, and coincident with the decline of 
religious authority in France.  Datta writes, “significantly, the intellectual in France was 
called at first “a cleric” (un clerc).  Indeed, the new secular cleric supplanted the 
traditional priest as a source of moral authority in modern French society.”28  The 
intellectual was a “national icon” for the new nation.  Yet the triumph of modern, secular 
society was never complete or total during the Third Republic, and there was always a 
challenge from the right, some of whom still sought the restoration of the monarchy, even 
at the end of the nineteenth century.  Thus, as the figure of the intellectual was born with 
the emergence of modern, democratic France, it was also always a bifurcated figure, with 
both a leftist and rightist face, each of which believed itself to be the true bearer, and 
shepherd of the spirit of the nation-state.  It was not that the Dreyfus affair split French 
intellectuals into leftist and rightist camps.  Rather, the already-existing leftist and rightist 
intellectuals simply became Dreyfusard, or anti-Dreyfusard.  As a result of the inherent 
duality of the figure of the intellectual, these two images of the intellectual as a national 
icon remained current until the end of World War II. 
After World War I, these leftist and the rightist images of the intellectual 
hardened, as the leftist intellectual came increasingly to be associated with communism, 
and the rightist intellectual with extreme nationalism, and even fascism.  At the same 
time, a new French intellectual culture emerged, with groupings and associations of 
                                                 
27 See Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels”: 1880-1900 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990). 
28 Datta, The Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in 
France, 1. 
   30
considerable complexity, and arcane ideological differences, even as they still adhered to 
the basic image of the leftist, or the rightist intellectual.  French intellectuals emerged 
from World War I questioning the virtue of republicanism, and many on the left became 
Marxists, socialists, and sometimes communists.29  While it is impossible to describe the 
full range of intellectual activities that went under the heading of communism with a 
single stroke, it is necessary to point out that the role of the Parti Communiste Français 
(PCF) loomed larger during the 1920s and 1930s than at any other point during the 
twentieth century.  Intellectual engagement through either works of art, or in politics 
directly, was designed to work towards the communist revolution.  This was an important 
precursor to Sartre’s notion of commitment, which, while not directly communist in its 
language, would have been recognized by other intellectuals during the 1950s as the 
successor to communism as a mode of intellectual engagement.  During this period, the 
Surrealists emerged as an independent movement of engaged intellectuals.30  Many 
rejected politics altogether, choosing instead to pursue “art for art’s sake.”  Others, like 
André Breton developed an intricate philosophical and political program that interwove 
Hegelian philosophy with Freudian psychoanalysis.  Breton maintained nominal relations 
with the PCF, but Surrealism was always more interested in affecting immaterial 
changes, than changes in material relations. 
On the right, a new form of anti-establishmentarianism emerged.  Labeled “non-
conformists” by the historian Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, these intellectuals belonged to 
the generation that came of age in the 1930s.  Born between 1900 and 1920, this 
                                                 
29 David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals (New York: Macmillan, 1964). 
30 Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1944). 
   31
generation was too young to have fought in World War I themselves, but was nonetheless 
deeply marked by its experience. 31  Maurice Blanchot was originally a member of this 
movement, and his participation in it remains the subject of heated debate even today.32  
Perhaps the intellectual who most embodied non-conformism was Julien Benda.  Benda’s 
polemic, La Trahison des clercs, argued that twentieth century intellectuals abdicated 
their task of safeguarding the principles of humanity and reason, when they began to 
engage in politics – which was properly the domain of what Benda called laymen, a 
capacious category that included everyone from peasants to princes.33  For Zeev 
Sternhell, non-conformism was not so mild, and in his influential study Neither Right Nor 
Left: Fascist Ideology in France, he went so far as to assert that French intellectuals like 
Thierry Maulnier and Henry de Man gave birth to a kind of platonic proto-fascism, purer 
than the version that emerged in Germany.34  Further to the right of Maulnier and de Man 
was Action Française, a nationalist-royalist movement under the leadership of Charles 
Maurras, which emerged directly out of the anti-Dreyfusard camp during the Dreyfus 
affair.35  
As a result of the widening gulf between the left and the right, the 1930s were a 
period of extreme instability in France.  Leftist and rightist intellectuals were at the head 
of mass movements with broad popular support.  Had World War II not erupted, and had 
Germany not invaded and conquered France, a civil war might have broken out within 
                                                 
31 Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes des années 30 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969). 
32 This controversy is treated at length in Chapter One of this dissertation.     
33 Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset, 1927). 
34 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: 
Princeton University Press, 1986). 
35 Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford, CA: 
Stanford University Press, 1962). 
   32
France itself.  Consequently, World War II actually intensified the differences between 
the French left and the right, rather than uniting them against a common German enemy.  
Many intellectuals on the right welcomed the invading Germans, seeing them as a 
necessary antidote to corrupting and polluting influence of the left.  Some, like Robert 
Brasillach, actively worked with the occupation forces, serving as a French mouthpiece 
for German anti-semitism.36  Others collaborated through the Vichy regime, which 
propagated its own right-wing, nationalist ideology.37  Literary historians like David 
Carroll and Alice Kaplan emphasize that right-wing French intellectuals were not co-
opted or brainwashed by the Nazi party.  Rather, they argue that right-wing intellectuals 
saw the invasion and occupation as an opportunity to give full expression to their native 
French version of extreme nationalism.38  Right–wing intellectuals thus experienced the 
invasion and the occupation as the validation of their claim to the role of protector of the 
national virtue. 
The intellectual left was nonetheless galvanized by the war.  The left’s abstract 
republicanism and communism came face to face with concrete forces of oppression in 
the form of the occupation and the Vichy regime.39  The left no longer argued against the 
threat of extreme nationalism.  Rather, their intellectual enemy was given definite 
features and qualities, which would forever shape the way that the left conceived of itself, 
                                                 
36 Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 2000). 
37 See Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1998). 
38 See David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, 
and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 
39 James Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 
1981). 
   33
and the way it conceived of its opponents – whether they were right-wing nationalists or 
not.   In this way, this dissertation argues that World War II was the decisive experience 
of the twentieth century for the intellectual left, and that the intellectual positions formed 
during, and immediately after the war, continued to determine the lines of intellectual 
engagement in politics throughout the rest of the century.  It is important, however, to 
detach the legacy of the war from the war itself, and to detach the Vichy Syndrome from 
the actual experience of Vichy.  During the war, leftist intellectuals were forced into a 
position either of silence, of unwilling consent and collaboration, or – much less 
frequently – a position of outright resistance.  Having opposed precisely the right-wing, 
nationalist intellectual agenda that was ushered into power with World War II, leftist 
intellectuals were no longer able to speak freely.  The occupation forces censored all 
publication within France, leaving leftist intellectuals with only clandestine publications, 
such as Albert Camus’ newspaper Combat, to disseminate their work.40  It is important 
however, to bear in mind that such cases were rare, and that most leftist intellectuals, like 
the rest of the population, were not in a position to participate in the resistance 
movement.  
In the years immediately following World War II, to the end of the war in Algeria 
– the period under consideration in this dissertation – the dual left and right figure of the 
intellectual was submitted to a fundamental revision for the first time since the 1890s.  
The experience of invasion and occupation thoroughly discredited the French right, and 
intellectuals who had collaborated were purged in the postwar period.  Some, like 
                                                 
40 See Albert Camus, Camus at “Combat”: Writing 1944-1947, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, NJ: 
Princeton University Press, 2005). 
   34
Brasillach, were tried and executed, while others, like Maurras, received death sentences 
that were commuted to life imprisonment.  It was during the postwar purge of writers and 
intellectuals that Sartre first articulated his notion of commitment, the first postwar theory 
of intellectual engagement in politics.  With the Liberation came new hopes for the 
recreation of French society.  Suddenly, with the Vichy regime removed, and the right 
thoroughly discredited by their association with the Nazis, it seemed possible for leftist 
ideals to be achieved in the real political sphere.  If anything, Sartrean commitment was a 
sincere belief in the possibility of changing the world, and realizing radical leftist 
ambitions for egalitarianism, and political unity.  At the same time, a critique of 
commitment’s political efficacy emerged almost instantly, from within the left.  Blanchot 
and Jean Paulhan immediately attacked commitment’s capacity to actually affect political 
change.  Chapter One of this dissertation examines the effects of the purge on the theory 
and practice of intellectual engagement, and the debates over commitment that occurred 
in the immediate postwar years.  It is necessary here, however, to indicate the way that 
the experience of the war, and also the experience of the purge, effectively destroyed the 
figure of the rightist intellectual.41  The debate was no longer between the right and the 
left, but between different factions on the left.  Thereafter the figure of the intellectual 
was a predominantly leftist social category, and often a radical one at that.   
Chapter Two of this dissertation looks at intellectual engagement during the 
1950s, when the leftist intellectual was above all engaged in world politics beyond 
French borders.  The 1950s were characterized by the Cold War on the one hand, and by 
                                                 
41 Of course, some of the old members of the right continued to publish after World War II, but they were 
increasingly marginalized, and did not constitute a cohesive movement.  See Kaplan, Reproductions of 
Banality. 
   35
decolonization on the other.  Domestically, French intellectuals experienced the so-called 
Coca-Colonization of the Marshall Plan, which led them to look favorably on the spread 
of socialism, and the Soviet Union generally.42  Tiers mondisme, an intellectual 
movement in support of the spread of the socialism in the third world, was closely linked 
to the way that French intellectuals sided against the United States during the  Cold War.  
This did not last however, as the Soviet Union’s violent repression of the Hungarian 
Revolution in 1956 strained relations between French intellectuals and the PCF.  Sartre, 
whose notion of commitment was never explicitly attached to communism, broke with 
the PCF completely over the Hungarian Revolution.  Prior to the Hungarian Revolution, 
however, French intellectuals like Camus and Blanchot had already begun to critique the 
ethics of commitment.  Though commitment was the most visible form of intellectual 
engagement at the beginning of the decade, it had been abandoned in favor of ethical 
engagement by the decade’s end.  When Camus issued his charge of hypocrisy in 1951, it 
was initially rebuffed.  But over the course of the 1950s, fewer and fewer intellectuals 
were willing to engage in commitment, and sought different means of engaging in 
politics that did not claim their own innocence.  Finally, during war in Algeria, the 
“Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” provided French 
intellectuals with a definitive alternative to commitment, by offering a mode of collective 
action that avoided the hypocrisy of commitment.  
The final episode studied in this dissertation, the exchange between Blanchot and 
Foucault that occurred at the beginning of the 1960s, took place in the context of the 
                                                 
42 See Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA: University 
of California Press, 1993); Jean-Philippe Mathy, Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 
   36
ascendancy of structuralism, and the birth of post-structuralism.  François Dosse argues 
that French intellectuals abandoned existentialism, and by extension commitment, 
because they saw it as an anachronistic product of the immediate postwar years.43  The 
atmosphere of the hyper-modernized France of 1960 seemed a world away from the 
Liberation.44  The existentialists around Sartre and Les Temps modernes were replaced by 
a new generation of postwar intellectuals, born around or after 1930, who were unmarked 
by the intellectual battles of the war and its immediate aftermath.  This generation 
produced many of the thinkers commonly associated with French theory: Étienne Balibar 
(b. 1942), Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), Gilles Deleuze (b. 1925), Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), 
Michel Foucault (b. 1926), Luce Irigaray (b. 1932), and Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), to name 
just a few.  Even as the debates of the 1930s and 1940s continued to exert a strong 
influence throughout the twentieth century, the new generation of French intellectuals 
consciously rejected commitment.  In 1960, a group of young intellectuals started the 
journal Tel Quel, which defined itself in strict opposition to Sartrean commitment.45  Tel 
Quel was influenced by the structuralism developed by the linguists Roman Jakobson and 
Ferdinand de Saussure, and its editors adhered to the principle of the linguistic 
construction of reality.  This generation believed that the intellectual should engage in 
politics not through direct intervention, but rather, through the textuality of world.  This 
was a radical departure from existentialism and commitment, which sought to engage in 
reality itself.  For the intellectuals grouped around Tel Quel, to engage in the text was 
                                                 
43 Dosse, 19-25. 
44 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture 
(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996). 
45 Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of 
Engagement (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 
   37
engaging with the very stuff of which reality was composed.  In this context, Blanchot 
and Foucault held an intellectual exchange in which they debated and articulated the need 
for myths in contemporary society, as a way to prop up and sustain textual and fictional 
practices.  In Blanchot’s case, he suggested that the myth of Orpheus was needed to 
support the textual institution of literature.  In Foucault’s case, he argued that the medical 
discourse surrounding mental illness was also a textual and fictional institution.  While 
contemporary society needed a discourse of mental illness, it could not be supported 
without an acknowledgement of its textuality or its fictionality.  Drawing on Blanchot’s 
work on literature, Foucault argued that the discourse of mental illness could only be 
withstood if its textuality and its fictionality was acknowledged.  Foucault suggested the 
myth of the ship of fools as a replacement for the ideological argument that medical 
discourse was supported by natural, scientific reality.  This form of intellectual 
engagement was particularly influential in the United States, where it opened up new 
political dimensions of the formerly a-political study of literature, philosophy, and 
culture.46   
While the trajectory followed in this dissertation stops in 1962, French 
intellectuals continued to debate, and to posit new means of intellectual engagement 
throughout the rest of the twentieth century.  While the figure of the engaged intellectual 
declined after the 1960s, the concept of intellectual engagement remained an important 
part of French theory.  The most important political event for French intellectuals after 
the war in Algeria was the revolution of May ’68, when millions of students and workers 
                                                 
46 See Cusset. 
   38
tried to start a revolution in protest of the conditions of labor and cultural life.  May ’68 
galvanized French intellectuals yet again, many of whom considered it a truly 
revolutionary experience.  Yet the failure of May ’68 to produce lasting political change 
forced French intellectuals to reconsider the value of intellectual engagement in politics 
itself.  There were two main responses to May ’68.  The first, described as the “logic of 
failed revolt” by Peter Starr, set about a wholesale critique of the possibility for 
revolutionary political change.47  Starr argues that after May ’68, French intellectuals no 
longer believed in old models of revolutionary action, which they traced to antiquated 
political philosophies, and Marxism in particular.  Instead, they articulated a logic in 
which the failure of political change was necessary – a political change based on failure.  
During the 1980s, this logic gave birth to a fully-fledged philosophical movement.  Jean-
Luc Nancy’s theory of an “inoperative community,” argued that all attempts to forge a 
community were doomed to failure, given the irremediable and constitutive singularity of 
each individual’s subjectivity.48  Political interventions should henceforth restrict 
themselves to finding ways to create associations between people that did not depend on 
their fusion into a unified whole.  Blanchot himself contributed to this movement in 1986 
with his notion of an “unavowable community.”49  While many saw the failed, 
“inoperative,” and “unavowable” community a regression to apolitical abstraction, it 
epitomized the way that intellectual engagement had retreated from commitment, and 
taken refuge in theory.  It was not that French theory had become apolitical.  It was, 
                                                 
47 Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May ’68 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 
Press, 1996). 
48 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986). 
49 Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986). 
   39
rather, that politics – which had been the province of practical reason for the better part of 
the twentieth century – had migrated into theoretical reason.  No longer was intellectual 
engagement defined solely according to the terms of Sartrean commitment, where the 
intellectual worked tirelessly to affect change in the material world.  Rather, many French 
intellectuals chose to engage in the immaterial world of textuality, as a means of affecting 
a change in the lived relationship to discursive institutions.  
The second response to May ’68 was the movement known as nouvelle 
philosophie, whose leading figures were Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkelkraut, and 
André Glucksmann.  Born, for the most part, after World War II, the nouveaux 
philosophes defined themselves specifically against Sartrean commitment, a brush with 
which they painted many of their enemies within French intellectual culture, like 
Blanchot and Foucault, who had actually battled against Sartre’s notion of intellectual 
engagement.  For the nouveaux philosophes, the emergence of both right-wing and left-
wing totalitarian governments during the twentieth century called for a categorical 
rejection of all philosophy tainted by Nazism or Stalinism, and a renewed adherence to 
liberal, rights-based political activism.  The nouveuax philosophes achieved enormous 
and near instantaneous popular success, but they were deeply criticized by the previous 
generation of French intellectuals for their lack of rigor, and their lack of philosophical 
sophistication.  Asked what he thought of the nouveaux philosophes in an interview, 
Gilles Deleuze responded, “Nothing.  I think that their thought is null… they proceed by 
huge concepts, so huge that one chokes over them: THE law, THE power, THE master, 
   40
THE world, THE rebellion, THE faith, etc.”50  More substantively, at the same time that 
nouvelle philosophie advocated a return to liberal rights, Michel Foucault embarked on a 
deep, and wide-ranging critique of liberal, and neo-liberal society during the 1970s.  With 
the recent publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, it has become clear 
that French intellectual culture was riven by a serious debate over liberalism, and that the 
radical leftism of the postwar period no longer had hegemony over the figure of the 
engaged intellectual.   
By the 1980s, as a result of the failure of May ’68, and the rise of nouvelle 
philosophie, intellectual engagement was no longer defined by the broad, sweeping ideals 
of Sartrean commitment.  Today, intellectual engagement in politics is largely reserved to 
tactical interventions in discrete political events on the one hand, and to the continued 
theorization of the political on the other.  This should not be regarded as a declension 
narrative, since there was no motor driving the concept of intellectual engagement to its 
height in the postwar years, and then to its subsequent decline after May ’68.  Rather, the 
concept of intellectual engagement in politics should be understood by qualitative 
measures of change and mutation, rather than quantitative indices of rise and decline.  
This dissertation examines the period between the end of World War II, and the end of 
the erection of the Berlin Wall, when French intellectuals debated the notion of 
engagement itself.  In the context of the longer history of intellectual engagement, this 
period stands out as a pivotal moment when French intellectuals questioned the purpose, 
                                                 
50 “Rien. Je crois que leur pensée est nulle… ils procèdent par gros concepts, aussi gros que des dents 
creuses, LA loi, LE pouvoir, LE maître, LE monde, LA rébellion, LA foi, etc.”  Interview with Gilles 
Deleuze.  First published in the journal, Minuit, May 1977.  http://www.generation-
online.org/p/fpdeleuze9.htm (Accessed November 22, 2009).  
   41
and the methods of engaging in politics.  By returning to the history of French theory in 
this period, it is possible to renew the self-reflexivity, and the humility with which they 
practiced intellectual engagement.  
 
 
 
 
  42
CHAPTER ONE 
 
Death Is Loose in the World: Revolution and Repetition in the Épuration 
 
 “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in 
world history occur, as it were, twice.  He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the 
second time as farce.  Caussodière for Danton.  Louis Blanc for Robespierre…the 
nephew for the uncle.”51  Marx wrote this famous statement with regard to the revolution 
of 1848 and Louis Napoléon’s coup in 1851 in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis 
Bonaparte.  It might equally be applied however, to the Vichy regime’s so-called 
“National Revolution” of 1940.  Indeed, many historians see the Vichy regime in this 
way, even though it was a revolution that reversed the traditional roles of the left and the 
right.  Robert Paxton writes that “the Vichy regime [was] another act in the long French 
drama of internal conflict opened in 1789 and still raging with the Popular Front election 
of 1936.”52  Laval for Danton, Pétain for Robespierre, Maurras for Rousseau, and so on.  
Continuing Marx’s logic, it follows that if the Vichy regime was a tragic repetition of the 
revolution, then the postwar purge – known as the épuration – of collaborationist writers 
and intellectuals was a farcical Thermidor.  But it was under the reign of this farcical 
Thermidorian purge that commitment, and the critique of commitment were first 
articulated.   
                                                 
51 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. International Publishers (New York: 
International Publishers, 1963).  
52 Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, Rev. ed. (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2001) xxxvi. 
  43
In order to understand the relationship between French thought and the purge, it is 
necessary to briefly review the history of the purge trials conducted in France after the 
war.  Following the Liberation in 1944, Charles de Gaulle returned to France and quickly 
installed a provisional government, proclaiming that the “Republic has never ceased to 
exist.”  De Gaulle’s assertion of continuity contained the promise of a new beginning, 
and the populace was seized by a sense of possibility bordering on revolutionary fervor.  
But this euphoria was accompanied by a wave of denunciations known as the purge.  
Thousands of accused collaborators were executed, imprisoned, or publicly humiliated.  
In all, there were some 10,800 executions, many of which came at the hands of vigilante 
groups.53  After the Liberation, purge tribunals sentenced nearly 7,000 collaborators to 
death, though less than 800 legal executions were actually carried out.54  These 
collaborators were seen by the public as a cancer that needed to be removed in order to 
preserve the continuity of the narrative of De Gaulle’s undying republic.55  
                                                 
53 Peter Novick established this estimate, but pointed out the inadequacies and discrepancies in the court 
records that continue to founder attempts to concretize the history of the purge.  See Novick, The 
Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 1968). 
54 Henri Rousso discusses the conflicting court records in detail, which vary between 6,763 and 7,037 
death sentences, and between 767 and 791 executions.  See Rousso, “L’épuration en France une histoire 
inachevée,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 33 (1992): 78-105. 
55 The history of the purge is well established, if still contested.  At this late stage of the “Vichy syndrome” 
the purge is no longer denied, nor is it hidden from public view, as it had been for the two decades 
following World War II.  Henri Rousso suggest that the issue now is to disabuse the notion of the “purge 
sauvage” – the “black legend” that exaggerated the extent, and the violence of the purges.  Against this 
fallacious notion, Rousso proposes that the legal purge be distinguished from the extralegal purge.  Megan 
Koreman suggests however, that the perceived split between a “legal” purge and an “extra-legal” purge is 
the product of postwar myth-making.  In reality, Koreman argues, the purge was split between the national 
and the local, where there was a shared understanding of the need for a purge, but divergent interpretations 
of how that purge should be conducted.  There was a general consensus that the purges should be 
conducted legally, but there was widespread popular disillusion with the slow pace of the national purge 
tribunals.  In some instances this led to vigilante justice, but far less than is commonly imagined.  See 
Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), and “L’épuration en France une histoire inachevée.”  
  44
In certain respects, however, the purge simply continued a protocol of retribution 
established by the resistance movement.  A purge had been planned as early as 1941, 
long before the Liberation, and the resistance announced its intention to mete out justice 
to collaborators in a series of proclamations throughout the war.  On March 15, 1944 the 
Conseil National de la Résistance (the CNR) issued a proclamation outlining the future 
that they envisioned for postwar France, promising to punish traitors and collaborators.56  
They even began administering their purge before to the allied landing on D-Day.  Of the 
10,800 total executions, 5,234 of the executions happened before D-Day.  Of these, 
roughly one-quarter were preceded by a mock trial, while the largest portion by far were 
summary executions.57  When the purge actually began it was understood as retribution 
visited upon collaborators by the Resistance.  
The purge was also a national attempt to redefine and reshape the whole of 
France, and it was directed at every sector of society.58  Henri Rousso argues that it was 
                                                                                                                                                 
See also, Koreman, The Expectation of Justice: France 1944-1946 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 
1999), 92-147. 
56 The second provision of the “Program of the Conseil nationale de la Résistance” concerned the purging 
of collaborators.  It “assur[ed] the punishment of traitors and the eviction from the administration and 
professional life of all those who have dealt with the enemy or who have actively associated themselves 
with the policy of the governments of collaboration.” “Afin de veiller au châtiment des trîtres et à l’éviction 
dans le domaine de l’administration et de la vie proessionnelle de tous ceux qui auront pactisé avec 
l’ennemi ou qui se seont associés activement à la politique des Gouvernements de collaboration.”  See 
Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévich, Les Idées politiques et sociale de la Résistance: Documents 
Clandestins, 1940-1944 (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1954), 216. 
57 The number 5,234 was suggested by Tony Judt, though he fails to provide sources for his claim.  Henri 
Rousso argues that the number of “extra-judicial” executions is impossible to determine, but cites several 
studies which place the total between 8,100 and 7,300.  See Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French 
Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 58.  See also, Rousso, 
“L’épuration en France une histoire inachevée,” 82.  
58 The purge’s most obvious targets were Vichy politicians, and government officials.  But across France 
there were widespread denunciations of public and private individuals as collaborators.  The popular image 
of the Liberation and of the purge features men in berets shaving the head of a woman, presumably for 
having sexually “collaborated” with the Nazis.  Like so many of the memories of the Occupation and its 
aftermath, this was more myth than reality.  The reality of collaboration and its punishment was both more 
  45
“a response to the barbarism, and the totalitarian Nazi system [and that] it was an 
occasion for the reaffirmation and the renewal of the foundational values of the Republic 
with a conception of the nation anchored in the tradition of 1789.”59  The purge must also 
be seen as part of the guerre franco-française – the ideological civil war fought over the 
destiny of France between those who wished to rebuild the nation on the spirit of 
revolutionary purity embodied by resistance, and those on the right who wished to rebuild 
the nation on old, conservative, nationalist values.60   
As the French intellectual community had participated in the Resistance, they also 
participated in the purge, convening the Comité National des Écrivains (or CNE) for the 
purpose of identifying and punishing writers and intellectuals who collaborated with the 
German occupation and the Vichy regime.61  During the Occupation, the German 
                                                                                                                                                 
mundane, and more sinister.  In all, there are records of only 586 women having suffered la tondue – 
having their heads shaved in public.  Fabrice Virgili suggests however, that head-shaving reflected a deep 
crisis of French masculinity: French men felt the indignity of the Occupation in the loss of control over 
women’s bodies, and the episodes of head-shaving that accompanied the Liberation were an attempt to 
regain that control.  The wave denunciations during the purge followed similarly lines.  They were often 
motivated as much by petty personal grievances as they were by concern for the body politic and criminal 
collaboration.  For an analysis of sexual “collaboration” and the motivations for denunciation, see Robert 
Gildea Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (New York: 
Picador, 2004).  For a detailed discussion of head-shaving, see Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and 
Punishment in Liberation France, trans. John Flower (London: Berg, 2002), 177-217. 
59 “Une réponse à la barbarie et au système totalitaire nazi.  Elle était l'occasion de réaffirmirmer les 
valeurs fondatrices de la République et de renouer avec une conception de la nation, ancrée dans la 
tradition of 1789." Rousso, “L’épuration en France une histoire inachevée,” 87. 
60 See Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 15-59. 
61 Numerous scholars, from both historical and literary perspectives, have discussed the history of the 
CNE, the blacklists, and their role purge trials.  The main synthetic work is Gisele Sapiro, La Guerre des 
écrivains: 1940-1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999).  Using the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (who was 
Sapiro’s doctoral advisor), she traces the history of the authors, the journals, and the disputes that 
comprised the “writers’ war” in order to establish their positions in the hazardous field of cultural 
production that existed in France during the Occupation and the immediate aftermath of the war.  A more 
literary account is provided by Philip Watts, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the 
Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).  Watts argues that 
writers engaged in the “writers’ war” used the trope of allegory to encode their attempts to negotiate the 
purge.  Allegory, Watts suggests, was particular useful for dealing with something as difficult to reconcile 
  46
administration embarked on a large-scale program of censorship of all literary 
publication.  In response, several writers associated with the resistance initiated a 
clandestine journal, Les Lettres françaises, edited by Jean Paulhan, whose exceptional 
stature within French literary circles gave to the journal the aura of carrying on the 
French literary tradition.  The journal also had a second purpose however: to ferret out 
and denounce collaborationist writers and intellectuals, an intention announced in its very 
first issue.62  The CNE, led by Paulhan (who would later break from the resistance and 
the CNE over the persecution of writers and intellectuals), along with Louis Aragon, Paul 
Eluard, François Mauriac, among others, monitored the collaborationist activities of 
writers and intellectuals.  The CNE published its first blacklist in September 1944 in Les 
Lettres françaises, just as the purge trials were gaining momentum.  In this blacklist the 
CNE identified the most serious collaborators, comprised of some well-known and some 
less well-known French novelists, journalists, and essayists: Robert Brasillach, Louis-
Ferdinand Céline, Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Jacques Chardonne, Pierre Drieu la 
Rochelle, Jean Giono, Marcel Jouhandeau, Charles Maurras, Henri de Montherlant, Paul 
Morand, Armand Petitjean, and André Thérive.63  One month later, Saurez, the first 
writer sent to trial, was convicted and executed.64 
                                                                                                                                                 
as the purge, because of its fundamental ambiguity.  See also, Pierre Assouline, L’Épuration des 
intellectuels (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1985).  
62 For a discussion of the editorial policies of Les Lettres françaises, see Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains, 
467-562, and Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 15-58. 
63 Watts indicates that the first blacklist was published in September 1944, but he does not provide the 
number of writers accused.  A second list was published in October 1944, in which some 60 collaborators 
were identified.  Eventually the number of collaborators became as high as 148.  Who were the 
collaborators?  Most were writers with small reputations and little influence.  Louis-Ferdinand Céline was 
the exception, rather than the rule.  See Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 15-58.  
64 The alacrity with which the trials of writers and intellectuals began is alarming.  Saurez was put on trial 
in October of 1944, while Pétain’s trial did not begin until August 1945.  Generally, the trials of Vichy 
  47
All in all, less than fifteen writers and intellectuals were tried during the purge – 
including some not on the CNE’s blacklist: Georges Suarez, Paul Chack, Jean Luchaire, 
Paul Ferdonet, Jean Hérold Paquis, Henri Béraud, Lucien Rebatet, Abel Hermant, Ramon 
Fernandez, as well as Drieu la Rochelle, Céline, Maurras, and Brasillach.65  What did one 
have to do to be blacklisted and brought to trial?  What counted as collaboration was a 
thorny issue.66  Initially the CNE defined collaboration as one of three things: having 
attended a writer’s congress sponsored by the Germans, having received money directly 
or indirectly from the Germans, or having aided German propaganda either through 
words or deeds.67  In reality however, writers were charged with treason primarily 
because of a general sentiment of having “betrayed France” with their words.  It was 
precisely as writers that they were tried.  Writers, in the eyes of the court, as in the eyes 
of the CNE, were gifted with the power of persuasion – a talent that gave them significant 
                                                                                                                                                 
politicians began so much later because they were squirreled away in Sigmaringen, and did not return to 
France until after the war.  For a detailed, chronological account of the trials of writers, see Assouline, 
L’Épuration des intellectuels, 167-168.  
65 See Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 22-24.   
66 A collaborator could be brought to trial under one of two laws.  The first was Article 75 of the 1939 
French Penal Code, a catch-all provision outlawing treason, defined as “intelligence with the enemy.”  This 
law carried the risk of the death penalty.  A second law, Article 83 of the Penal Code, which was created in 
order to prosecute less grave crimes of collaboration, defined collaboration as a “national indignity.”  In 
most cases the penalty for the crime of national indignity was prison, and sometimes exile, and the loss of 
one’s citizenship.  The difference between these two laws was never clearly established, and they allowed 
for enormous latitude in the kinds of acts that were prosecutable.  Article 75, the stiffer of the two laws, 
was used immediately following the Liberation, when most writers and intellectuals were tried.  At this 
time, most Vichy government officials were in hiding in Sigmaringen, in Germany, and were not brought to 
trial until 1945, when the less strict Article 83 was used to prosecute collaborators.  Thus the weight of the 
purge fell most harshly on writers and intellectuals not least because they were simply present in Paris, and 
had a body of writing with which their culpability could be established.  As a consequence, the trials of 
writers and intellectuals in the summer and autumn of 1944 were among the most spectacular and widely 
reported.  Indeed, the trial narratives of these writers and intellectuals became a cottage genre in the 
immediate postwar years.  For a detailed discussion of these laws and the way they were applied to writers 
and intellectuals, see Philip Watts, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar 
Trials of Writers and Intellectuals, 16-19.  See also, Judt, Past Imperfect, 45-74.  
67 See Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains, 572.  
  48
ability to influence public opinion.68  A collaborationist writer could be as guilty, if not 
more guilty, than a murderer, for inciting murder with his words, however indirectly.69   
Compared with the 10,800 men and women executed, writers and intellectuals 
represented a relatively small portion of those victimized by the purge.  But the purge’s 
biggest impact on the community of writers and intellectuals registered not in terms of 
the number of writers purged, but in the intellectual consequences of putting writers on 
trial, convicting, and executing them on the basis of nothing more than their printed 
words.  An entire polemic was manufactured in order to justify the purge, while an 
equally vocal anti-purge polemic denounced the trials.  On the side of the purge were 
Sartre and Aragon from the CNE, as well as Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel 
Mounier, in addition to many others.  To these writers the purge was an attempt to wipe 
clean the slate of France’s history under the Vichy regime, creating a blank page on 
which a new revolutionary France could be established.  Against the purge were Paulhan 
– who recanted his role as maître des lettres of the Resistance after the publication of the 
blacklists – François Mauriac, and eventually Albert Camus.  The “writers’ war,” as 
Gisèle Sapiro has termed it, was a passionate debate between the CNE and those who 
defended the collaborators.  It was an ideological battle, fought along baldly partisan 
lines, in which both sides believed that the fate of the nation was at stake.  
Sartre developed his theory of committed literature during his time in the CNE, 
and in the debates over the postwar purge of writers and intellectuals.70  In Qu’est-ce que 
                                                 
68 Watts, 32. 
69 These were the charges brought specifically against Maurras and Brasillach.  See, Judt, 60-67.  See also, 
Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 2000). 
  49
la littérature?, a collection of essays originally published in Sartre’s journal, Les Temps 
modernes, he articulated his vision of what literature should be, and how writers should 
write.71   The experience of the occupation and the Vichy regime demonstrated that 
writing could be used for evil.  Collaborationist writers were guilty of having betrayed 
their community by offering their services to the enemy.  To Sartre, who was on the 
extreme of the intellectual left, it was a writer’s duty to write in service of their 
community, which, after the occupation and the Vichy regime, was construed strictly as 
the national community.  Moreover, in Sartre’s view, all writing should serve the end of 
achieving egalitarian political change within his or her national community.  Whether a 
writer wrote novels, essays, or philosophical treatises, Sartre believed that he or she must 
commit themselves to affecting leftist political change through their written work.   
At the very instant that Sartre developed his notion of commitment though, a 
counter-movement emerged in opposition to commitment.  This counter-movement came 
from the moderate side of the intellectual left, which also condemned collaboration, but 
stopped short of calling for a purge.  This group, led by Jean Paulhan, developed a 
critique Sartrean commitment’s requirement that all written work contribute to leftist 
political change.  In De la paille et du grain Paulhan argued that the purpose of writing, 
                                                                                                                                                 
70 The treatments of Sartre's work range from the hagiographical to the theoretical.  The standard 
biographical work is Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Concogni (New York: Pantheon, 
1987).  On the more critical end of the scale is Denis Hollier, The Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre, trans. 
Jeffrey Mehlman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Joseph Halpern, Critical 
Fictions: The Literary Criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).  For 
shorter treatments, see Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 59-82; Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The 
Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 49-82; and Judt, Past 
Imperfect, 45-74.  For treatments of Jean Paulhan's work see Michael Syrotinski, Defying Gravity: Jean 
Paulhan's Interventions in Twentieth-Century French Intellectual History (Albany, NY: State University of 
New York Press, 1998).  
71 Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littèrature? (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1948). 
  50
especially literary writing, was to give pleasure, and so writers should not be forced to 
commit themselves to politics.72   Paulhan explicitly condemned the purge, and the entire 
notion that a writer would ever be tried before law for his or her writing.   
The critique of commitment was completed by Maurice Blanchot, whose “La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort” intervened in between Sartre and Paulhan.73  Falling in 
between Sartre’s radicalism and Paulhan’s moderation, Blanchot’s critique of 
commitment sought to complicate the terms of intellectual engagement in politics by 
showing that one could not commit only to politics, nor could one commit only to 
literature.  Unlike Paulhan, Blanchot did not explicitly condemn the purge – though his 
contribution to the purge debate was implicitly anti-purge.   Rather, Blanchot entered the 
purge debate by critiquing the notion of commitment on which Sartre based his demand 
that collaborationist writers be purged.  To Blanchot, commitment was politically 
ineffective: in Blanchot’s view commitment misapprehended the nature of language, at 
the same time that it overestimated the writer’s power to control the effect of his or her 
writing.  Blanchot argued that all writers – the committed and the collaborators alike – 
were equally unable to master language, which remained forever beyond their power to 
control.  In this way, Blanchot made it clear that commitment was an inadequate form of 
intellectual engagement in politics, because it failed to understand the very medium 
through which it sought to engage.  This chapter argues that Paulhan and Blanchot 
                                                 
72 Jean Paulhan, De la paille et du grain (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1948). 
73 Maurice Blanchot, “Le règne animal de l’esprit,” Critique, 18 (November 1947): 387-405, followed by 
“La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” Critique, 20 (January 1948): 30-47.  The essays were published 
together, with no changes other than a suture where they met, under the title “La Littérature et le droit à la 
mort.”  See Blanchot, “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” La Part du feu (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 
1949), 291-331.  All references henceforth will be to the 1949 edition of the essay.  
  51
established a critique of commitment together during the debate over the postwar purge 
of writers and intellectuals that laid the foundation for French theory’s gradual move 
beyond commitment throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 
Sapiro argues that this “writers’ war” issued from a “crisis of representation.”  
During the occupation and the immediate postwar years, when the recognizable poles of 
political orientation were thrown into chaos, it was no longer clear who represented 
France, nor what representing France even meant.74  To be sure, those who had 
participated in the resistance had the biggest claim on France, and “résistantialisme” was 
a dominant factor in French politics after the war.75  The resistance shrouded itself in the 
revolutionary legacy of 1789, granting historical as well as political legitimacy on its 
claim to represent France.  The intellectual historian Michael Kelly argues that French 
intellectuals were “nationalized” in the immediate postwar years.  It was their task “to 
produce the ideas, images, and stories which could knit French people together in an 
imagined community, which they could share, and which could be presented to France’s 
international partners.”76   The writers and intellectuals of the CNE and Les Lettres 
françaises went even further in assuming the role of the Jacobin, and espousing an 
updated version of Jacobin radicalism.77  For the writers and intellectuals of the CNE and 
Les Lettres françaises this Jacobinism was essence of Frenchness, and by extension, 
                                                 
74 Sapiro, 14-16. 
75 On résistantialisme and the predominance of former resistance fighters in French politics, see Rousso, 
The Vichy Syndrome. 
76 Michael Kelly, “The Nationalization of French Intellectuals in 1945,” South Central Review 17, no. 4 
(Winter 2000): 15. 
77 For extended discussions of this tendency within among French intellectuals to conflate French 
intellectual culture with the nation itself, see Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in 
Postwar France. 
  52
writers and intellectuals were the true representatives of France.  With the right 
thoroughly discredited through its association with the occupying forces, and the Vichy 
regime, this claim to Jacobinism signified a renaissance of the intellectual left in France, 
intent on reclaiming its role as the self-appointed guardian of the nation’s self-
consciousness.  
Yet if the crisis of representation identified by Sapiro was concerned with the 
question of the true representative of France, it was also always concerned with the 
concept of representation itself.  For Sartre, Paulhan and Blanchot, the question of who 
was representative of France was subtended by the question of what was linguistic 
representation, and how did it work?  In Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Sartre bracketed the 
question of a writer's commitment and responsibility within a discussion of linguistic 
representation.  Likewise, in De la paille et du grain, Paulhan argued that writers should 
not be put on trial for what they had written, only after he elaborated a theory of 
linguistics.  In “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” Blanchot also articulated his critique 
of Sartrean commitment by advancing his own theory of linguistic representation.  By 
1948, the year in which Sartre, Paulhan, and Blanchot published their purge polemics, the 
debate over the purge was no longer about whether or not collaborationist writers should 
be executed.  Rather, it turned into a debate over language, what language was, and how 
language should be used.   
The crisis of representation that fueled the purge debate thus rested on a 
homology drawn between two separate questions.  The first question was who, or what 
was representative of France?  The second question was how does linguistic 
  53
representation operate?  This chapter argues that purge polemics such as Qu'est-ce que la 
littérature?, De la paille et du grain, and “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” linked these 
two separate questions together by figuring the purge as the repetition of previous 
revolutionary moments in French history.  To Sartre the purge was the repetition of 1789.  
To Paulhan the purge was not a distinct event, but only an aftereffect of the German 
occupation, which was itself merely the repetition of previous German invasions, such as 
1871.  To Blanchot however, the purge was the repetition of the Thermidorian reaction of 
1794.   
What did repetition do to the problematic of representation that has been 
identified with the purge?  Jeffrey Mehlman points to a possible interpretation in 
Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac when – discussing the possibility of a 
Freudian reading of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – he writes:  
It may be that rediscovering a certain Freud within Marx is itself unheimlich 
[uncanny], for the uncanny for Freud is thought above all in terms of repetition-
as-failure.  But then the site of that rediscovery, within one of the crucial texts on 
revolution in France, is precisely that of a traumatic repetition within history…an 
utterly new kind of catastrophe, the return of a Bonaparte.78   
 
That is to say, history repeats itself, as in 1851 when Louis Napoléon repeated his uncle, 
Napoléon Bonaparte.  The first Bonaparte was a tragedy, the second Bonaparte was a 
farce.   
For Mehlman, what is lost in repetitions such as these, is the very possibility of 
representation itself, and what is gained, is polysemy.  The introduction of repetition into 
Marx’s dialectic wreaks havoc on the notion of representation, and specifically on the 
                                                 
78 Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1977), 8. 
  54
notion that the state is able to represent society.  Louis Napoléon – brought to office on 
the back of those outside of society, the lumpen-proletariat – represented the state only in 
its antagonism to society, only as the parasite through which one class dominated 
another.  Once the state is figured strictly as an organ of domination, any notion of the 
state representing society falls apart. 
Within Marx’s theory, but already breaking with a certain stratum of it, we see the 
project of advancing a deluded notion of the relation of representation between 
State and Society to a true notion of that relation – the State as instrument of 
exploitation of one class by another – give way to an affirmation of an antagonism 
between State and Society and consequently of the irrelevance of the category of 
(true or false) representation.  But may we not, then, read this instance, which 
breaks, say, with the philosopheme of representation (and, consequently, of 
truth)…as the formation in the text most alive to that which never ceases 
recurring within it: to the fact that in an unheimlich manner, absolutely anything 
may come to occupy the positions of the repetitive structure? 79 
 
Mehlman’s description of the breakdown of the state’s representation of society applies 
to the Vichy regime, and to the purge.  It was precisely as a perverse repetition of 1789 
(since it was a collaborating regime which existed only for the convenience of Germany) 
that the Vichy regime was a state that did not represent French society.  And it was as a 
perverse repetition of 1794 that the purge – claiming the same revolutionary heritage of 
1789 – was unable to conclusively produce a representative of French society.  It was 
under these conditions that the great purge debate over who represented France occurred.  
Just as in 1851, absolutely anything was able to occupy the position of representative of 
France during the postwar purge, “in an unheimlich manner.”  
 This chapter argues that when French intellectuals like Blanchot, Sartre, and 
Paulhan experienced and encoded the purge as the repetition of the French Revolution, 
                                                 
79 Ibid., 19-20. 
  55
and attached it to various theories of the representation of the body politic, they injected 
the unheimlich force of repetition into their notions of representation.  It was at this point 
that the concept of polysemy first became linked to the concept of the political in French 
intellectual culture.  Sartre, Paulhan, and Blanchot each responded to this unheimlich 
linkage in different ways.  It caused Sartre to produce a theory of representation and of 
political community based entirely on holding the dispersive effect of repetition at bay.  It 
caused Paulhan to despair of the possibility of ever reconstituting the political unity of 
France.  But for Blanchot, it was revelatory.  It caused him to conceive a theory of 
linguistic representation as dependent on the emptiness of words effected by the 
repetitive structure, and a theory of the political as the perpetual negotiation and 
renegotiation within the literary of the relationship between polysemic language, and 
material community. 
Unlike Sartre, whose political activism has long been an object of inquiry, 
Blanchot’s role in the debate over the postwar purge has only recently attracted the 
attention of scholars.  Though many Blanchot scholars consider Blanchot’s postwar 
career entirely devoid of any political engagement, “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” is 
now understood as Blanchot’s contribution to the polemics of the purge debate.80  While 
it is agreed that the purge and “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” are intimately 
                                                 
80 One trend in the scholarship on Blanchot has detected a glaring absence of politics in Blanchot’s postwar 
work.  To these scholars, Blanchot’s political silence was designed to hide his pre-war journalism, some of 
which was polemically right-wing, and nationalist.  This aspect of Blanchot’s career is discussed at length 
below.  For references, see Jeffrey Mehlman, “Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror.” MLN 95, no. 
4. (1980), 808-829.  See also Mehlman, Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France, (Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1983); Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern 
France, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).  For a more recent, full-length treatment see 
Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930, (Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1995).      
  56
connected, accounts of this connection founder on one of two problems.  Either the 
history of the purge is privileged over the specific philosophical content of Blanchot's 
work, or Blanchot’s philosophy is privileged over the purge.  Two important essays 
illustrate this difficulty.  Phillip Watts devotes a chapter of Allegories of the Purge: How 
Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France to 
Blanchot’s “La Littérature et le droit à la mort.”81  Watts is more interested in proving 
that “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” allegorizes the purge, a goal which he 
accomplishes admirably, than he is in pursuing the essay’s full implications.  For Watts,  
allegory [became] the preferred figure of rhetoric in the post-war years precisely 
because it is a trope of indeterminacy.  Allegory [allowed] writers not only to 
speak about World War II and its aftermath but also to speak indirectly about the 
difficulty, if not the impossibility, of putting in place a system of moral and legal 
precepts about the roles and responsibilities of literature.82   
 
That is to say, the trope of allegory allowed writers to confront the crisis of representation 
in all of its ambiguity, by affording them the ability to discuss the war and its aftermath in 
indirect, and metaphorical terms.  “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” scarcely made any 
mention of contemporary events.  It was, on the face of it, not a purge polemic at all, but 
rather a theoretical essay on the possibility of literature.  In Allegories of the Purge Watts 
analyzes Blanchot’s covert but systematic usage of keywords from the purge debate to 
demonstrate that “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” was indeed a contribution to the 
debate over the purge.  By conclusively demonstrating the way in which “La Littérature 
et le droit à la mort” participated in the postwar purge discourse through a close analysis 
of its vocabulary, Watts shows that Blanchot’s text was engaged in the political battles of 
                                                 
81 See Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 83-105. 
82 Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 11. 
  57
1948.  Watts establishes a critical space within which to consider Blanchot’s work 
historically, rather than selectively reading its philosophical content.   
Allan Stoekl takes a different approach to “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” in 
his essay, “Blanchot, Death, Language, Community and Politics.”83  Stoekl argues that 
Blanchot’s essay was not about the purge, but rather, it was concerned with building a 
theory of politics and a theory of community.  In this regard, Blanchot’s participation in 
the polemics of the purge, and his use of its vocabulary were incidental to his larger goal 
of articulating a new vision of political community, a project which spanned the length of 
his corpus, and which culminated with the publication of La Communauté inavouable in 
1983.  Stoekl departs from Watts at this point, suggesting that Watts historicizes 
Blanchot’s work at the sacrifice of the philosophical meaning of the work itself.  But if 
Stoekl criticizes Watts for failing to recognize the kind of community implicit in 
Blanchot’s “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” then it is important to recognize the way 
in which Stoekl himself evacuates Blanchot’s essay of the history of the purge.  Watts 
and Stoekl ultimately present a deeply dissatisfying dichotomy for any attempt to account 
for Blanchot’s politics and his role in the purge debate: either the erasure of history, or 
the erasure of philosophy. 
While Watts and Stoekl have made important contributions to our understanding 
of the literary and philosophical value of Blanchot’s role in the debate over the purge, 
there has not yet been a systematic historical treatment of this episode in context of 
Blanchot’s entire career.  The result is that intellectual historians have been left with an 
                                                 
83 Allan Stoekl, “Blanchot: Death, Language, Community and Politics,” Parallax, Vol. 12, no. 2: 40-52. 
  58
incomplete understanding of the purge debates, and an incomplete understanding of how 
this troubled moment in French history affected Blanchot’s thought.  This chapter 
reconciles the dichotomy between history and philosophy, arguing that “La Littérature et 
le droit à la mort” was imbued with the history of the postwar purge in which it was 
created, and that “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” made a philosophical contribution 
to the purge debate.  This chapter argues that Blanchot engaged in the purge debate by 
critiquing the political efficacy of Sartrean commitment.  Like Sartre and Paulhan, 
Blanchot theorized the representation of political community and wedded the 
representation of political community to linguistic representation.  Unlike Sartre and 
Paulhan, however, Blanchot was pessimistic about the possibility for the creation of a 
new political community, since such a community would always founder on the desires 
of its creators for an impossible version of representation.   
In doing so, Blanchot’s theory of linguistic representation paved the way for the 
much of the French theory of the 1950s and 1960s.  Today, we take the political valence 
of French theory for granted.  But the basic epistemological assumption that language is a 
determinate factor of the politics, was not always such a universally accepted proposition.  
Rather, the political valence of French theory was born during the debate over the 
postwar purge of writers and intellectuals, when the purge polemicists explicitly 
questioned the relationship of language to politics.   
 This chapter proceeds in three parts.  The first part details Blanchot's personal, 
political, and intellectual history through an examination of the journals with which he 
was associated.  Such a view provides the essential background of Blanchot's history, but 
  59
it also introduces the cultural atmosphere of Parisian intellectual life.  The second part of 
this chapter is an analysis of the two texts that defined the poles of the purge debate, 
Sartre's pro-purge Qu'est-ce que la littérature? and Paulhan's anti-purge De la paille et du 
grain.  These texts introduce the lexicon of the purge debate, and provide the context 
within which to situate Blanchot's own purge polemic, "La Littérature et le droit à la 
mort."  The third part of this chapter takes a close look at "La Littérature et le droit à la 
mort" and its response to the crisis of representation.   
 
The Print Culture of French Intellectuals 
Before turning to the analysis of the purge polemic, and to its effect on Blanchot’s 
thought, it is necessary to review Blanchot’s own history before, during, and immediately 
after World War II.  One gets the best sense of Blanchot’s historical context by 
considering his relationship with the intellectual world in which he lived, rather than 
through his personal biography.  Blanchot himself organized his past by the journals in 
which he participated, and the encounters with others that they brought.  In 1984 he 
wrote, “I recall once working for France-Observateur, which takes me back to earlier 
periods…For me, what mattered were the encounters, where chance transformed into 
necessity.  Encounters with people, encounters with places.  This is what my biography 
amounts to.”84  The history of his connection with literary journals simultaneously attests 
to Blanchot’s publicity, and to his relationship with his contemporaries, while revealing 
some of the reciprocal influence that they had on each other.  Indeed, it can be said these 
                                                 
84 Blanchot, “Encounters,” trans. Michael Holland, Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 27-28.   
  60
sentences speak for the entirety of Blanchot’s generation, which was absolutely 
consumed by journals.  Journals were the primary venue of their intellectual activity.  
They founded new journals constantly, and after each inevitably failed, they began 
another one again with renewed optimism.  There were journals covering the gamut of 
French intellectual activity.  The resistance journal Les Lettres françaises has already 
been mentioned.  But in addition to the literary journals, which were Blanchot’s primary 
venue of publication, there were also Marxist journals such as Socialisme ou Barbarie, 
structuralist and post-structuralist journals like Tel Quel, and existentialist journals like 
Sartre’s Les Temps modernes, not to mention the more academic journals like the Revue 
de Métaphysique et de Morale.  Just as Blanchot’s history can be viewed through the 
journals that offered the chance encounters that mark his life, so too can postwar French 
intellectual history be traced by the rise and fall of its various journals.85   
As journal after journal sprang up, publishing a few issues with the highest 
possible ambitions, only to peter out for lack of funding or attention, Blanchot could 
always be relied on to contribute something to a new venture.  These journals ranged 
from the strictly literary to the wildly interdisciplinary.  What united them was their 
boundless faith in the medium of the journal to create a renewed intellectual community 
after World War II.  Perhaps this accounts for the stunning array of authors that published 
in these short-lived journals.  In these years it was possible to purchase an issue of 
                                                 
85 The history of the many, fascinating journals that sprang up in the post war decades only to die within a 
few months remains to be written.  The major journals are well documented, however, and instructive 
histories include Anna Boschetti, Sartre et “les Temps modernes”: une enterprise intellectuelle, (Paris: 
Éditions de Minuit, 1985); Sylvie Patron, Critique: 1946-1996, une encyclopédie de l’esprit modernes, 
(Paris: Éditions de L’IMEC, 1999); and Patrick ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel, 1960-
1983, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 
  61
L’Espagne libre, and read an essay by Blanchot on André Malraux’s role in the Spanish 
Civil War, as well as pieces by international figures like the existentialist Albert Camus, 
the Spanish poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca, and the American novelist Ernest Hemingway.  
Or the lavishly-printed art journal, La Table ronde (not to be confused with the long-
running literary journal of the same name), which managed only three issues, but in 
which Blanchot’s work appeared side by side with an essay by the English novelist 
Virginia Woolf, a facsimile reproduction of a letter by Ernst Renan, author of the essay 
“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” and a drawing of Charlie Chaplin by the surrealist poet and 
filmmaker Jean Cocteau.  
Of all the journals that Blanchot participated in during his career as a literary 
critic, three stand out as especially significant, either for their place within French 
intellectual culture, or the encounters with others that Blanchot experienced through 
them.  The first was Combat, a short-lived journal edited and organized by the Christian 
nationalist Thierry Maulnier in 1936-1937.  The second was La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue 
Française, which became his institutional home from 1953 to 1963, the most productive 
period of Blanchot’s career.  The third journal that Blanchot was affiliated with was 
Georges Bataille’s long-running journal, Critique, to which he was a contributor and 
editor.  
In the 1930s Blanchot dallied with the nationalist, interwar press.  Jean-Louis 
Loubet del Bayle named Blanchot among the “non-conformistes des années trentes,” the 
disaffected intellectuals of the interwar period. 86  Initially, Blanchot gravitated to the 
                                                 
86 See Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années trentes (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 61-62.   
  62
Jeune Droite out of his innate nationalist sympathy for France, which he felt was being 
sabotaged from within by the Popular Front, and assaulted from without by Hitler’s 
Germany.  Soon Blanchot turned to journalism to give expression to his political 
sentiments.  For a brief time in 1936 and 1937 he authored nationalist, and even anti-
semitic editorials directed against the Popular Front for the militant monthly journal, 
Combat.  The main thrust of these articles was that the Popular Front, and especially its 
leader Léon Blum, had betrayed the patrie to foreign powers.  In an article titled “Le 
Terrorisme, méthode de salut public,” Blanchot wrote that the Popular Front government 
represented a “beautiful union, a sainted alliance which conglomerates Soviet, Jewish, 
and capitalist interests.  All that is anti-national, all that is anti-social will be served [by 
the Popular Front].”87  Such was Blanchot’s reputation as a right-wing journalist that 
Sartre was still able to accuse him of “Maurrasism” in a 1943 review of the novel 
Aminadab.88  Sartre alleged that Blanchot had been, and that he still was a follower of 
Charles Maurras, the principle “theorist” of right-wing French ideology, and one of the 
first writers tried during the purge. 
As striking as the language of “Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public” is, the 
incoherence of Blanchot’s claim that the Popular Front served both Soviet and capitalist 
interests gives one the sense that Blanchot’s politics were more anti-establishmentarian 
than anything else.89  Indeed, he was a peripheral figure in Combat’s circle, drawn there 
                                                 
87 “Belle union, sainte alliance que ce conglomérat d’intérets soviétiques, juifs, capitalists.  Tout ce qui est 
antinational, tout ce qui est antisocial sera servi.” Blanchot, “Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public,” 
Combat, 7 (July 1936): 106. 
88 See Watts, Allegories of the Purge, 90-91. 
89 Zeev Sternhell has controversially argued that the non-conformistes were actually fully developed proto-
fascists.  Though he discusses Maulnier in great detail, Sternhell touches on Blanchot only on isolated 
  63
more by his “non-conformisme” than by his political conviction, and present more by the 
force of his intellect than by his physical person.  Claude Roy, another writer for Combat, 
recalled seeing Blanchot arrive for the journal’s meetings at the Left Bank café La 
Coupole like a “diaphanous and fragile apparition.”90  The few pictures that remain of 
Blanchot confirm Roy’s memory.  Pale, gray eyes affixed with otherworldly intensity, to 
some point beyond the camera, the sole features of an otherwise expressionless face.  
This image should not be read as a photographic record of Blanchot, but rather as a 
metaphor for his tenuous relationship of presence within and withdrawal from the world 
of French intellectual culture.  
Blanchot abandoned his political journalism in 1938 along with his nationalist 
politics, and began to write literary criticism almost exclusively.  During the war 
Blanchot split his time between Paris and his parents’ home in Quain, just west of the 
border of the occupied north zone of France.  Throughout the war Blanchot published 
book reviews in the Journal des débats, a journal with a distinctly anti-German editorial 
position.  Blanchot’s biographer, Christophe Bident, alleges that although Blanchot never 
attached his name to another political essay until the 1950s, many of the Journal des 
débats anti-German editorials published during the war are stylistically identifiable as 
Blanchot’s.  Bident writes that Blanchot was personally devastated by the invasion, and 
above all by France’s willing surrender.  It was at this point that Blanchot decided that 
the extreme left offered the only tenable solution to France’s compromised situation, and 
                                                                                                                                                 
occasions.  He was never a major figure in the French right.  See Sternhell, Neither Right, Nor Left: Fascist 
Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 
90 “Trés diaphane et fragile apparition.” Claude Roy, Moi je, (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 233. 
  64
to the idea of the French nation.  But Blanchot never openly wrote about politics.  Nor 
did he contribute to any of the clandestine reviews, such as Les Lettres françaises.91 
Even though Blanchot never formally joined the Resistance, that did not prevent 
him from engaging in the many tiny acts of resistance that constituted life in occupied 
France.  For instance, Blanchot was active in hiding Jews during the first months of the 
occupation, when Vichy France collaborated in the deportation of French Jews to the 
concentration camps in eastern Europe, including the wife and daughter of his friend, 
Emmanuel Levinas.  Blanchot even drove cars for the Resistance across the line of 
demarcation between the occupied north, and the “free” south.92   
One incident in particular, much-discussed among Blanchot scholars, must be 
mentioned, even if it does not pertain directly to the subject of the present chapter.  At the 
end of June of 1944, as the Allied army advanced across western France, a squad of 
retreating German soldiers dragged Blanchot and his family from their house in Quain, 
and lined them against a wall to be shot.  Blanchot and his family were saved when the 
German officer was distracted by the distant sounds of a skirmish between another group 
of German soldiers and the Maquis.  When the officer left to investigate, the soldiers 
revealed to Blanchot that they were not actually Germans, but members of the Vlassov 
army – anti-communist Russian soldiers who sided with Germany during World War II.  
While the German officer was preoccupied by the Maquis, one of the Russian soldiers 
gave Blanchot the opportunity to hide.  When the officer returned, he half-heartedly tried 
to find Blanchot, but gave up quickly and ransacked the house instead.  Blanchot 
                                                 
91 For Blanchot’s wartime activity, see Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible 
(Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 151-157. 
92 See Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible, 156. 
  65
recounted the story fifty years later in the short récit, L'Instant de ma mort, published in 
1994.93  This encounter with the Russian/German army deeply affected Blanchot.  But 
the dangers that were seen in Watts’ reading of “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” as an 
allegory of the purge would also threaten any attempt to read the essay as an allegory of 
Blanchot's personal history during the war.  Reading the death risked by the writer in “La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort” as an allegory of the death that Blanchot himself escaped 
in 1944 does not sufficiently problematize the relationship between a writer’s texts and 
his biography. 94  For what we have of Blanchot's history during World War II is nothing 
more and nothing less than texts: many hundreds of texts.  It is to these that one must 
look if one intends to trace Blanchot's history.95   
Throughout the war Blanchot continued to publish book reviews.  He quickly 
established his reputation as a critic, coming to the attention of Jean Paulhan in early 
1942, who then served as the editor of the original La Nouvelle Revue Française.96  
Paulhan was the éminence grise of the Parisian intellectual scene and not easily 
impressed, but after reading Blanchot’s novel, Thomas L’Obscur, Paulhan admitted to his 
co-editor that he “found [Blanchot] intimidating.”97  Even at this early stage Blanchot’s 
                                                 
93 Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, bilingual edition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 
2000).  Though Blanchot waited fifty years to publish an account of this episode, by no means did he keep 
it a secret.  Christophe Bident discusses a letter sent to Pierre Prévost, in which Blanchot told him of his 
encounter with the German/Russian troops.  Bident also suggests that Blanchot told Georges Bataille, who 
incorporated it into his book, Sur Nietzsche.  See Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible, 228-232.  
94 Derrida addresses the difficult question of how to distinguish the récit from autobiography, fiction from 
testimony.  See, Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1998). 
95 See the prolonged discussion of this mode of discretion in Chapter One.   
96 In 1943 occupation authorities closed La Nouvelle Revue française.  See Martyn Cornick, Intellectuals 
in History: The Nouvelle revue française under Jean Paulhan, 1925-1940, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). 
97 “Je le trouve indimidant.”  Jean Paulhan to Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Paris, January 1942, Choix de 
lettres, II, 1937-1945, eds. Dominique Aury, Jean-Claude Zylberstein & Bernard Leuilliot, (Paris: Éditions 
Gallimard, 1992), 262.  
  66
work was influential and imposing.  Paulhan’s opinion of Blanchot was cemented the 
following year when Blanchot published Comment la littérature est-elle possible?, which 
ambiguously reviewed Paulhan’s manifesto of literary theory, Les Fleurs de Tarbes, ou, 
La terreur dans les lettres.  Despite his intimidation, and despite the ambiguity of 
Blanchot’s assessment, Paulhan recommended and shared Blanchot’s review with as 
many figures within the French literary scene as he could.  By 1942 Blanchot’s status had 
risen to such heights that Paulhan could select him as his successor for the editorship of 
La Nouvelle Revue Française.98   
In 1942 Paulhan left La Nouvelle Revue Française, which had been co-opted by 
the German occupation, to join the clandestine resistance journal Les Lettres Françaises.  
He left Les Lettres Françaises in 1944, following the publication of the blacklists, and 
began to plot the revival of his old journal, La Nouvelle Revue Française.  The first 
attempt was Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, dedicated to art and literature, and whose editorial 
policy a sustained protest of the editorial policy of commitment at Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les 
Temps modernes.  Blanchot became one of his most regular contributors.  In 1953, after 
Les Cahiers de la Pléiade collapsed, Paulhan launched another venture, this time under 
the title La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française (the double Nouvelle Nouvelle indicating 
the new journal’s distance from the collaborationist position of the original La Nouvelle 
Revue Française), and immediately enlisted Blanchot as a contributor.  No longer 
performing in an editorial capacity, Blanchot became one of the most regular contributors 
to La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, publishing a monthly column from 1953 until 
                                                 
98 Paulhan to Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, 9 June 1942, Choix de lettres, II, 1937-1945, 280. 
  67
1962.  The essays from this column comprised the backbone of Blanchot’s critical 
corpus, and were reprinted in L’Espace littéraire, Le Livre à venir, L’Entretien infini, and 
L’Àmitié.  In these postwar essays for La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française Blanchot 
cultivated a significant readership among French intellectuals, and cemented his name as 
the preeminent literary critic of his time.   
Out of their collaboration at La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française Blanchot and 
Paulhan became acquaintances. Their friendship, if it can be called that, was 
characteristic of many of the relationships that Blanchot had with other writers: intense 
personal devotion, always in the service of literary and intellectual companionship, such 
that one almost suspects that Blanchot came to the personal strictly through the literary, 
and through the philosophic.  When Paulhan died in 1968, Blanchot turned a critical 
overview of his literary and philosophical work, “La Facilité de mourir,” into a panegyric 
for his lost friend, and published it in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française’s special 
issue commemorating Paulhan.  In this essay Blanchot returned to the beginning of their 
friendship by a reference to the first letter he received from Paulhan: “I think that the first 
letter I received from Jean Paulhan is dated May 10, 1940: ‘We will remember these 
days,’ he said to me.”99  But Blanchot also returned to the beginnings of their intellectual 
relationship, retracing the steps of his initial review of Paulhan’s work, Comment la 
littérature est-elle possible?  Thus, “La Facilité de mourir” was a eulogy for Paulhan, but 
through its philosophical reflection on his work, it was also a eulogy for what Blanchot 
                                                 
99 “Je crois que la première lettre que je reçus de Jean Paulhan est datée du 10 mai 1940: “Nous nous 
souviendrons de ces jours,” m’y disait-il.” Blanchot, “La Facilité de mourir,” La Nouvelle Revue française 
(May 1969), 743. 
  68
learned through his relationship with Paulhan, indicating the truth and intimacy of their 
relationship.    
The next publication with which Blanchot participated was launched by another 
longtime friend: George Bataille’s Critique.  Since its founding in 1945 Critique has been 
an institution of French intellectual culture.  Critique’s editorial policy was one of total 
authorial freedom over content, even if authors were bound to the format of the book-
review.  Each issue began with the masthead, “the authors of these articles freely develop 
an opinion which engages only themselves.”100  This policy was intended to counter the 
dogmatic conformism to the philosophy of commitment required at Sartre’s Les Temps 
modernes.  From the outset Bataille requested that Blanchot be consulted on all manner 
of editorial decisions, even though he was only a member of the editorial board, and not 
one of the principal editors.  Bataille’s letters to the other editors are laced with requests 
that Blanchot’s opinion on every little detail be solicited before taking action.  Blanchot 
was Critique’s lead reviewer for eight years, and he was given a relatively free hand to 
distort and expand the genre of the book review into radical re-considerations of literary 
creation.  It was in the pages of Critique that “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” 
originally appeared. 
“Let us suppose,” the essay begins, “that literature begins at the moment when 
literature becomes a question…addressed to language, behind the man who writes and 
who reads, by language become literature.”101  This statement, with its paradoxical 
                                                 
100 “Les auteurs des articles développent librement une opinion qui n'engage qu'eux-mêmes." 
101 “Admettons que la littérature commence au moment où la littérature devient une question addressée au 
langage, derrière l’homme qui écrit et lit, par le langage devenu littérature,” Blanchot, “La Littérature et le 
droit à la mort,” 293. 
  69
juxtaposition of literature and language, was characteristic of Blanchot’s “reviews.”  
Eventually this format became too restrictive for Blanchot, and he abandoned Critique in 
1953 in order to gain more freedom. Shortly thereafter, Blanchot turned to Paulhan’s La 
Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française, where he spent the next ten years.  This parting of 
ways should not however, diminish our perception of the benefits that Blanchot received 
from his work with Critique.  By his partnership with Critique, Blanchot’s work rapidly 
developed into a fully-fledged theory of literature, with a unique style and logic, and it 
began to take on the significance for which it was renowned in the latter part of the 
twentieth-century. 
Blanchot’s friendship with Bataille began shortly before the founding of Critique, 
in 1940, at a series of salon readings that Bataille had organized for the presentation of 
his book, L’expérience intérieure.  These meetings, which included such well-known 
figures as Michel Leiris, Pierre Prévost, and Raymond Queneau consisted primarily of a 
debate between Bataille and Blanchot.  Witnesses described Blanchot as a diaphanous 
apparition, whose ghostly appearance was at odds with the tenacity with which he 
questioned Bataille, as others watched in reverent silence.102  Bataille recounted the event 
himself in L’Expérience intérieure: “Conversation with Blanchot.  I said to him: the inner 
experience has neither aim, nor authority, which is its justification.…He said to me that 
experience itself is authority.”103  This example indicates the intellectual exchange 
                                                 
102 For a description of this meeting, see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. 
Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 312-317. 
103 “Conversation avec Blanchot. Je lui dis: l'expérience intérieure n'a ni but, ni autorité, qui la justifient…. 
Il me dit que l'expérience elle-même est l'autorité.” Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure (Paris: 
Éditions Gallimard, 1943), 87. 
  70
between Blanchot and Bataille, which has been commented on numerous occasions.104  
More importantly however, this example indicates Blanchot’s place in the intellectual 
culture of wartime Paris.  Just as he was in Paulhan’s literary circle, so too was Blanchot 
an integral member of Bataille’s.   
By 1966 Blanchot’s renown was such that Critique published a special issue in 
his honor, long after he had resigned from the journal.  With contributions from Paul de 
Man, Michel Foucault, Roger Laporte, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Starobinski this 
special issue marked one of the first moments when Blanchot passed beyond mere 
membership in the Parisian intelligentsia, to become an object of study in his own right.  
At the same time, it also functioned as the postwar generation’s acknowledgement of 
Blanchot’s influence.  It will suffice to take the example of Michel Foucault, who 
admitted that in the 1950s he “dreamt of being Blanchot,”105 and again in the 1980s that 
he believed that “Blanchot made possible all discourse about literature.”106  François 
Dosse, a historian of structuralism, has noted that Foucault probably even derived his 
style, including his penchant for the oxymoron, from Blanchot.107  But it was in the pages 
                                                 
104 Most accounts of this encounter tend to occult either Blanchot’s influence on Bataille, or Bataille’s 
influence on Blanchot.  For an analysis of this tempting occultation, and an attempt to move in a different 
direction, see Michael Holland, “Bataille, Blanchot and the Last Man,” Paragraph, 27, no. 1 (March 2004): 
50-63; See also, Holland, “An Event Without Witness: Contestation between Blanchot and Bataille,” in 
Kevin Hart & Geoffrey Hartman, eds., The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot 
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2004), 27-45. 
105 Michel Foucault, quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing, (London: Faber, 1992), 
58.    
106 Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” in Ed. James Faubion, Aesthetics, Method, and 
Epistemology: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Vol. 2. General ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. 
Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), 287. 
107 “In the early fifties, Foucault was also an avid reader of literature and was particularly fascinated by 
Maurice Blanchot’s writing, which left its mark on Foucault’s style, especially in his systematic use of the 
oxymoron.” François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Volume I: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966, trans. 
Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 148-149. 
  71
of Critique that Foucault transmitted his appreciation of Blanchot into an essay, “La 
Pensée du dehors,” which can be read as an allegory of Blanchot’s influence on Foucault 
and his presence throughout Foucault’s corpus: “It is only a formless and streaming 
murmur; its power is in dissimulation.”108  
The history of Blanchot’s connections with journals, and the encounters that he 
experienced through them provides a rough, but accurate index of his place in the 
trajectory of twentieth century intellectual history.  Blanchot’s work was at the forefront 
of the connection between literature and philosophy, and by his connection with journals 
like La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française and Critique, he helped to accelerate their 
convergence.  It was in these journals, also, that the purge debate was fought.  It is to the 
general political terrain of this debate that I now wish to turn, before examining 
Blanchot's relation to the purge debate itself.  
 
The Politics of the Purge 
 It was in the journals and pamphlets that proliferated in postwar French 
intellectual culture that the debate over the purge occurred.  After four years of 
occupation, after which the intellectual right was thoroughly discredited, the postwar 
purge offered the intellectual left the opportunity to reconstruct public discourse.  This 
reconstruction of public discourse took the form of a debate over how to deal with 
collaborationist writers and intellectuals.  Though the debate occurred entirely within the 
intellectual left, there were significant points of difference between those who wished to 
                                                 
108 “Il n’est que rumeur informe et ruissellement, sa force est dans la dissimulation,” Foucault, “La Pensée 
du dehors,” Critique, 229 (June 1966): 544.  This murmur is examined at length in Chapter Four of this 
dissertation. 
  72
put collaborationist writers on trial, and those who argued against the criminalization of 
the written word.  Jean-Paul Sartre was in the former camp, and his policy of committed 
literature emerged out of his efforts to intervene in the debate over the purge in favor of 
putting collaborationist writers on trial.  Jean Paulhan was in the latter group, and he 
argued against putting collaborationist writers on trial specifically because one could not 
criminalize language.  Together, Sartre and Paulhan formed the extreme poles of the 
debate.    
In a certain sense, the purge debate was a conflict over editorial policy between 
Sartre's pro-purge Les Temps modernes, and Paulhan's anti-purge journal, Les Cahiers de 
la Pléiade.  They articulated their respective positions in a series of well-known essays 
and books.  While Sartre and Paulhan differed dramatically in their polemics, they each 
shared the same common problematic: the crisis of representation.  Rarely was this 
identified as the explicit topic of their polemics, of course, as they were couched under 
the guise either of an investigation into the origins of literature, or into the propriety of 
the trials and executions of writers.  Yet it was the homology drawn between the two 
questions of the crisis of representation that consistently enabled the polemicists of the 
purge debate to articulate their politics.  The questions of who was representative of 
France, and how linguistic and literary representation operated, were one and the same to 
the polemicists who participated in the purge debate.  A second trope subtended the 
polemics of the purge debate as well: the trope of repetition.  World War II, the 
occupation, the Vichy regime, and the purge were all figured as the repetitions of prior 
events in French history.  A close analysis of Sartre's contributions to the purge debate, 
  73
including his major articulation of his theory of commitment in Qu'est-ce que la 
littérature? and Paulhan's De la paille et du grain, demonstrates the central status that 
representation and repetition occupied in during the purge of writers and intellectuals.  
They served as poles that oriented the field of production in 1947 and 1948. 
 Today, it is necessary to historicize Sartre’s work on commitment in order to see 
past the sometimes inflammatory cant of his polemics.  Only by keeping in mind the 
historical moment in which Sartre articulated his notion of commitment is it possible to 
see Sartre’s desire to create a genuinely egalitarian French republic.  The end of World 
War II was a time of jubilant celebration, and limitless possibility.  During the 
reconstruction, there was a palpable sense that France could, and should be remade from 
the ground up.  It was a time when French intellectuals rethought the very foundations of 
French communal life.  In this context, Sartre laid the foundations for his theory of 
commitment in a series of essays considering the war and its immediate aftermath, 
published in 1944 and 1945, just as the postwar purge was getting underway.  In these 
essays Sartre questioned what had made France vulnerable to collaboration in the first 
place.  His aim was to identify and exclude the preconditions of collaboration from the 
reconstruction of France, so that France could be remade in the most egalitarian way 
possible.   
The most explicit of these essays, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” was published 
in August 1945.  In this piece – which discussed several of the writers implicated by the 
CNE and who were on trial at the purge tribunal, including Alphonse de Chauteaubriant, 
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and Robert Brasillach – Sartre was concerned not so much with 
  74
defining the act of collaboration, as he was interested in isolating the social and 
psychological profile of the collaborator.  To Sartre, the collaborator was characterized 
by his or her failure to integrate into normal society: “Collaboration is a fact of 
disassimilation, in every case it has been an individual decision.”109  These poorly 
integrated collaborators became fascinated with foreign social life, precisely because of 
their own failure to assimilate into domestic social life, and the failure of domestic 
society to bring them in: “At bottom [collaboration] represents a fixation on foreign 
structures of collectivity by those elements who have been poorly assimilated by the 
indigenous community…Everywhere that social life remains intense, in the halls of 
religion or politics, [collaboration] cannot take hold.”110  To Sartre the collaborator was 
an outsider, a person whose own failings prevented them from joining society and 
participating in it fully.   
In what was perhaps Sartre’s most controversial claim made during the purge 
debate, he charged that the collaborator was unable to join and participate in society 
because of an innate weakness, which for Sartre was analogous to homosexuality and 
femininity.  Not possessing strength of his own (after the humiliation of the occupation), 
the collaborator “appropriated for himself the weapons of weakness, and of woman.  One 
will notice curious metaphors throughout the articles of Chateaubriant, Drieu, and 
Brazillach, metaphors which present the relations between France and Germany under the 
                                                 
109 “La collaboration est un fait de désintégration, elle a été dans tous les cas une décision individuelle.” 
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” in Situations III (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1949), 46.  
Originally published in the periodical, La République Française (August 1945). 
110 “Elle représente à l’origine une fixation par des formes collectives étrangères d’éléments mal assimilés 
par la communauté indigène…Partout où la vie sociale est restée intense, dans les foyers religieux ou 
politiques, ces phénomènes ne trouvent pas de place.” Ibid. 
  75
aspect of a sexual union in which France plays the role of the woman.”111  Not only was 
collaboration feminine, it was also a seduction: “The collaborator speaks in the name of 
strength, but he is not strength: he is the ruse, the trick which relies on force, he is even 
charm and seduction, since he pretends to play the lure that French culture exerts on the 
Germans through him.”112  Sartre even went so far as to allege that most collaborators 
were homosexual: “It seems to me that there is a curious mixture of masochism and 
homosexuality [in collaboration].  The homosexual milieu of Paris, and elsewhere, has 
provided numerous, and brilliant recruits.”113   
In order to appreciate the real import of Sartre’s allegations for the debate over the 
purge, it is necessary to see past the sexism and homophobia of his allegations, and look 
closely at the progression that he made from the writing of collaborators, to their 
supposed femininity or homosexuality.  Sartre began by highlighting the collaborators’ 
writing.  He started by pointing out “metaphors which present the relations between 
France and Germany under the aspect of a sexual union in which France plays the role of 
the woman” in the written work of Chateaubriant, Drieu, and Brasillach.  But by the end 
of the same passage, the question of writing had been elided altogether, and the presence 
                                                 
111 “Il reconnaît donc sa faiblesse et ce prêtre de la puissance virile et des vertus masculines s’accomode 
des armes du faible, de la femme.  On relèvera partout dans les articles de Chateaubriant, de Drieu, de 
Brazillach de curieuses métaphores qui présentent les relations de la France et de l’Allemagne sous l’aspect 
d’une union sexuelle où la France joue le rôle de la femme.” Ibid, 58. The misspelling of Brasillach’s name 
– wrongly printed with a z replacing the s, as Brazillach – is a telling error.  Alice Kaplan argues that the 
misspelling was a graphamatic parapraxis, a Freudian slip in which the z betrayed the adequation that 
Sartre drew between collaboration and Nazism.  See Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, 
Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 14. 
112 “Le collaborateur parle au nom de la force, mais il n’est pas la force: il est la ruse, l’astuce qui s’appuie 
sur la force, il est même le charme et la séduction puisqu’il prétend jouer de l’attrait que la culture française 
exerce, d’après lui, sur les Allemands.” Sartre, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” 58. 
113 “Il me paraît qu’il y a là un curieux mélange de masochisme et d’homosexualité.  Les milieux 
homosexuels parisiens, d’ailleurs, ont fourni de monbreuses et brillantes recrues.” Ibid. 
  76
of sexual metaphors now indicated that collaborationist writers were themselves feminine 
or homosexual.  In rhetorical terms, this elision was metonymy: the rhetorical figure by 
which a quality of a thing (in this case, the collaborators’ writing) is taken to represent 
the whole (the collaborators themselves).  This  metonymic elision between the 
collaborators’ writing, and the collaborators’ person  was an early articulation of the 
homology between writing and the national community, later expressed through the 
question of who was representative of France, and the question of what was linguistic 
representation. 
This priority given to the character of the collaborator over acts of collaboration 
reflected Sartre’s interest in the reconstruction of the French national community.  If 
those likely to collaborate could be identified by their telltale traits, then they could be 
excluded from the rebuilding of the national community through the purge.  In making 
this argument, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” introduced the other major trope of the 
purge debate: the figuration of the purge as the repetition of the French Revolution: 
The collaborator, who may or not have had the occasion to manifest himself as 
such, is an enemy that democratic societies constantly carry within their breast.  If 
we want to avoid collaboration that survived the war in other forms, it does not 
suffice to execute certain traitors.  The unification of French society must be 
achieved, as much as possible, which is to say, the work that the Revolution of 
1789 began, which will only be able to realize itself by a new revolution, this 
revolution that was attempted in 1830, in 1848, in 1871.114 
 
                                                 
114 “Le collaborateur, qu’il ait ou non l’occasion de se manifester comme tel, est un ennemi que les 
sociétés démocratiques portent perpétuellement en leur sein.  Si nous voulons éviter qu’il ne survive à la 
guerre sous d’autres formes, il ne suffit pas d’exécuter quelques traîtres.  Il faut, autant que possible, 
achever l’unification de la société française c’est-à-dire le travail que la Révolution de 89 a commencé; et 
c’est ce qui ne peut se réaliser que par une révolution nouvelle, cette révolution qu’on a tentée en 1830, en 
1848, en 1871.” 60. 
  77
In other words, Sartre called not just for a purge, but a full-scale national revolution that 
would remake the national community entirely.  Moreover, Sartre believed that only this 
wholesale reconstruction would be able to protect the national community from those 
collaborators whose collabortionist tendencies remained latent.  In Sartre’s view, this 
reconstruction repeated, and carried the mantle of previous revolutionary moments in 
French history: not just the revolution of 1789, but also those of 1830, 1848, and 1871.   
While “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” made a metonymic elision between the 
collaborators’ writing, and the collaborators themselves, Sartre did not explicitly take up 
the question of writing – that is, the question of the nature of linguistic representation 
itself – until the essays collected in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?  Originally published 
serially from 1945 to 1947 in Les Temps modernes, and collected into a single volume in 
1948, Qu'est-ce que la littérature? was an explicit contribution to the purge debate.  
Though it never reached the same inflammatory tone of “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” 
Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? picked up the former’s line of thought, including the 
homology between the national community and writing, and the figuration of the postwar 
purge of writers and intellectuals as a repetition of previous French revolutions.  The 
central argument of Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, which also became the de jure editorial 
policy at Les Temps modernes was that a writer must commit his or her writing, whether 
they wrote fiction, or non-fiction.  The purge showed that a writer could be held 
materially responsible for what he or she writes before the law, before the body politic, 
and before the nation, sometimes on pain of death.  For Sartre, it was as participants in 
the world that writers were responsible.  In the first issue of Les Temps modernes 
  78
published just two months after “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” Sartre announced in an 
editorial titled “Présentation des Temps modernes” that "the writer is situated in his time: 
each word has reverberations.  Each silence as well.  I hold Flaubert and the Goncourts 
responsible for the repression which followed the Commune because they did not write a 
line to prevent it."115  Preventing such a repression, which meant preventing another 
occupation to Sartre, became the mantra of Les Temps modernes, and a first step toward 
the articulation of Sartre's theory of commitment.   
Moreover, Sartre argued that the committed writer will do more than just try to 
prevent further Occupations, the committed writer will also work towards the betterment 
of society now, and in the future: "our intention is to help produce certain changes in the 
Society that surrounds us...[we] want to change, at the same time, the social condition of 
man, and the concept that he has of himself."116  To desire these changes, and to write in 
a way that worked towards them was to be a committed writer.  Articulating exactly what 
these changes might entail, and how they might be effected, required that Sartre explain 
the thing called writing, which itself required that he articulate his theory of 
representation.  For Sartre, all writing was divisible into either prose or poetry, each of 
which had a different constitution, and a different purpose.  The difference came down to 
what use that the writer made of language.  In Qu'est-ce que la littérature Sartre wrote, 
"Prose is utilitarian in its essence; I would willingly define the prose writer as a man who 
                                                 
115 "L'écrivain est en situtation dans son époque: chaque parole a des retentissements.  Chaque silence 
aussi.  Je tiens Flaubert et Goncourt pour responsable de la répression qui suivit la Commune parce qu'ils 
n'ont pas écrit une ligne pour l'empêcher." Sartre, "Présentation des Temps Modernes," Les Temps 
modernes, 1 (October 1945): 5. 
116 "...notre intention est de concourir à produire certains changements dans la Société qui nous 
entoure...[nous voulons] changer à la fois la condition sociale de l'homme et la conception qu'il a de lui-
même." Ibid. 7-8. 
  79
makes use of words."117  Sartre defined poetry, by contrast, as that which "does not make 
use of [words] at all; I would say, rather, that [poetry] is made use of by words.  Poets are 
men who refuse to utilize language."118  A committed writer should use language like a 
tool.  Language, for Sartre, was an instrument with a purpose.  Each word had its 
entelechy: the goal, aim, or end towards which it tended.  The committed writer must 
voluntarily take responsibility for guiding words toward that end.  "Words...are 'loaded 
pistols'.  If [the writer] speaks, [the writer] fires.  He may be silent, but since he has 
chosen to fire, he must do it like a man, by aiming at targets, and not like a child, at 
random, with eyes closed, solely for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off."119  The poet 
played with words irresponsibly, the way a child might play with its father’s loaded gun.  
The child closes its eyes, squeezes the trigger without looking, and delights in the sound 
of the report.  Who knows where the shot went, or what – if anything – it might have hit?  
Committed prose writers, by contrast, aimed their guns.   
 "The end of language," wrote Sartre, "is to communicate."120  Moreover, as one 
who used the communicative tool of language, the committed prose writer's "function is 
to deliver messages to his readers."121  Messages were little bullets of language, held 
together by meaning, which "alone can give words their verbal unity."122  This mirrored 
                                                 
117 "La prose est utilitaire par essence; je définirais volontiers le prosateur comme un homme qui se sert 
des mots." Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, 26. 
118 "...elle ne n'en sert pas du tout; je dirais plutôt qu'elle les sert.  Les poètes sont des hommes qui refusent 
d'utiliser le langage." Ibid. 17. 
119 "...les mots...sont des "pistolets chargés."  S'il parles, il tire.  Il peut se taire, mais puisqu'il a choisi de 
tierer, il faut que ce soit comme un homme, en visant des cibles et non comme un enfant, au hasard, en 
fermant les yeux et pour le seul plaisir d'entendre les détonations." Ibid. 31. 
120 "...la fin du langage est de communiquer." Ibid. 28. 
121 "...fonction est de délivrer des messages à ses lecteurs." Ibid. 35. 
122 "...c'est en effet la signification seule qui peut donner aux mots leur unité veritable." Ibid. 19. 
  80
the place that Sartre accorded to language in the primordial constitution of subjectivity in 
L'Être et le néant.  Sartre argued that the human subject, as someone whose subjectivity 
was constituted by being the object for another subject (which Sartre called being-for-
others), was essentially a meaning for the other.   Each person meant something for every 
other person.  In this sense, language qua meaning was the primordial condition of the 
subject's being.   
Language is not a phenomenon added on to being-for-others: it is originally 
being-for-others, that is to say the fact that a subjectivity experiences itself as an 
object for the other.  In a universe of pure objects, in no case could language be 
"invented," since it presupposes originally a relation to another subject; and in 
intersubjectivity of the for-others, it is not necessary to invent it, because it is 
already given in the recognition of the other.  I am language by the single fact 
that, whatever I might do, my freely conceived and executed acts, and my 
projections towards my possibilities have a meaning beyond them that escapes me 
and that I experience.123   
 
Citing Heidegger's essay, "Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung," Sartre wrote, "it is in 
this sense – and this sense alone - that Heidegger is right to declare that: I am what I 
say."124  One is what one says because that was how one’s meaning was expressed to the 
other, through whom one was able to recognize one’s own existence.  Unlike the poet, 
who relinquished control over the meaning toward which his or her writing tended, it was 
only with meanings, as Sartre put it, “that the [committed prose writer] has to deal.”125  
The committed prose writer dealt with the human subject in its meaning, which is to say, 
                                                 
123 "Le langage n'est pas un phénomène surajouté à l'être-pour-autrui: il est originellement l'être-pour-
autrui, c'est-à-dire le fait qu'une subjectivité s'éprouve comme objet pour l'autre.  Dans un univers de purs 
objets, le langage ne saurait en aucun cas être "inventé", puis-qu'il suppose originellement un rapport à un 
autre sujet; et dans l'intersubjectivité des pour-autrui, il n'est pas nécessaire de l'inventer, car il est déjà 
donné dans la reconnaissance de l'autre.  Du seul fait que, quoi que je fasse, mes actes librement conçus et 
exécutes, me pro-jet vers mes possibilités ont dehors un sense qui m'échappe et que j'éprouve, je suis 
langage."  Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Être et le néant (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943), 440. 
124 "C'est en ce sens – et en ce sens seulement – que Heidegger a raison de declarer que: je suis ce que je 
dis.” Ibid.   
125 “L’écrivain…c’est aux significations qu’il a affaire.” Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, 16. 
  81
at the level of the subject's reality.  In this way, for Sartre, being a committed writer 
meant committing to reality above all else.  
 There was, however, in both L'Être et le néant and Qu'est-ce que la littérature? 
the repeated suggestion that meaning took precedence over language, that language itself 
was a parasite which only obstructed essential relations.   In L'Être et le néant Sartre 
characterized language – the actual words one said – as subordinate to meaning, the 
means of intersubjective recognition.  He wrote, "it is obvious that by language we mean 
all phenomena of expression, and not the articulated word that is a derivative and 
secondary mode whose appearance could be the object of a historical study."126  For 
Sartre language was derivative and secondary, but also historical, contingent, and 
epiphenomenal.  What was essential was that the meaning was transmitted, in order that 
the reader could be affected by the message.  Language itself, especially poetic language, 
only got in the way of the committed writer's effort to communicate meanings with the 
reader.  In Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Sartre wrote that language should be as much like 
a window as possible: present, but absolutely transparent.  "Words are transparent," 
Sartre wrote, "and the gaze looks through them."127  To Sartre, words "must pass 
unperceived."128  Trafficking with them, as opposed to through them, made no sense.  
This, Sartre suggested, was the trap that stylists fell into, who "consider only this 
                                                 
126 "Il va de soi que par langage nous entendons tous les phénomènes d'expression et non pas la parole 
articulée qui est un mode dérivé et secondaire dont l'apparition peut faire l'objet d'une étude historique." 
Sartre, L'Être et le néant, 441. 
127 "...lest mots sont transparents et...le regard les traverse." Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, 32 
128 "...il doit passer inaperçu." Ibid. 32. 
  82
secondary structure of the enterprise [of writing]."129  Meaning was primary, a human 
host off of which a secondary, inhuman, and parasitic language fed.130   
 The literary historian Denis Hollier detects a tendency to privilege reality over 
language in Sartre's formulation of writing, which rested on a theory of representation 
that privileged semantics over semiotics.  Hollier writes, 
Whether it is a matter of signs (or words) or of images, there is not a line of Sartre 
in which the inflationary precipitousness discrediting in advance any initiative 
that might be accorded to language is not (in one way or another) discredited.  
The definition from Qu'est-ce que la littérature? will be recalled: the verbal phase 
is no more than a "secondary structure" in our enterprise.131  
 
Hollier argues that this "antilinguistics" allowed Sartre to disentangle the confusion of 
words and things that poetry, and stylistics had been allowed to release into reality.  This 
confusion had to be protected against at all costs, up to and including the purge.  Sartre 
made commitment into a principle by which reality would be defended against the 
encroachments of a harmful parasite.  Commitment was a "reality principle," as Hollier 
terms it, drawing on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.132   
 But what was it exactly that Sartre thought had to be protected so dearly?  And 
why did language, of all things, threaten it so seriously?  According to Hollier it was the 
spontaneous community that sprang into the streets of Paris upon the Liberation that had 
                                                 
129 "...à considérer seulement cette structure secondaire de l'enterprise." Ibid. 28-29. 
130 At one point in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? Sartre described Rimbaud's poetry as inhuman, and as 
imposing inhumanity on its reader.  He wrote, "Rimbaud invites us to see [the world] from the outside with 
him, its strangeness comes from the fact that in order to consider it, we place ourselves on the other side of 
the human condition: on the side of God."  "Rimbaud nous invite à la voir du dehors avec lui, son étrangeté 
vient de ce que nous nous plaçons, pour la considérer, de l'autre côté de la condition humaine; du côté de 
Dieu." Ibid. 24. 
131 Hollier, The Politics of Prose, 58-59. 
132 Sartre himself alluded to a "reality principle" at work in his thought in his introduction to Les Temps 
modernes: "Thus we have recourse...to a synthetic conception of reality, whose principle is that of a 
whole."  "Ainsi rcourons-nous...à une conception synthétique de la réalité, dont le principe est qu'un tout."  
Sartre, "Présentation des Temps modernes," 13.  See also Hollier, The Politics of Prose, 51-64. 
  83
to be protected.  Hollier writes: "It was the Liberation that accorded him for the first time 
an experience of the group in fusion, which can be described as the irruption in a public 
space of collective self-consciousness or even as the collectivization of self-
consciousness."133  It might be added that the Liberation was also perhaps the first time 
that Sartre experienced the collectivization of national self-consciousness as well.134  In 
this moment of national celebration, Sartre felt, for the first time, the freedom of being-
together.  In that moment, “society [became] an act of freedoms realizing themselves by 
the simple fact of being-together.”135  It was this “group in fusion” that became so dear to 
Sartre.  Returning to the definition of the committed writer from the “Présentation des 
Temps modernes,” in which Sartre stated that the committed writer would help to produce 
changes in society, one sees Sartre’s desire for the group in fusion made manifest in the 
editorial policy of Les Temps modernes.  It was to be a journal that helped to produce a 
change in society, a change in which one experienced the freedom of the group in fusion 
perpetually renewing itself.  It was to be a journal that protected the group in fusion by 
sorting out the committed from the collaborators. 
 The term "group in fusion" did not appear in Sartre's writing until the Critique de 
la raison dialectique, published in 1960, at which point his model was the storming of the 
                                                 
133 Ibid. 30. 
134 Tony Judt notes that the resistance and the purge were the first occasion in many twentieth-century 
intellectuals' lives that they experienced any kind of national cohesion or purpose, as the period in which 
writers like Sartre and Blanchot came to political consciousness was the dishevelment of the années 
trentes.  Of the sense of national purpose offered by the Resistance and the desire to see it continued after 
the war, Judt writes, "Extrapolating from the Resistance years, the only experience of collective action most 
of them had ever known, unaffiliated intellectuals looked upon inaction as the worst of all options...They 
saw revolution, in this case the continuation and completion of the experience and objectives of the 
Resistance, as the only solution, the only way to prevent France from slipping backward." (Emphasis 
added).  Judt, Past Imperfect, 36. 
135 Hollier, The Politics of Prose, 30. 
  84
Bastille in 1789.  Sartre breathlessly described the mentality of the Parisians in the days 
leading up to the Bastille: "people were running in the streets, shouting, forming 
gatherings, and burning down the gates of the toll houses.  The bond between individuals 
was, in its various forms, that of alterity as the immediate discovery of oneself in the 
Other."136  There was elation and excitement, but not yet true unity.  When the Parisians 
actually stormed the Bastille, the group, formerly a loosely bound collectivity of 
individuals, fused into a unity directed toward a single end.  It was at this point, for 
Sartre, that France became a self-determined nation: "This type of group (a homogeneity 
of fusion) produces itself as its own idea...it is the sovereign nation."137  Writing this in 
1960, Sartre drew an analogy between the group in fusion and the nation, which began 
for him on July 14, 1789.   
 Hollier argues however, that Sartre's understanding of the group in fusion actually 
derived from his experience in the Liberation of 1944.  Sartre repressed the Liberation 
from his consciousness in 1960, Hollier suggests, because it was tainted with the stain of 
literary commitment.  For the Sartre of 1960, literature was degraded, bourgeois, 
superfluous, and secondary to the primary means of commitment: revolutionary political 
activism.  But the logic of the group in fusion as nation was already present even in 
Qu'est-ce que la littérature? albeit not designated as such.  In Qu’est-ce que la 
littérature? Sartre drew a connection between the profusion of "freedoms" that 
                                                 
136 “On court dans les rues, on crie, on se rassemble, on brûle les barrières de l’octroi.  Le lien des 
individus entre eux est – sous les diverses formes réelles qu’il peut prendre – celui de l’altérité comme 
révélation immédiate de soi en l’Autre.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, (Paris: Éditions 
Gallimard, 1960), 387-388. 
137 “Ce type de groupe (homogénéité de fusion) se produit lui-même comme sa propre idée (nous verrons 
le sens de cela): c’est la nation souveraine.” Ibid. 395 
  85
spontaneously erupted during the Liberation with what happens between the writer and 
the reader.  Sartre argued that the writer was incapable of creating the work alone, and 
that the reader was required to complete the task of bringing it into existence.138  This 
dialect of writing and reading engaged the writer and the reader in an intersubjective 
relationship: "To write is to make a call to the reader that he bring the revelation that I 
have undertaken by means of language into objective existence."139  This was a call to the 
reader to exercise his or her freedom.  It was not an injunction, since the reader could 
always put the book down, leaving the creation incomplete.  It was a call, or an appeal for 
the reader to decide to participate in the creation voluntarily.  Since it was voluntarily 
given, the reader participated through his or her freedom: "since this directed creation is 
an absolute beginning, it is thus realized by freedom of the reader, and by what is purest 
in this freedom."140  Thus does freedom become the true essence and content of literature.  
"Whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks only 
of individual passions or whether he attacks the prevailing social regime, the writer, a 
                                                 
138 The difference between Blanchot's conception of reading and Sartre's is that the latter thought that 
reading engaged and engendered both the freedom of the writer as well the reader.  For Sartre, in a 
Cartesianization of the dialectic, this freedom affirmed the subjective agency of each party.  Blanchot's 
concept of reading was, by contrast, strictly anti-humanist.  Neither the writer's nor the reader's freedom are 
affirmed for Blanchot.  Rather, Being violently imposes itself between them, such that they are subjected to 
its presence, rather than subjects that make it present.  See Blanchot, Comment la littérature est-elle 
possible? (Paris: José Corti, 1942), and the essays collected in L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Éditions 
Gallimard, 1955). 
139 "Écrire, c'est faire appel au lecteur pour qu'il fasse passer à l'existence objective le dévoilement que j'ai 
entrepris par le moyen du langage." Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, 59. 
140 "...puisque cette création dirigée est un commencement absolu, elle est donc opérée par la liberté du 
lecteur en ce que cette liberté a de plus pur." Ibid. 
  86
man freely addressing other free men, has only one subject: freedom."141  And it was 
freedom that was brought into the world when the reader read.  
As if to quell any doubt about precisely what kind of freedom he was talking about, and 
precisely who threatened it, Sartre enumerated the difference between and the free writer 
and a collaborationist writer like Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, whom he identified as the 
archetypical disassimilated, collaborationist writer in 1945 in “Qu’est-ce qu’un 
collaborateur?”  If the free writer appealed to the reader's freedom, the collaborationist 
writer – working in concert with a regime that violently restricted France's freedom – 
made no appeal to freedom whatsoever.  Indeed, the collaborationist writer made no 
appeal at all, he merely harangued, and grew increasingly estranged from the body politic 
for it:   
The first months of the Occupation [Drieu la Rochelle] admonished, chided and 
sermonized at his compatriots.  If no one responded it is because they were no 
longer free to do so.  He became irritated; he no longer sensed his readers.  He 
pressed harder, but no sign appeared to prove that he had been understood.  No 
sign of hatred, nor of anger either: nothing.  He seemed disoriented, gripped by a 
growing distress.  He complained bitterly to the Germans.  His articles were 
superb; they became shrill.  The moment came when he struck his breast; no echo, 
except among the sell-out journalists who he despised.  He offered his resignation, 
withdrew it, spoke again, stranded in the desert.  Finally he stopped talking, 
gagged by the silence of the others.  He had demanded their enslavement, but in 
his crazy mind he had imagined it given voluntarily, as if they were still free.142   
                                                 
141 "Ainsi qu'il soit essayiste, pamphlétaire, satiriste ou romancier, qu'il parle seulement des passions 
individuelles ou qu'il s'attaque au régime de la société, l'écrivain, homme libre s'adressant à des hommes 
libres, n'a qu'un seul sujet: la liberté." Ibid. 81. 
142 "Les premiers mois il admonestait, chapitrait, sermonnait ses compatriotes.  Personne ne lui répondit: 
c'est parce qu'on n'était plus libre de le faire.  Il en témoigna de l'humeur, il ne sentait plus ses lecteurs.  Il 
se montra plus pressant mais aucun signe ne vint lui prouver qu'il avait été compris.  Aucun signe de haine, 
ni de colère non plus: rien.  Il parut désorienté, en proie à une agitation grandissante, il se plaignit 
amèrrement aux Allemands; ses articles étaient superbes, il devinrent aigres; le moment arriva où il se 
frappa la poitrine: nul écho, sauf chez des journalistes vendus qu'il méprisait.  Il offrit sa démission, la 
reprit, parla encore, toujours dans le désert.  Finalement il se tut, bâillonné par le silence des autres.  Il avait 
réclamé leur asservissement mais, dans sa tête folle, il avait dû l'imaginer volontaire, libre encore." Ibid. 
81-82. 
  87
 
Collaboration, then, was aligned with a useless profusion of language.  Sartre 
characterized Drieu as someone who spoke merely to hear the sound of his words, like 
the child that plays with a gun just to hear the sound of the shot.  The collaborator 
threatened the fusion of the group because he said things that had no meaning, and that 
did not address the freedom of the reader.  In this way, Sartre drew on his depiction of the 
collaborationist writer as an outsider in “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” in order to 
articulate his theory of committed literature.  It was not just Drieu who was outside the 
body politic: it was the things that he said.  It was as a writer that Drieu was accused of 
collaboration, and though he committed suicide before he could be brought to trial, it was 
for his words that he was condemned.  It was because they signified nothing.  
Collaborationist writing, like poetry, was literally unreal, beyond Sartre's reality 
principle.   
 Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, Sartre's purge polemic, drew the same equivalence 
between the group in fusion and the Liberation that Critique de la raison dialectique 
drew between the group in fusion and July 14.  In a passage prescient of the enthralled 
account of the storming of the Bastille that he wrote twelve years later, Sartre connected 
committed prose writing with the foundations of French citizenship and statehood: "at the 
same time [that Drieu la Rochelle and others were collaborating], others who, happily, far 
outweighed them, understood that the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the 
citizen.  One cannot write for slaves.  The art of prose is at one with the only regime in 
  88
which prose has any meaning: democracy."143  The freedom of the citizen, and the regime 
of democracy founded in the French Revolution were linked, in Sartre's view, with the 
writing of prose during the Liberation.   
Similarly, the Liberation was conceived as the repetition of the French 
Revolution.  As Sartre wrote in “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” the Liberation was the 
repetition of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871.  To these he added the year 1944.  Conceiving 
of the purge as the repetition of the French Revolution vacated the content of the terms by 
which it was represented.  Jeffrey Mehlman's formulation, that "in an unheimlich manner, 
absolutely anything may come to occupy the positions of the repetitive structure," 
haunted Sartre's purge polemic.  When anything could represent the revolution, even the 
purge tribunals, then the revolution lost its specific content.  "Everything would thus be 
vulnerable to seizure by that repetitive and disruptive movement," writes Mehlman.  It 
was this loss of the reassuring stability of content that led Sartre to theorize representation 
as the invisible window of reality, and demand that a prose writer commit him or herself 
to a principle of representing only reality.  A "reality principle" designed to protect the 
repetitive structure of representation from being occupied by someone or something that 
might threaten the purity, and the fragile cohesion of the group in fusion.  And a 
conception of language rooted in the exigency to succeed in protecting that fragile purity: 
"one cannot write without the intention of succeeding perfectly," wrote Sartre, in Qu'est-
                                                 
143 "Au même moment d'autres, qui furent heureusement le plus grand nombre, comprenaient que la liberté 
d'écrire implique la liberté du citoyen.  On n'écrit pas pour des esclaves.  L'art de la prose est solidaire du 
seul régime où la prose garde un sense: la démocratie."  Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, 82. 
  89
ce que la littérature?144  And, by extension, one could be judged based on whether one's 
shot had hit the target. 
 
* 
 It was precisely with Sartre’s conception of language as success or failure that 
Jean Paulhan took issue in his response to the purge debate, De la paille et du grain.145  
Initially, Paulhan was a member of the resistance, a founding member of the CNE, and he 
was even drafted into an editorship during the early stages of Sartre's pro-purge journal, 
Les Temps modernes.  His first split with the CNE and with Sartre happened over the 
publication of the blacklist of writers, which caused him to found his own anti-purge 
journal, Les Cahiers de la Pléiade.  Like Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, Paulhan’s De la 
paille et du grain was initially published serially in Les Cahiers de le Pléiade from 1946 
to 1949, and it was an extension and amplification of the editorial policy that Paulhan 
installed there.  Paulhan's polemic was the exact opposite of Sartre's, and as such, he 
defined the other pole of the purge debate.  Paulhan was against the purge where Sartre 
was for it.  He was against commitment when Sartre demanded it.  He advocated 
pleasure, where Sartre insisted on reality.  De la paille et du grain was playful and ironic 
where Qu'est-ce que la littérature? was didactic and densely philosophical, though 
Paulhan’s thought was equally rigorous and deep.  And most importantly, Paulhan 
                                                 
144 "...on ne saurait écrire sans le projet de réussir parfaitement." Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, 31. 
145 Paulhan, in fact, was a frequent participant in the purge debate, often engaging in petty skirmishes with 
members of the CNE, some of which were partially reprinted in De la paille et du grain.  He also authored 
another anti-purge pamphlet after Les Cahiers de la Pléiade folded, titled Lettre aux directeurs de la 
Résistance, a polemic against the "résistantialiste" discourse that had come to dominate French politics.  
See, Paulhan, De la paille et du grain, 131-173.  See also, Paulhan, Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance 
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1952).   
  90
reveled in the ambiguous reversibility of words, while Sartre tried to batten them down to 
reality.  For all of these reasons, Paulhan's contribution to the purge debate valorized a 
conception of representation and political community vacated of all stable content, and 
denounced the trying and executing of writers for their deviation from what was 
imagined to be the stable content of France. 
 The key difference between Paulhan and Sartre was that Paulhan did not conceive 
of the purge as a repetition of the French Revolution.  To Paulhan, this proposition rested 
on selective memory, on picking and choosing the desirable parts of France's past and 
willfully ignoring its moments of ignominy.  There was repetition in the Occupation and 
the Resistance for Paulhan, but for him it was a repetition of the previous instances when 
Germany invaded and occupied France.  Paulhan's repetitive sequence was not 1789, 
1848, 1870, 1944, but rather 1873, 1914, 1940.146  Yet even as Paulhan's dates differed 
from Sartre's, the effect of repetition was the very same: an unheimlich reversibility, 
ambiguity, substitutability, and undecidability.  For Paulhan, this came down to the fact 
that arguments claiming the French homeland, the patrie, as their justification could be 
made by virtually anybody.  The patrie was, in a sense, subject to reversibility and 
substitutability.  Yesterday's collaborators were today's resisters, and vice versa.  Paulhan 
pointed out that several members of the CNE, who considered themselves the righteous 
representatives of France during the purge, had made vigorous arguments against France 
and Frenchness during the non-conformist 1930s.  Ironically, it was the collaborators 
Maurras, Béraud, and others who defended France and Frenchness during the 1930s, 
                                                 
146 In 1873 Prussian soldiers briefly occupied French territory in order to secure payment of reparations 
from the Franco-Prussian War. 
  91
while the writers who became members of the CNE heaped on abuse after abuse.  “What 
a strange adventure: France almost ruined by the men who prayed to the Goddess France 
every morning.  It was saved (among others) by those who threw the French army into 
the waste basket every day.”147  For Paulhan, patrie was, then, a word with no lasting, 
stable content, a word subject to absolute substitutability.   
 As Paulhan did not conceive of the purge as a repetition of the French Revolution 
in the same manner as Sartre, he did not think that it was the writer's job to stabilize the 
political or linguistic risks run by repetition.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Paulhan 
considered such efforts to be inherently flawed, destined to be washed away with the 
inward and outward tide of repetition.  As such, the writer was under no obligation to 
succeed perfectly.  In a short piece that was the specular reversal of Sartre's "Présentation 
des Temps modernes," entitled "Présentation des 'Cahiers de la Pléiade'," Paulhan wrote, 
"It [the Cahiers] takes the view that a suspect text is not always without merit, and that 
sometimes a work comes to the great writers while they’re asleep.  The Cahiers hopes 
simply to bring together certain curious and apparently useless texts."148  Paulhan 
employed a vocabulary that directly contradicted Sartre's.  Less than perfect texts had 
value.  It was possible for a writer to not know what he or she was doing, to fall asleep at 
the wheel, and still produce something worthwhile.  It was not a requirement of 
worthwhile literature that it have utility.  Paulhan was entirely prepared to publish and 
                                                 
147 “Quelle étrange aventure: la France a failli être ruinée par des hommes qui priaient chaque matin la 
déesse France; elle a été sauvée (entre autres) par ceux qui jetaient chaque jour l'armée française au panier." 
Paulhan, De la paille et du grain, 124-125. 
148 “Ils estiment qu’un texte douteux n’est pas toujours sans mérites, et qu’il arrive aux grands écrivains de 
l’heure d’avoir leurs sommeils.  Simplement espèrent-ils qu’il leur sera donné de recueillir divers textes 
curieux et apparemment inutiles.” Paulhan, “Présentation des “Cahiers de la Pléiade,” Œuvres complètes de 
Jean Paulhan IV (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1969), 368.   
  92
enjoy useless literature.  Moreover, it was possible for someone whose commitments 
were unclear to write the best literature.  Continuing his appropriation and inversion of 
Sartre's vocabulary, Paulhan wrote: "it can easily happen that children or madmen or the 
totally naïve and uneducated will hit the mark the first time, or straightaway catch the sort 
of visionary work that so enchants us."149  Unlike Sartre, who inveighed against writers 
that played with words as a child played with guns, Paulhan believed that the child's 
errant, irresponsible shot, released solely for the pleasure of hearing the gun's sound, 
sometimes hit the target dead on. 
 As Les Cahiers de le Pléiade was the reverse of Les Temps modernes, Paulhan's 
De la paille et du grain was, likewise, the specular opposite of Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la 
littérature?  Where Sartre demanded perfect success, Paulhan hinged his argument on the 
writer's right to error.  Literature, for Paulhan, was language.  And language was 
imperfect.  Words were ambiguous, had multiple meanings, and sometimes they were 
devoid of sense entirely.  But this was precisely why the language of literature enthralled 
the world:  
What attracts us to a language and what gives us the desire of speaking it, is not 
that it is perfect.  It is, rather, its confusions, its errors, its baroquialisms. It's that 
any given word can, fortuitously (by etymology or by pun), evoke twenty other 
words.  In short, it is that it stirs the mind...Languages are destroyed through an 
excess of precision.150   
 
                                                 
149 “C’est qu’il arrive très bien à des enfants ou à des fous, à des gens tout à faits naïfs ou incultes de 
tomber juste du premier coup, d’attraper de prime abord cette sorte de voyance qui nous enchante.” Ibid.   
150 "Ce qui nous attache à une langue et nous donne envie de la parler, ce n'est pas qu'elle soit parfaite.  
C'est qu'elle ait ses confusions, ses erreurs, ses baroqueries.  C'est qu'un mot donné y évoque, au petit 
bonheur (par étymologie ou calembour) vingt autres mots.  Bref, c'est qu'elle agite l'esprit.  Mais les 
langues se détruisent par un excès de précision."  Paulhan, De la paille et du grain, 43. 
  93
Not just poetry, but all language rested on the inherent imperfection of words, which was 
that each word held several meanings.  A writer not only had the right to be in error, it 
was the writer's job to make errors.  Literature depended, in fact, on the exigent risk run 
by the writer:  
We could even ask ourselves if [error] doesn't make a writer better, if error isn't a 
part of  literature, if we don't have an interest becoming guilty quickly, and if must 
not invite the writer into error and madness one more time.  Because, in the end, 
he exposes himself for all of us, who have placed him at the frontier of discovery 
and disquietude.151   
 
For Paulhan, the writer was in the position of having to take the risks of language – the 
risks of erring through language – for the rest of society, which enjoyed the fruits of the 
writer's risks.  And because the writer's business was to take risks for all of society, it 
would be hypocritical for society to then demand that a writer always be correct.  
Imperfection was at the core of what the writer did. 
 The purpose of literature for Paulhan, the end toward which it tended, was not to 
succeed at representing reality, as it was for Sartre.  If Sartre argued that the 
revolutionary purge would adhere to a strict reality principle, as Hollier termed it, then it 
might be possible to continue Hollier’s Freudian analogy and claim that Paulhan argued 
for a principle pleasure.  “What a pleasure to read…” were to first words of De la paille 
et du grain.152  The editorial declaration of intent that Paulhan announced in Les Cahiers 
de la Pléiade even defined literature as pleasure: "By "literature" and even by "poetry" 
we mean what honest people have meant for all time: not necessarily arguments in 
                                                 
151 "C'est même à se demander si ça ne réussit pas à un écrivain d'être coupable, si ça ne fait pas partie de 
la littérature, si nous n'aurions pas intérêt à devenir rapidement coupable, et s'il ne faut pas inviter une fois 
pour toutes l'écrivain à l'erreur et à la folie.  Puisqu'il s'expose enfin pour nous tous, qui l'avons placé a 
l'extrême pointe de la recherche et de l'inquiétude." Ibid. 53-54.   
152 "Quel plaisir de lire." Ibid. 9. 
  94
support of an ethical position or thesis (however attractive), but rather works capable of 
bringing us a certain revelation, a certain pleasure."153  Paulhan's policy was the very 
opposite of Sartre's, for whom every novel was a roman à thèse, to be read for nothing 
other than its ethical position or thesis.   
 Conceiving of literature as a pleasure, open to error and imperfection led Paulhan 
to a conception of political community that was also nearly the opposite of Sartre's.  
While both shared the basic idea that literature built community, and that it was only able 
to do so through language, Paulhan's notion of community was the polar opposite of 
Sartre's.  His was open and indeterminate at every point where Sartre's was closed and 
solidified.  For Paulhan the community was not a somber affair, guarded by a vigilant 
regulatory committee.  Rather, it was a festival, free and open to any and all comers: "The 
point I wanted to come to, is that literature is a language, and also a festival for everyone, 
to which everyone is invited  (even if one does not always attend it)."154  Language and 
literature had a democratic quality for Paulhan.  They were available to the first comer, 
who would always be welcomed.  They existed, like festivals, specifically in order invite 
participants inside:  
I know that language, with its baroque or surprising words, was actually seen...as 
a grand public rejoicing.  It gives pleasure, it is willfully arbitrary and surprising, 
like a festival.  It can be sung and danced.  It even draws a crowd (because 
ultimately, what end does language serve if it does not become popular?).155   
                                                 
153 “Où l’on entende par littérature, et même par poésie, ce que les honnêtes gens ont de tout temps 
entendu: non pas nécessairement des arguments à l’appui d’une morale ou d’une thèse (fût-elle 
sympathiqe).  Non, mais des œuvres capables de nous apporter certain révélation, certaine joie.” Paulhan, 
“Présentation des “Cahiers de la Pléiade,” 367. 
154 "Où je voulais en venir, c'est que la littérature aussi est un langage, et (bien qu'il n'y apparaisse pas 
toujours) une fête pour tout le monde, où tout le monde est invité." Paulhan, De la paille et du grain, 31-32. 
155 "Je vois bien que le langage, avec tous ses mots baroques ou surprenants était plutôt regardé...comme 
une grande réjouissance publique.  Il donne du plaisir; il est volontiers arbitraire et surprenant, comme les 
  95
 
Language was a public thing for Paulhan, a res publica, and not the oligarchy that the 
CNE wanted.  Its entire purpose was to bring people together around the shared pleasure 
of the play of the festival.  For this very reason it was best left to the first comer, the one 
who wandered into the democratic space of the festival unawares, and who would always 
be able to enjoy in the festivities unselfconsciously, without the calculations and the 
reservations of a regulatory committee like the CNE.  Paulhan wrote, "It's not like 
pyrography on the bark of a willow tree, or embroidery on tarlatan, which it's to avoid if 
you don't know how to do it.  Rather, it's like love, or dancing, it's better if you don't 
know how to do it well yet."156  Furthermore, because it was open to any and all comers, 
the democratic festival of language should be a little bit dangerous.  It was right that there 
were inherent risks.  They should be invited, courted, and fostered, not protected against, 
as the democratic festival of language needed the threat of danger in order to keep people 
interested.  The same was therefore true of literature conceived as a language:  "And if it 
is true that literature is a festival, nobody would want it to be a festival without danger.  It 
is a festival where a bomb might blow up in your face, and which could end (as with all 
true festivals) with the cut of a knife."157 Paulhan's conception of literature, of literature 
as a language, and language as a res publica thus pulled together several of his 
                                                                                                                                                 
fêtes.  Il peut se chanter et se danser.  Il réunit même les foules (car enfin, si le langage ne devient pas 
populaire, à quoi sert-il?)." Ibid. 12-13.  
156 "Ce n'est pas comme la pyrogravure sur écorce de saule ou la broderie sur tarlatane, qu'il vaut mieux ne 
pas faire si on ne sait pas.  C'est plutôt comme l'amour, et le danse, qu'il vaut mieux faire, même si l'on ne 
sait pas encore très bien." Ibid. 32. 
157 "Et s'il est exact que la littérature soit une fête, personne ne voudrait qu'elle fût une fête sans danger.  
C'est une fête où il arrive qu'un pétard vous saute aux yeux, et qui peut s'achever (comme toutes le 
véritables fêtes) par des coups de couteau." Ibid. 53. 
  96
underlying metaprinciples: here the festival was conceived as giving pleasure because it 
was arbitrary, surprising, and dangerous.  
 Michael Syrotinski argues that De la paille et du grain was itself the very 
enactment of its theory, that it simultaneously produced a conception of community 
based on linguistic undecidability as it argued for the undecidability of the guilt of 
collaborationist writers.  Syrotinski writes, "Paulhan's text only really begins to come into 
focus if the explicit political discussion is read as a version of the fundamental 
indifference informing linguistic analysis."158 As the historical patrie discussed above 
was subject to reversibility and substitutability because of its repetition, so too was the 
word patrie also subject to these forces.  The terms that Paulhan used to characterize the 
French patrie, whose undecidability, and substitutability derived from the fact that 
absolutely anything was able to occupy to position of the patrie, which is to say, from the 
fact that the patrie was subject to repetition, were the very same that he used to describe 
the situation of collaboration before and after the war: yesterday's patriots were today's 
collaborators.  But, as Syrotinski argues, this undecidability made it impossible to 
determine the innocence or guilt of collaboration.  Paulhan thematized this undecidability 
with a cliché: 
Here is the point that I wanted to come to: as long as they have not decreed that 
opinions exist that make one guilty, and condemn one to death, the pacifists of 
1914 have no right to show such aggression to the pacifists of 1940.  Nor do the 
executed of 1915 (if I might put it this way) look down from on high at the 
executed of 1945.  From the simple point of view of the patrie, they're the same: 
it's six of one, a half dozen of the other [blanc bonnet et bonnet blanc].159  
                                                 
158 Syrotinski, Defying Gravity, 118. 
159 "Voici où je voulais en venir: tant qu'ils n'auront pas décrété qu'il existe des opinions coupables, et 
dignes de mort, les pacifistes de 1914 n'ont pas le droit de se montrer si agressifs pour les pacifistes de 
  97
 
The reversibility of the cliché "bonnet blanc et blanc bonnet" mirrored the reversibility of 
the patrie, from whose point of view, both were the entirely the same.  Because of the 
repetition of the term patrie, no one could claim to be the true patriot, which is to say, no 
one could claim to be the true representative of France.  In this linguistic confusion, it 
was impossible to tell who was a patriot, and who was not.  For Paulhan, even the most 
perfectly aimed shot could not be guaranteed of hitting its target. 
 Paulhan did, however, offer one suggestion of who might be the true 
representative of France, almost as an afterthought and without much elaboration:  
Ah, I would like to be a Jew, to say with more authority than I have that I have 
pardoned France, once and for all, for its inability to defend me.  I would like to 
be a Jew to work with more force than I have at returning to France all of its 
voices, its entire voice.  I would like to be a Jew to become the best of France.160    
 
This astonishing statement, like the "blanc bonnet et bonnet blanc," simultaneously 
collapsed the linguistic into the political, and the political into the linguistic, as Syrotinski 
suggests.  Thus, it must be read ambivalently, as both having both a linguistic and a 
political edge at the same time.  Paulhan's conception of France subject to repeated 
invasions and occupations, and constantly reversing definitions of collaboration and 
resistance meant that there was no stable core to France in 1948.  France was a patrie 
without patriots, a community with nothing around which to commune.  Here the figure 
of the Jew stood in for the representative of France by giving it voice.  There were two 
                                                                                                                                                 
1940.  Ni les fusillés de 1915 (si je peux dire) de regarder de si haut les fusillés de 1945.  Du simple point 
de vue de la patrie, ils se valent: c'est blanc bonnet et bonnet blanc." Paulhan, De la paille et du grain, 116. 
160 "Ah, je voudrais être juif, pour dire - avec plus d'autorité que je n'en puis avoir - que j'ai pardonné à la 
France, une fois pour toutes, son impuissance à me défendre.  Je voudrais être juif pour travailler - avec 
plus de force que je n'en ai - à rendre à la France toutes ses voix, toute sa voix.  Je voudrais être juif pour 
devenir le meilleur des Français." Ibid. 58. 
  98
reasons why the Jew should be able to represent France for Paulhan.  The first reason 
concerned the ability of the Jew to forgive France.  "I would like to be a Jew to be able to 
say with more authority than I have that I have pardoned France for its inability to defend 
me."  This called upon the figure of the Jew as the true victim of WWII, of the 
Occupation, and of collaboration.  That is, this called upon the Jew as an actually existing 
historical-political figure, with more authority than Paulhan (who was a member of the 
Resistance) to forgive France of its sins.  But the second reason why Paulhan claimed that 
the Jew should represent France referred to the linguistic argument made within De la 
paille et du grain about the patrie.  "I would like to be a Jew to work with more force 
than I have at returning to France all of its voices, its entire voice."  In the context of De 
la paille et du grain, the restoration of France's voice referred specifically to giving voice 
to a patrie that had lost its voice through the repeated seizure and re-seizure of role of 
spokesperson for the patrie.  That the Jew was the only figure who was able to return to 
France its voice depended, for Paulhan, on the emptiness of the patrie.  For the Jew was 
the paradigmatic figure lacking a patrie, a figure perpetually without a homeland.  The 
Jew was the only one capable of speaking for a patrie emptied of its content, because the 
Jew represented a people detached from its patrie.  In Paulhan's logic, the Jew was able 
to represent France precisely because France was incapable of being represented by the 
French.  
 Between the cliché, "blanc bonnet et bonnet blanc," and the statement "I would 
like to be a Jew," Paulhan brought together the question of who was representative of 
France and the question of who was allowed to represent France in writing into a 
  99
homology with the question of how linguistic representation operates.  All four were, 
from Paulhan's point of view, the same thing.  The priority that Sartre tried to establish 
for certain writers over others, and for certain ways of writing over others, was 
impossible to decide.  Thus, Paulhan derived the opposite lesson from the formulation of 
repetition, in which absolutely anything may come to occupy the positions of the 
repetitive structure.  Sartre saw in repetition the need to secure the patrie against the 
chance that someone undesirable would wrest it for themselves.  Paulhan, by contrast, 
saw in repetition the inability of anybody at all to secure the patrie. 
 On the one side of the purge debate was the idealist Sartre, who believed that the 
perfect community was possible by way of committing language strictly to reality, and 
who was willing to single out and condemn those who stood in the way of achieving this 
community.  On the other side was the realistic Paulhan, for whom such perfection was 
impossible, and who believed that community fused only over the messy yet pleasurable 
imperfection of language.  Here, in the field of the purge debate, the ravages of repetition 
produced an idealism that justified itself by reality, and a realism that based its claims on 
pleasure.  Sartre conceived of the purge as the repetition of the French Revolution (1789, 
1830, 1848, March 1871, August 1944), Paulhan conceived of World War II as the 
repetition of previous German occupations of France (1873, 1914, 1940).  Collapsing the 
two questions of the crisis of representation (who was representative of France and how 
does linguistic representation operate) under the unifying problematic of repetition led 
both to the indeterminacy of the patrie.  Sartre's response was to fix the patrie's 
  100
indeterminacy to a reality principle.  Paulhan's response was to let the patrie's 
indeterminacy sway back and forth through a pleasure principle.   
 
* 
It was between these two poles in the field of the purge debate that Blanchot 
intervened.  Blanchot joined Paulhan in the critique of Sartrean commitment.  Like 
Paulhan, Blanchot was deeply suspicious of Sartre’s desire to affect material political 
relations through language.  To Blanchot, as to Paulhan, language was far too volatile to 
be used as an instrument of political engagement without serious precaution.  But unlike 
Paulhan, Blanchot did not think that language’s sole use was pleasure.  Rather, language 
was the universal condition of all political existence for Blanchot, and as such language 
was neither as pleasurable as Paulhan conceived it to be, nor did it have the hard and fast 
reality that Sartre hoped for.  Blanchot critiqued the way that Sartrean commitment both 
overstepped the inherent limits of language, and failed to recognize language’s true 
political register. 
Blanchot also united the questions of the crisis of representation by figuring the 
purge as repetition, but for him it was the repetition of the massacres meted out to 
revolutionaries in the aftermath of revolution: 1794, 1851, May 1871, October 1944.  In 
this repetitive sequence (Thermidor, the coup of Louis Napoléon, the massacre of the 
Commune, and the purge), language was neither that which secured reality, nor that 
which gave pleasure.  Rather, for Blanchot, language was the compulsion toward death 
that united all communities.  If Hollier drew on Freud in describing Sartre’s conception 
  101
of language as a reality principle, and if Paulhan’s conception of language might be 
called a pleasure principle, then Blanchot's "La Littérature et le droit à la mort" can be 
said to have articulated the death drive of the patrie. 
 Before publishing his major intervention in the purge debate, "La Littérature et le 
droit à la mort" in the journal Critique, Blanchot was an occasional contributor to both 
Sartre's Les Temps modernes, and Paulhan's Les Cahiers de la Pléiade.  Despite the 
impartiality that participating in both journals might convey, Blanchot was decidedly 
closer to Paulhan's position than he was to Sartre's through 1946 and 1947.  His 
contributions to Les Cahiers de la Pléiade followed Paulhan's editorial policy of giving 
precedence to art over reality, though they lacked the polemic edge of Paulhan's pieces.161  
Indeed, Blanchot reserved his first polemical contributions to the purge debate for Les 
Temps modernes, where he published three essays at the same time that he was 
contributing to Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, and each of which ran counter to the Sartrean 
editorial policy of commitment articulated in the "Présentation des Temps modernes."  
The first was a positive review of Jean Paulhan's récit, "Aytré qui perd l'habitude," titled, 
"Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," published in June 1946.162  The second was the more pointedly 
anti-Sartrean, "Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi," from April 1947.163  And the third – 
which appeared immediately before "La Littérature et le droit à la mort" – was a long 
essay on Sade, "À la rencontre de Sade," written in October 1947.164  Yet it is not the 
scandal of these essays having appeared in Les Temps modernes, but rather their content 
                                                 
161 These contributions included, for instance, a short passage from the novel Les Très-Haut.  See 
Blanchot, "En Bonne Voie," Les Cahiers de la Pléiade 1 (April 1946): 141-151.   
162 Blanchot, “Le Paradoxe d’Aytré,” Les Temps modernes 9 (June, 1946): 1576-1593. 
163 Blanchot, “Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi,” Les Temps modernes 19 (April, 1947): 1304-1317. 
164 Blanchot, “A la Rencontre de Sade,” Les Temps modernes 25 (October, 1947): 577-612. 
  102
that is historically significant.  While none was a fully developed purge polemic in its 
own right, these pieces published in Les Temps modernes explicitly responded to the 
thought of both Sartre and Paulhan, by taking up the questions of the crisis of 
representation.  As such, they laid the implicit foundation of "La Littérature et le droit à 
la mort," in which neither Sartre nor Paulhan appeared.   
 "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," which appeared just two months after the first issue of Les 
Cahiers de la Pléiade, was Blanchot's attempt to answer the linguistic question of the 
crisis of representation: how does representation operate?  At this point, however, in the 
summer of 1946, Blanchot answered this question without reference to the purge.  "Le 
Paradoxe d'Aytré" considered linguistic representation through a comparative analysis of 
Pauhlan's "Aytré qui perd l'habitude," and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé.  Between 
these two, Blanchot found a correspondence in which both Paulhan and Mallarmé 
thought that all language tended toward the poetic, and that all language paradoxically 
depended on the absence of the thing represented.  Citing Mallarmé's "Crise de vers," 
Blanchot expressed the problematic simply: "I say: a flower!" and in order for this 
statement to be intelligible, it is necessary for the real flower to be removed, displaced, 
cast out of the scene, and replaced by the word flower.165  What was crucial for both 
Paulhan and Mallarmé, in Blanchot's view, was the movement of absence followed 
immediately by presence.  In the first phase of the movement, the power of creation 
enabled by the word, also pushed the thing away, made the thing absent, so that the word 
could exist on its own.  This was the "power of representation and of signification which 
                                                 
165 "Je dis: une fleur!" Blanchot, "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," 1580. 
  103
creates a distance, an emptiness between things and their names, and prepares the 
absence where creation takes form."166  In this sense, absence was at the foundation of 
language as words were only intelligible to the extent that they put the things they 
represented at a distance.  Indeed, words were made possible by this absence, for they 
would not be necessary if the thing itself was present (in which case it would suffice to 
communicate entirely by means of pointing one's finger).  Here Blanchot used Paulhan's 
récit to move beyond the terms of De la paille et du grain: absence was the necessary 
precondition of language, rather than its effect, as Paulhan believed of language's 
indeterminacy and substitutability.   
 With the second part of this movement however, Blanchot went further still than 
Paulhan, by arguing that when language became a part of thought, when it became 
consciousness itself, then it replaced this absence created by the word, with the 
materiality of the word itself.  This thing was made of letters and ink when written down, 
or sound and rhythm when spoken.  It was all of the tactile, material qualities of the word.   
Language must, in the moment when it allies itself to the movement of 
consciousness, to consciousness' ability to be present to things in holding them 
infinitely at a distance, when it allies itself to consciousness' right to know by the 
nothingness of what it knows, then language must also ally itself to the contrary 
of consciousness, to a thing, to a solidity, to a pure and simple material 
presence.167   
 
Thus, Blanchot argued that language became a solid presence at the very instant it 
seemed to vanish behind an absence.  By the simple movement of passing through 
                                                 
166 "...pouvoir de représentation et de signification qui, créant une distance, un vide, entre les choses et leur 
nom, prépare l'absence où la création prend forme." Ibid. 
167 "Il faut que le langage, dans le moment où il s'apparénte le plus au mouvement de la conscience, à son 
pouvoir d'être présente aux choses en les tenant infiniment à distance, à son droit de connaître par le néant 
de ce qu'elle connaît, s'apparente aussi le plus au contraire de la conscience, à une chose, à un bloc, à une 
pure et simple présence matérielle." Ibid. 1581. 
  104
consciousness, through the experience of thought, language became a thing.  The absence 
on which language formerly rested became the heavy, handy things that composed the 
ordinary discourse of lived reality.   
 Blanchot illustrated this point through a reading of Paulhan's "Aytré qui perd 
l'habitude." The main character in this récit, a soldier named Aytré, keeps a journal 
recording each day's mundane events while he marches with the Fourth Colonial Division 
through Madagascar.  Eventually, Aytré loses the ability to describe these mundane 
events anymore, and suddenly begins to describe not the day’s banalities, but "hairstyles, 
judgments on colonization, strange landscapes," with heretofore unknown literary brio.168  
For Blanchot, the question raised by this outburst of language was, what lack in Aytré did 
this effusion of speech come to fill?  Blanchot’s answer was that language came to him in 
order to fill a fundamental lack within his consciousness, but it exited his consciousness 
with the full weight of a real, material thing:  
The paradox of Aytré is that speech comes to him as the response to a 
fundamental lack, and at the same time, speech itself is attained through this lack, 
sent back through Aytré to its beginning (or, one might equally say, condemned to 
end), and thus speech is made possible by what puts it in contestation, by what 
makes it impossible.169   
 
This paradox was the paradox of language itself, that it was both substantive, and 
ineffable.  For Blanchot, its ineffability came from the absence into which words 
dispersed the things they purported to represent.  Its substantiality came from having 
passed through, and having been spoken by a historically situated consciousness in the 
                                                 
168 "Cheveux tressés, jugements sur la colonisation, paysages étranges." Ibid. 1588. 
169 "Le paradoxe d'Aytré est qu'en lui la parole vient comme la réponse à un manque fondamental, mais 
qu'en plus elle est elle-même atteinte par ce manque, renvoyée par lui à son commencement (ou, aussi bien, 
condamnée à finir) et ainsi rendue possible par ce qui la met en contestation, par ce qui la rend impossible." 
Ibid. 1592. 
  105
real world.  In this way, Blanchot answered not only the question of how linguistic 
representation operated, but also the question of how it became significant within a 
specified historical context.  Yet Blanchot managed to answer the latter question without 
yet conceding such historical significance to the political, to which Jean-Paul Sartre 
insisted that any article published in his Les Temps modernes commit.   
 While "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré" responded to the question of how linguistic 
representation operated through a consideration of one of Paulhan's récits, Blanchot's 
second contribution to Les Temps modernes, "Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi," 
attacked the Sartrean theory of commitment directly.  Blanchot made a step-by-step 
critique of commitment by reviewing Temps et roman, a work of literary criticism by one 
of Sartre's disciples, Jean Pouillon, which advanced Sartre's argument about the necessity 
of the writer committing himself to reality.  Blanchot disagreed with Pouillon at almost 
every turn.  "Le roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi" was a relentlessly negative review: 
Pouillon "encountered more obstacles than he admits," Pouillon's book was flawed 
because it did not question its own "paradoxical character," there are things over which 
Pouillon "passes hastily," and "problems that he neglects," Pouillon treats Balzac in "a 
slightly specious manner."   
 These objections were, however, epiphenomenal to Blanchot's main point of 
contention, which was that novels were, first of all, works of fiction.  To commit to the 
novel would be committing to fiction, even as Sartre and Pouillon believed it was 
committing to reality.  No amount of philosophizing would be able to circumvent this 
irreducible fact.     
  106
The novel is a work in which fictitious events and characters are realized in words 
through a double act of writing and reading, each one incommensurable to the 
other.  That this fiction justifiably needs words to realize itself, and that outside of 
words it has no specific means of manifesting itself, is sufficient to demonstrate 
the extent to which fiction is the novel's proper reality.170   
 
To be sure, Blanchot’s version of fiction took on a reality proper to itself, but this reality 
was the reality of words, which required the passage through consciousness in order to 
manifest as reality.  This was Blanchot's point in "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," which he 
painstakingly recapitulated in "Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi," as if to remind Sartre 
himself that he published the former piece.  For Pouillon, as for Sartre, there was a 
continuum between the writer, the words of the novel, and the reader.  Together they 
established a circuit of reality.  But for Blanchot no such continuum existed, there was 
always an absolute distance between one subject and the other, the distance of two 
separate consciousnesses who will never meet on the plane of reality.   
Even if it is recognized that the relations with the other are unmediated, they are 
such that they only allow us to meet the other as other, forever different from us.  
It is in the novel alone that we are able 'to put ourselves in the place of the 
characters'; only the reader can allow himself to slip into an existence which is not 
his, and thanks to the fascinating emptiness that reading creates, acquiesce to live 
outside himself, as if he were  no longer anything but the other.171   
 
For Sartre and Pouillon it was the act of sharing reality that established community, the 
fusion between two people.  For Blanchot the contrary was true.  It was in fiction that 
                                                 
170 "Le roman est une œuvre où les événements, les personnages, en tant que fictifs, se réalisent sur les 
mots par un acte double, en perpétuel porte à faux, celui de l'écriture et celui de la lecture.  Que cette fiction 
ait justement besoin des mots pour se réaliser, qu'en dehors d'eux elle n'ait aucun moyen spécifique de se 
manifester, cela suffirait à faire comprendre combien la fiction est la réalité propre du roman."  Blanchot, 
"Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi," 1311-1312. 
171 "Même si l'on reconnaît que les relations avec autrui sont des relations immédiates, elles sont telles 
qu'elles ne nous font rejoindre autrui que comme étant autre, à jamais différent de nous.  C'est dans le 
roman et le roman seul que l'on peut 'se mettre dans la peau des personnages'; seul le lecteur se laisse 
glisser dans une existence qui n'est pas la sienne et, grâce au vide fascinant que crée la lecture, accepte de 
vivre en dehors de soi, comme s'il n'était plus rien qu'autrui." Ibid. 1315. 
  107
communion was established: communion between the reader and the characters, between 
the reader and the writer, and between the characters and the writer.  This was, as 
Blanchot put it, not reality, but rather the fiction that was the proper reality of the novel.  
It was a secondary reality, made of the very same stuff as the material words that 
Blanchot discussed in "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," which required passage through 
consciousness, and through lived experience in order to become a part of material reality. 
 To commit oneself to writing was thus to commit to fiction rather than to reality.  
It involved a bit of deception.  Pouillon called those novels that established the circuit of 
reality between the writer, the characters of the novel, and the reader, "with-novels," 
rather like Heidegger's mitsein.  For Blanchot, these involved deception more than any 
other novels.  Blanchot wrote, "If the 'with-novel' invites us into a kind of relation in 
which it makes us live with someone other than ourselves, in exactly the same relation as 
we have with ourselves, a fundamental deception lies waiting to be discovered there, for 
existence presents nothing of the sort to us."172  If the writing of the novel required a bit 
of deception, then the writer was by necessity a bit deceitful.  For Blanchot, however, this 
was the "deceit essential to art, and to the art of the novel in particular."173  Blanchot 
declared:   
The novel is a work of bad faith.  Bad faith on the part of the novelist who 
believes in his  characters and who at the same time sees himself behind them, 
who ignores them, who realizes them as strangers, and who finds the means to 
dispose of them in the words of which he is the master, without ever ceasing to 
believe that words escape him.  Bad faith on the part of the reader who plays with 
the imaginary, who plays at being the hero he is not, who plays at taking fiction 
                                                 
172 "Si 'le roman-avec' nous invite à un genre de rapport où il nous faut vivre avec quelqu'un d'autre, 
exactement comme celui-ci vit avec soi, il faut bien y découvrir une tricherie de principe, car l'existence ne 
nous propose rien de semblable." Ibid. 
173 "Tricherie essentielle à l'art, à l'art romanesque en particulier." Ibid. 
  108
for reality, and finally who, in this enchantment that holds existence at a distance, 
finds the possibility of living this existence with meaning.174   
 
Bad faith was not a bad thing for Blanchot.  On the contrary, it was preferable to 
commitment, which naïvely believed that it committed to reality through literature, but 
which succeeded merely in deceiving itself as to the nature of both reality and literature.  
Bad faith, on the other hand, held no illusions about the fiction it created.  It was 
therefore able to realize a connection between people at the level of fiction, which was, in 
the summer of 1947, after the experience of the occupation, the Vichy regime, and the 
postwar purge of writers and intellectuals, the only level at which such a connection 
remained possible for Blanchot.       
 Blanchot's third, and final, contribution to Les Temps modernes was "À la 
rencontre de Sade," was published in October 1947, immediately before "La Littérature et 
le droit à la mort" was published in Critique.  Unlike "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré" and "Le 
Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi," it did not respond to the polemics, or the polemicists of 
the purge debate.   It stood apart from the purge debate, as an independent consideration 
of the entire œuvre of Sade.175  Blanchot's explicit concern was with neither the 
mechanics of representation, nor with the politics of commitment, nor even with the 
formation of community, even though all were important subtexts.  Nor was he 
concerned with the scandalous libertinage that Sade described.  Rather, Blanchot was 
                                                 
174 "Le roman est une œuvre de mauvaise foi, mauvaise foi de la part du romancier qui croit en ses 
personnages et cependant se voit derrière eux, qui les ignore, les réalise comme inconnus et troube dans les 
mots dont il est maître le moyen de disposer d'eux sans cesser de croire qu'ils lui échappent.  Mauvaise foi 
du lecteur qui joue avec l'imaginaire, qui joue à être ce héros qu'il n'est pas, qui joue à prendre pour réel ce 
qui est fiction et finalement s'y laisse prendre et, dans cet enchantement qui tient l'existence écartée, 
retroube une possibilité de vivre le sens de cette existence." Ibid. 1316.  
175 If "À la rencontre de Sade" had an interlocutor, it was Pierre Klossowski's Sade, mon prochain.  See 
Klossowski, Sade, mon prochain (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1947). 
  109
interested in what he called Sade's logic, which consisted of turning one dialectical term 
into the other's condition of possibility.  For Sade, "the basis of...imperfect crimes is an 
impossible crime, of which the imagination alone is able to contemplate."176  By this 
logic, the latter, impossible crime was a perfect, dreamt-of crime whose very inexistence 
made possible the existence of the many lesser, imperfect crimes that abounded 
throughout the work of Sade.  This paradox, in which the impossible was the very 
condition of possibility for real crime, advanced the logic Blanchot offered in "Le 
Paradoxe d'Aytré."  There, Blanchot suggested that the absence at the heart of language 
made all communication possible.  In "À la rencontre de Sade," Blanchot extended this 
logic beyond the sphere of language to thought itself.  The characters in Sade's novels 
always sought to approach a crime beyond the petty ones with which they busied 
themselves.  They always strove to exceed the crimes that they were actually capable of 
committing.  If they murdered someone, their depravity drove them to desire a murder 
that the victim would endure perpetually, and infinitely.  This impossible, imaginary 
murder incited Sade's characters to commit ever more ordinary, possible murders.  
Without it, they could not have continued to commit any crimes at all.  In this way, the 
impossible crime became the condition of possibility for the possible crime.   
 This logic, in which one dialectical term became the other's condition of 
possibility, informed Blanchot's key concept in "À la rencontre de Sade": the law. This 
was the exact opposite of the ordinary conceptions of natural law and positive law.  
Traditionally, natural law is held to be a law emanating from a universal natural 
                                                 
176 "Le fondement de...crimes imparfaits est un crime impossible dont seule l'imagination peut rendre 
compte." Blanchot, "À la rencontre de Sade," 597. 
  110
authority.  A common example of natural law is cited in the United States Declaration of 
independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their 
Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  Positive law, by contrast, describes those laws 
conceived and enacted by people, such as contract law, for example.  Both conceptions of 
the law share, however, the belief that subjects exist anterior to the law.  Blanchot, on the 
other hand, drawing on Sade, viewed the law as a subject-forming discourse: subjects did 
not exist until they were made subject to the law.  The law of god, for example, served to 
demonstrate the way in which the law could be construed to be wholly determinative of 
subjectivity.  If one believed that all men were created by god, and therefore subject to 
god’s law, then one would also have to accept that all subjectivity was determined by 
god’s law.  To Sade, this law indicated that humanity was never actually free, insofar as 
humanity was always subject to god’s law.  Sade’s goal was to find a way to get outside, 
or beyond the law, in order to reach a place of pure freedom.  For Sade, the only way to 
accomplish this move beyond the law was transgression.  But during the postwar purge of 
writers and intellectuals, Blanchot was interested in Sade’s attempt to move beyond the 
law, and establish a new order of pure freedom because of the way that it paralleled 
Sartrean commitment’s desire to establish a new national community purged of the 
corrupting influence of collaborators. 
In Blanchot's understanding of Sade, the law, in seeking to protect, actually ended 
up inciting transgression.  In "À la rencontre de Sade," on the contrary, transgression was 
not possible until there was law.  Like the impossible crime that drove the libertine to 
commit ever greater crimes, the law became the condition of possibility for its own 
  111
violation.  The law was an inaccessible, unreachable limit, like the impossible: "Nothing 
arrests the law, because there is nothing higher than it, and it is therefore always above 
me.  This is why, even if it serves me, it oppresses me."177  Even the sovereign was 
subject to the law, since it was through the law that his sovereignty existed: "the 
Sovereign is only the sovereign, even if the law helps him to tyrannize the weak, entirely 
by an authority created in the name of the weak.  It is only by substituting the false bond 
of a contract for the force of a single man that the sovereign becomes master."178  The 
sovereign only "incarnated" the power of the law.  The Sadean figure was driven to 
surpass this most high law, in order to achieve freedom.  To the Sadean figure, the law 
was an unnatural fetter placed on the natural freedom of mankind.  Only the power to 
commit the most deplorable transgressions of the law gave one access to the space 
beyond the law.  This power was the energy of the Sadean figure.  "In a world denatured 
by law, [Power] creates a haven where the law is silenced, a closed space where legal 
sovereignty is ignored rather than combated."179  For Blanchot, the law operated with the 
same logic as the impossible, it was an unreachable limit that created the very possibility 
of transgression, even if this transgression was always thwarted by the law's 
inaccessibility.  If there were no law, transgression would not need to exist. 
 Blanchot argued that the inaccessible law drove Sade's libertines not just to 
horrific transgressions, but also to the absurd repetition of transgression.  The compulsion 
                                                 
177 "Rien n'arrête la loi, parce qu'il n'y a rien au-dessus d'elle et qu'elle est dès lors toujours au-dessus de 
moi." Ibid. 585. 
178 "Le Souverain n'est que le souverain, car même si la loi l'aide à écraser les faibles, c'est tout de même 
par une autorité créée au nom des faibles, c'est tout de même, et substituant à la force de l'homme seul le 
faux lien d'un practe, qu'il devient le maître."  Ibid.  
179 "D'un monde dénaturé par la loi, elle se crée une enclave où la loi fait silence, un lieu clos où la 
souveraineté légale est ignorée plutôt que combattue." Ibid. 586. 
  112
to exceed the law drove Sade's figures to repeat their massacres two and three times a 
day, murdering four and five hundred victims at a time.  These victims were stripped of 
all their individual qualities, reduced to the absence of their personhood before they were 
ever killed, in the same way that Mallarmé suggested that the word flower eliminated the 
actual flower.  "The repetitions are infinite, and fabulous," wrote Blanchot.180  The 
absurdity into which the crimes descended as a consequence of their repetition had the 
effect of evacuating them of all content.  The victims' lives were rendered meaningless by 
being placed into the repetitive structure of the massacre:  
In these gigantic scenes of death, those who die have already lost even the 
smallest bit of  reality, who, if they disappear under this derisive facility, were 
annihilated by an act of total and absolute destruction beforehand, are not actually 
there, and they only die to bear witness to this kind of original cataclysm, to this 
destruction which is not only for them, but for everyone else as well.181    
 
As repetition evacuated words of their meaning, so too was it able to evacuate a life of its 
meaning, long before the victim's body actually expired.  The libertine attempting to 
accede beyond the law thus lived alone in a desert: "the beings that he meets there have 
less reality than mere things, they are less than shadows, and, in tormenting them, in 
destroying them, it is not their lives that he seizes, rather he verifies their nothingness."182  
Blanchot cited a long passage from the Les 120 jours de Sodom, in which Sade described 
the women who will be the victims of the libertines, as beyond rescue, and already dead.  
                                                 
180 "Les répétitions sont infinies, fabuleuses." Ibid. 595. 
181 "Dans ces mises à mort gigantesques, ceux qui meurent n'ont déjà plus la moindre réalité, que, s'ils 
disparaissent avec cette facilité dérisoire, c'est qu'ils ont été préalablement annihilés par un acte de 
destruction totale et absolue, qu'ils ne sont là et qu'ils ne meurent que pour porter témoignage de cette 
espèce de cataclyseme originel, de cette destruction qui ne vaut pas seulement pour eux mais pour tous les 
autres." Ibid. 
182 "Désert; les être qu'il y rencontre sont moins que des choses, moins que des ombres et, en les 
tourmentant, en les détruisant, ce n'est pas de leur vie qu'il s'empare, mais c'est leur néant qu'il vérifie."  
Ibid. 
  113
"This must be taken literally," Blanchot wrote, "these women are already dead, 
eliminated, locked away in the absolute emptiness of a bastille into which existence no 
longer penetrates, and where their lives only serve to manifest this quality of "already 
dead" with which their lives are linked."183  By being subjected to the dispersive effect of 
repetition, the women who will be the victims of Sade's libertines, entered into a space of 
emptiness, where they were present only by virtue of the absence of their lives, like 
Mallarmé’s flower.   
For Blanchot, Sade's logic was the logic of the attempt to surpass the law through 
repetition.  Where the law gave meaning to people's lives, and determined their 
subjectivity, the repetition of transgressing the law evacuated those lives of all meaning, 
and hence the law was denuded of its tyrannical authority.  Freedom could only exist in 
the vacancy established by repetition.  Here repetition was an attempt to gain access to a 
zone beyond the law, where the law no longer held sway over existence.  As Blanchot 
wrote in "À la rencontre de Sade,"  "This is also why Sade was able to recognize himself 
in the Revolution, only in the measure to which, during the passage from one law to 
another, it sometimes represented the possibility of a regime without law."184  On this 
point Blanchot quoted Sade himself: "In order to annul its old laws, it is obligated to 
establish a revolutionary regime in which there is no law."185  Repetition became a means 
                                                 
183 "Cela doit être entendu au sens propre: elles sont déjà mortes, supprimées, enfermées dans le vide 
absolue d'une bastille où l'existence n'entre plus et où leur vie ne sert qu'à rendre sensible ce caractère de 
"déjà mort" avec lequel elle se confond." Ibid. 
184 "C'est pourquoi aussi Sade n'a pu se reconnaître dans la Révolution que dans la mesure où, passage 
d'une loi à une autre, elle a pendant quelque temps représenté la possibilité d'un régime sans loi." Ibid. 585. 
185 "Pour abroger ses anciennes lois, il est obligé d'établir un régime révolutionnaire où il n'y a pas de loi."  
Ibid. 586. 
  114
of vacating old laws of their efficacy, and clearing a space within which to establish new 
bonds for the community.   
Blanchot’s work on Sade laid the foundation for his intervention in the debate 
over the purge of writers and intellectuals.  Blanchot’s intervention was a critique of 
Sartrean commitment’s desire to found a new national community beyond the law, its 
desire for a community of pure freedom, removed of any cancerous collaborators.  Sade’s 
quotation about the necessity of creating a society in which there are no laws at all in 
order to leave an old order of society behind, might equally have been applied to the 
purge.  Here Blanchot drew on Sade to illustrate that Sartre’s desire for a pure national 
community could never be achieved through commitment’s attempts to excise only a few 
traitors.  Rather, real change could only be affected through the total annihlation of the 
old order.  In order to establish the pure community that Sartre desire, Blanchot argued 
that a wave of revolutionary force would have to sweep through France, carrying 
everyone away with it, including Sartre’s committed writers.      
 
Why This Woman? 
"À la rencontre de Sade" may not have been an explicit purge polemic, but it 
dovetailed with the trope of repetition that circulated throughout the writing of Sartre and 
Paulhan, and its discussion of the law formed a crucial third term in between the absence 
of language analyzed in "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," and the notion of a community through 
fiction from "Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi."  In "La Littérature et le droit à la mort," 
the first half of which was published immediately after "À la rencontre de Sade," in 
  115
November 1947, Blanchot used this logic to explain the purge, and to intervene in the 
purge debate.  But while Blanchot’s contribution to the purge debate was couched in the 
same terms, and used the same tropes as Sartre and Paulhan’s, “La Littérature et le droit à 
la mort” was a radical departure from their understandings of language, representation, 
and repetition’s relation to politics.  In this way “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” was 
more than just a critique of the political efficacy of commitment.  It also shifted the terms 
of the debate away from the possibility of using literature to affect politics, to a 
consideration of the implicit collusion between literature and politics – that is to say, to 
the very literary quality of politics itself.  Unlike Sartrean commitment, which sought to 
affect material political relations through the linguistic realm of literature, “La Littérature 
et le droit à la mort”  established that the political and the linguistic were one and the 
same.  Blanchot’s critique of Sartrean commitment was that if one wished to engage in 
the political through the literary, one must limit one’s engagement strictly to the literary.    
 Just as both Sartre and Paulhan's purge polemics were situated by their 
association with Les Temps modernes and Les Cahiers de la Pléiade respectively, so was 
"La Littérature et le droit à la mort" partially defined by its institutional location.  "La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort" was situated elsewhere in the landscape of French 
intellectual politics than his previous essays.  Blanchot published it in the journal, 
Critique, which had largely abstained from engaging in the open politics of the purge 
debate.  To be sure, Critique contested the editorial policy of commitment of Les Temps 
modernes, but by no means was it as openly polemical as Les Cahiers de la Pléiade.  
Furthermore, even though Critique was founded by Blanchot's friend, Georges Bataille, 
  116
and even thought Blanchot was a member of the editorial board, his choice to publish his 
major intervention in the purge debate with a predominantly anti-polemical journal 
signified more than just a filial connection.  It placed "La Littérature et le droit à la mort" 
at a distance from the open polemics of Sartre and Paulhan.  It was recognizable as a 
purge polemic from the very first sentence (which called into question the very validity of 
Sartre's question, what is literature?), yet it was also immediately recognizable as a 
different kind of purge polemic, for it neither justified nor condemned the purge in 
explicit terms.  While "La Littérature et le droit à la mort" had all the hallmarks of the 
purge debate (it was clearly articulated within the crisis of representation and it took up 
the standard questions of who was representative of France, and how linguistic 
representation worked), Blanchot's answers to these questions however, distinguished his 
the rest of the purge polemics.   
"La Littérature et le droit à la mort" drew together all of the threads that Blanchot 
unraveled in the essays he published in Les Temps modernes, gathering them together 
into a single, unified whole, which together formed his contribution to the purge debate.  
The absence of words that Blanchot elaborated in "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," the community 
through fiction elaborated in "Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi," and the repetitive 
transgression of the law from "À la rencontre de Sade" all came together in "La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort."  Unlike Sartre, who saw the Liberation as the repetition 
of the French Revolution, and unlike Paulhan who saw the Occupation as the repetition 
of previous moments in French history when France had been occupied by Germany, 
Blanchot saw the purge as the repetition of Thermidor; his  chronology included those 
  117
moments when France had undergone a revolutionary counter-reaction and a purge: 
1794, 1851, May 1871, October 1944. 
 For Blanchot, literature was the fulfillment of revolution, and revolution 
necessarily ended in a Thermidorian coup.  Literature and revolution were analogous, 
insofar as they both pass from nothing to everything, in a movement of pure creation.  
For Blanchot, literature and revolution shared the same power of creation: 
Revolutionary action is in every aspect analogous to the action embodied in 
literature: the passage from nothing to everything, the affirmation of the absolute 
as event and of each event as the absolute.  Revolutionary action explodes with 
the same power and the same facility as the writer who only needs to line up a 
few words side by side in order to change the world.186   
 
Moreover, the writer was analogous to the revolutionary for Blanchot, not because the 
writer incited revolution, as Sartre argued, but because the writer's activity was the same 
as revolutionary action: "Every writer who, by the very fact of writing, is not driven to 
think: I am the revolution, freedom alone makes me write, is not actually writing."187  
The writer who enjoys this experience of literature as revolution "can never completely 
recover, because he has known history as his own history and his own freedom as 
universal freedom."188  
At the same time, writing, like revolution, necessarily led to terror for Blanchot.  
Writing also shared with revolution "the same demand for purity, and the certainty that 
                                                 
186 "L'action révolutionaire est en tous points analogue à l'action telle que l'incarne la littérature: passage 
dur rien à tout, affirmation de l'absolu comme événement et de chaque événement comme absolu.  L'action 
révolutionaire se déchaîne avec la même puissance et la même facilité que l'écrivain qui pour changer le 
monde n'a besoin que d'aligner quelques mots." Blanchot, "La Littérature et le droit à la mort," 309. 
187 "Tout écrivain qui, par le fait même d'écrire, n'est pas conduit à penser: je suis la révolution, seule la 
liberté me fait écrire, en réalité n'écrit pas." Ibid. 311. 
188 "Celui qui l'a connu ne peut tout à fait revenir, car il a connu l'histoire comme sa propre histoire et sa 
propre liberté comme la liberté universelle." Ibid. 309. 
  118
everything it does has absolute value, that it is not just any action performed to bring 
about desirable and respectable goal, but that it is the ultimate goal, the Final Act."189  
Such desires brought about the Terror.  For Blanchot the Reign of Terror was nothing less 
than this demand for purity made public, without exception.  The Reign of Terror was 
absolute in the very same way that literature was absolute.  Such was the logic of both 
literature and the Terror's universality that it could broach no material interference.  Both 
drove forward to a pure ideality: literature toward the pure word absent of its referent, 
like Mallarmé’s flower, and Terror toward a pure community, absent of any real person 
who might impugn its purity.   
 But the examples Blanchot cited of the victims of Terror were not Camille 
Desmoulins or Georges Danton.  Rather, Blanchot identified Robespierre and Saint-Just 
as the victims of the Terror.  For Blanchot, Terror was not just the reign of the Committee 
of Public Safety.  Terror was also the Thermidorian Coup that ousted the Committee, and 
executed its members.  Robespierre and Saint-Just's deaths were inevitable, argued 
Blanchot, because the freedom achieved through Terror meant that everyone was subject 
to the death that Terror implied.  "When the blade falls on Saint-Just or on Robespierre, 
in a sense it hits no one.  The virtue of Robespierre, the implacability of Saint-Just, are 
nothing other than their existence already suppressed, the anticipated presence of their 
death, the decision to allow freedom to be affirmed completely in them, and to deny the 
                                                 
189 "Elle a aussi la même exigence de pureté et cette certitude que tout ce qu'elle fait vaut absolument, n'est 
pas une action quelconque se rapportant à quelque fin désirable et estimable, mais est la fin, dernière, le 
Dernier Acte." Ibid. 
  119
reality of their own life by the universal quality of freedom."190  Terror meant not just the 
death of Robespierre's enemies without and enemies within, it also meant Robespierre's 
own death.  True freedom was absolute such that it required everyone submit to its rule.  
"The Terrorists are those who, desiring absolute freedom, know that by this desire, they 
desire their own death, who are conscious of this freedom that they affirm as their 
death."191  Thus, the terrorists, by Blanchot's logic, actually desired Thermidor.  "Death in 
the Terror is not only a method of punishing counter-revolutionaries, but it becomes the 
desired end of everyone, and as such it seems like the very work of freedom in all free 
men."192  In Blanchot's logic, Thermidor was freedom realizing itself through the deaths 
of the directors of the Reign of Terror: "The Terror that they embody does not come 
through the deaths that they mete out to others, but through the death that they mete out 
to themselves."193  In this logic, Robespierre and Saint-Just already knew that the Terror 
meant their own death, that the revolution they started already required a Thermidorian 
reaction.  Like the women in Sade's castle who knew they were already dead, Robespierre 
and Saint-Just already knew in 1793 that they would be the victims of 1794. 
 In figuring the purge as the repetition of Thermidor in "La Littérature et le droit à 
la mort," Blanchot injected it with a different kind of repetition than either Sartre or 
Paulhan had allowed into their purge polemics, for Thermidor was itself a kind of 
                                                 
190 "Quand le couteau tombe sur Saint-Just et sur Robespierre, il n'atteint en quelque sorte personne.  La 
vertu de Robespierre, la rigueur de Saint-Just ne sont rien d'autre que leur existence déjà supprimée, la 
présence anticipée de leur mort, la décision de laisser la liberté s'affirmer complètement en eux et nier, par 
son caractère universel, la réalité propre de leur vie." Ibid. 310. 
191 "Les Terroristes sont ceux qui, voulant la liberté absolue, savent qu'ils veulent par là même leur mort, 
qui ont conscience de cette liberté qu'ils affirment comme de leur mort." Ibid. 
192 "La mort de la Terreur n'y est pas le seul châtiment des factieux, mais, devenue l'échéance inéluctable, 
comme voulue, de tous, elle semble le travail même de la liberté dans les hommes libres." Ibid. 
193 "La Terreur qu'ils incarnent ne vient pas de la mort qu'ils donnent, mais de la mort qu'ils se donnent." 
Ibid. 
  120
repetition.  Figuring the purge as the repetition of the French Revolution, or the 
occupation as previous occupations led Sartre and Paulhan to a notion of language as 
substitutable, and undecidable.  Sartre responded to this substitutability by demanding 
that committed writers protect the patrie from outsiders.  Paulhan responded by claiming 
that no one had the right to represent the patrie, or make judgments against others on its 
behalf.  But Blanchot's interpretation of the purge as the repetition of Thermidor had far 
more sinister implications than either Sartre or Paulhan’s interpretations.  "La Littérature 
et le droit à la mort" figured the purge as the repetition of Thermidor in two ways, each of 
which corresponded to one of the two questions of the crisis of representation.  First, 
Blanchot figured the purge as a repetition of the acts of Thermidor.  In this sense, the 
purge repeated the murders committed under Thermidor.  The Vichy regime had styled 
itself as a revolution, and initiated its own regime of terror.  Likewise, the postwar purge 
was a Thermidorian counter-reaction, in which the revolutions of 1940 were swept away 
by their own terror.  In this second sense of repetition, the purge was the farcical return of 
Thermidor in Marx's sense of the term, disrupting the natural progression of History.  
Both senses of repetition, however, had the same effect on Blanchot's discourse: they 
volatized the notion first of linguistic representation, and secondly the notion of the 
representation of France.  It is necessary to consider both in detail. 
 The figuration of the purge as the repetition of acts of Thermidor drew directly on 
Blanchot's articulation of repetition in "À la rencontre de Sade."  Blanchot had described 
repetition as the result of the libertine's quest to surpass the law, where the law was the 
limit on the libertine's freedom.  The desire for the freedom that existed beyond the law 
  121
compelled Sade's libertine to repeat his or her crimes to an absurd degree, killing an 
unfathomable number of victims.  The victims, whose lives were previously defined by 
being subjects of the law, that is, by being citizens, were denied that meaning by the 
libertine, who inserted them into the repetitive structure of his or her crimes.  By entering 
into the logic of repetition, the victims were deprived of all personal existence long 
before they were actually killed.  They signified nothing other than the libertine's 
freedom.  Blanchot described the deaths of the Terror and Thermidor in exactly the same 
way.  Robespierre and Saint-Just's presentiment of already being dead applied equally to 
all:  
Each person ceases to be an individual working at a specific task, and becomes 
concerned only with the here and now: he is universal freedom which knows 
neither outside nor future, neither labor nor accomplishment.  In such moments, 
no one has a right any longer to do anything, because everything is done.  No one 
has the right any longer to a private life, everything is public, and the most guilty 
person is the suspect who has a secret, who keeps his thought alone, like an 
intimacy shared only with himself.  And finally, no one has the right any longer to 
his life, to his existence as separate and physically distinct from everyone else.194  
 
Here death appeared not as a punishment, but as the granting of a new freedom.  Death 
was not a threat.  Like Robespierre and Saint-Just, the person living under Terror was 
already actually dead, insofar as their previous life was one of personal, individual 
existence ended the very instant that revolution began.  This life was sacrificed to the 
collectivity, it was effectively killed the moment that Terror was proclaimed.  "Each 
citizen has a right to death, so to speak: this death is not his condemnation, it is the 
                                                 
194 "Chaque homme cesse d'être un individu travaillant à une tâche déterminée, agissant ici et seulement 
maintenant: il est la liberté universelle qui ne connaît ni ailleurs ni demain, ni travail ni œuvre.  Dans de tels 
moments, personne n'a plus droit à une vie privée, tout est secret, qui garde pour soi seul une pensée, une 
intimité.  Et, enfin, personne n'a plus droit à sa vie, à son existence effectivement séparée et physiquement 
distincte."  Ibid. 309.  
  122
essence of his right; it is not his suppression as guilty.  Rather he needs death to affirm 
himself as a citizen, and it is the disappearance of death that freedom gives birth to 
him."195   
In the Terror, and the Thermidorian reaction that followed, everyone was subject 
to the same death.  And in the same way that the deaths of the women victimized by the 
libertine served the creation of a greater freedom, insofar as the repetition of their deaths 
allowed the libertine to surpass the law, one's death under the Terror – or especially under 
Thermidor – served the creation of the highest, purest freedom.  Likewise, as the 
victimized women lost their personal meaning in the libertine's castle, so too did one lose 
the meaning of one's personal private existence, which was sacrificed to the collective 
freedom of the community.  The repetition of death deprived the law of its power to give 
meaning to people's lives, and acceded to a place beyond the law, the only place where 
absolute freedom existed.  Only repetition of death allowed the old law to be surpassed, 
whether it was the law of Louis XVI in the case of Thermidor, the law of the most high in 
the case of Sade, or the law of the Third Republic and the Vichy regime in the case of the 
purge.   
 Blanchot's figuration of the purge as the Sadean repetition of the acts of 
Thermidor provided his answer to the question of how linguistic representation worked.  
In "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré" Blanchot described a version of linguistic representation based 
on Mallarmé's phrase from "Crise de vers": "I say: a flower."  Blanchot suggested that 
Mallarmé's formulation was able to signify the flower "absent from every bouquet" only 
                                                 
195 "Chaque citoyen a pour ainsi dire droit à la mort: la mort n'est pas sa condamnation, c'est l'essence de 
son droit; il n'est pas supprimé comme coupable, mais il a besoin de la mort pour s'affirmer citoyen et c'est 
dans la disparation de la mort que la liberté le fait naître." Ibid. 
  123
by relegating the real flower out of sight.  The word flower could only exist in the 
absence of the flower itself.  In this way, all language depended not on the presence of 
things, but rather on their absence.  Blanchot repeated this formulation in "La Littérature 
et le droit à la mort," although he made two crucial distinctions drawn from the repetition 
of death.  In "La Littérature et le droit à la mort," "a flower" changed into "this woman."  
The repetition remained, in which the pronunciation of the phrase "this woman" became 
the fort/da of language: "I say: this woman, and immediately she is at my disposal, I push 
her away, I pull her close, she is everything that I desire her to be, she becomes the site of 
the most surprising transformations and actions."196  Blanchot repeated the phase "I say: 
this woman" twice more in "La Littérature et le droit à la mort," enacting the repetition of 
the word.  Here, Blanchot used the phrase "this woman" because he drew on "À la 
rencontre de Sade," where the notion of repetition was articulated through a consideration 
of the Sadean libertine’s repeated victimization and murder of women.  It gave the writer 
tremendous freedom to be able to say "this woman," and instantly have control over her 
as the libertine had control over the victim.  And, like the libertine's accession to pure 
freedom, it could only come at the cost of the death of the woman.  In the case of the 
phrase "I say: this woman," this meant that what was lost was the particular being of this 
woman.   
The word gives me what it signifies, but first it suppresses it.  For me to be able to 
say: this woman, it requires that I relinquish her flesh-and-blood reality in one 
way or another, it requires that I make her absent and annihilate her.  The word 
gives me being, but it  gives it to me stripped of being.  It is the absence of this 
                                                 
196 "Je dis: cette femme, et immédiatement je dispose d'elle, je l'éloigne, la rapproche, elle est tout ce que je 
désire qu'elle soit, elle devient le lieu des transformations et des actions les plus surprenantes."  Ibid. 312.  
  124
being, its nothingness, that which remains of her after it has lost being, that is to 
say, it is the very fact that it does not exist.197   
 
The terminology that Blanchot employed in this passage concerning the repetition of 
"this woman" replicated the language in which he described the repetition of the 
libertine's crimes.  Like the Sade’s libertine, who was compelled to repeat his or her 
murders in order to surpass the law and accede to pure freedom, the writer was also 
compelled to a kind of repetition in order to surpass a law as well.  But the law that the 
writer was compelled to transgress repetitively was the law of literature itself, which was 
the rule established in “Le Roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi,” that literature may speak of 
anything, so long as it speaks of things only in fiction.  The writer could possess "this 
woman" only so long as it was done in fiction.  "This woman" could be had only so long 
as the writer relinquished the claim to her "flesh-and-blood" reality.  In this way, the 
writer could possess everything, "everything is possible," but only everything was 
possible: one thing alone was absolutely impossible:  "He is only master of everything, he 
only possesses the infinite, he lacks the finite, the limit escapes him."198  Every time the 
writer said "this woman" it was an attempt to surpass the law which prevented accession 
to the thing itself.  And every time the writer said "this woman," she was "annihilated," 
"made absent," stripped of all her particular being, just like the libertine's victims.    
 The literary historian James Swenson argues that the logic by which universality 
supplanted particularity in "La Littérature et le droit à la mort" prevented Blanchot from 
                                                 
197 "Le mot me donne ce qu'il signifie, mais d'abord il le supprime.  Pour que je puisse dire: cette femme, il 
faut que d'une manière ou d'une autre je lui retire sa réalité d'os et de chair, la rende absente et l'anéantisse.  
Le mot me donne l'être, mais il me le donne privé d'être.  Il est l'absence de cet être, son néant, ce qui 
demeure de lui lorsqu'il a perdu l'être, c'est-a-dire le seul fait qu'il n'est pas." Ibid. 312. 
198 "Il n'est maître que de tout, il ne possède que l'infini, le fini lui manque, la limite lui échappe." Ibid. 
306. 
  125
allowing that the writer could actually ever commit to any single revolutionary cause.  
Swenson writes, "the writer cannot commit himself to a cause because the activity 
through which this commitment would be expressed, namely literature, nullifies any 
particular purpose it would represent."199  But for Blanchot there was an even stronger 
force within literature that prevented the writer from committing to any particular 
revolutionary cause.  For Blanchot the "danger that [the writer] represents is even more 
serious" than the danger of revolutionary action.200  "The truth is that he ruins action, not 
because he makes the unreal available, but because he puts the entirety of reality at our 
disposal."201  Blanchot's writer was dangerous in precisely the same way that Sade's 
libertine was dangerous, not because they both drove themselves to the unreal, but 
because they sought an excess of reality.  The "everything" of reality was made available 
to the writer at the expense of particular beings that existed in reality.  Here Blanchot 
drew on the formulation from "Le Paradoxe d'Aytré," only now the logic of repetition 
introduced death into the word.  The freedom experienced in literature that formerly 
fascinated the writer with the power of being about to say "a flower," now compelled the 
writer to annihilate "this woman."  The writer was dangerous precisely because death was 
loosed into the world through the written and the spoken word.   
Of course, my language does not kill anyone.  Yet: when I say "this woman," real 
death is announced and is already present in my language; my language wants to 
say that this person here, who is there now, can be detached from herself, 
removed from her existence and her presence, and plunged suddenly in a 
nothingness of existence and of presence; my language essentially signifies the 
possibility of this destruction; it is, at every moment, a bold allusion to such an 
                                                 
199 James Swenson, "Revolutionary Sentences," Yale French Studies 93 (1998): 25. 
200 "Le danger qu'il représente est bien plus sérieux." Blanchot, "La Littérature et le droit à la mort," 307. 
201 "La vérité, c'est qu'il ruine l'action, non parce qu'il dispose de l'irréel, mais parce qu'il met à notre 
disposition toute la réalité." Ibid. 
  126
event.  My language does not kill anyone.  But, if this woman was not really 
capable of dying, if she was not threatened by death at each moment of her life, 
bound and united to her by an essential bond, I would not be able to accomplish 
this ideal negation, this deferred assassination that is my language.202   
 
The writer was a danger precisely because death sneaks into the world through the very 
action of writing.  Death was what pushed thing named away from the word that did the 
naming:  
When I speak, death speaks in me.  My speech is a warning that death is, at this 
very moment, loose in the world, between me and the being that I address.  It is 
between us as  the distance that separates us.  But this distance is also what 
prevents us from being separated, because in it is the condition of all 
understanding.203   
 
Blanchot was not simply indulging in metaphorical histrionics.  Death was the limit 
concept beyond which the writer had no access.  Death was the only word in the entirety 
of language to which no concept could be attached, for the simple reason that no one was 
capable of experiencing his or her own death and speaking about it.  The word death was 
thus split into two sides, one positive, and one negative.  The positive side described 
death in the same way as "this woman" described a woman, deprived of being.  But the 
negative side lost all meaning, because it was impossible to experience "dying."  "'Is 
dead',” Blanchot wrote, “is the positive side of the freedom that has become the world: 
                                                 
202 "Sans doute, mon langage ne tue personne.  Cependant: quand je dis "cette femme", la mort réelle est 
annoncée et déjà présente dans mon langage; mon langage veut dire que cette personne-ci, qui est là, 
maintenant, peut être détachée d'elle-même, soustraite à son existence et à sa présence et plongée soudain 
dans un néant d'existence et de présence; mon langage signifie essentiellement la possibilité de cette 
destruction; il est, à tout moment, une allusion résolue à un tel événement.  Mon langage ne tue personne.  
Mais, si cette femme n'était pas réellement capable de mourir, si elle n'était pas à chaque moment de sa vie 
menacée de la mort, liée et unie à elle par un lien d'essence, je ne pourrais pas accomplir cette négation 
idéale, cet assassinat différé qu'est mon langage." Ibid. 313. 
203 "Quand je parle: la mort parle en moi.  Ma parole est l'avertissement que la mort est, en ce moment 
même, lâchée dans le monde, qu'entre moi qui parle et l'être que j'interpelle elle a brusquement surgi: elle 
est entre nous comme la distance qui nous séparé, mais cette distance est aussi ce qui nous empêche d'être 
séparés, car en elle est la condition de toute entente." Ibid. 
  127
being is revealed there as absolute.  ‘Dying’, on the contrary, is pure insignificance, an 
event without concrete reality, which has lost all value as a personal and interior drama, 
because there is no longer any interior."204  Death served the function of a limit concept, 
or rather, it designated that which existed beyond the limit, to which no concept could be 
attached.  Death named the law that the writer was compelled to surpass, like the 
libertine, in order to accede to the pure space beyond the law.  Each word written by the 
writer affected the death of things, such as the phrase "this woman," which signified the 
ability of words to exist, at the expense of the death of the things the words named.  For 
Blanchot, all  words were directed toward death, they all depended on death for their 
meaning.  "[Death] is in words as the sole possibility of their meaning.  Without death, 
everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness."205  This desire for death was the 
real danger of the writer, and not any specific revolutionary commitments that might be 
espoused in writing. 
 In "La Littérature et le droit à la mort" Blanchot answered the question of how 
linguistic representation operated by combining the repetitive transgression of the law, 
and the death discussed in "À la rencontre de Sade," with the absence and the distance 
imposed on things by words discussed in "Le Paradoxe d'Aytrè."  The result was a 
conception of linguistic representation in which communicative speech or writing was 
only possible because of the internal capacity for death that rested within every named 
thing.  The writer was not a murderer, but the writer's compulsion to transgress the law of 
                                                 
204 "Le 'est mort', c'est le côté positif de la liberté faite monde: l'être s'y révèle comme absolu.  Au 
contraire, 'mourir' est pure insignificance, événement sans réalité concrète, qui a perdu toute valeur de 
drame personnel et intérieur, car il n'y a plus d'intérieur." Ibid. 310. 
205 "[La mort] est dans le mots la seule possibilité de leur sens.  Sans la mort, tout s'effondrerait dans 
l'absurde et dans le néant." Ibid. 312. 
  128
death, which loosed death in the world, was what allowed made communication possible.  
Thus, "the writer recognizes himself in the Revolution.  It attracts him because it is the 
time when literature makes itself history.  It is its truth."206   
In addition to figuring the purge as the repetition of the acts of Thermidor, "La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort" also figured the purge as the farcical historical repetition 
of Thermidor.  While Blanchot used the former type of repetition to answer one question 
of the crisis of representation – how did linguistic representation operate – he used the 
latter type of repetition to answer the other question: who was representative of France.  
As Blanchot had volatized the meaning of words through the figure of the repetition of 
the acts of Thermidor, he volatized the notion of a community formed around a linguistic 
entity (like the patrie) through the figure of the repetition of Thermidor itself.  For 
Blanchot, this question was, to a certain extent, irrelevant, first of all because it was 
impossible for the entirety of the patrie to be distilled into a single representative, and 
second of all because the death inflicted on things by language made it so that any 
connection between a person and the patrie would be severed.  Instead, Blanchot 
suggested that community could only be formed – the kind of community formed through 
language – through acceptance of both the death carried within language, and also the 
materiality of words, first discussed in “Le Paradoxe d’Aytré.”   
 Blanchot argued in “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” that the death inflicted on 
things by words “is between us as the distance that separates us.”  At the same time 
however, words were also “what prevents us from being separated.”  In this way, the 
                                                 
206 "L'écrivain se reconnaît dans la Révolution.  Elle l'attire parce qu'elle est le temps où la littérature se fait 
histoire.  Elle est sa vérité." Ibid. 311. 
  129
absence created by words became “the condition of all understanding.”  Blanchot 
believed that the connection between two people was founded on words, but that nothing 
existed behind the word.  The only thing that remained was the material existence of the 
word, the word spoken between two people.  For Blanchot, communication, and by 
extension community, rested on the tension between these two aspects of language.  
Drawing on the definition of fiction and communication articulated in “le Roman, œuvre 
de mauvaise foi,” Blanchot argued that the only place where this tension could be held in 
suspense was in literary language.  “Literary language,” Blanchot wrote, “is made of 
uneasiness, and it is also made of contradictions.  Its position is unstable and insecure.”207  
Literary language had the power to maintain the distance necessary for communication, 
but also provide a material reality through which communication might occur.  That 
material was the word itself.  “[Literary language] observes that the word cat is not only 
the non-existence of the cat, but the non-existence become word, which is to say, a 
perfectly determined and objective reality.”208  After the death inflicted on things by 
words, the only thing left was the materiality of the word.  The ambiguity of language, 
however, was that the materiality of the word could only be embraced if the death of the 
thing it named was embraced as well.  They were inseparable in Blanchot’s eyes.  For if 
one failed to accept the death on which the materiality of the word rested, one mistook 
the word for the thing it represented.  Likewise, if one only accepted the death inflicted 
by the word, and failed to acknowledge the word’s materiality, one never left the realm of 
                                                 
207 “Le langage littéraire est fait d’inquiétude, il est fait aussi de contradictions.  Sa position est peu stable 
et peu solide.” Ibid. 315.  
208 “Il observe que le mot chat n’est pas seulement la non-existence du chat, mais la non-existence devenue 
mot, c’est-à-dire une réalité parfaitement déterminée et objective.”  Ibid. 315. 
  130
negation and universality, one never approached the particularity of material words that 
actually allowed communication.  It was essential to hold both sides of language in an 
indefinite state of suspense:  
If we want to restore literature to the movement which makes all its ambiguities 
understandable, this movement is here: literature, as the common speech, begins 
with the end that alone is the condition of understanding.  To speak, we have to 
see death, we have to see it behind us.  When we speak, we are leaning on a tomb, 
and the emptiness of the tomb is what makes the truth of language, but at the 
same time, the emptiness is reality and death made into being.  There is being – 
which is to say, a logical and communicable truth – and there is a world, because 
we are able to destroy things and suspend existence.  It is in this sense that we can 
say that there is being because there is nothingness.209   
 
If being only existed because it leaned on the emptiness of the tomb, death was both the 
beginning and the end of the possibility for communicative language.  Death, 
paradoxically, was what made humanity humane: “Death works in the world with us; it is 
a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, it is in us, as the part of us 
that is the most human.”210  Holding being in tension with death was the only chance that 
Blanchot saw for community to be created: “Death is the possibility of man, it is his 
chance, it is through death that the future of a finished world remains; death is the 
greatest hope of men, their only hope of being men.”211  In this way, Blanchot came to 
see the effort to hold the death inflicted by words on things, and the material being 
                                                 
209 “Si l’on veut ramener la littérature au mouvement qui en rend saisissables toutes les ambiguiïtés, il est 
là: la littérature, comme la parole commune, commence avec la fin qui seule permet de comprendre.  Pour 
parler, nous devons voir la mort, la voir derrière nous.  Quand nous parlons, nous nous appuyons à un 
tombeau, et ce vide du tombeau est ce qui fait la vérité du langage, mais en même temps le vide est réalité 
et la mort se fait être.  Il y a de l’être – c’est-à-dire une vérité logique et exprimable – et il y a un monde, 
parce que nous pouvons détruire les choses et suspendre l’existence.  C’est en cela qu’on peut dire qu’il y a 
de l’être parce qu’il y a du néant.” Ibid. 324. 
210 “La mort travaille avec nous dans le monde; pouvoir qui humanise la nature, qui élève l’existence à 
l’être, elle est en nous, comme notre part la plus humaine.” Ibid. 325. 
211 “La mort est la possibilité de l’homme, elle est sa chance, c’est par elle que nous reste l’avenir d’un 
monde achevé; la mort est la plus grande espoir des hommes, leur seul espoir d’être hommes.” Ibid. 324. 
  131
created out of that death, as the one thing that could bring a community into 
reconciliation with itself. 
Blanchot thus conceived of death as the law, as the limit-threshold, of community, 
as well as of language.  Death was the law toward which all communities must move, and 
which all communities must transgress, in order to exist, for it gave being to the language 
over which and through which they communed.  Death was their internal and necessary 
death drive.   
Death ends in being: such is the hope and such is the task of man, because the 
very nothingness helped to make the world, nothingness is the creator of the 
world in the man who works and who understands.  Death ends in being: such is 
the rending of man, the origin of his unhappy death, because death comes into 
being through man, and through man meaning rests on nothingness; we are only 
able to comprehend by stripping ourselves of existence, by making death possible, 
by infecting what we comprehend with the nothingness of death, of the kind that, 
if we depart from being, we fall outside the possibility of death, and the way out 
becomes the disappearance of every way out.212   
 
Sartre desired the perfect community, in which all members were present to each other 
through language.  Paulhan desired an imperfect community, a community that accepted 
its own imperfectness, and continued to exist in spite of its imperfection.  Blanchot 
articulated the desire for a perfect but ambiguous community.  Or rather, a perfectly 
ambiguous community, in which community was split between two perfect, but 
irreconcilable sides: death, and being.  For Blanchot, this was the meaning of the 
repetition of Thermidor, itself an ambiguous tension between the Terror, and a counter-
                                                 
212 “La mort about it à l’être: tel est l’espoir et telle est la tâche de l’homme, car le néant même aide à faire 
le monde, le néant est créateur du monde en l’homme qui travaille et comprend.  La mort about it à l’être: 
telle est la déchirure de l’homme, l’origine de son sort malheureux, car par l’homme la mort vient à l’être et 
par l’homme le sens repose sur le néant; nous ne comprenons qu’en nous privant d’exister, en rendant la 
mort possible, en infectant ce que nous comprenons du néant de la mort, de sorte que, si nous sortons de 
l’être, nous tombons hors de la possibilité de la mort, et l’issue devient la disparitions de toute issue.” Ibid. 
331. 
  132
terrorist impulse.  The repetition of Thermidor signified that the patrie could never be 
stabilized, never secured.  It would always remain henceforth in perpetual suspension 
between its two sides: the desire for death, and the desire to arrest death.  The purge 
repeated Thermidor to the letter, making it impossible for France to ever again lapse into 
the security of Sartrean commitment, or the exasperation of Paulhanian undecidability.  
For Blanchot, the purge signified that the future of France would rest on the will to hold 
both elements of the community in tension, on the one side its death drive, and on the 
other, its being.  Forever France would be the tension within language that “is the life that 
endures death and maintains itself in death (italics in original).”213 
 What, then, was Blanchot’s ultimate contribution to the purge debate?  If Sartre 
could be definitively identified as pro-purge, and Paulhan as distinctly anti-purge, could 
such a polemic be extracted from “La Littérature et le droit à la mort?”  If the readers of 
Critique in 1947 understood that “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” participated in the 
purge debate, what would they have understood its message to be?  First of all, his 
critique of commitment, and of the Sartrean view of language and literature, indicated 
Blanchot’s contestation of the purge.  Though Blanchot never supported amnesty for the 
collaborators, he thought it was unjust for writers to be put on trial for what they wrote.  
Second, the notion of community presented in “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” 
explicitly rejected the version of France being constructed through the purge trials.  The 
purge trials essentially supported the Sartrean notion of committed literature, and 
indicated a desire for Sartre’s perfect community.  For Blanchot however, the writer’s 
                                                 
213 “Cette vie qui porte la mort et se maintient en elle.” Ibid. 330. 
  133
sole commitment was to literature, the task of which was to maintain the tension between 
the death that made language possible, and the life that emerged from that death.  For 
Blanchot, the writer was neither a committed writer treating language like a loaded pistol, 
aiming his shots with precision.  Nor was the writer a child playing irresponsibly with a 
gun just to hear the shot go off.  Rather, for Blanchot, language was a guillotine, and the 
writer’s job was to make sure it fell on everyone’s head equally.  
 In real terms, Blanchot’s contribution to the purge debate was to thoroughly 
critique even the possibility of Sartrean commitment.  Blanchot detonated both the notion 
of language, and the notion of political action on which commitment depended.  “La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort” demonstrated that the writer had neither the control over 
language that was so central to Sartrean commitment, nor the control over the political 
ends of language.  There was thus no way to establish whether a writer’s language or 
writing was committed, or whether it collaborated, because both the committed and the 
collaborator were equally victim to the power of death that language inflicted on the 
world of things.  In failing to recognize this, Blanchot argued that Sartrean commitment 
overestimated the writer’s power to control the ends of his or her writing.  At the same 
time, Blanchot also argued that Sartrean commitment failed to grasp the actual political 
power that resided in language, and by consequence, it failed to appreciate the actual way 
in which langauge was the foundation of all political community.  For Blanchot, language 
was ultimately fictional.  The consequence of this was that the writer did not have the 
power to affect material political relations.  On the other hand, political relations were 
also established within language, in which the writer was indeed able to intervene 
  134
effectively.  In Blanchot’s view the writer’s task was to continually make and remake the 
community through language in a perpetual process of linguistic death and rebirth.  The 
writer’s duty was to name and rename the community, without ever believing that his 
words would hold everlasting significance.  Blanchot’s main contribution to the purge 
debate, and his main critique of commitment was thus to insist on the limits of the 
writer’s ability to affect political change.  At the same time, Blanchot also placed the 
power of making and remaking the community in the hands of writers.  To Blanchot this 
involved a change not so much in the ontological foundations of politics, as in the stance 
that one adopted towards politics.  One should neither commit, nor collaborate politically.  
Rather, the only way to engage in politics was to commit to language itself.  
 
*  
Shortly before or shortly after the publication of “La Littérature et le droit à la 
mort” (the exact date remains unknown), Blanchot left Paris and relocated in the South of 
France, to the small coastal village of Èze.  As with Blanchot's encounter with the 
German/Russian firing squad in 1944, it is important to resist the temptation to see this 
episode of Blanchot's life allegorically reflected in his writings (the exact reason for 
Blanchot’s departure also remains unknown).  But the choice of self-imposed exile was a 
meaningful one in the context of the philosophical, literary, and political debates in which 
Blanchot was engaged in late 1947 and early 1948.  He rejected the communities being 
formed in Paris by Sartre and Paulhan.  By no means was Blanchot’s rejection complete.  
He still maintained his friendships, and his family relations.  He still wrote letters and 
  135
made visits.  What he rejected, rather, was Sartrean commitment.  Instead Blanchot chose 
solitude, in which he could devote himself to the literary.  If there was going to be refuge 
for Blanchot after the purge, it would be in the literary, where he could work at the 
suspension of death and being which was the promise of language.   
The meaning of Blanchot’s contribution to the purge debate however, has 
implications beyond his personal life.  To fully understand its historical significance, it is 
necessary to return to the comment of Marx’s concerning revolution and repetition with 
which this chapter began.  In the purge debate there was a historical movement similar to 
the one that Jeffrey Mehlman traces in Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac.  
Mehlman shows how Marx’s figuration of the coup of Louis Napoléon as the repetition 
of the first Napoléon’s coup disrupted the theory of the state as the representative of the 
people.  By figuring Louis Napoléon as repetition, Marx injected his discourse with 
repetition’s volatility, which separated the state from the thing it purported to represent.  
Mehlman argues that when anything can occupy the terms of the repetitive structure, 
those terms are voided of their specific content.  Thus, Louis Napoléon was a farcical 
repetition because he lacked any of the first Napoléon Bonaparte’s content.      
Similarly, the polemicists of the purge debate figured WWII, the occupation, the 
liberation, and the purge as repetitions of revolution.  In every case, the repetition of the 
revolution led to a realization of the vacancy, substitutability, or corruptibility of words in 
general, and the words which bonded the community in specific (such as patrie).  Jean-
Paul Sartre and Jean Paulhan represented the opposite poles of the debate, and each drew 
different conclusions from this repetition of revolution.  Sartre saw the liberation and the 
  136
purge as the repetition of the French Revolution, whose signal moment was 1789, and he 
sought to protect the patrie from those who would use its substitutability to usurp the 
revolution.  Through his journal, Les Temps modernes, Sartre developed a theory of 
committed writing, which he used as intellectual justification for the postwar purging of 
collaborationist writers and intellectuals.  Paulhan, by contrast, saw the Occupation as the 
repetition of previous moments in France's history when it was occupied by Germany.  
Paulhan argued that because the France patrie could be substituted for a German one, that 
no stable patrie existed, and all claims to it must be relinquished.  In Les Cahiers de la 
Pléiade, Paulhan pursued an editorial policy that advocated the writer's right to error, and 
criticized the hypocritical fervor of those who condemned writers to death simply for 
their written works.   Blanchot, for his part, saw the purge as the repetition of the 
Thermidorian coup, from which he derived the essential ambiguity of the patrie.  In his 
contribution to the purge debate, Blanchot neither attempted to stabilize the patrie, nor 
did he reject the possibility of the patrie ever existing peacefully.  Rather, Blanchot 
established a third way that transcended both Sartre and Paulhan’s positions.  He argued 
that the tendency towards death contained within language must be held in tension with 
the being that language creates, without ever prioritizing one term over the other, so that 
the community could be preserved.   
 It is telling that the critique of commitment emerged simultaneously with Sartre’s 
initial articulation of commitment.  The critique of commitment should not be seen as a 
knee-jerk reaction to Sartre’s popularity or influence.  Rather, it should be seen as a 
measure of the extent to which language and politics had become intertwined in postwar 
  137
France.  The critique begun by Paulhan and Blanchot during the postwar purge ultimately 
contributed to the abandonment and replacement of commitment that occurred during the 
protests over the war in Algeria, the subject of the next chapter of this dissertation.  But it 
also helped to define the political implications of postwar French theory.  Blanchot’s 
critique of commitment laid the foundation for the current of postwar French theory that 
aligned language with politics.  In this way, the history of Paulhan and Blanchot’s 
intervention in the debate over the postwar purge, and their critique of Sartrean 
commitment demonstrates that French theory has a history.  It was born out of a specific 
intervention into postwar French politics, and it is necessary to bear the postwar purge of 
writers and intellectuals in mind whenever one encounters a piece of French theory that 
argues for the alignment of language and politics.  
  138
CHAPTER TWO 
 
Beyond Commitment: The Ethics of Engagement during the War in Algeria 
  
On September 6, 1960, Le Monde reported that “one hundred and twenty-one 
writers, professors, and artists have signed a declaration on ‘the right to insubordination 
in the war in Algeria.’”214  The article – no more than a nine-line announcement 
appearing on back page of the newspaper, in the “last news” section – gave no indication 
of the signatories’ identities.  Nor was the article able to explain the content of the 
manifesto, other than to provide a brief quotation of its primary claim: “we respect and 
judge justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.”215  Three days 
later another announcement appeared, stating that the chief prosecutor of department of 
the Seine had opened an investigation against the unknown persons responsible – 
designated solely by an “X” – for inciting insubordination and desertion in the army.216  
The “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” was a mystery.   
By the end of September the “Déclaration” was front page news, and it had 
become one of the grand affairs of the war in Algeria.  The “Déclaration” was a short 
pamphlet of about four pages, written anonymously, but signed by one hundred and 
twenty-one writers, intellectuals, and celebrities, declaring the right to refuse to serve in 
                                                 
214 “Cent vingt et un écrivains, universitaires et artistes ont signé une déclaration sur “le droit à 
l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie.”  Le Monde, September 6, 1960. 
215 “Nous respecton et jugeons justifié le refus de prendre les armes contre le peuple algérien.” Ibid. 
216 “Le Parquet de la Seine ordonne l’ouverture d’une information contre X.” Le Monde, September 9, 
1960. 
  139
the army.217  It was the largest, and most effective act of collective, intellectual 
engagement in politics during the war.  The “Déclaration” united the French intellectual 
community, deeply divided up to that point, against the war in Algeria.  During a war that 
historian Jean-François Sirinelli calls “the war of petitions,” the “Déclaration” was one of 
the most widely publicized and discussed.218   
And yet for all of the publicity that the “Déclaration” received throughout 
September and October of 1960, those first, brief notices from September 6 and 9 
captured the spirit of the “Déclaration” better than anything else.  There was no 
explanation in the “Déclaration” itself, no definition of humanity, no appeal to historical 
necessity, no theory of justice.  After a précis in which it detailed the catastrophe of the 
war in Algeria, the “Déclaration” made three, brief proclamations: 
The undersigned, considering that each one of us must speak out against the acts 
which it is no long possible to present as the news-in-brief of an individual 
adventure, considering that they themselves have the obligation to intervene, in 
their place and according to their means, not in order to give advice to people who 
must make decisions personally, in the face of equally serious problems, but to 
ask of those who judge them to not let themselves be taken in by the ambiguity of 
words and of values, declare:     
 
– We respect and judge as justified the refusal to take up arms against the 
Algerian people. 
                                                 
217 The “Déclaration” was set to appear in numerous journals and newspapers, before the government 
censored its publication from all but four tiny publications.  Some of the journals from which it had been 
censored managed to show their solidarity anyways.  Les Temps modernes for instance, intentionally left 
three pages of its September 1960 issue blank, where the “Déclaration” was to have appeared, with only a 
small note of explanation written by the editors on the first page.  Additional copies of the pamphet were all 
seized by the police.  Still, the “Déclaration” disseminated widely and rapidly, despite the government’s 
efforts.  Throughout this chapter I have used the version included in the collected edition of Maurice 
Blanchot’s political writings.  See Blanchot, Écrits politiques: 1953-1993 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 
2008), 49-54. 
218 Jean-François Sirinelli, “Guerre d’Algérie, guerre des pétitions?” in Jean-Pierre Rioux & Jean-François 
Sirinelli, eds. La Guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1991), 265-
306. 
  140
– We respect and judge as justified the conduct of those French citizens who feel 
their need to give help and protection to the Algerians oppressed in the name of 
the French people. 
– The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes to the end of the colonial 
system in a decisive way, is the cause of all free men.219     
 
In reality, the “Déclaration” had no other content, and no other authority than what these 
first announcements provided: one hundred and twenty-one people declaring that refusing 
to fight in the war was justified.  The real mystery of the “Déclaration sur le droit à 
l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” was not who had signed it, since the signatories 
made no effort whatsoever to hide their identities.  Rather, the real mystery was the 
“Déclaration’s” deeper philosophical content, which seemed not to exist at all. 
And yet, it was the lack of justification, and the assumption of responsibility that 
was at the same time collective and impersonal that made the “Déclaration” so effective.  
The “Déclaration” merely affirmed the right to not bear arms against the Algerian people.  
Adhering to a strict form of ethical action, the signatories refused to claim sovereignty for 
themselves by dissolving their own individual authority into the impersonal collectivity.  
While each signatory fully admitted his or her culpability, no individual signatory 
claimed to be true “initiator” of the “Déclaration,” as the magistrate charged with 
investigating the “Déclaration” put it, for to do so would mean to claim sovereignty.  It 
                                                 
219 “Les soussignés, considérant que chacun doit se prononcer sur des actes qu’il est désormais impossible 
de présenter comme des faits divers de l’aventure individuelle; considérant qu’eux-mêmes, à leur place, et 
selon leurs moyens, ont le devoir d’intervenir, non pas pour donner des conseils aux hommes qui ont à se 
décider personnellment face à des problèmes aussi graves, mais pour demander à ceux qui les jugent de pas 
se laisser prendre à l’équivoque des mots et des valeurs, déclarent: 
- Nous respectons et jugeons le refus de prendre les armes contre le peuple algérien.   
- Nous respectons et jugeons justifiée la conduite des Français qui estiment de leur devoir 
d’apporter aide et protection aux Algériens opprimés au nom du peuple français. 
- La cause du peuple algérien, qui contribue de façon décisive à ruiner le système colonial, est la 
cause de tous les hommes libres.”  
Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie, 52-53. 
  141
would mean the admission of a personal authority higher than anyone else’s, which 
granted them the right to create new laws.  Such an act of sovereignty resembled the 
Sadean libertine’s desire for accession beyond the law, to a place where the libertine had 
sole sovereignty over him or herself, and over the entire world.  And, such a act of 
sovereignty transgressed the laws of the state in a way that the state was entirely prepared 
to handle: such acts could be identified, the guilty parties tried and convicted, and the 
sovereignty of the state’s law reasserted.  By refusing such sovereignty however, the 
“Déclaration” became an ethical action that created a new law that granted the right to 
not bear arms.  This new law was created outside the purview of the state, and the right 
that it granted was not granted by the state.  Through their action the signatories of the 
“Déclaration” were able to challenge the very authority of the state, creating a space 
external to the state’s law, within which one could act ethically.  This was a new form of 
intellectual engagement in politics beyond commitment, that sought political change not 
through the revolution necessitated by historical conditions of oppression, but through 
ethical actions that made no appeal to higher justices, and for which the actors claimed 
sole responsibility, submitting themselves equally to the impersonality of the law.   
The government instantly recognized the challenge made by the “Déclaration,” 
and quickly acted to bring it back within the jurisdiction of the law of the state.  The 
investigation opened on September 9 by the chief prosecutor of the Department of the 
Seine’s main goal was to find the responsible parties, and assign guilt.  On September 16, 
the government indefinitely suspended all university professors who had signed the 
  142
“Déclaration.”220 At the time, university professors were employees of the state, in 
France’s nationalized education system.  On September 23, the government created a new 
law, increasing the penalty for inciting insubordination or desertion if the guilty party was 
a civil servant in the employment of the state.221  A week later, the government expanded 
the reach of the new law against inciting insubordination, to include acts of speech that 
excused or apologized for insubordination or desertion.222  The government’s reaction 
served to verify the force of the “Déclaration,” as the new laws that it passed provided 
proof that the “Déclaration” had created a space for ethical action outside the law of the 
state.  The “Déclaration” played an important role, then, in the challenges to the 
government’s authority that eventually forced France to pursue peace talks with Algeria 
in the last two years of the war.      
In the 1980s, nearly two decades after the fact, it was revealed that Maurice 
Blanchot had been one of the manifesto’s primary authors.223  Yet this did nothing to 
clarify matters.  As Bernard Henri-Lévy wrote upon learning of Blanchot’s authorship of 
the “Déclaration” in 1989: 
 Just think!  The author of Thomas l’obscur.  The apostle of an empty, evanescent,  
absent literature.  The man who was never seen, and who was never heard.  The 
only French intellectual to have made to a point to never allow the image of his 
                                                 
220 “Des universitaires suspendus.” Le Monde, September 18-19, 1960. 
221 “La provocation à l’insoumission sera punie plus sévèrement si le délit est commis par un 
fonctionnaire.” Le Monde, Septmber 24, 1960. 
222 “Les sanctions contre les artistes et fonctionnaires signataires du manifeste sur l’insoumission.” Le 
Monde, September 30, 1960. 
223 Blanchot’s role in drafting the “Déclaration sur la droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” was 
first revealed by Dionys Mascolo, one of the other main authors, in response to questions posed to him by 
L’Autre journal in November, 1985.  At first Mascolo said only that Blanchot had proposed the title, but 
over the course of the 1980s other participants in the “Déclaration” came forward and made it known that 
he played a more significant part in shaping both the philosophical direction of the “Déclaration,” and the 
style of its language.  See Mascolo, “Aux Heures d’un communisme de pensée,” reprinted in Mascolo, À la 
recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993): 439-441. 
  143
face to appear in any newspaper or in any archive.  The invisible man, in so many 
words…And yet it is this man who is behind the famous ‘Manifeste.’  It is he who 
spent days, and nights, not only writing it, but discussing it…telephoning people 
to get their signatures.  He left his lair on this occasion.  He showed himself, 
exposed himself.  This man whose face no one knew, this man whom it was 
difficult to imagine living, chatting, mingling like ordinary mortals…suddenly 
‘played intellectual’ like Sartre or Zola.  There is something almost unthinkable to 
me in this situation, in this gap between a man and his relation to himself and to 
his ethics.224  
 
Henri-Lévy took it upon himself to ask Blanchot directly, sending him a letter soliciting 
an explanation of the “Déclaration” and Blanchot’s role in its genesis – and in particular, 
asking Blanchot why he chose to intervene in the war in Algeria, but not during the 
Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956.  Blanchot’s response, which 
Henri-Lévy published, only clouded the matter further:  “Thank you for your letter.  But 
pardon me for being unable to respond as you wished.  I no longer receive even my 
closest friends, without our friendship being diminished.  And today, I think only of 
Auschwitz.”225  At the time, there was a controversy over the erection of a memorial on 
the site of the Carmelite monastery at Auschwitz, which many (including both Blanchot 
and Henri-Lévy) thought should remain untouched.  But what had Auschwitz to do with 
Algeria?  Why was Blanchot so evasive?  What were the real reasons behind the 
                                                 
224 “Pensez!  L’auteur de Thomas l’obscur.  L’apôtre d’une littérature blanche, lacunaire, évanescente.  
L’homme que l’on ne voit pas.  Que l’on n’entend jamais.  Le seul intellectual français à avoir fait en sorte 
qu’il n’y ait dans aucun jounal, dans aucune archive d’aucune espèce, une image de son visage….Eh bien 
c’est lui, cet homme-là, qui est derrière ce fameux Manifeste.  C’est lui qui passe des jours, des nuits, non 
seulement à l’écrire, le discuter…mais à téléphoner aux gens, à recueillir leurs signatures.  Il est sorti de 
son trou pour l’occasion.  Il s’est montré, exposé.  Cet homme don’t personne, encore une fois, ne 
connaissait le visage, cet homme que l’on a peine à imaginer vivant, causant, circulant comme le commun 
des mortels…le voilà qui se met, comme Sartre ou Zola, à “faire intellectuel.”  Et il y a dans cette situation, 
dans cet écart d’un homme par rapport à lui-même et à son éthique, quelque chose qui, encore une fois, me 
semble presque impensable.” Bernard Henri-Lévy, Les Aventures de la liberté: Une histoire subjective des 
intellectuels (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 309. 
225 “Merci pour votre lettre.  Mais pardonnez-moi de ne pouvoir répondre comme vous le souhaitez.  Je ne 
revois même pas mes plus proches amis, sans que l’amitié soit diminuée.  Et aujourd’hui je n’ai de pensée 
que pour Auschwitz.”  Ibid., 311. 
  144
“Déclaration”?  This chapter investigates the origins of the “Déclaration sur le droit à 
l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” to answer these questions.  
 
* 
 In order to understand the full scope of the “Déclaration,” it is necessary to briefly 
review the history of the war in Algeria, and the responses that it elicited among French 
intellectuals.  The war began in November 1, 1954 when the Fronte de Libération 
Nationale (FLN) staged a series of guerilla attacks against various French military and 
civilian targets.  The French army responded to the FLN’s guerilla tactics by employing 
equally vicious methods of counter-insurgency, and the entire conflict was characterized 
by horrific violence on the part of both combatants.  While the war in Algeria was part of 
the larger decolonization of the French empire, and while it began just as the French 
Indochina War was ending, France invested much more energy and resources into 
maintaining its hold on to Algeria, because it was considered part of metropolitan France 
itself.  The war was the defining political event of the 1950s in France, the political and 
social order of which was thrown into chaos through coups, assassination attempts, 
massacres, and torture.   
One of the major events of the war in Algeria was the emergence of the army as a 
political force, leading to the collapse of the government of the Fourth Republic.  Over 
the course of the war the French army grew increasingly independent from the French 
metropolitan and colonial administrations, which had become unstable under the pressure 
of the war.  Dissatisfied with the government’s support for military operations in Algeria, 
  145
on May 13, 1958 the army staged a putsch in Algiers ousting the colonial administration.  
On May 24 the army invaded the island of Corsica, as a prelude to an airborne invasion 
of Paris, in which they intended to take control of the civilian government, and replace 
the elected officials of the Fourth Republic with Charles de Gaulle, whom they still 
supported.  In a series of public statements, de Gaulle made it clear that he thought of 
himself as independent from the army, but also that he was willing to help restore order 
by returning to power for the first time since 1946.  To forestall the invasion, the French 
parliament itself asked de Gaulle on May 29 to serve as prime minister before the army 
could take action.  In June, de Gaulle was installed in power, and given the authority to 
re-write the constitution.  In October 1958, the Fifth Republic was formed, with the major 
change that the government shifted from a parliamentary system, to a semi-presidential 
one.  To many in France, this was little more than a coup, despite de Gaulle’s claims to 
neutrality.  The result of this sequence of events was that from 1958 to the end of the war 
in 1962, there was a perpetual siege mentality in France.  
 While the May 1958 crisis contributed to a general sense of instability, other 
events related to the war incited tension between the French populace and the French 
government.  There was a reciprocal cycle of hostility: on many occasions, the public 
responded to the army’s actions by protesting, and the government responded to the 
protests by taking increasingly repressive measures.  In 1957 and 1958 it became widely 
known that the French army had employed torture in its counter-insurgency efforts 
against the FLN, setting off a wave of demonstrations and denunciations.226  Two events 
                                                 
226 See Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954-1962 (Paris: Éditions 
Gallimard, 2001); La Guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005). 
  146
in particular turned public opinion against the government: the first was the trial of 
Djamila Boupacha, a young woman who was a member of the FLN, and who had been 
raped and tortured.227  The second was the publication of La Question by the French 
journalist Henri Alleg, who had also been imprisoned and tortured by the French army.228  
Alleg’s book was immediately censored.  In addition to torture, the French army had 
resumed using the guillotine for both legal and extra-legal execution, recalling the 
excesses of state power during the French Revolution.  This too, turned the populace 
against the government.   
In France, the cycle of violence and state repression intensified after the 
revelation of torture and the public outcry against it.  At the end of 1960, a small cadre of 
right-wing army officers formed the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), a guerilla 
organization dedicated to maintaining French control over Algeria.  The OAS carried out 
terrorist attacks against officials both in France and Algeria who supported Algerian 
independence, including several assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle.  These acts 
of domestic terrorism were complimented by an FLN campaign in France itself, which 
targeted the French police, as well as muslims living in France who did not support 
Algerian independence.  In response to these actions, the Parisian police set a curfew on 
the nearly 150,000 Algerians and muslims living in Paris.  On October 17, 1961 some 50-
200 Algerians living in Paris were massacred by the city police as they demonstrated 
against the curfew, their bodies thrown in the Seine after having been beaten to death.229  
                                                 
227 See Gisele Halimi & Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962). 
228 See Henri Alleg, La Question (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1958). 
229 See Jean-Luc Einaudi, La Bataille de Paris: 17 Octobre 1961 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991). 
  147
During this period of severe unrest, de Gaulle declared a state of emergency, lasting from 
April 22, 1961 to September 29, 1961, amplifying the government’s repressive practices 
to an unprecedented level. 
 Like the postwar purge before it, the war in Algeria produced a vigorous debate 
among French intellectuals.  At stake once more was the identity of the French nation, 
and the values of postwar France, just as much as its physical borders.  As in the purge 
debate, French intellectuals appointed themselves the custodians of French identity, a 
trust in which it was their task to speak out against injustices.  They were the champions 
of French politics, in the sense that they were the designated spokesmen of various 
political alignments, whose jousts were followed in the mainstream press as avidly as any 
speech by a parliamentary representative.  Unlike the purge debate however, which took 
place principally between various factions of the left, the war in Algeria blurred the 
boundaries between right and left because of its violence, the complicated sentiments it 
aroused, and its implications for French national identity.  Further confusing the matter, 
the positions in the debate evolved considerably over the course of the war, as the 
revelation of torture, de Gaulle’s questionable legitimacy, and the inevitability of 
Algerian victory compelled French intellectuals to revise not just their stance for or 
against Algerian independence, but also the reasons behind their stance.  While a full 
account of the intellectual debate surrounding the war in Algeria would require more 
attention than is currently possible, it is necessary to delineate the major positions of this 
debate for the purposes of the present study.230   
                                                 
230 The political groupings of the purge debate changed over time, and blurred the traditional boundaries 
between the left and right.  For two foundational studies, see Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and 
  148
At the beginning of the war French intellectuals were split into three camps.231  
The first camp opposed Algerian independence.  This group was composed of an odd 
alliance between the traditional French right and liberal intellectuals.  While the right 
insisted on France’s sovereign possession of Algeria, many liberal intellectuals argued 
against Algerian independence with a rationale that combined the universal values of 
French republicanism, with the virtue of France’s civilizing mission.232  The remaining 
camps came from the left, which was split into two factions.  The first faction 
acknowledged the necessity of Algerian self-rule, but still sought some form of Franco-
muslim reconciliation.  The most prominent advocate of this position throughout the war 
was Albert Camus.  Outraged at the callous violence committed against civilians by both 
the FLN and the French army, and influenced by his personal devotion to French Algeria, 
Camus continued to argue for a Franco-muslim reconciliation in which the white French 
                                                                                                                                                 
Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); and David Schalk, 
War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).  For a sense 
of the wide range of responses to the war, see Joël Roman, ed. Esprit: Ecrire contre la guerre d’Algérie: 
1947-1962 (Paris: Hachette, 2002). 
231 This taxonomy draws on other recent interpretations of the fault lines in the debate over the war in 
Algeria.  For instance, Todd Sheperd argues that there were only two major positions.  For Sheperd, these 
positions were not defined by the place on the political spectrum, but rather by the ideology mustered in 
their arguments: “The ideological confrontation at the war’s close, then, can be understood best not in 
commentator’s usual terms, of “republican” versus antirepublican, far right, or “fascist.”  Rather, the 
primary clash was between those who relied on historical determinism and others who looked to republican 
legalism.”  Sheperd’s work makes an important contribution by demonstrating the extent to which 
traditional right and left political positions were blurred during the debate over the war in Algeria.  Sheperd 
highlights the need to take seriously the ideological claims to republican legalism made by the OAS and 
their supporters, and at the same time underscores the way that arguments about the historical necessity of 
deconolization – a seemingly leftist position – allowed France to abandon the war without modifying any 
of its own structures of governance and identity.  By sorting the debate over the war in Algeria into three 
main camps, this dissertation builds on Sheperd’s work, but adds some new wrinkles in order to adequately 
demonstrate the unique position of the “Déclaration.”  See Sheperd, The Invention of Decolonization: The 
Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 
232 The most visible and vocal representative of the latter group was Jacques Soustelle, the governer-
general of Algeria until 1960, and a former professor of ethnology at the École des Hautes Études et 
Sciences Sociales.  On France’s perceived civilizing mission, see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The 
Idea of Empire in France and West Africa: 1895-1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 
  149
settlers would be allowed to remain in Algeria, until his death in an automobile accident 
in January 1960.233   
Camus was heavily criticized for this position however, and many leftist 
intellectuals argued for a Franco-muslim reconciliation in which French settlers were 
repatriated, but formal ties between France and Algeria were not fully severed.  Still 
others sought a Franco-muslim reconciliation in which Algeria was granted full 
independence through a peace treaty.  While this faction among the left mainly desired a 
peaceful end to the war, another, more committed faction openly supported the FLN, and 
argued for the necessity that the colonized Algerians violently oust the colonizing French.  
Prominent among this group were Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon, who have received 
much attention in the years since the war in Algeria.  During the war however, the most 
widely recognized representative of the radical left, was perhaps Francis Jeanson, a 
Sartrean disciple who ran a clandestine network of Algerian and French operatives 
providing material support to the FLN in metropolitan France.  In September 1960, the 
organizers of the Jeanson Network were put on trial, and the proceedings quickly 
devolved into political spectacle.  The government saw the trial as an opportunity to 
make an example of the most famous of the “porteurs des valises,” the “suitcase carriers” 
who aided the FLN.  Likewise, the left saw the trial as an opportunity to make a stand 
                                                 
233 This has been a point of considerable debate among intellectual historians for many years.  Recently, 
David Carroll has persuasively argued that Camus’ stance against Algerian independence requires a 
nuanced reading of Camus’ personal history.  See David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 2008). 
. 
  150
against injustice.234  The result was that the trial of the Jeanson Network was a major 
point of public debate throughout the autumn of 1960, and it was by far the most visible 
example of the radical left’s engagement against the war.     
The differences between the members of the left thwarted any attempt to build a 
united coalition of intellectuals against the war.  The most significant attempt to create 
such a coalition prior to the “Déclaration” was the Comité d’Action des Intellectuels 
contre le Poursuite de la Guerre en Afrique du Nord, founded in 1955 by Dionys 
Mascolo, Louis-René des Forêts, Robert Antelme, and Edgar Morin. The Comité 
d’Action fell apart when the various participants could not reach an agreement about 
whether to lend their support to the radical, muslim FLN, or the less violent Mouvement 
National Algérien, led by the Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj.235  By the end of the war 
however, few intellectuals on the left still supported a diplomatic end to the war.  Most 
had come to recognize the necessity of an independent Algeria, and the right of the 
Algerians to fight for their self-determination, though few went as far as Jeanson.  Still, 
these three groups – those who supported French possession of Algeria, those who sought 
peaceful resolution to the war with some sort of Franco-muslim reconciliation, and the 
radicals who supported the FLN materially – represent the broad spectrum of positions in 
the intellectual debate over the war in Algeria.     
If the trope that structured the debate over the postwar purge of writers and 
intellectuals was the crisis of representation (who represented France and how did 
                                                 
234 See Hervé Hamon & Patrick Rotman, Les Porteurs des valises: La Résistance française à la guerre 
d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982). 
235 On the history of the Comité d’Action des Intellectuels contre la Poursuite de la Guerre en Afrique du 
Nord, see James Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of 
Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 
  151
linguistic representation work) then the structuring trope of the debate over the war in 
Algeria was a crisis of legitimacy.  James Le Sueur argues that the war in Algeria forced 
French intellectuals to reconcile their longstanding faith in the universality of French 
republicanism, with the sometimes irreducible difference of the Algerian other.236  
Reconciliation of these two contradictory notions required French intellectuals to 
reconsider the legitimacy of their positions and their actions.  It was one thing to take on 
the role of spokesman for France, but quite another to take on that role for Algeria and 
Algerians.  The two questions that animated the debate were: In whose name did one 
speak?  And by what authority did one speak?  Regardless of their position within the 
debate, French intellectuals felt obligated to state their qualifications for speaking on 
behalf of Algerians, and to proclaim the concepts of justice and of right that legitimated 
their speech.   
Polemicists from positions as diverse as Camus and Sartre’s all hewed to the same 
trope of the crisis of legitimacy.  Both made explicit the groups in whose name they 
spoke, and the authority by which they had the legitimacy to speak.  Camus’ arguments 
against Algerian independence, for instance, were deeply intertwined with his heritage as 
a French-Algerian.  Camus stressed that his status as a pied-noir gave him the personal 
authority to speak out on the necessity of a Franco-muslim reconciliation that would 
allow French-Algerians to remain in their homes.  Additionally, Camus legitimated his 
position with a humanist sense of justice, and outrage at the violence perpetrated by both 
                                                 
236 Ibid. 1-14. 
  152
sides in the war.237  While Sartre argued for Algerian independence – often in direct 
contradistinction to Camus – he too was compelled to do so through a profession of the 
legitimacy of speech on behalf of Algeria and Algerians.  It was a matter of historical 
justice, Sartre argued, that the colonized people of Algeria should win freedom, since the 
history of colonial oppression was synonymous with the history of the oppression of the 
global proletariat.  In essence, Sartre’s position against the war was an extension of 
intellectual commitment to cover situations beyond the metropole, and inclusive of the 
third world.238  These positions were outgrowths of the spectacular falling out that 
occurred between Sartre and Camus in 1952, which happened largely because of their 
differences in opinion regarding the necessity of committed intervention in politics.  In 
the debate over the war in Algeria however, the crisis of legitimacy intensified their 
differences, even as they both articulated their positions through the same tropes of 
legitimacy and authority.  It was in the name of the Algerians that Sartre spoke, and by 
the authority of historical justice, just as Camus too spoke in the name of the Algerians, 
and by the authority of an ethical humanism.   
While historians like James le Sueur and Todd Sheperd have discussed the use of 
these tropes, little attention has been paid to their philosophical stakes.  By legitimizing 
their positions through appeals to justice and right, French intellectuals turned their 
speech into ethical action. In this way, the intellectual debate over the war in Algeria was 
qualitatively different than the debate over the postwar purge of writers and intellectuals.  
While the debate over the postwar purge of writers and intellectuals was essentially a 
                                                 
237 See Le Sueur, 87-131. 
238 See Le Sueur, 28-54; and Sheperd, 55-81. 
  153
political debate, the debate over the war in Algeria was an ethical one.  The appeals to 
justice and right that French intellectuals made in their speech were intended to ground 
their actions in metaphysics.  The philosophical question that motivated the debate was 
not what kind of ethical action should be taken, but rather, if one has a metaphysical or 
theoretical understanding of the world, was one enjoined to act on it?  This chapter takes 
these philosophical stakes as a point of departure, and accounts for the “Déclaration” in 
order to follow the ethical critique and abandonment of Sartrean commitment.   
The history of the “Déclaration” begins with Blanchot’s friendship with Dionys 
Mascolo, the husband of Marguerite Duras, and the principal organizer of the failed 
Comité d’Action des Intellectuels contre la Poursuite de la Guerre en Afrique du Nord.  
Along with the surrealist Jean Schuster, Mascolo had founded an anti-Gaullist journal 
titled Le 14 juillet in order to protest the events of May 1958.  Shortly after seeing the 
first issue later that summer, Blanchot wrote to Mascolo, breaking his decade of political 
silence.  Mascolo recalled the striking words of Blanchot’s unsolicited overture thirty-two 
years later in 1990: “I want to tell you my agreement.  I refuse everything of the past, and 
I accept nothing of the present.”239  This brought Blanchot into the group of intellectuals 
known as the “Group of Rue Saint-Benoit,” after the location of Duras’ apartment where 
the members gathered, including des Forêts (the author of “La Bavard,” and a major 
French writer in his own right, who worked with Mascolo as an editor at Gallimard), 
Robert Antelme (Duras’ ex-husband), and Edgar Morin. The title of Le 14 juillet 
harkened to the founding moment of the French Revolution, and its pages were 
                                                 
239 “Je veux vous dire mon accord.  Je refuse tout le passé et je n’accepte rien du présent.”  Dionys 
Mascolo, “Un itinéraire politique.” By Aliette Armel. Magazin littéraire, 278 (June 1990): 40.  
  154
punctuated by etchings of famous events and personalities of the Revolution, with 
supplementary quotations from Robespierre, Saint-Just, and others.  Blanchot contributed 
one essay apiece to the second and third issues, titled “Le Refus,” and “La Perversion 
essentielle,” which made arguments against de Gaulle’s legitimacy.240  Le 14 juillet 
ceased publication in 1959, but the group of Rue Saint-Benoit continued to be active in 
the anti-war movement.  To protest the trial of the Jeanson Network in 1960, Mascolo 
wanted to circulate a collective petition, reprising the coalition of the Comité d’Action.241  
He sought assistance from Blanchot and Schuster, with whom he co-authored the 
petition.  This was the “Déclaration sur la Droit à l’Insoumission dans la guerre 
d’Algérie.”242  
The “Déclaration” adhered to the theme of ethical action that motivated the rest of 
the debate over the war in Algeria, claiming that “a moral dilemma has been posed since 
the beginning of the war,” regarding the possibility of acting in the absence of any clear 
values.243  This was Blanchot’s contribution to the debate over the war in Algeria 
however, and as he did with the debate over the postwar purge of writers and 
                                                 
240 See Blanchot, “Le Refus”, Le 14 juillet 2 (October 1958): 3; and “La Perversion essentielle”, Le 14 
juillet 3 (June 1959): 18-20. 
241 Blanchot’s role in the drafting of the “Déclaration” is discussed at length in Christophe Bident, Maurice 
Blanchot: partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 391-402.  See also, Annie-Cohen Solal, 
Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 694-717. 
242 The collective authorship of the “Déclaration” calls into question the extent to which it can be treated as 
the work of Blanchot, and consequently, as Blanchot’s contribution to the debate over the war in Algeria.  
But for Blanchot, even the act of signing the “Déclaration” was binding, since it attached one’s being to the 
words in the text.  To this extent, it did not matter whether one was the author in a traditional sense.  For 
Blanchot, he was responsible for the “Déclaration” not just because he was one of its three principal 
authors, but also because he took responsibility for it by virtue of his signature.  In view of Blanchot’s 
understanding of his own responsibility for the “Déclaration,” this chapter will treat the “Déclaration” as 
the part of his corpus that represents his stance on the war in Algeria.  This point is developed at length 
below.   
243 “Le cas de conscience s’est trouvé posé des le début de la guerre.” Déclaration sur le droit à 
l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie, 50. 
  155
intellectuals, he appropriated the form and the terms of the other polemicists, while going 
far beyond them.  Any resemblance to the other positions in the debate over the war in 
Algeria ended with the exigency for ethical action: the commitment of the radical left, 
and the reconciliation of the liberal and humanist left were both inadequate to respond to 
the war in Algeria for Blanchot, and the other signatories.  It was equally necessary to 
abandon Sartre’s notion of commitment, which Blanchot had shown to be incapable of 
producing genuine political change during the postwar purge, and invent an alternative 
form of engagement.  Likewise, it was necessary to make a clear intervention in the 
debate over the war in Algeria without resorting to the humanist notions of justice that 
Camus, and other liberals invoked in support of both reconciliation, and independence.  
For many French intellectuals, not least among whom was Sartre himself, Camus’ 
humanism was abhorrent because it led him to support the continued French possession 
of Algeria.  From this position, a notion of justice based on an ethics of humanism was 
inadequate because it blinded Camus to the manifest injustice of his political positions.  
But for Blanchot, the ethical humanism of Camus was inadequate for different reasons.  
Blanchot developed his opposition to Camus’ ethical humanism when he was called on 
by La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française to respond to the falling out between Sartre 
and Camus.244  His objection to Camus was not that his ethical humanism allowed for 
                                                 
244 Blanchot’s response to the split between Sartre and Camus was published in the summer of 1954, 
spread out over four issues of La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française.  They were: “Orphée, Don Juan, 
Tristan,” La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, 15 (March 1954): 492-501; “Réflexions sur l’enfer (I),” 
La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, 16 (April 1954): 677-686; “Réflexions sur le nihilisme (II),” La 
Nouvelle nouvelle Revue Française, 17 (May 1954): 850-859; “Tu peux tuer cet homme (III),” La Nouvelle 
Nouvelle Revue Française, 18 (June 1954): 1059-1069.  Though the first essay did not carry a roman 
numeral designating its place, it was an engagement Camus’ reading of Don Juan.  Its publication in 
March, immediately before the three-part piece which began in April, as well as its inclusion along with the 
three-part piece in the collection L’Éntretien infini under the title “Réflexions sur l’enfer,” indicates that it 
  156
injustice to exist, but that humanism could never provide a stable ground on which to act 
ethically.  Blanchot’s response to the dispute between Sartre and Camus was, then, 
crucial for his development of an ethical critique of Sartrean commitment, and an 
important antecedent of the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre 
d’Algérie.”    
Today it is known that Blanchot was one of the principal authors of the 
“Déclaration,” but at the time all one hundred and twenty-one of the signatories took 
responsibility for the text collectively.245  Nor did any of them relent under legal pressure.  
In the many depositions, inquests, and interrogations that followed, none of the 
signatories were willing to single out any one individual as the document’s true author.  It 
was a text for which they all insisted on their collective responsibility.  At its most basic 
level, it disavowed the right of a single author to speak in the name of anyone else, even 
if they had countersigned the text.  The “Déclaration” was unique because it did not 
attempt to speak for anyone other than its signatories, and it did not profess a concept of 
justice.  It affirmed the right to refuse service in the army, but the one hundred and 
twenty-one signatories made this affirmation only in their own name, collectively.  It 
declared that the right to refuse service was justified, but it did not explain the notion of 
justice on which this right was based.  This declaration was followed by the signatures of 
                                                                                                                                                 
should be treated as a part of Blanchot’s response to the split between Sartre and Camus.  See L’Éntretien 
infini (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969), 256-288.  
245 This creates a difficulty for any account of the “Déclaration.”  On the one hand, there is substantial 
historical evidence that Blanchot wrote the “Déclaration.”  On the other, it is also necessary to refer to the 
collective responsibility of the signatories when discussing the “Déclaration” as an ethical act with definite 
consequences for the debate over the war in Algeria.  Throughout this chapter, I will refer to Blanchot as 
the author of the “Déclaration” when discussing its philosophical genealogy in an analytical register.  But 
when discussing its historical affect as an ethical action, I will refer to the collective responsibility of the 
signatories.   
  157
one hundred and twenty-one people, including Robert Antelme, Blanchot, André Breton, 
Simone Dreyfus, Marguerite Duras, Louis-René des Forêts, Henri Lefebvre, Michel 
Leiris, Dionys Mascolo, François Maspero, Maurice Nadeau, Alain Resnais, Alain 
Robbe-Grillet, Christiane Rochefort, Nathalie Sarraute, Simone Signoret, and Pierre 
Vidal-Naquet among others.246   
As a result of the decision to not speak in anyone’s name other than their own, 
and the decision to not provide any concept of justice on which their declaration rested, 
the signatories of the “Déclaration” performed a different kind of ethical action than 
either Camus, or Sartre’s speech.  The act of the “Déclaration” was able to create an 
ethical law outside the purview of the law of the state because those who wrote it did so 
only in their own names, and because they did not succumb to the pressure to attach their 
act to a notion of justice based on metaphysics.  As an act, it provided an alternative to 
Sartrean commitment, which was an inadequate grounding for intervention in politics 
ever since the debate over the postwar purge of writers and intellectuals.  At the same 
time, the “Déclaration” provided an alternative to the equally inadequate positions of the 
liberal and reconciliatory left.   
As a text however, the “Déclaration” only served as the blank mask of its deeper 
philosophical content.  It cannot be explained solely by contextualizing it within the 
debate over the war in Algeria, because it departed from the positions of that debate so 
                                                 
246 In a confusing turn of events Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Jeanson, and Simone de Beauvoir all signed as 
well.  At the time however, Sartre was in Brazil, pursuing interests there, and not in France.  Sartre gave his 
signtature to the “Déclaration” to lend it symbolic weight, since he was France’s most visible public 
intellectual.  This should not be taken to mean that Sartre reached a philosophical or political 
rapprochement with Blanchot or with Camus.  Rather he set aside his intellectual differences to further the 
anti-war movement.  See Cohen-Solal, Sartre.  
  158
radically.  Nor can it be explained solely by reference to Blanchot’s corpus, because it 
bore none of the traces of his philosophical or literary concepts.  The history of the 
“Déclaration” thus suffers from the same problems that plague the history of “La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort.”  Historical treatments have failed to account for its 
philosophical content by focusing on its place in the debate over the war in Algeria to the 
exclusion of Blanchot’s role in its composition.  For le Sueur and Sirinelli, the 
“Déclaration” was just one more petition in a war in which French intellectuals produced 
new petitions on a regular basis.  Setting it beside the Alleg and Boupacha affairs, le 
Sueur folds the “Déclaration” into the trial of the Jeanson Network, and the protests that 
it occasioned.  For le Sueur, the “Déclaration” demonstrated the gulf separating the 
radical left from more moderate intellectuals, who issued a counter-manifesto, which 
called for peace but stopped short of advocating desertion from the army.247  Sirinelli 
takes a more detailed look at the affair inspired by the “Déclaration” itself, narrating its 
genesis, the trial that followed, and the petitions that flew back and forth between the 
manifesto’s supporters, and its antagonists.  For Sirinelli, the “Déclaration” was but one 
of many such petitions, and not even the most important, as its signatories tended too 
much to the avant-garde to exert a real influence on “civil society.”248  These treatments 
are helpful for having established the “Déclaration” within the wider field of the debate 
over the war in Algeria, but they do not go far enough in exploring the things that set it 
                                                 
247 The signatories of this counter-manifesto included Raymond Aron, Roland Barthes, Georges 
Canguilhem, Jean Cassou, Jean-Marie Domenach, Jean Dresch, Claude Lefort, Jacques Le Goff, Maurice 
Merleau-Ponty, Edgar Morin, Daniel Meyer, and Paul Ricouer.  See Le Sueur, 205-213. 
248 See Sirinelli, 265-306. 
  159
apart: the rejection of any claims to legitimacy and authority to speak on another’s behalf, 
and the character of the collective ethical action.  
Philosophical treatments, by contrast, have ignored the history of the 
“Déclaration” in the debate over the war in Algeria, in order to focus on its relation to 
Blanchot’s later communitarian and utopian politics.  Christopher Fynsk places the 
“Déclaration” in the context of Blanchot’s efforts to establish an international journal, a 
reprisal of Le 14 juillet to be published collaboratively in French, German, Italian, and 
English, as a response to the abstraction of politics wrought by the Cold War.249  Similar 
to Allan Stoekl’s treatment of “La Littérature et la droit à la mort,” Fynsk’s essay argues 
that Blanchot’s thought in the years between 1958 and 1962 was not concerned with the 
war in Algeria, but again with building a theory of politics and a theory of community.  
Fynsk’s essay is subtle and nuanced in its critique of Blanchot’s vision for a utopian 
project of collaborative literary creation, but by choosing not to pursue the deeper 
meaning of the “Déclaration,” Fynsk misses a crucial opportunity to revise the prevailing 
understanding of Blanchot’s politics, and redress what Henri-Lévy called an 
“unthinkable…gap between [Blanchot] and his relation to himself and to his ethics.”   
By tracing the genealogy of the “Déclaration” within Blanchot’s thought, it is 
possible to recover its missing philosophical content.  The content of the “Déclaration” 
lays not in the context of the debate over the war in Algeria, but in Blanchot’s response to 
the controversy sparked by the split between Sartre and Camus in 1952.  This split set the 
ideological lines of the debate over the war in Algeria, and determined Blanchot’s stance 
                                                 
249 Christopher Fynsk, “Blanchot in The International Review,” Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 104-120.  
Even more abstract in this regard is Patrick Hanafin, “The Writer’s Refusal and the Law’s Malady,” 
Journal of Law and Society 31, no. 1 (2004): 3-14. 
  160
on the ethics of intellectual engagement.  By following Blanchot’s involvement in this 
debate, it is possible to understand the full significance of the “Déclaration” as an ethical 
act.  That is to say, by examining the grounds which conditioned the positions in the 
debate over the war in Algeria – including that of the “Déclaration” – it is possible to 
determine Blanchot’s stance on the war in Algeria.  Following this line of inquiry leads to 
a relatively unknown corner of Blanchot’s corpus, but an important one nonetheless.  
Blanchot’s essays on the split between Sartre and Camus represented more than just his 
own voice.  They were also La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française’s response to the 
split, and as such, they represented the position of the most influential and widely 
circulated anti-commitment journal, and its anti-commitment editor, Jean Paulhan.  By 
tracing this genealogy, I argue that the “Déclaration” advanced upon to the critique of 
commitment made during the postwar purge by articulating a ethical mode of intellectual 
engagement in politics.  
This was a key moment in the move beyond commitment.  With the “Déclaration” 
Blanchot and his co-signatories found a grounding for ethical action which relied neither 
on the appeals to metaphysical and historical justice made by commitment, nor the 
Camusian appeals to humanism, nor the crisis of legitimacy’s injunction to speak 
another’s name.  Indeed, the grounding for ethical action was found precisely in the 
refusal of these appeals and injunctions.  The previous chapter charted Blanchot's critique 
of commitment’s inability to produce a viable politics.  This chapter charts Blanchot’s 
abandonment of commitment tout court, in favor of an ethically, rather than politically 
grounded mode of intellectual engagement.  Scholars of Blanchot’s ethics typically focus 
  161
on his relationship with Levinas and Bataille, and his development of the concept of the 
radical alterity in later works such as L’Écriture du désastre.250  Such scholarship offers a 
vision of Blanchot’s ethics anchored firmly in theoretical reason.  The history of the 
“Déclaration” however, offers a very different picture of Blanchot’s ethics.  It offers a 
picture not only of Blanchot’s stance on the war in Algeria, but also of an ethics based on 
practical reason.   
 
Blanchot and Camus during the 1950s 
In 1960, at the time of the “Déclaration,” Blanchot was a fully participating 
member of the Parisian intellectual avant-garde.  But throughout much of the 1950s, as 
the war in Algeria developed, Blanchot remained in the exile he had imposed on himself 
after the postwar purge of writers and intellectuals.  After World War II Blanchot fled 
Paris, and took a room on the French Mediterranean, in the village of Èze, from which he 
did not return until the winter of 1957-1958.  At the time he was only 39 years old, and 
had published just two of his eventual thirteen major works of fiction, and only one 
collection of critical work, of an eventual six by the time of his death.251  While he had 
achieved a measure of respect from the small circle of intellectuals that attended George 
Bataille’s salon, he had not yet distinguished himself more widely.  But personal renown 
                                                 
250 See, for example, Simon Critchley, Very Little...Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 1997); and 
William Large, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing 
(Manchester, UK: Clinamen, 2004). 
251 Since Blanchot died in February 2003, two new collections of previously unpublished material have 
appeared.  The first collects all of Blanchot’s political writing from the postwar period, including many of 
the pamphlets and tracts that he authored anonymously for the Comité d’action d’étudiants-écrivains.  The 
second collects all of the critical pieces Blanchot published in the Journal des débats that were not released 
in Faux Pas (1943).  See Blanchot, Écrits politiques: 1958-1993; Blanchot, Chroniques littéraire du 
Journal des débats: Avril 1941-août 1944 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). 
  162
was the furthest thing from Blanchot’s mind.  Between the end of 1947 the summer of 
1958 his only presence in Parisian intellectual culture was his signature on the cryptic and 
obscure book reviews and literary essays that were published in Critique and La Nouvelle 
Nouvelle Revue Française.   
In Èze Blanchot found the solitude that he deemed necessary to be able to write, 
and which the constant circulation of Parisian intellectual culture prohibited.  Indeed, 
while living in Èze, Blanchot developed the theory of writerly solitude that became a 
cornerstone of his philosophy.  In Blanchot’s inimitable manner however, he went 
beyond the solitude of being alone, to suggest that real solitude had nothing do with the 
writer at all, and everything to do with the solitude of the work of art.  To Blanchot, the 
work existed in solitude because it was suspended between the writer and the reader.  It 
was not the writer’s, because once he had finished producing the work he set it aside.  In 
an essay published in January of 1953, Blanchot wrote that the work emerges from its 
solitude and “is accomplished when the œuvre is the intimacy between someone who 
writes it and someone who reads it.”252  Blanchot believed that the work became a true 
work “only when, through it, with the violence of a beginning which is proper to it, the 
word being is pronounced.”253  And the work had being only when it became the 
intimacy between a writer and a reader.  For Blanchot, solitude was not merely being 
alone – this common solitude was “concentration” – the essential solitude of the writer 
was the condition of being able to communicate.  
                                                 
252 “S’accomplit quand l’œuvre est l’intimité de quelqu’un qui l’écrit et de quelqu’un qui la lit.” Blanchot, 
“La Solitude essentielle,” La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 (January 1953): 77. 
253 “L’œuvre n’est œuvre que lorsque se prononce par elle, dans la violence d’un commencement qui lui 
est propre, le mot être.” Blanchot, “La Solitude essentielle,” 77. 
  163
Blanchot’s years in Èze were the most prolific of his career, both as a critic, and 
as a writer of fiction.  During this period Blanchot published nearly one hundred critical 
essays, in a variety of journals.  These pieces formed the bulk of the 1949 collection, La 
Part de feu, and the entirety of the collections L’Espace littéraire, released in 1956, and 
La Livre à venir, from 1959.  Indeed, Blanchot published so many critical essays during 
this period that he was still able to return to them in order to fill out the collections he 
released in 1969 and 1971, L’Entretien infini, and L’Amitié.  It was also during this 
period that Blanchot began his longtime residence at La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue 
Française, which was to be the most enduring institutional relationship of his life, and the 
venue through which he established his centrality in French intellectual culture. 
At the same time, Blanchot also experienced a period of greater literary 
production than at any other time in his life.  While in Èze Blanchot published seven new 
works of fiction.  This flurry of activity coincided with his decision to abandon the format 
of the novel.  During the early 1940s Blanchot had published his first two novels, Thomas 
l’obscur and Aminadab.  Thomas l’obscur was agonizingly written and rewritten many 
times between 1932 and 1940, before it was finally published in 1941.  Aminadab, named 
for the brother of a friend, the Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, was published 
in 1942.  Blanchot published his last novel, Le Trés-Haut, in 1948.  That same year he 
published his first récit, L’Arrêt de mort.  In French literature the récit, or account, is 
distinguished from the novel by its shorter length, and more importantly by its disavowal 
of the omniscient narrative position of the novel.  Wholly embracing the minimalism of 
the genre, Blanchot titled his second récit simply, “Un Récit,” which appeared in the 
  164
journal Empédocle in 1949.  This récit was later republished under the title La Folie du 
jour.254  In 1950 Blanchot revisited his own corpus, and published a severely truncated 
version of Thomas l’obscur.255  Au Moment voulu and Le Ressassement éternel followed 
in 1951; Celui que ne m’accompagnait pas in 1953, and Le Dernier homme 1957. 
If Blanchot was intellectually productive, it came at the expense of other 
concerns.  During his time in Èze, Blanchot did not participate actively in the political 
arguments of the Fourth Republic, or the developments in the satellite states of the Soviet 
Union or the third world, which consumed the Parisian intelligentsia.  Over the course of 
the 1950s, French intellectuals shifted their allegiances from international communism to 
decolonization.  The Moscow show trials of the postwar period, Khruschev’s secret 
speech denouncing Stalinism, and ultimately the brutality of the Soviet repression of the 
Hungarian Revolution disenchanted the intellectual left from their commitment to the 
revolution embodied by the Soviet Union.256  At the same time, freedom movements in 
both Indochina and Algeria shifted intellectuals’ attention from the spread of communism 
to third world struggles.  By the end of the 1950s tiers mondisme, the support for third 
world revolutions against colonial possession, replaced communism among the 
                                                 
254 Jacques Derrida has commented extensively on the ambiguity of the alternative titles “Un Récit,” and 
La Folie du jour.  See Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), esp. “Survivre,” pp. 117-218, and “La loi du 
genre,” pp. 249-287.  For Derrida this ambiguity opens the polysemia of the text.   
255 On the choice to shorten Thomas l’Obscur, see Thomas Schestag, “Mantis, Relics,” trans. Georgia 
Albert, Yale French Studies 93 (1998): 221-251.  Schestag deals with a situation that is the inverse of 
Derrida’s.  While Derrida studies a single text that has borne alternate titles, Schestag deals with two texts 
that bear the same title.  Interestingly, Schestag comes to the almost opposite conclusion: “They mean 
nothing. The version published in 1950 is essentially no different from the one published in 1941; thus it is 
also not the same, but the relation of the two versions to each is in-different.” (248) 
256 See Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley, CA: University of California 
Press, 1992). 
  165
intellectual left.257  Blanchot’s return to Paris in the winter of 1957-1958, and his 
radicalization by De Gaulle’s seizure of power in May of 1958, persuaded him to rejoin 
the intellectual community and its engagement in politics.  
 
* 
During the same period that Blanchot withdrew from Parisian intellectual society, 
Albert Camus became its champion, eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 
1957.  Yet from the moment he was born on 7 November 1913, to his premature death in 
a car accident on 4 January 1960, Camus was an outsider on the inside, a peripheral 
member of the elite societies in which he uncomfortably found himself.258  Raised and 
educated in Algiers, Camus moved to Paris only in March of 1940 to work for the 
newspaper Paris-Soir.  During World War II, he became the editor of the prominent 
resistance newspaper Combat, earning his reputation as the emblematic politically-
committed intellectual.259  In 1942 Camus published L’Etranger, the short novel that 
brought his first public success, and Le mythe de sisyphe, the philosophical text for which 
he is associated with existentialism.  After World War II Camus continued to work for 
Combat until 1947, but by then his commitment had begun to wane.  In 1951 he 
published L’homme révolté, in which he condemned the French communist party, and 
communism more generally, for turning a blind eye to all the suffering created in the 
                                                 
257 See Jean-Pierre Rioux & Jean-François Sirinelli, eds., La guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuals français. 
258 Two comprehensive biographies of Camus exist:  Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography 
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), and Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: une vie (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 
1996).  
259 This daily newspaper put out by the resistance bore no relation to the right-wing weekly called Combat, 
to which Blanchot contributed in 1936 and 1937. 
  166
name of revolution.  News was just reaching France of Stalin’s gulags from sources such 
as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and the entire intellectual community was split 
over the question of whether to continue supporting the Soviet Union.260  This debate 
crystallized in the highly publicized split between Camus and Sartre, who insisted that the 
Soviet Union remained the guiding light for humanity, despite its atrocities.261  Such was 
Camus’ fame that two prominent news-magazines ran headlines covering his split with 
Sartre: “The Sartre-Camus Break is consummated,” announced Samedi-Soir, “Sartre 
against Camus” ran France-Illustration.262  Camus continued to advocate, in ever more 
official capacities, for peaceful, non-violent resolutions to revolutionary conflicts during 
the Algerian War of Independence.  When he was awarded the Nobel Prize Camus was 
confirmed as the avatar of Parisian intellectual culture. 
Yet for all this, Camus was an outsider in the very culture that he led.  He held 
neither of the two most important entry cards to Parisian intellectual culture.  First, 
Camus was not educated at the École Normale Supérieure, nor at the Sorbonne, but rather 
in Algeria, so he did not belong to the exclusive club of normaliens.   Secondly, Camus 
was essentially a moralist, a trait which the Parisian esthetes shunned.263  But more than 
anything else, it was Camus’ Algerian identity that barred his access, and prevented him 
                                                 
260 On French intellectuals’ relationship to the USSR, see Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-
1956.  See also David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: 
Yale University Press, 1988). 
261 On the Sartre-Camus confrontation see Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship 
and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Germaine Brée, Camus 
and Satre: Crisis and Commitment (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972).  The primary documents of the 
confrontation have been translated and assembled in David Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven, eds., 
Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, trans. Sprintzen and van den Hoven (Amherst, NY: Humanity 
Books, 2004). 
262 Cited in Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It, 2. 
263 Paulhan, one of Parisian intellectual culture’s ringleaders during and after the war, was especially 
uncharitable toward Camus moralism.  See Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biogrpahy, 293-294. 
  167
from assimilating to Parisian intellectual culture.  Camus was a pied-noir, one of the 
roughly 750,000 white, Algerian-born, French colonists that ruled over 8 million Arab 
and Berber Algerians.  This proved to be an identity that Camus could never fully inhabit.  
While he enjoyed the privileges of membership in Algeria’s racial elite, Camus grew up 
in poverty that prevented him from fully identifying with the wealthy French colons.  
David Carroll suggests that “the poor, uneducated pieds-noirs to which Camus’ family 
belonged, even if the only official national identity they had was French, clearly 
considered themselves more Algerian than French and referred to France as if it were a 
foreign country.”264  Likewise, when Camus gained access to the highest echelons of 
Parisian intellectual culture through the success of his books and his friendship with Jean-
Paul Sartre, he never fully assimilated into the role of the Parisian intellectual.  Instead, 
he remained attached to what he saw as his Algerian identity.  For Carroll, this accounts 
for Camus’ refusal to march lockstep with other Parisian intellectuals into the Parti 
Communiste Français, for his quixotic pleas for a peaceful resolution to the Algerian War 
of Independence, and his calls for the establishment of a multicultural, multiethnic 
Algeria.  For Camus, it was “the Algerian” in him that opened him up to the harsh, even 
ad hominem criticism that he encountered in the 1950s.265   
It might seem startling then, to place Camus alongside Blanchot.  In the annals of 
postwar French intellectual history Camus’ name belongs in the tradition of humanism, 
while Blanchot gets listed next to anti-humanists like Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, 
Foucault, Lacan, etc.  Most commentators on Blanchot’s life and work also tend to treat 
                                                 
264 David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice, 4. 
265 For a rigorous discussion of the multiple valences of Camus’ self-identification with Algeria, see 
Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian, 1-16. 
  168
his relationship to Camus dismissively.266  Yet their lives intersected in a multitude of 
ways – professionally, and personally.  Both worked as readers for Gallimard, Camus 
having joined the staff in 1943.  Both served on the committee that awarded Gallimard’s 
Prix de la Pléiade, given to young writers of promise.267  Indeed, Blanchot may even have 
voted for La Peste for another of Gallimard’s prizes in 1948, the Prix des Critiques.268  
Both published with Gallimard, though Camus was printed in much higher numbers, and 
distributed much more widely than Blanchot.269  Finally, Blanchot wrote an article for the 
resistance newspaper Combat in 1946, while it was still under Camus’ editorship.270   
These ephemeral, professional connections are unable to account for the startling 
number of essays that Blanchot published on Camus, however.  Significantly for a writer 
who was so sparing with his references to others, Blanchot published no less than eight 
articles on Camus from 1942 to 1960, more than he devoted to any of his other 
contemporaries.  Blanchot reviewed both L’Étranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe when they 
appeared in 1942.271  He reviewed Les Justes and La Chute when they were published in 
                                                 
266 This includes philosophical analyses like those by Leslie Hill and Marlène Zarader, but also Blanchot’s 
biography.  Christophe Bident subsumes Blanchot’s work on Camus underneath his work on Nietzsche, 
effectively denying the importance of the former to the development of Blanchot’s thought.  See Bident, 
Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 348.  For analytical works that 
dismiss Camus, see Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, and Marlène Zarader, L’être et 
le neutre: à partir de Maurice Blanchot.  
267 See Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography, 297; see also Bident. Maurice Blanchot: partenaire 
invisible, 224. 
268 La Peste, so close in theme and in tenor to Blanchot’s Le Trés-haut – published only one year later – 
was the only of Camus’ major works that Blanchot did not review.  See Lottman, Albert Camus: A 
Biography, 426. 
269 See Todd, Albert Camus: une vie, 290. 
270 Maurice Blanchot, “L’intellectuel est toujours responsable”, Combat (26 July 1946): 2. 
271 Maurice Blanchot, “Le Roman de l’étranger,” Journal des Débats (19 August 1942): 3; “Le Mythe de 
Sisyphe,” Journal des Débats, (25 November 1942): 3. 
  169
1950 and 1956, respectively.272  And in the spring of 1954 Blanchot published his 
response to the Camus-Sartre split, which included the longest essay Blanchot wrote on a 
single author other than Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, Lautréamont or Sade.  Written while 
Blanchot was on his sojourn in Èze, this response was published over the course of four 
months.  Ostensibly a review of L’Homme révolté – the book that had initiated the split 
with Sartre – Blanchot’s essay reunited the themes that he had been developing in his 
literary criticism, with the issue of ethics.  Camus for his part became aware of Blanchot 
in December of 1942, when he read Thomas l’obscur and Aminadab, later pressing his 
friends to read them, along with Nietzsche.273  While Camus was travelling through 
France in 1943 – his residency having been cancelled by the occupying German forces – 
he regularly read and discussed Blanchot’s essays published in Journal des débats, sent 
to him by his friend Pascal Pia.274  
In order to account for the affinity between Blanchot and Camus, it is necessary to 
move beyond the biographical anecdote, and consider their identity as writers and 
intellectuals.  As an outsider on the inside of Parisian intellectual culture, Camus was 
actually closer to Blanchot than it appears at first.  Like Camus, Blanchot also 
experienced Parisian intellectual culture as an outsider, having been educated at 
Strasbourg, rather than the École Normale Supérieure, and having dedicated himself to 
solitude, rather than the starlit publicity enjoyed by Sartre, André Malraux, and others of 
                                                 
272 Maurice Blanchot, “Les Justes,” L’Observateur 15 (20 July 1950): 17; “La Confession dédaigneuse”, 
La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 48 (December 1956): 1050-1056.  
273 Camus made note of Aminadab and Thomas l’obscur in his notebooks under the heading “The 
metaphysical novels by Maurice Blanchot.”  See Albert Camus, Carnets: janvier 1942 – mars 1951 (Paris: 
Gallimard, 1964), 65-66.  See also Todd, Albert Camus: une vie, 320. 
274 See Todd, Albert Camus: une vie, 306. 
  170
the inner circle.  In the two panegyrics that Blanchot wrote for Camus (later condensed 
into a single essay for the collection L’Amitié), Blanchot wrote of the way that Camus’ 
work at once seemed to mask Camus’ face, yet at the same time manifest his face in the 
only truthful way possible.  In “Le Détour vers la simplicité,” the second of the 
panegyrics, published in May 1960, five months after Camus’ death, Blanchot wrote:  
L’Etranger is not Camus, which it would be simplicity to believe, no more than is  
the lawyer in La Chute or Doctor Rieux in La Peste: everything rejects this  
identification.  However, we recognize, by a very certain presentiment, that these  
characters, however decisively drawn, are only characters, that is, they are masks:  
the figured surface behind which a certain voice speaks and, through this voice, a  
presence that could not reveal itself.  Masked, what advances behind the mask –  
must I make this clear? – is not the man who is natural, and simple, and often 
direct, who is Albert Camus.275 
 
Blanchot might as well have been writing about himself, for he too withdrew into his 
work, which became the patchwork material from which a mask of Blanchot was cut.276  
The use of the term “figured” (figurée) intimates the ambivalence of the French figure, 
which can mean both “figure,” and “face.”  It was often assumed that the Henri Sorge, 
the main character of Blanchot’s novel, Le Trés-haut, Thomas from Thomas l’obscur, 
and especially the nameless character from the L’instant de ma mort were each figures of 
the real Blanchot.  Michel Foucault described the way Blanchot receded into his work, 
and the way that his work came to function as a substitute for Blanchot’s physical 
                                                 
275 “L’Étranger n’est pas Camus, quelle simplicité que de le croire, et pas davantage l’avocat de La Chute, 
ni le docteur Rieux de La Peste: tout se refuse à cette identification.  Pourtant, nous reconnaissons, par un 
presentiment très sûr, que ces personages, si décidément tracés, ne sont que des personages, c’est-à-dire des 
masques: la surface figurée derrière laquelle parle une certaine voix et, par cette vox, une présense qui ne 
saurait se découvrir.  Masqué, ce qui s’avance sous le masque, - dois-je le préciser? – ce n’est pas cet 
homme parfaitement naturel, et simple, et souvent direct, qu’est Albert Camus.”  Maurice Blanchot, “Le 
detour vers la simplicité,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 89 (May 1960): 7.   
276 J. Hillis Miller concludes that this withdrawal was deliberate, and that Blanchot’s corpus constitutes a 
sustained meditation on prosopopoeia.  See Miller, “Death Mask: Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort,” in Versions 
of Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 179-210. 
  171
absence in “La Pensée du dehors”: “So far has [Blanchot] withdrawn into the 
manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from 
their existence and absent by the marvelous force of their existence, that for us he is 
above all, that thought itself – its real presence.”277 
When Camus died in January of 1960, it was of his works that Blanchot wrote – 
as though they limned Camus himself.  Blanchot contributed the preface to the March 
1960 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française dedicated to Camus, in which he wrote, 
entirely in italics “that [Camus' works] should suddenly desert us, we must indeed be 
convinced of this, even if they are there, around us, with all of the strength that belongs to 
them…[yet] this desertion does not take them away from us, surely; it is the manner in 
which they are close to us.”278  But it was also of their ethical resonance that Blanchot 
wrote, and it was also ethically that Camus’ friendship remained with Blanchot.  This he 
expressed not through declarations or protestations, but by issuing the reminder that 
Camus lived on only in the anguish a reader felt when confronted with the task of 
bringing a work into being: “[Camus’ works remain close to us through] the pain that this 
proximity introduces in our thought each time that, turning toward them, we come up 
against this presence of resistance proper to a work already closing itself up, and we 
cannot help it to close itself up by appreciating or calmly regarding it from a little farther 
                                                 
277 “Tanti il se retire dans la manifestation de son œuvre, tant il est, non pas caché par ses texts, mais 
absent de leur existence et absent par la force merveilleuse de leur existence, il est plutôt pour nous cette 
pensée meme – la présence réelle.”  Michel Foucault, “La Pensée du dehors,” Critique 229 (June 1966): 
527. 
278 “Que ceux-ci tout à coup nous manquent, il faut bien nous en convaincre, même s’ils sont là, autour de 
nous, avec toutes les forces qui leur appartiennent.  Ce manqué ne les écarte pas de nous, assurement: il 
est la manière dont ils nous sont proches.” Maurice Blanchot, “Albert Camus,” La Nouvelle Revue 
Française 87 (March 1960): 403-404. 
  172
away.”279  Blanchot’s implication was that Camus did not remain – and was not present 
in life – when others reduced his work to philosophically baseless humanism, and his 
politics to naïve complicity and toleration, "cold-bloodedly," and "in ignorance of their 
shadow," as was so often the case.280 
If Blanchot and Camus are now considered to have inhabited separate spheres of 
postwar French intellectual culture, it is in spite of the many material connections that 
existed between them throughout the 1940s and 1950s.  In truth, postwar French 
intellectual culture was a site where many such unlikely connections existed, both in the 
lives of intellectuals, and in the texts that they wrote.  Many times, it was the context of 
these unlikely connections, that proved essential to the development of a particular idea, 
or a particular text.  Such was the case with the “Déclaration sur la droit à l’insoumission 
dans la guerre d’Algérie.”  Taken at face value, the “Déclaration,” seemed to exist at a 
significant remove from mainstream intellectual culture, which is to say, outside of the 
polemics of Sartre and Camus.  It was written by Blanchot, Mascolo, and Schuster, all 
denizens of Duras’ apartment on Rue Saint-Benoit rather than the cafés of Boulevard de 
Montparnasse.  It refused to invoke the tropes that other polemics on the war in Algeria 
used so freely.  Yet on closer inspection, the history of the “Déclaration,” with its genesis 
in Blanchot’s response to the split between Sartre and Camus in 1952, becomes clear.  
 
 
                                                 
279 “...la douleur que cette promimité introduit dans nortre pensée, chaque fois que, nous tournant vers 
eux, nous nous heurtons à cette présence de dureté, propre à l'œuvre qui déjà se referme et que nous 
n'aiderons pas à se refermer en l'appréciant ou en la regardant calmement, d'un peu loin." Ibid. 404.   
280 "...sang-froid...en ignorant l'ombre..." Ibid. 403. 
  173
The Ethics of Commitment 
In 1952, the year of the split between Sartre and Camus, Sartre still held to the 
doctrine of existential commitment as a mode of intellectual engagement in politics that 
he had elaborated during the postwar purge of writers and intellectuals.  Likewise, 
Blanchot was still convinced of the critique of commitment that he had articulated in “La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort.”  His response to the split between Sartre and Camus 
hinged not on any reappraisal of commitment, but on a deep and painstaking engagement 
with Camus.  This split was occasioned by Camus’s publication of L’Homme révolté in 
1951, which launched its own full-scale critique of commitment, though from a distinctly 
different position than Blanchot’s.  It was this critique, and the ethics that Camus 
established out of it, to which Blanchot responded when he was commissioned by La 
Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française to issue a statement on the split.   
Before addressing Blanchot’s work on Camus, it is necessary to first review the 
history of the split.  L’Homme révolté directly challenged the ethical legitimacy of 
commitment.  It was a turning point in Camus’ philosophy and his life, which had 
formerly been devoted to the struggle against oppression.  Sartre responded by 
disavowing his friendship with Camus in a series of condemnatory essays, which berated 
Camus’ philosophy and accused him of naïveté and bad faith.  Unlike the debate over the 
postwar purge, which was largely impersonal, and which was fought between the 
editorial positions of the journals Les Temps modernes, Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, 
Critique and La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française rather than individuals, the split 
between Sartre and Camus was intensely personal.  It went back and forth for most of 
  174
1952, with Sartre, Camus, and Francis Jeanson trading ripostes in the pages of Les Temps 
modernes.  As petty as the ad hominem attacks became in this feud, what was at stake 
was the very possibility of intervening in politics, and making a change for the better.281  
Camus charged that commitment was unethical because it condoned, and even suborned 
murder.  This critique of commitment’s ethics differed from Blanchot’s political critique, 
which argued in 1947 that commitment was incapable of creating any kind of real 
political change.  
L’Homme révolté emerged out of Camus’ disenchantment with the treatment of 
political prisoners in the Soviet gulags, and with the French intellectual left’s willful 
blindness to the atrocities that communism perpetrated in the name of freedom.  Its 
central argument was that revolutionary movements begun in good faith always became 
enamored with their own power, and ended up becoming just another repressive regime, 
justifying murder with political doctrine.  Camus’ book was abominated by the left-wing 
intellectual community from the moment it was published in October 1951, costing 
Camus his friendship with Sartre, and isolating him politically from the vast majority of 
French intellectuals.   
But L’Homme révolté contained two different critiques.  The first was the critique 
of history, revolution, Hegel, Marx, and the Soviet gulags, which everyone recognized, 
and to which the intellectual left had profoundly hostile reactions.  This was the critique 
                                                 
281 It is important to recognize the weight of what was at stake in the confrontation between Sartre and 
Camus in order to properly appreciate the ethical and philosophical quality of the “Déclaration.”  Despite 
this, there is a tendency among scholars to scoff at the pretension of French intellectuals, and thereby 
dismiss the stakes of this debate.  Russell Jacoby notes, “To pursue this question requires taking French 
intellectuals as seriously as they take themselves.  This is not always easy.”  Jacoby, “Accidental Friends,” 
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040405/jacoby, retrieved October 27, 2009.  Originally published March 
18, 2004.  
  175
about which Sartre quipped, “Hegel and I have at least this much in common, you have 
read neither of us.”282  In Camus’ view, all revolutions fell prey to the temptation to take 
on more power than they deserved.  This caused the totalitarianism and political terror 
that characterized so many revolutionary regimes.  For Camus, the use of the camps in 
service of the proletarian revolution undermined its ideals of emancipation and 
egalitarianism, and revealed the revolution to have merely supplanted one oppressive 
regime for another.  From this point of view, all historical revolutions were the same, 
whether they were made in the name of the French peuple, the Russian proletariat, or the 
German Volk: “Every modern revolution has led to a reinforcement of the state.  1789 
begat Napoléon; 1848, Napoléon III; 1917, Stalin; the troubles in Italy during the 1920s, 
Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler.”283  Indeed, the very utopianism of revolutions 
based on Marxist philosophy led to state terror, since the perfection of the utopian ideal 
was necessitated by history itself.  This utopia demanded total participation from its 
citizens as the condition of the achievement of its revolutionary goals: “If a subject of the 
[revolutionary state] does not believe in the revolution, then he is, historically speaking, 
nothing, by his own choice.  He thus chooses sides against history, he is a 
blasphemer.”284  From the perspective of the revolution, these people who stood against 
history had to be exterminated.  For Camus, such revolutions carried the logic of terror 
                                                 
282 “J’aurai du moins ceci de commun avec Hegel que vous ne nous aurez lu ni l’un ni l’autre.”  Jean-Paul 
Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” Les Temps modernes 82 (August 1952): 344. 
283 “Toutes les révolutions modernes ont abouti à un renforcement de l'état. 1789 Amène Napoléon, 1848 
Napoléon III, 1917 Staline, les troubles italiens des années 20 Mussolini, la république de Weimar Hitler.” 
Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951), 221. 
284 “Si le sujet de l'empire ne croit pas à l'empire, il n'est rien historiquement, de son propre choix; il choisit 
donc contre l'histoire, il est blasphémateur.” Ibid. 300. 
  176
within themselves.  For this reason, Camus argued that utopian revolution was itself 
corrupt.   
This first critique was framed however, by a second critique that was less 
provocative, more elusive, and which went relatively unnoticed by critics.  This other 
critique placed the political question of revolution inside the larger ethical question of 
murder.  In the ten stunning pages that introduced L’Homme révolté, Camus turned the 
ethical question of murder into a critique of ethics tout court.  He explained that his goal 
in this ethical critique was to find out “if we have the right to kill another human being, 
or the right to let him be killed.”285  Camus’ immediate target was Sartre’s concept of 
commitment, whereby the intellectual advocated the killing of others, or consented to let 
them be killed.  Sartre’s commitment granted itself the right to allow people to be killed 
in the service of a historically necessitated correction to a political injustice – and in the 
                                                 
285 “Si nous avons le droit de tuer cet autre devant nous ou de consentir qu'il soit tué.” Ibid. 14.  L’Homme 
révolté’s ethical questioning of murder was, at bottom, Kantian in nature.  For instance, the terms that it 
employed to describe the motives for crimes – crimes of “passion” and crimes of “logic” – were strikingly 
similar to Kant’s distinction in the Critique of Practical Reason between the “pathological” motives for 
actions, and “Reason.”  This aspect of L’Homme révolté, and by extension, the Kantian overtones in 
Blanchot’s response to Camus, have not been developed explicitly in this chapter, though they are an 
important, implicit subtext.  See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar 
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002).  In the course of conducting the research for this chapter, it became 
evident that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was pursuing a re-evaluation of Kant’s ethics during 
the 1950s in very similar terms to those developed by Camus and Blanchot.  This too, is an important, but 
implicit subtext of the present chapter.  Future research projects might pursue the intriguing relation 
between these unlikely partners in thought more explicitly.  See Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre VII: 
L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986); and “Kant avec Sade,” in Lacan, 
Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966): 765-790.  Jacques Alain Miller’s commentary on “Kant avec Sade” 
has been extremely helpful.  See Miller, “A Discussion of Lacan’s ‘Kant avec Sade’,” in Richard Feldstein, 
Bruce Fink & Maire Jaanus, eds. Reading Seminars I and II (Albany, NY: State University of New York 
Press, 1996): 212-240.  The work of the Slovenian Lacanians, who are some of the few contemporary 
philosophers to have engaged with Kant’s ethical thought, has been indispensable.  See Joan Copjec, 
Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology Press, 2002); Slavoj Žižek, “Kant with (or against) Sade,” in The Zizek Reader (London: 
Blackwell, 1999): 283-301; Alenka Zupančič, The Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000); 
Zupančič, “The Subject of the Law,” in Zizek, ed. Cogito and the Unconscious (Durham, NC: Duke 
University Press, 1998): 41-73.  Also helpful as been Russell Grigg, “Kant and Freud,” in Lacan, 
Language, and Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008): 95-108. 
  177
case of the postwar purge of writers and intellectuals, going so far as to call for the killing 
of specific people.  Camus argued that this position was unethical not because it violated 
the sanctity of human life, as a common misperception holds.286  Rather, commitment to 
historically necessitated killing was unethical because it allowed one to cede personal 
responsibility for one’s own actions.  In this second critique, Camus argued that it was 
impossible to determine whether killing was ethically legitimate.  Neither the 
metaphysical principle of the absurd, nor the doctrine of positive law were able to 
establish whether one had the right to kill or not.   
Camus’ critique was that, in the absence of any principles by which to determine 
the legitimacy of killing, ethics – universalizable and absolute rules of conduct – no 
longer existed as such.  In the absence of a general ethics, all decisions regarding the act 
of killing became contingent on one’s personal responsibility.  In place of ethics, Camus 
advocated a principle of reasonable culpability, as he termed it.  It fell on each and every 
person to decide for themselves if they were able to kill in any given situation of 
injustice, and each person had to admit responsibility for their decision.  As such, Camus 
argued that the principle of historical necessity by which commitment legitimated killing, 
was entirely unethical since it displaced one’s personal responsibility onto an external, 
inhuman rationality.  It might be necessary for people to kill in order to defend 
themselves against oppression, but they were never justified by the historical conditions 
of that oppression.  They were justified only by their ability to make the decision to kill in 
that specific situation, and on their own responsibility.  It was to this second, ethical 
                                                 
286 See, for instance, Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian, 101. 
  178
critique that Blanchot responded, rather than the first, political critique of revolution, or 
to the polemics that it generated, and so it is necessary to discuss it in detail before 
turning to Blanchot’s response. 
Camus’ general critique of ethics, and his critique of the ethics of commitment in 
specific contained three parts: the first was a critique of the absurd and its inability 
produce a conclusive ethical position for or against killing.  The second part was a 
critique of the law, and its similar inability to produce a statement for or against killing.  
This was not the law that Blanchot analyzed in his discussion of Sade during the postwar 
purge of writers and intellectuals.  Rather, this was positive law: an agreed-upon, and 
codified set of statutes by which crimes could be adjudicated.   The final part of Camus’ 
critique of ethics was an articulation of “reasonable culpability,” the principle he 
developed to define one’s personal responsibility. 
 
a) The Absurd 
The key difference between Camus and Sartre was that Camus refused to allow 
that the necessity of correcting a historical injustice was a legitimate reason to kill, or to 
permit people to be killed.  In Camus’ assessment, the logic of the necessity of correcting 
historical injustice took on the status of a transcendental truth in the theory of 
commitment, something external to the human domain in which people actually lived.  
Such truths were anathema to the Camusian notion of the absurd, which he first 
articulated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.  Today it is difficult to appreciate the philosophical 
import of the absurd, because structuralism and post-structuralism have discredited the 
  179
humanist and existentialist language in which the absurd was articulated.  But in reality, 
Camus’ version of the absurd was an extension of Nietzsche’s thesis of the death of god, 
and an important point of reference for post-structuralist thought.287  The question of the 
death of god was that if god was dead, and no longer able to guarantee one’s system of 
values, was it actually possible to know if one’s values were universally true, and not just 
the product of particular, local, cultural systems?  The absurd was Camus’ name for the 
state of affairs resulting from the death of god.  In this way, it is possible to see that the 
real significance of the absurd was a serious, and all-encompassing critique of 
transcendental values.   
For Camus, centuries of philosophical, theological, and scientific inquiry led to 
the fundamental conclusion that the human being was the only thing whose existence 
could be verified and relied upon.  The implication of this conclusion was that life was 
meaningless and absurd, since all of the gods and religions that claimed to offer a 
meaning to life did not really exist.  If one reduced everything that was not human out of 
the universe, nothing was left to guarantee the meaning of existence.  There was no 
transcendental value to which one could turn.  One was left with nothing but the naked 
absurdity of human existence.  For Camus this manifested in every facet of life, from the 
moments of the deepest metaphysical reflection, to the most banal scenes on the street:  
In certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of [one’s] gestures, one’s 
meaningless pantomime makes everything that surrounds them stupid.  A man 
speaks on the telephone behind a glass partition; he cannot be heard, but his 
                                                 
287 Elaine Marks argues that Camus’ articulation of the “death of God” was metonymically repeated in 
post-structuralist formulations, such as the Michel Foucault’s death of man, Roland Barthes’ death of the 
author, and Jacques Lacan’s death of the subject.  See Marks, “The Absurd and the Death of God,” in 
Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 2006), 131-134. 
  180
idiotic mimicry can be seen; one asks oneself why he is alive.  This malaise 
before the inhumanity of mankind itself, this incalculable fall before the image of 
what we are, this “nausea” as it is called by a writer of today, is…the absurd.288    
 
For Camus, even historical injustices fell under the category of the absurd.  Camus agreed 
that historical injustices existed, but not that there was a transcendental truth that 
demanded their correction.  Such a necessity would have admitted that life had a 
transcendental value, which should not be compromised, or allowed to be compromised.  
And this value had no basis in the man-made world of the absurd, it could only come 
from a transcendental principle, like a god or a religion.  Such valuation of life 
contradicted the terms of the absurd, which was entirely indifferent to humanity.  In this 
way, the absurd took the place of metaphysics in Camus’ thought.  Where previously 
transcendental concepts had determined the metaphysics of the world, for Camus the 
absurd absence of any transcendentality became his anti-metaphysics. 
For Camus, the absurdity of existence meant that there was no firm, 
transcendental law that could be used to decide whether one had the right to kill another 
human being, or to let another human being be killed.  In L’Homme révolté, Camus even 
went so far as to claim that that the absurd was so indifferent to ethical questions in 
general, that it gave a contradictory response to the question of killing.  On the one hand, 
the absurd’s indifference to humanity seemed to imply that there was no prohibition 
against murder.  The absence of any transcendental value to human life, and of any 
                                                 
288 “Dans certaines heures de lucidité, l’aspect mecanique de leurs gestes, leur pantomime privée de sens 
rend stupide tout ce qui les entoure.  Un homme parle au téléphone derrière une cloison vitrée; on ne 
l’entend pas, mais on voit sa mimique sans portée; on se demande pourquoi il vit.  Ce malaise devant 
l’inhumanité de l’homme même, cette incalculable chute devant l’image de ce que nous sommes, cette 
“nausée” comme l’appelle un auteur de nos jours, c’est…l’absurde.”  Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: 
Éditions Gallimard, 1942), 29.  
  181
transcendental principle guiding human actions, made it seem like the world was a place 
of anarchy where anything was possible, since nothing existed that would or could 
prohibit a person’s actions: “If one believes in nothing, if nothing has any meaning, and if 
we can affirm no value, everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”289  
Human life had no transcendental value that would prevent one from killing, nor was 
there any transcendental law that would punish one for killing.  In this way, the absurd’s 
indifference left the possibility of murder open.  “The sense of the absurd,” Camus wrote, 
“when one claims first of all to draw from it a rule of conduct, makes murder a matter of 
indifference, and consequently, possible.”290  It was not that the absurd affirmed 
humanity’s right to kill, since the absurd would affirm nothing.  Rather, it was that the 
absurd contained nothing that would prohibit killing, and thus killing remained a 
possibility.  
On the other hand however, the absurd gave a contradictory response to the 
question of suicide, that is, the question of killing oneself rather than another.  In Le 
Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus posed the question: given that life is meaningless, should one 
kill oneself?  Camus’ answer was no, that when confronted with the absurdity of life, it 
was logically incoherent to kill oneself.  For Camus the absurdity of the world was an 
absolute fact of reality, and any attempt to escape reality – of which suicide was the most 
extreme example – was a denial of the only real meaning that one’s existence had.  It is 
important to note however, that as with the question of murder, the absurd did not 
                                                 
289 “Si l'on ne croit à rien, si rien n'a de sens et si nous ne pouvons affirmer aucune valeur, tout est possible 
et rien n'a d'importance.” Camus, L’Homme révolté, 15. 
290 “Le sentiment de l'absurde, quand on prétend d'abord en tirer une règle d'action, rend le meurtre au 
moins indifférent et, par conséquent, possible.” Ibid. 
  182
prohibit killing oneself – it merely created a condition in which killing oneself was not 
possible.  The desire to escape the absurdity of reality caused only unhappiness, and 
sprang only from the false hope offered by religion, which claimed that the meaning of 
life lay outside the absurdity of this world.  True happiness was accepting the absurd 
reality of one’s existence, and not killing oneself.  Killing oneself in such a situation was 
logically impossible: “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.  They are 
inseparable.  The error would be to say that happiness is born directly from the absurd 
discovery.  It also happens that the presentiment of the absurd is born with happiness.”291 
As an example of an absurd man who accepted his existence, Camus offered Sisyphus, 
the mythological figure who was condemned to roll a rock endlessly to the top of a 
mountain, after which it would roll right back down, and Sisyphus would have to begin 
again.  That Sisyphus willingly went after the rock, and rolled it back up the mountain 
indicated his acceptance of the absurdity of the world.  The absurd man said “yes” to his 
existence and was content.   
The contradiction came in L’Homme révolté, when Camus reiterated the argument 
against killing oneself, but extended it to include murder: “The final conclusion of absurd 
reasoning is, in effect, the rejection of suicide, and the acceptance of this hopeless 
encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the world.  Suicide would mean the 
end of this encounter, and absurd reasoning maintains that it could not consent to this 
                                                 
291 “Le bonheur et l’absurde sont deux fils de la même terre.  Ils sont inséparable.  L’erreur serait de dire 
que le bonheur naît forcément de la découverte absurde.  Il arrive ausi bien que le sentiment de l’absurde 
naisse du bonheur.” Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 165. 
  183
without negating its own premises.”292  In claiming that suicide would end the encounter 
between the human and the absurd, and that absurd reasoning (of Sisyphus’ kind) could 
not countenance the end of that encounter, Camus built human existence into the absurd.  
Now, the absurd needed the human in order to exist.  The absurd was nothing other than 
the meaninglessness of life, and thus it did not exist outside of the encounter with the 
human.  The human and the absurd required each other for their own existence.  And just 
as Sisyphus found happiness in the absurd, so too did the human being signify what was 
good for the absurd.  Camus wrote, “It is clear that absurd reasoning admits, in the same 
stroke, that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely what permits this 
encounter.”293  Camus argued that because human life was the good, it was not logically 
coherent to suppose that one could not kill oneself, while also permitting the killing of 
others: “From the moment when the good [of human life] is recognized as such, it is the 
same for all men.  It is not possible to make murder logically coherent if one refuses 
coherence to suicide.”294  Thus, even though it first seemed as though the absurd made 
killing possible, in the end, the impossibility of killing oneself extended to killing 
another.  The absurd was at odds with itself over the question of killing.  This 
contradiction made it impossible to rely on the absurd for a rule by which one could 
                                                 
292 “La conclusion dernière du raisonnement absurde est, en effet, le rejet du suicide et le maintien de cette 
confrontation désespérée entre l'interrogation humaine et le silence du monde. Le suicide signifierait la fin 
de cette confrontation et le raisonnement absurde considère qu'il ne pourrait y souscrire qu'en niant ses 
propres prémisses.” Camus, L’Homme révolté, 16-17. 
293 “Il est clair que, du même coup, ce raisonnement admet la vie comme le seul bien nécessaire puisqu'elle 
permet précisément cette confrontation.” Ibid. 17. 
294 “Dès l'instant où ce bien est reconnu comme tel, il est celui de tous les hommes. On ne peut donner une 
cohérence au meurtre si on la refuse au suicide.” Ibid.  
  184
determine if the right to kill others, or to let others be killed existed.  The absurd was not 
capable of producing an ethical rule on killing.   
 
b) The Law 
If the metaphysical fact of the absurd was not able to answer the question of 
killing, neither was positive law, the man-made law of the courtroom, by which killing 
was adjudicated in everyday life.  For Camus, the law was just as incapable as the absurd 
of founding an ethical rule on killing, not because of excessive indifference, but because 
killing had become part of the very logic by which the law made its judgments.  In 
Camus’ conception of the law, logic stood in judgment of crime, which he divided into 
two categories: crimes of passion, and crimes of logic.  In earlier centuries, Camus 
argued, it had been the case that all murders were crimes of passion, while logic was on 
the side of the law.  In the twentieth century however, the philosophically justified killing 
in the gulags of the Soviet Union created a new category of crime, the crime of logic.  
But the fact that logic had been used to justify killing meant that logic itself had been 
corrupted.  For this reason, logic, and by extension the law, was no longer capable of 
producing a verdict on the ethics of killing.  Like the absurd, Camus’ conception of the 
law was a serious and complex philosophical argument that was hidden underneath a 
seemingly reductive terminology.  The simplistic chronology which restricted crimes of 
passion to pre-1900, when they could justly be judged by the law, betrayed Camus’ larger 
argument that crime and law operated according to rationalities of passion and logic.  In 
order to fully understand Camus’ critique of the law, it is necessary to understand the way 
  185
in which his use of the terms passion and logic stood for entire jurisprudential 
rationalities. 
In Camus’ conception of crime and law, the only crimes prior to the twentieth 
century were crimes of passion: murders committed out of rage, out of love, or out of 
tyranny.  To illustrate the crime of passion, Camus provided an example drawn from 
nineteenth century literature: “Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, would kill everybody in 
the world in order to possess Cathy.”295  In this example, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff was 
possessed by a passion that overwhelmed his logic, and that might have driven him to 
murder.  The crime was motivated by passion, and logic was thoroughly excluded.  
Because it was excluded from crime, logic was always able to pass judgment based on its 
calculated, reasonable distance from passion.  The absolute division between logic and 
passion guaranteed the smooth functioning of the law: “When the tyrant razed cities for 
his greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror’s chariot was dragged through 
the rejoicing streets, when the enemy was thrown to the beasts in front of the assembled 
people, before such naked crimes conscience could be untroubled, and judgment 
clear.”296  Likewise, the criminal thoroughly understood that he committed his crime out 
of passion, and not by logic: “[Heathcliff] would not believe that his crime is reasonable, 
or justified by a philosophical system.  He would accomplish it and that would be the end 
of things.”297  For Camus, crime itself was passionate, while law was the embodiment of 
                                                 
295 “Heathcliff, dans les hauts de hurlevent, tuerait la terre entière pour posséder Cathie.” Ibid. 13. 
296 “Aux temps naïfs où le tyran rasait des villes pour sa plus grande gloire, où l'esclave enchaîné au char 
du vainqueur défilait dans les villes en fête, où l'ennemi était jeté aux bêtes devant le peuple assemblé, 
devant des crimes si candides, la conscience pouvait être ferme, et le jugement clair.” Ibid. 14. 
297 “Il n'aurait pas l'idée de dire que ce meurtre est raisonnable ou justifié par le système. Il l'accomplirait, 
là s'arrête toute sa croyance.” Ibid. 13. 
  186
logic.  The law could judge such crimes clearly, and without confusion because of the 
absolute separation between passion and logic.     
In the twentieth century however, “the boundary that separates [passion and logic] 
is uncertain.”298  For Camus, logic became indistinguishable from passion at the moment 
when logic was used to justify crime, at the moment that crimes of logic came into being: 
 From the moment when…crime gives itself a doctrine, from the second that crime  
reasons about itself, it multiplies itself like reason, it takes on all of the 
characteristics of a syllogism.  Crime used to be as solitary as a lone cry in the 
dark, now it is as universal as science.  Yesterday it was just, today it has become 
the law.299  
 
In Camus’ understanding of crime, a crime of logic was an oxymoron, since crime was 
passionate by definition.  Neither Brontë’s Heathcliff, nor the tyrant would ever have 
considered explaining their crimes away with logic.  But in the twentieth century, new 
philosophical justifications for murder appeared, such as the historical necessity of the 
gulags.  Any time that reason was applied to legitimize killing, even for the sake of 
correcting an injustice, crime became logical.  Passion and logic were no longer strictly 
separable, and therefore, logic was no longer adequate for adjudicating crime.  “Slave 
camps under the banner of liberty,” wrote Camus, “massacres justified by the love of 
mankind or by a taste for the superhuman, cripple judgment.”300  For Camus, the point 
was that logic itself was tainted by crime, and that the law itself had become criminal.  In 
the twentieth century it was no longer the Heathcliffs, or the tyrants who were criminals: 
                                                 
298 “La frontière qui les sépare est incertaine.” Ibid. 
299 “À partir du moment où, faute de caractère, on court se donner une doctrine, dès l'instant où le crime se 
raisonne, il prolifère comme la raison elle-même, il prend toutes les figures du syllogisme. Il était solitaire 
comme le cri, le voilà universel comme la science. Hier jugé, il légifère aujourd'hui.” Ibid. 
300 “Les camps d'esclaves sous la bannière de la liberté, les massacres justifiés par l'amour de l'homme ou 
le goût de la surhumanité, désemparent…le jugement.” Ibid. 14. 
  187
it was the judges themselves: “Our criminals are no longer these helpless children who 
invoked love as their excuse.  They are adults, on the contrary, and their alibi is 
irrefutable: it is philosophy, which can be made to serve any end, even the transformation 
of murderers into judges.”301  For Camus, “Each day at dawn, assassins bearing the 
implements and ornaments of high office, slip into someone’s cell: murder is the question 
of today.”302  The effect of explaining away the massive crimes of the gulags with logic, 
was that the law was corrupted with the passion of crime.  
For this reason, neither the dictates of philosophy, nor the statutes of law were 
able provide a decision on the legitimacy of killing.  Just as the absurd metaphysical basis 
of existence was incapable of establishing ethical rules, so too were the man-made laws 
of the state insufficient.  For Camus, this meant that no ethical rule of conduct governing 
the killing of others, or allowing others to be killed was to be found, either in the 
transcendental realm, or in the mundane world of human affairs.  Since there was nothing 
in the absurd, and nothing in the law to prevent killing, there simply was no answer to the 
question of whether one had the right to kill, or the right to allow someone to be killed.  
In the strictest sense of the term, there was no ethics.    
 
c) Reasonable Culpability 
In the absence of any ethics, Camus proposed what he called reasonable 
culpability, a principle of self-responsibility, and self-acknowledgement of guilt, which 
                                                 
301 “Nos criminels ne sont plus ces enfants désarmés qui invoquaient l'excuse de l'amour. Ils sont adultes, 
au contraire, et leur alibi est irréfutable: c'est la philosophie qui peut servir à tout, même à changer les 
meurtriers en juges.” Ibid. 13. 
302 “À chaque aube, des assassins chamarrés se glissent dans une cellule: le meurtre est la question.” Ibid. 
15. 
  188
neither legitimated nor excused killing for the sake of fighting injustice, but which at 
least avoided the hypocrisy of logically-justified killing.  Camus argued that the search 
for an ethical rule that would apply universally to all killing was doomed to failure, since 
the absurd was contradictory, and the law was corrupt.  The only thing of which one 
could be sure was one’s own existence in the face of the absurd.  The absurd was 
“nothing other than a point of departure, a critique made flesh, the equivalent, on the 
plane of existence, of systematic doubt.”303  From this point of departure, Camus argued 
that each individual was responsible for choosing whether he or she had the right to kill, 
or the right to allow others to be killed based on the contingent circumstances of 
oppression.  The fact that crime had taken refuge in the law, and that guilt now 
masqueraded as innocence in the twentieth century meant that one could no longer claim 
the excuse that logic justified killing in order to correct historical injustices.  One could 
not seek refuge in revolutionary philosophy any longer.  Instead, one had to admit 
culpability for the killing one did, or that one allowed to be done in the name of fighting 
oppression.  Thus, Camus turned the principle of reasonable culpability into an ethics of 
individual responsibility and guilt, rather than logic and innocence.  And while the ethic 
of reasonable culpability was not a specific code of conduct in the terms of traditional 
ethics (for instance, Christian ethics), it was similar to traditional ethics in the sense that 
the admission of culpability was intended to carry the same absoluteness as traditional 
ethics’ universalizability.   
                                                 
303 “Rien d'autre qu'un point de départ, une critique vécue, l'équivalent, sur le plan de l'existence, du doute 
systématique.” Ibid. 21 
  189
For Camus, the principle of reasonable culpability rested on a redefinition of the 
concepts of innocence and guilt.  Camus’ use of the term innocence differed from the 
standard notion in that he argued that both innocence and guilt needed to be redefined 
from the new perspective of the twentieth century in which crime and law had become 
indistinguishable.  The standard notion of innocence corresponded to the legality and 
criminality of the crime of passion.  Like Brontë’s Heathcliff, one was simply guilty or 
innocent of having committed a crime of passion, and the law determined one’s guilt or 
innocence by means of logic.  In the twentieth century however, when crime was 
confused with law, and passion with logic, it was possible to be guilty of killing while 
also claiming that the philosophical justification for the historical necessity of that killing 
actually made one innocent.  In such a period, innocence itself was suspect: “The day 
when crime adorns itself with the clothes of innocence, in a curious reversal which is 
unique to our times, it is innocence that is summoned to provide its justifications.”304  
This claim of innocence appealed to the authority of an immutable philosophy principle 
of justice, which was a false transcendentality in the context of the absurd.   As such, it 
displaced one’s guilt for killing onto a philosophical doctrine that was logically 
unassailable, and un-convictable in any court of law.  In this way, the guilty were able to 
claim that they were innocent, and that any killing they did, or allowed to be done, was 
mitigated by oppression, and justified by the historical necessity to fight oppression.   
The notion of passing off one’s guilt was crucial to Camus’ conception of 
reasonable culpability.  From Camus’ point of departure – the absurd – this displacement 
                                                 
304 “Le jour où le crime se pare des dépouilles de l'innocence, par un curieux renversement qui est propre à 
notre temps, c'est l'innocence qui est sommée de fournir ses justifications.” Ibid. 4. 
  190
of guilt amounted to a hypocritical denial of reality, since the absurdity of existence 
meant that there were no transcendental principles onto which one could displace one’s 
guilt.  One was entirely alone in the face of the absurd, there simply was nothing that 
could exculpate one for the act of killing, or for allowing others to be killed.  If one was 
to act against injustice in an absurd world, one had to take responsibility oneself:   
I declare that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but that I cannot 
doubt the fact of my declaration and I must at least believe in my protest.  The 
first and only evidence that is given to me, from within the experience of the 
absurd, is rebellion…Therefore, rebellion must find its reasons within itself, since 
it finds nothing in the other.305   
 
For Camus, one had the ability to rebel, even to kill in order to correct injustice, since 
there was nothing in the absurd to prevent such killing.  But, one had to take 
responsibility for such killing oneself.  One could not look to the philosophical principle 
of historical necessity – one could only act based on one’s own individual sense of 
injustice.  There were no transcendental, extra-mundane principles that would guide one 
in acting, or that would exculpate one for action.  There was only one’s own sense of 
injustice in the local and contingent situation in which one found oneself.  For this 
reason, Camus emphasized the principle of culpability instead of guilt.  The term guilt 
implied that one could be judged by a transcendental rule, or a law that existed outside or 
beyond oneself, the existence of which Camus called into question with his critique of 
ethics.  Indeed, it was the entire conceptual binary of guilt and innocence that Camus 
disavowed, since innocence too had lost all of its meaning.  The opposite of culpability, 
                                                 
305 “Je crie que je ne crois à rien et que tout est absurde, mais je ne puis douter de mon cri et il me faut au 
moins croire à ma protestation. La première et la seule évidence qui me soit ainsi donnée, à l'intérieur de 
l'expérience absurde, est la révolte… Il faut donc bien que la révolte tire ses raisons d'elle-même, 
puisqu'elle ne peut les tirer de rien d'autre.” Ibid. 21-22. 
  191
by contrast, was exculpation, a principle of innocence which did not require the judgment 
of the now-corrupt law, or justification by a hypocritical logic.  The term culpability, in 
Camus’ usage, implied that one acted on one’s own recognizance, in keeping with the 
individual experience of the absurd.  The task for rebellion was to “discover the principle 
of a reasonable culpability…without laying claim to an impossible innocence.”306  
Camus’ use of the term reasonable referred to the exigency for the individual to decide 
whether he has the right to kill, or to allow another to be killed in a local and contingent 
situation, based on the individual’s own recognizance.  Such culpability was reasonable 
only to the extent that the individual was able to justify action with personal reasoning.  
In this way, one had the right to rebel, and even to kill, but traditional law was inadequate 
to deciding if this right existed.  In the absurd there was no general, universal ethics that 
could provide rules for governing such action.  There was only the anti-ethic of the 
individual’s reasonable culpability. 
In her essay, “Broken Engagements,” Debarati Sanyal argues that Camus’ ethics 
applied to the field of the literary, rather than the situation of real killing.  Sanyal skips 
over the concept of rebellion, and focuses her attention on the critique of committed 
writing made in L’Homme révolté.  Sanyal argues that L’Homme révolté displaced 
political engagement into the literary, and demanded that the committed writer engage in 
the world through their writing, but on one’s own individual authority, without appealing 
to the political and philosophical justifications of Sartrean commitment.  Against the 
                                                 
306 “Sans prétention à une impossible innocence, elle peut découvrir le principe d'une culpabilité 
raisonnable.” Ibid. 24. 
  192
atrocities of the twentieth century, the only ethical objection was the writer’s individual 
testimony to suffering:  
From the early articles in Combat collected under the suggestive heading of La 
chair to his speech upon receiving the Nobel prize, Camus maintained an 
unwavering conviction that writing should bear witness to the irreducible 
specificity of individual suffering, a living reality betrayed or eclipsed by 
historical processes….Camus was appealing for a realignment of the writer’s 
engagement from the ambiguous exigencies of political practice to the equally 
complex dilemmas of a self-reflexive literary practice attentive to the ethical 
implication of its representational models.307     
 
But Camus’ critique of ethics extended beyond the ethics of committed literature, to 
include a general critique of ethics.  It was not simply that the writer must act out of his 
own self-reflexive literary practice.  Camus argued, rather, that all ethical action had to be 
rooted in self-reflexivity, and in one’s reasonable culpability.  Camus’ critique of 
commitment was a critique not just of committed writing then, but also a critique of 
intellectual commitment as a mode of engaging in politics tout court.   
The ultimate contribution of L’Homme révolté to postwar French intellectual 
culture was its argument for an abandonment of commitment, and its suggestion of the 
principle of rebellion with reasonable culpability.  In this critique of ethics, and in the 
suggestion of reasonable culpability, Camus articulated two new requirements for an 
ethical act.  First, an ethical act must not claim any notion of justice, since no 
transcendental principles of justice existed in the absurd.  Second, an ethical must be 
done on one’s own recognizance, since the only principle of judgment that could exist in 
the absurd was the principle of reasonable culpability.  These two requirements for an 
ethical act provided Blanchot with the base with which to complete Camus’ critique of 
                                                 
307 Debarati Sanyal, “Broken Engagements.” Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 43. 
  193
the ethics of commitment, and the groundwork from which to articulate his own ethics of 
intellectual engagement.   
When L’Homme révolté appeared in 1951 however, hardly any of its critics 
focused on Camus’ critique of ethics.  Instead they dwelt on the rest of the book, in which 
Camus attempted to argue for a form of rebellion based on the principle of reasonable 
culpability.  For Camus, the rebel was a slave, who recognized the oppression imposed 
on him by his master.  Loosely Hegelian in inspiration, Camus’ rendition of rebellion 
depended on the situation of slavery which would naturally provoke a feeling of injustice, 
of which the slave would be so certain, that he would have to take action: “In a certain 
way, he is confronted by an order which oppresses him, until he realizes a sort of right to 
not be oppressed any further than he can tolerate.”308  In recognizing this right within 
himself, the rebel is forced to take action against his master.   For Camus, this rebellion 
called upon the rebel to recognize that he shared this basic right with his fellow men.  
Thus, the rebellion became the foundation of a community in L’Homme révolté, the 
community of rebels.  Camus argued that there were other rebellions, however, which did 
not recognize this common right among men.  In these rebellions, after the overthrow of 
the master, one rebel attempted to seize power for himself, essentially replacing the 
master: “It is right to say that every rebellion that claims authority for itself, or destroys 
this solidarity, simultaneously loses the name of rebellion, and becomes, in reality, an 
                                                 
308 “D'une certaine manière, il oppose à l'ordre qui l'opprime une sorte de droit à ne pas être opprimé au 
delà de ce qu'il peut admettre.” Ibid. 25-26. 
 
  194
acquiescence to murder.”309  All modern revolutions fell under this latter category, and 
those who committed to them, became the accomplices of murder.   
The committed existentialists at Les Temps modernes failed to recognize Camus’ 
critique of ethics – or perhaps they recognized it only too well.  They responded swiftly 
and severely, defending commitment as the only ethical response to the state of the 
world.  Sartre commissioned Francis Jeanson to write a review of L’Homme révolté.  The 
review, “Albert Camus, ou l’âme révoltée,” appeared in May of 1952, just seven months 
after L’Homme révolté. In it, Jeanson attacked Camus for taking a hypocritically 
transcendental view of revolution, and alleging that Camus’ version of rebellion 
amounted to little more than solipsistic contempt for the world.  For Jeanson, there were 
real conditions of injustice, oppression, and suffering in the world, which were the work 
of undeniable, historical processes.  Camus either had to get his hands dirty in the muck 
of history, or abandon any claims to providing grounds for practical action: “If Camus’ 
rebellion deliberately wishes to remain static, it no longer concerns anyone other than 
Camus himself.  If, on the contrary, it pretends to influence the course of events, it must 
enter into the fray, insert itself in the historical context, determine its objectives there, and 
choose its adversaries there.”310  Sartre was even more pointed in his response, which 
came three months later, but his criticism was the same.  “Our friendship was not easy,” 
                                                 
309 “Nous serons donc en droit de dire que toute révolte qui s'autorise à nier ou à détruire cette solidarité 
perd du même coup le nom de révolte et coïncide en réalité avec un consentement meurtrier.” Ibid. 35. 
310 “Si la révolte de Camus se veut délibérément statique, elle ne peut plus concerner que Camus lui-même.  
Si peu qu’elle prétende, par contre, à influer sur le cours du monde, il lui faut entrer dans le jeu, s’insérer 
dans le contexte historique, y déterminer ses objectifs, y choisir ses adversaires.” Francis Jeanson, “Albert 
Camus, ou l’ame révoltée.” Les Temps modernes 79 (May 1952): 2089. 
  195
his response began, “but I will miss it.”311  For Sartre, L’Homme révolté failed to grasp 
even the most basic point of commitment: that human beings make the world, and it is 
therefore their responsibility to make it justly, particularly in the face of the twentieth 
century’s injustices:  
Our freedom today is nothing other than the free choice of struggling to become 
free.  And the paradoxical aspect of this formula expresses simply the paradox of 
our historical condition.  It does not concern, you see, the imprisonment of my 
contemporaries: they are already in prison; it concerns, on the contrary, us uniting 
with them to break their bars.  Because we too, Camus, we are imprisoned, and if 
you truly want to prevent any popular movement from degenerating into tyranny, 
do not start by condemning out of hand and threatening to retreat to a desert, 
especially since your deserts are nothing more than a slightly less crowded part of 
our prison.  To be worthy of the right to influence men who are struggling, one 
must, first of all, participate in their struggle, one must first of all accept many 
things, if one wants to try to change some of them.312      
  
Sartre’s response to Camus echoed the arguments that he made during the postwar purge 
of writers and intellectuals.  In 1952 however, Sartre was committed not to saving 
France, but to the global liberation of the proletariat.  Like Jeanson, he criticized Camus 
for removing himself from the real struggles of the world, and abstracting them to high 
moral dilemmas which existed only for himself.  In order to change the world, Sartre 
argued, one must commit to it.  These were extremely damaging critiques in 1952, and 
they drove Camus into silence, never to return to the volatile public sphere that was 
                                                 
311 “Notre amitié n’était pas facile mais je la regrettterai.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” 
334.  
312 “Notre liberté aujourd’hui n’est rien d’autre que le libre choix de lutter pour devenir libres.  Et l’aspect 
paradoxical de cette formule exprime simplement le paradoxe de notre condition historique.  Il ne s’agit 
pas, vous le voyez, d’encager mes contemporains: ils son déjà dans la cage; il s’agit au conraire de nous 
unir à eux pour briser les barreaux.  Car nous aussi, Camus, nous sommes encagés, et si vous voulez 
vraiment empêcher qu’un mouvement populaire ne dégénère en tyrannie, ne commencez pas par le 
condamner sans recours et par menacer de vous retirer au désert, d’autant que vos déserts ne sont jamais 
qu’une partie un peu moins fréquentée de notre cage; pour mériter le droit d’influencer des hommes qui 
luttent, il faut d’abord participer à leur combat, il faut d’abord accepter beaucoup de choses, si, l’on veut 
essayer d’en changer quelque-unes.” Ibid. 345. 
  196
French intellectual culture in the 1950s.  From then on, he was an outsider once again, 
and his stance on the war in Algeria distanced him only further.   
 
* 
When Blanchot responded to the great debate between Camus and Les Temps 
modernes, he completely ignored the objections of the existentialists, paying them no 
heed whatsoever.313  The existentialists saw L’Homme révolté as a political book, arguing 
against their political ambitions.  Blanchot saw the book for what it was: a critique of 
ethics in general, and a critique of the ethics of commitment specifically.  Blanchot sided 
completely with Camus against the commitment advocated by Les Temps modernes, 
seeing Camus’ ethical critique as an extension of his own political critique of “La 
Littérature et le droit à la mort.”  Furthermore, Blanchot accepted Camus’ two 
requirements for an ethical act: the prohibition on claiming any transcendental notion of 
                                                 
313 A measure of Blanchot’s utter disregard for Les Temps modernes’ feud with Camus was that the one 
reference he actually made concerned not their reaction to L’Homme révolté, but rather, Jeanson’s criticism 
of La Peste! Blanchot wrote, “It is in this sense perhaps, that Albert Camus, in La Peste, chose to made a 
doctor the symbol of the action that remains just, of what can be done in the situation where nothing can be 
done.  It is a reasonable decision, which one is astonished to hear scornfully criticized, since it responds to 
the energetic will of the modern age.” “C’est en ce sens peut-être qu’Albert camus, dans La Peste, a choisi 
de faire d’un médecin le symbole de l’action qui reste juste, de ce qui peut être fait là où pourtant rien ne 
peut être fait.  Cela est raisonnable, c’est une décision qu’on s’étonne d’avoir entendu critiquer 
dédaigneusement, elle répond à l’énergique volonté de l’âge moderne.”  Blanchot, “Réflexions sur l’enfer,” 
679.  This is the passage to which Blanchot responded: “La Peste was already a transcendental 
chronicle…Viewed from on high, the struggles of human beings down on earth could easily appear to be 
nothing more than vanity.  But if you want to know what their existence is actually like, you must pick up 
the thread of your own life, and come back to down to live once more among men.  There, each one gives 
meaning to his own life.  You cannot renounce the meaning of your life and decide that, therefore, the 
meaning of all life is only an illusion.” “Pour qui la contemple de haut, l’agitation des humains à ras de 
terre risque d’apparaître assez vaine; mais si vous voulez savoir ce qu’il en est de leur existence, il vous 
faudra reprendre le fil de la vôtre et redescendre vivre à nouveau parmi les hommes.  Là, chacun donne un 
sens à sa vie, et vous ne pouvez quitter la vôtre pour décider que le sens de toute vie n’est qu’illusion.” 
Jeanson, “Albert Camus, ou l’âme révoltée,” 2073-2074. 
  197
justice or right, and the requirement to act entirely on one’s own accord, and to assume 
reasonable culpability.   
Yet Blanchot considered Camus’ critique of ethics, and of the ethics of 
commitment incomplete, and insufficient in themselves for moving beyond commitment.  
Blanchot had two main criticisms of L’Homme révolté.  The first was that the rebel was 
not a truly ethical actor.  For Blanchot, one could not ground ethical action in the slave’s 
rebellion against his master because the slave’s rebellion relied on the existence of the 
master.  For this reason, the slave could never fully assume reasonable culpability for his 
rebellion, since the master’s oppression was always there, serving as an outside condition 
that exculpated the slave, and prevented him from acting entirely on his own.  In this 
way, Blanchot argued that the rebel violated Camus’ own requirements for an ethical act.  
Instead of the rebel, Blanchot proposed another figure from Camus’ corpus as an example 
of a truly ethical actor: that of Don Juan, whom Camus had considered as a man of the 
absurd in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.  While Blanchot’s choice of Don Juan as an archetypical 
ethical actor may strike some as counter-intuitive, it is certainly the case that as a 
mythical and literary figure, Don Juan appealed to Blanchot’s sensibility more than the 
rebel.  But there was more in the selection of Don Juan than simply Blanchot’s literary 
inclinations.314  Blanchot critiqued Camus’ version of Don Juan, rearticulating the myth 
in his own way.  Even though Camus’ Don Juan might have come closer to satisfying the 
                                                 
314 Indeed, the subject of Don Juan was an au courant topic in Paris in the early 1950s.  In addition to 
rewriting the Don Juan myth as a way to critique L’Homme révolté, Blanchot’s essay on Don Juan also 
served as a review of a recent publication on Don Juan.  Typical of Blanchot’s reviews for La Nouvelle 
Nouvelle Revue Française, scant mention was made of the book actually under review.  Instead Blanchot 
employed his usual tactic of reviewing a book by offering his take on the subject of the book rather than the 
book itself.  See Micheline Sauvage, Le Cas Don Juan (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1953). 
  198
requirement for an ethical act than the rebel, Blanchot argued that he did not go far 
enough.  Camus’ Don Juan did not accept the full burden of reasonable culpability, and 
escaped from his crimes unpunished.  For Blanchot, reasonable culpability imposed a 
strict law, such that any person who undertook an ethical action was subject to the law 
absolutely.  As Blanchot demonstrated with regard to Robespierre and Saint-Just in “La 
Littérature et la droit à la mort,” it was possible to establish a new law, but only if one 
submitted to it oneself, and did not hold oneself above the law.  Through his serial 
seductions, Camus’ Don Juan established an ethical code for the treatment of others in 
which all people were interchangeable, and devoid of any personal qualities, yet he 
himself never lost his personal identity.  In holding onto his identity, Blanchot argued that 
Camus’ Don Juan failed to submit to the rules of ethical action.  Blanchot rearticulated 
the Don Juan myth, creating a version in which Don Juan subjected himself to the same 
law of individual abstraction as the women he seduced, by way of providing an example 
of a genuinely ethical actor, who followed the requirements for an ethical act absolutely, 
and completely.     
Blanchot’s goal was not to attack or damage Camus, but rather to take what was 
best from L’Homme révolté, critique its weaknesses, and go beyond them towards an 
ethics of intellectual engagement in politics.  In this way, Blanchot’s intervention in the 
debate between Sartre and Camus, and his re-articulation of the Don Juan myth provided 
the foundation for the ethical action of “Déclaration sur la droit à l’insoumission dans la 
guerre d’Algérie.”  In what follows, this chapter will examine Blanchot’s two criticisms 
of L’Homme révolté, and his revision to the Don Juan myth in detail, in order to provide 
  199
the philosophical background of the “Déclaration,” and explain Blanchot’s ethical 
engagement in the war in Algeria.  
Blanchot’s response to the debate between Sartre and Camus was published 
between March and June 1954, just months before the war in Algeria began in 
November.  Blanchot criticized L’Homme révolté for attempting to ground ethical action 
in the situation of the slave.  For Blanchot, the requirement of reasonable culpability 
required that one start from a point of absolute beginning, where one could rely on 
nothing other than oneself for the means of action.  Culpability itself had to be genuinely 
absolute, if it was going to satisfy the burden of ethics.  One could not assume culpability 
for one’s action unless it came from within oneself, without support from any external 
power or agency, since such a force acted as an external justification and exculpation by 
its presence alone.  For Blanchot, such a person had to first be stripped of every human 
quality, and only then could they be sure of finding the will to act within themselves.  
Such a person existed below slavery, below poverty, in a state of near inhumanity, 
without relation to any other: “The man who is entirely unhappy, the man reduced by 
oppression, abjection, hunger, sickness, and fear becomes that which no longer has any 
relation with himself, nor with anyone else: an empty neutrality, a phantom who wanders 
in a space where nothing happens, methodically and submissively.”315  Real destitution 
cast one into a state of pure abjection, where all relations with other humans, even one’s 
relation with oneself, became impossible to sustain.  If one were to be able to withstand 
                                                 
315 “L’homme tout à fait malheureux, l’homme réduit par l’oppression, l’abjection, la faim, la maladie, la 
peur, devient ce qui n’a plus de rapport avec soi, ni avec qui que ce soit, une neutralité vide, un fantôme qui 
erre, méthodiquement et avec soumission, dans un espace où il n’arrive plus rien.” Blanchot, “Réflexions 
sur l’Enfer (I),” 679. 
  200
the experience of abjection, it was only by disavowing one’s humanity.  If one were to 
endure the endless humiliation of oppression, it was only by renouncing one’s 
individuality, that last shred of dignity which would prevent one from being able to 
endure the experience of abjection.  In this way, oppression was, “intolerable, but borne, 
because the one who bears it is no longer anyone, he is no longer there to experience it in 
the first person.”316  Blanchot had in mind the suffering of the Occupation, where one’s 
individuality and one’s humanity were stripped away by the irreducible fact of 
domination, or the colonial regime, which had a similar affect.  Only here at this nadir, 
Blanchot argued, was one in a position to acknowledge absolute culpability, and act 
entirely of one’s own accord.  
The situation of the slave, invoked by Camus in L’Homme révolté, was not able to 
provide an adequate place from which to begin.  Unlike the abject man, the slave began 
from a fundamental position of relation.  The slave’s relationship with the master was a 
significant improvement on the absence of relation of the abject man, even though the 
slave was still a slave, and his relation was one of domination.  Blanchot wrote, “The 
suffering man, and the man of extreme unhappiness, or the man subjected to misery have 
become strangers to the master-slave relations which take on an almost attractive status, 
by their very relations.”317   The relation with the master excluded the slave from the 
possibility of taking on absolute culpability, since there was always another with whom 
he was in relation, even if that relation was antagonistic, and even if that relation was 
                                                 
316 “Intolérable, mais supporté, parce que celui qui le supporte n’est plus personne, n’est plus là pour 
l’éprouver à la première personne.” Ibid. 680. 
317 “L’homme souffrant et l’homme de l’extrême malheur ou soumis à la misère sont devenus étrangers 
aux rapports maître-esclave qui constituent, par rapport à leur situation, un statut presque prometteur.” Ibid. 
  201
what the slave revolted against: “The slave is the man who has already succeeded – an 
infinite progress – in encountering a master; he thus has this master for a support.”318  No 
matter how dire the slave’s suffering, his revolt would always rest on the support of the 
master.  In this way, the slave was incapable of acting on his own recognizance to the 
extent necessary to meet the requirements of reasonable culpability.  For this reason, 
Blanchot argued that the situation of slavery was not capable of providing a ground for 
action. 
Yet if the slave was not able to ground ethical action because his situation rested 
on the fundamental relation with the master, and if the abject man whose absolute lack of 
relation prevented him from being able even to speaking in the first person, let alone act, 
who, then, qualified as a genuine ethical actor?  Who was able to act without legitimating 
their actions with a notion of transcendental justice, and willingly accept full culpability?  
Instead of the rebel, instead of even Sisyphus, Blanchot proposed Don Juan, whom 
Camus had described as a true man of the absurd in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.319  But for 
Blanchot, Don Juan was more than a mere man of the absurd, he was an allegory of 
ethical action.  Through the numerical repetition of seduction and conquest, Don Juan 
rejected any relation with the women he conquered, which allegorized the impersonality 
of the law.320  Nor did Don Juan make recourse to any to a logical justification for his 
                                                 
318 “L’esclave est l’homme qui a déjà réussi – progrès infini – à rencontrer un maître, il a donc ce maître 
pour appui.” Ibid. 684. 
319 My understanding of the ethical issues involved in the Don Juan myth has benefited from the work of 
Alenka Zupančič.  See Zupančič, “Kant with Don Juan and Sade,” in Copjec, ed. Radical Evil (London: 
Verso, 1996), 105-125.  See also Zupančič, The Ethics of the Real, esp. 106-139. 
320 The use of the Don Juan myth to articulate an ethical critique of commitment is troubling for its 
treatment of the category of woman.  While it is not within the scope of the present undertaking to account 
  202
crimes.  They were simply the crimes of a passionate man.  At the same time, Don Juan’s 
refusal to repent for his crimes – while at the same time acknowledging his culpability for 
them – accomplished the refusal of the slave in revolt more completely than the slave 
himself.  In this way, Don Juan resolved the problem of transgression as a means of 
establishing a new law, which Blanchot first examined with regard to Sade and the 
postwar purge debate.  The Sadean libertine sought to transgress the law as a means to 
accede beyond it.  Don Juan however, submitted to his own law of transgression, 
surrendering himself to the same law of non-relation to which he had submitted his 
sexual conquests.321  
Though there are many versions of the Don Juan myth – the most famous of 
which are Molière’s play, Mozart’s opera, and Byron’s epic poem – both Blanchot and 
Camus chose to present their own interpretation of the myth, and both drew their own 
conclusions from it.  That said, both Blanchot and Camus employ the same basic 
narrative of the myth.  In the classic account, Don Juan – an eighteenth-century libertine 
who believed neither in God, nor in morals – went ceaselessly from one woman to the 
next, keeping a list of his conquests that tallied to 1,003.  Eventually Don Juan encounters 
the ghost of the dead father of one of his conquest’s, the Commander, in the form of a 
stone statue, who invites Don Juan to dinner with him.  Don Juan cavalierly accepts, and 
is pulled down to hell when he takes the statue’s hand.     
                                                                                                                                                 
for the role of women in Camus and Blanchot’s treatment of the Don Juan myth, further research will 
necessarily provide a complete account of the sexual and gender dynamics of their work. 
321 In some versions of the myth Don Juan seduces women, in others he rapes them.  Neither Blanchot nor 
Camus specify.  Both focus on the fact that Don Juan’s actions were transgression – it did not matter 
whether Don Juan took women by force, or whether he violated their virginity.  Don Juan’s significance for 
ethics was simply that he transgressed.  It was the form of his actions, which were a crime, rather than their 
content, which could be rape, seduction, etc, that mattered to the question of ethical action.  I have chosen 
to use the word seduction throughout this chapter. 
  203
Camus told his own version of the Don Juan legend, giving it a very different 
meaning.  For Camus, Don Juan was an absurd man because he saw the meaninglessness 
of existence, and sought instead simply to multiply his conquests ad infinitum.  There 
was no meaning to Don Juan’s list.  It existed solely to verify the presence of the absurd.  
In Camus’ version, Don Juan never meets the statue of the Commander, because the 
Commander represented a transcendental authority that would judge Don Juan’s 
misdeeds.   
What else does the Commander signify, this cold statute put into play to punish 
the blood and the courage which dared to think?  All the powers of eternal 
Reason, of order, of the universal moral, all the strange grandeur of a God open to 
wrath are summed up in him.  This gigantic and soulless stone symbolizes only 
the power that Don Juan negated forever.  The Commander’s mission ends 
there.322 
 
In reality, Camus suggested, there was no moral authority to judge Don Juan at all, and 
therefore the Commander never could have appeared.  Camus had Don Juan living out 
his days, ironically in a Spanish monastery, contemplating the absurdity of the world.  It 
was on precisely this point that Blanchot’s version of the Don Juan myth differed from 
Camus’.  Since Don Juan never met the Commander, the implicit meaning of Camus’ 
Don Juan myth was that he was exculpated.  Rather than accepting culpability for his 
crimes – which would require some kind of reckoning, or at least a confession – Camus’ 
Don Juan simply went about his business. 
                                                 
322 “Que signifie d’autre ce commandeur de pierre, cette froide statue mise en branle pour punir le sang et 
le courage qui ont osé penser?  Tous les pouvoirs de la Raison éternelle, de l’ordre, de la morale 
universelle, toute la grandeur étrangère d’un Dieu accessible à la colère, se résument en lui.  Cette pierre 
gigantesque et sans âme symbolise seulement les puissances que pour toujours Don Juan a nîées.  Mais la 
mission du commandeur s’arrête là.” Camus, Le Myth de Sisyphe, 104. 
  204
 For Blanchot however, Don Juan was the archetypal ethical actor, which meant 
that he not only had to accept culpability for his crimes, he also could not justify them 
with logic.  Blanchot’s Don Juan started from the fact of the absurd, just as Camus’ did, 
to which he responded by engaging in serial seduction to an equally absurd degree.  But 
unlike Camus’s Don Juan, who relied on the absurd for his actions, Blanchot’s Don Juan 
acted solely out of his passion and his desire:  
Don Juan, like the characters of Sade, is the one who has decided on numerical 
repetition: with an admirable effrontery, he accepts the pleasure of enumeration as 
a solution.  To add encounter to encounter without end, to make a number of the 
innumerable, this is pleasing to desire…The myth of Don Juan essentially 
presupposes the lista numerosa, the Catalog in which joyful desire recognizes 
itself in the number, and recognizes what is stronger than eternity there, since 
eternity could no more exhaust desire than succeed in coming to the end of the 
number by a final figure.323  
 
Blanchot’s Don Juan chose to act in the face of the absurd.  He chose to match the absurd 
meaningless of life by pursuing sexual conquest to an absurdly infinite number.  Blanchot 
was careful, however, to insist that Don Juan acted out of his own desire.  He did not foist 
his crimes off on the absurd, or seek exculpation from the absurd.  Like Brontë’s 
Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Blanchot’s Don Juan committed crimes of passion, fully 
cognizant that the only reason for his action was his own desire.   
Don Juan is not a man who desires in order to have, or to possess.  His list is not 
like the list of Alexander’s conquests, it does not give him the satisfaction of an 
immense empire: he desires, that is all.  And this desire, certainly, is a desire that 
                                                 
323 “Don Juan, comme le héros de Sade, est celui qui a pris parti pour la répétition du nombre: avec une 
force, une effronterie admirables, il acueille comme une solution satisfaisante le plaisir de l’énumeration.  
Ajouter sans fin des rencontres à des rencontres, faire de l’innombrable un nombre, cela plait au désir…le 
myth de Don Juan suppose essentiellement la lista numerosa, le Catalogue où le désir joyeux se reconnaît 
dans le nomre et y reconnaît ce qui est plus fort que l’éternité, puisque celle-ci ne saurait pas plus épuiser le 
désir qu’elle ne réussirait à terminer le nombre par un dernier chiffre.” Blanchot, “Orphée, Don Juan, 
Tristan,” 494. 
  205
seizes and takes, but with desire’s joyous force and ravishment, without 
afterthought, without concern.324 
 
For Blanchot, Don Juan’s desire came from nowhere else, it rested on no relation, like 
Camus’ slave.  It was Don Juan’s alone, and it pursued its ends strictly for the sake of 
pursuit.  In this way, Blanchot’s Don Juan thus met Camus’ requirement that an ethical 
act not appeal to any transcendental notion of justice.  But he also met the requirement 
for an absolute beginning, which Blanchot elaborated in his critique of L’Homme révolté, 
and which neither the slave, nor Sisyphus were capable of achieving. 
Blanchot’s version of the Don Juan myth differed from Camus’ in a second, more 
important way.  In Camus’ version of the myth, the confrontation between the 
Commander and Don Juan never occurred.  Camus allowed Don Juan to escape, since 
Camus saw a transcendental force in the Commander which cannot possibly exist in the 
absurd.  But Blanchot saw this essentially as exculpation for Don Juan’s crimes.  If the 
myth was to serve as an example of a figure who fulfilled the requirements of ethical 
action, Don Juan would have to assume culpability.  In Blanchot’s version, Don Juan’s 
culpability manifested through the Commander:  
And yet, inevitably, Don Juan comes up against the Commander, in the cold, 
empty, and impersonal night.  What is he?  In a way, the Commander is the other 
face of desire, the other demand of the passion that Don Juan has only recovered 
through an energetic action.  He is not the representative of God, or even the 
beyond of death, the other world.  He is always and still desire, but desire’s 
nocturnal face.325 
                                                 
324 “Don Juan n’est pas l’homme qui désire pour avoir ou pour posséder.  Sa liste n’est pas celle des 
conquêtes d’Alexandre, ne lui donne pas la satisfaction de l’immensité d’un empire: il désire, c’est tout, et 
ce désir, certes, est désir qui saisit et qui prend, mais par la force joyeuse et la ravissement du désir, sans 
arrière-pensée, sans souici.” Ibid. 495. 
325 “Et, pourtant, épisode inévitable, Don Juan se heurte au Commandeur, à la nuit froide, impersonnelle et 
vide.  Qu’est-ce que cela?  En quelque sorte, l’autre face du désir, l’autre exigence de la passion que Don 
  206
 
In Blanchot’s version of the myth, the Commander did not signify any transcendental 
principle that stood in judgment over Don Juan.  In this much Blanchot followed Camus’ 
definition of the absurd as the irreducible lack of transcendental principles.  But that was 
as far as Blanchot followed Camus.  For Blanchot, the Commander signified the 
culpability of acting on one’s desire, and the acknowledgement of one’s actions as such.  
One could act on one’s own, but one was then obligated to take culpability: “The 
consequence is the Commander.  And the Commander is the encounter of passion 
become the coldness and impersonality of the night.”326  For Blanchot, the Commander 
signified Don Juan’s culpability itself.   
 The Commander was not simply consequence, however.  He was not simply the 
penalty that Don Juan had to pay for the crimes he had committed.  The Commander was 
rather, the rule Don Juan had applied to women, doubled back on himself.  Blanchot 
revised the definition of culpability, drawing on the critique of the law that he elaborated 
in his work on Sade.  Leaving the definition of the law as embodied logic that Camus 
developed in L’Homme révolté to the side, Blanchot applied the lesson of the Sadean 
libertine to Don Juan.  During the purge debate, Blanchot examined the Sadean 
libertine’s attempt to get beyond the law, to accede to the space above it through 
transgression, as a way of becoming higher than the law itself, to become a law unto 
oneself.  Through repetition, the Sadean libertine’s crimes stripped his victims of their 
personal identity, and in so doing deprived the law of its power to define its subjects.  Yet 
                                                                                                                                                 
Juan a seulement recouverte par un parti pris énergique.  Ce n’est pas le représentant de Dieu ou même 
l’au-delà de la mort, l’autre monde.  C’est toujours et encoure le désir, mais sa face nocturne.” Ibid. 494. 
326 “La conséquence, c’est le Commandeur, et le Commandeur, c’est la rencontre de la passion devenue la 
froideur et l’impersonalité de la nuit.” Ibid. 496. 
  207
the Sadean libertine failed to establish this new law in himself, on his own authority, for 
the very reason that he did not himself submit to his crimes – for a new law had to apply 
to everyone, it could not brook any exceptions.  Similarly, Don Juan attempted to create a 
law – a rule of conduct for his own life, by which he could treat all others equally.  
Because Don Juan was a rogue, he created a law of serial seduction, a law of using 
women and disposing of them.  Under Don Juan’s law, all women were stripped of their 
personality, their individuality, and their humanity through his repeated conquests.  As 
Blanchot wrote, “Don Juan could just as well limit himself to a single woman, whom he 
might possess only a single time, on the condition that he desires her not as a unique 
person, but as the unity that engages the infinity of repetition.”327  Don Juan’s law, 
according to which he acted his entire life, was one which denied women their 
individuality and their personality.  In order for Don Juan’s law to be universally 
applicable – that is, in order for it to serve as a law – it was necessary for him to submit to 
the law himself.  Thus, when he met the Commander, Blanchot argued that he 
encountered the very impersonality that he himself had imposed on the world.  By 
treating the entire world of women as impersonal beings, Don Juan himself became 
impersonal.  When he met the Commander, Don Juan was exposed to his own 
impersonality: 
What he encounters is not the All-Powerful, an encounter that would have 
fundamentally pleased him, this man of power, war, and combative desire.  What 
he meets is not the extreme of the possible, but impossibility, the abyss of non-
power, the frozen excess of the other night.  At the bottom of the myth there is 
always the enigma of the stone statue, which is not only death, which is 
                                                 
327 “Don Juan pourrait fort bien s’en tenir à une seule femme qu’il pourrait fort bien ne posséder qu’une 
seule fois, à condition de la désirer non comme l’unique, mas comme l’unité qui engage l’inifi de la 
répétition.” Blanchot, “Orphée, Don Juan, Tristan,” 495. 
  208
something colder and more anonymous than Christian death: it is the 
impersonality of all relation, the outside itself.328 
 
Blanchot juxtaposed the heat of Don Juan’s passion, the fire that drove him to take 
woman after woman, with the coldness and impersonality of his law.  They were two 
sides of the same law, the same rule of conduct.  The coldness of the Commander 
signified Don Juan’s culpability for  having created a law of coldness himself.  
While Camus’ version of the myth of Don Juan was exemplary of the absurd, 
Blanchot’s was allegorical in two separate ways.  First, Blanchot critiqued and revised 
the Don Juan myth, making it into an allegory of ethical action.  Here, the impersonality 
of Don Juan’s law for the treatment of women was akin to the absence of relation 
experienced by the abject man, who had no relation to the world, or to himself.  Blanchot 
argued that ethical action could only be taken in the absence of any relation, even to 
oneself.  The requirement to not rely on any transcendental notion of justice, and to take 
culpability meant that one could not rely on any other – neither another person, such as a 
master, nor a principle, even the principle of the absurd.  In Blanchot’s version of the 
myth of Don Juan, all women were subjected to a law of impersonality, and Don Juan’s 
relation to them was a relation of repetition.  It was, in fact, the absence of a relation.  
Likewise, when Don Juan met the Commander, what he met was the absence of relation 
that he had imposed on the world.  If the Commander took Don Juan with him into death, 
then this death was not the normal death, the cessation of mortal life.  In Blanchot’s 
                                                 
328 “Ce qu’il rencontre, ce n’est pas la Tout-Puissance, rencontre qui au fond lui plairait, à l’extrême du 
possible, mais l’impossibilité, l’abîme du non-pouvoir, la démesure glacée de l’autre nuit.  Il y a toujours 
au fond du myth l’énigme de la statue de pierre, qui n’est pas seulement la mort, qui est quelque chose de 
plus froid et de plus anonyme que la mort chrétienne, - qui est l’impersonnalité de tout rapport, le dehors 
même.” Ibid. 497. 
  209
version of the myth of Don Juan, death was a metaphor for the absence of relation 
necessary for ethical action. 
Blanchot’s version of the myth was allegorical in a second way as well.  If the 
first critiqued and improved Camus’ notion of ethical action, the second returned to his 
critique of the Sadean attempt to found a law.  For Blanchot, law could only exist if its 
founders submitted to it themselves.  No single person could exist beyond the law, as its 
sovereign.  In this way, the law was cold and impersonal.  Blanchot’s Don Juan myth 
provided an allegory of the necessary impersonality of the law.  Don Juan did not reserve 
a space for himself beyond the law, where he could exist safely.  Blanchot argued that 
Don Juan’s rule of conduct was an ethical law precisely because Don Juan submitted to it 
himself, when he encountered the Commander.  In this way, Blanchot’s version of the 
Don Juan myth added a further requirement for ethical action to those elaborated by 
Camus in L’Homme révolté: one must submit to the ethical law that one founds to the 
same extent that one applies it to others.  One must renounce one’s personality, if one 
truly desires to found a law, since the law itself was impersonal.   
In these two allegorical lessons drawn from the myth of Don Juan – the absence 
of relations as the ground for ethical action, and the impersonality of the law – Blanchot 
planted the genealogical foundations for his response to the war in Algeria.  The 
“Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” was composed, 
signed, and issued by means of these two lessons.   
  210
  
The Refusal of the War in Algeria 
In November 1954, five months after Blanchot’s response to the debate between 
Sartre and Camus was published, the war in Algeria began as the FLN staged their the 
first attacks on French civil and military institutions in Algeria.  Blanchot remained silent 
until 1958, when he contacted Dionys Mascolo about participating in the journal, Le 14 
juillet.  Two years later, in 1960, Blanchot, Mascolo, and Jean Schuster drafted the 
“Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie.”  The preceding part 
of this chapter considered Blanchot’s response to the debate between Sartre and Camus in 
order to explore the genealogical roots of the philosophy and the ethics behind the 
“Déclaration.”  The final part of this chapter will consider the “Déclaration” as an ethical 
act beyond commitment through an examination of Blanchot’s contribution to Le 14 
juillet, his testimony before the chief prosecutor of the department of the Seine, and an 
interview that he gave with L’Express magazine with several other signatories.   
Before turning to Blanchot’s contribution to Le 14 juillet, it is helpful to briefly 
review Sartre and Camus’ responses to the war in Algeria.  Since Blanchot’s ethics were 
at the genealogical root of the “Déclaration,” it is useful to bear in mind the kinds of 
actions that Sartre and Camus’ ethics themselves produced.  Sartre issued statement after 
statement demanding that French intellectuals commit to the freedom of the Algerian 
people.  Camus, bruised from his confrontation with Sartre and Jeanson, tried to avoid the 
public spotlight during the war.  His status as the leading French-Algerian intellectual 
guaranteed, however, that he would not be able to remain silent for long.  When finally 
  211
Camus spoke out on the war, he pled for an end to the violence, and for a rapprochement 
between France and Algeria.  He sought to secure a future in Algeria for French-
Algerians, and in so doing, he argued for the continued French possession of Algeria.  
While these two positions by no means encompassed the entire array of stances taken by 
French intellectuals during the war, they were the extensions and continuations of the 
Sartrean and Camusian ethics of engagement against which Blanchot had defined his own 
ethics.  
After Blanchot returned to Paris from his self-imposed solitude in Èze in the 
winter of 1957-1958, he did not immediately return to political activity, as there had not 
yet been a political event that necessitated an ethical – rather than strictly political – 
engagement.  Such an event occurred in May 1958 however, when Charles de Gaulle 
returned to power after the reckless intervention of the army in domestic politics.  This 
prompted Blanchot to contact Mascolo, the editor of Le 14 juillet, and the former 
organizer of the Comité d’Action des Intellectuels contre le Poursuite de la Guerre en 
Afrique du Nord.  Through his contact with Mascolo, Blanchot placed himself at a 
distance from both Sartre and Camus in the debate over the war.  Mascolo had been 
behind the largest effort to organize French intellectuals into a collective movement of 
protest against the war.  Together, he and Blanchot were dedicated solely to collective 
action, while Sartre and Camus continued to issue individual statements based on their 
own personal reasoning.  In this way, Blanchot’s participation in the debate over the war 
in Algeria must be studied not just for the way it put his ethics into action, but also as a 
continuation of the collective protest against the war begun by Mascolo.    
  212
Blanchot’s first contribution to Le 14 juillet was a one-page essay titled “Le 
Refus,” which appeared in October 1958, with picture of Saint-Just in the upper right 
hand corner of the page with the legend, “All the arts have produced their marvels.  The 
art of governing has produced only monsters.”329  This essay was the final genealogical 
building block of the “Déclaration.”  To the requirements for ethical action drawn from 
Camus’ L’Homme révolté, Blanchot added the principle of refusal-in-itself.  Of de 
Gaulle’s return to power, Blanchot wrote:   
The movement of refusal is rare and difficult, though equal and the same for each 
one of us, once we have understood it.  Why difficult?  Because one must refuse 
not only the worst, but also what seems reasonable, a solution that could be called 
felicitous.  In 1940, the refusal did not have to be exercised against the invading 
force (to not accept it was obvious), but against this opportunity that the old man 
of the armistice, not without good faith or justifications, thought himself able to 
represent.  Eighteen years later, the exigency of refusal did not arise with the 
events of May 13 (which were refused in themselves), but against a power that 
pretended to reconcile us honorably with those events, by the sole authority of a 
name.330   
 
In “Le Refus” Blanchot compared de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 with the 
ascendency of Maréchal Pétain’s Vichy regime in 1940.  Each event shared two common 
traits for Blanchot.  The first trait was that in both 1940 and 1958 France was plunged 
into the chaos of wartime, and each time an old, legendary war hero appeared on the 
political scene to allow the French populace to reconcile itself with the new political 
order.  In 1940 the German army invaded France, and Pétain allowed the French to make 
                                                 
329 “Tous les arts ont produit leurs merveilles.  L’art de gourverner n’a produit que des monstres.” 
Blanchot, “Le Refus,” 3. 
330 “Le mouvement de refuse rest rare et difficile, quoique égal et le meme en chacun de nous, dès que 
nous l’avons saisi.  Pourquoi difficile?  C’est qu’il faut refuser, non pas seulement le pire, mais un semblant 
raisonnable, une solution qu’on dirait heureuse.  En 1940, le refus n’eut pas à s’exercer contre la force 
envahissante (ne pas l’accepter allait de soi), mais contre cette chance qu le vieil homme de l’armistice, non 
sans bonne foi ni justifications, pensait pouvoir représenter.  Dix-huit ans plus tard, l’exigence du refus 
n’est pas intervenue à propos des événements du 13 Mai (qui se refusaient d’eux-mêmes), mais face au 
pouvoir qui prétendait nous réconcilier honorablement avec eux, par le seule autorité d’un nom.” Ibid. 
  213
peace with themselves over their surrender and occupation.  In 1958, de Gaulle similarly 
stepped in to allow the French to reconcile themselves to the new political prominence of 
the French army, which took steps to invade in protest against the government’s softening 
position on the war in Algeria, getting as far as Corsica.  In both cases, the old general of 
the First World War and the old general of the Résistance were able to achieve 
reconciliation solely by the authority of their names – when no actual, political 
reconciliation was possible since the fact in both instances was that France had been 
invaded and occupied.  
 The first trait – the way that both Pétain and de Gaulle reconciled the political 
situation in France with the authority of their names rather than through actual political 
negotiation – recalled the farcical repetition of Thermidor elaborated by Blanchot in “La 
Littérature et la droit à la mort,” with de Gaulle standing as the new Napoléon.  In 1958, 
it was this trait that created the exigency of refusal for Blanchot, the demand that action 
be taken.  The corruption of politics by a single name could no longer be borne when that 
corruption pretended that the populace need not distress itself in the face of chaos and 
invasion.   
While this first trait provided the impetus for Blanchot’s return to political 
debates, and provoked the need for refusal, it was the second trait that was the most 
significant in the genealogy of the “Déclaration.”  The second trait shared by 1940 and 
1958 was the common fact that France had been invaded, and that these invasions 
required refusal, without any explanation or justification.  “Not to accept” the invasion by 
the German army “was obvious,” Blanchot wrote.  The events of May 13 were “refused 
  214
in themselves.”  By designating certain political events as capable of being refused-in-
themselves, without further elaboration, Blanchot drew on both the ethical requirement 
for personal culpability and the requirement that ethical action not justify itself with an 
appeal to a transcendental notion of justice.  Both of these requirements laid down the 
formal conditions for ethical action, but neither of them indicated the specific content of 
an ethical act.  That is to say, neither of these formal requirements for ethical action gave 
any indication of what kinds of things might qualify for ethical action.  Strictly speaking, 
ethics had no content.  It had no specific prescriptions or demands.  The decision about 
what required action fell to the individual actor, who made judgments based on the 
cultural mores in which he or she had been raised.  The requirements that one not seek 
justification in a transcendental principle, and that one act of one’s own recognizance, 
made it so that the content of ethical actions were always determined by local, cultural 
rules.  Thus, the formal principles of ethics were universal, while the content of ethics 
was entirely contingent.  For Blanchot, the content of ethical action was “obvious” 
because one’s ethical judgments were always personal, idiosyncratic, and contingent.  
Events that could be refused-in-themselves “obviously” required refusal, because they 
violated the standard codes by which one lived.  It was “obvious” that one had to refuse 
the German invasion, just as it was “obvious” that one had to refuse the French army’s 
plot to overthrow the government.  This refusal-in-itself was a demonstration of the how 
an ethical actor bridged the gap between the formal requirements for ethical action 
(which provided no rules for conduct in themselves) and ethical action itself.  
  215
The “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” enacted 
precisely this principle of refusal of the war in Algeria in itself.  Just as it was obvious 
that the invading German army and the mutinous French army needed to be refused, it 
was also obvious that the war in Algeria needed to be refused.  The “Déclaration” was 
couched in the terms of a refusal-in-itself, citing only the exigency of action, without 
explaining it: “Are there no cases when the refusal to serve is a sacred obligation, when 
“treason” signifies the courageous respect of truth?”331  The “Déclaration” did not 
provide any justification because it adhered to the formal requirement that prohibited any 
appeal to a transcendental notion of justice, and it did not provide any reasons for its 
ethical action because it was simply obvious that the war was unjust.  Indeed, all the 
“Déclaration” claimed was that the one hundred and twenty-one signatories “respect and 
judge justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.”  The refusal of 
the “Déclaration” simply allowed others to not fight against the Algerians.  The refusal of 
the war was implicit, unspoken, and obvious.  This principle of refusal-in-itself did not 
mean that the war violated a universal code of justice.  Rather, the principle of refusal-in-
itself meant that for the members of the French intellectual left, whose cultural values 
were egalitarian, it was obvious that the unjust war in Algeria needed to be refused-in-
itself.   
In this way, the signatories of the “Déclaration” provided the content of their 
ethical action themselves.  The war was refused-in-itself because it was obvious within 
the cultural codes of the French intellectual left that it was wrong.  The “Déclaration” met 
                                                 
331 “N’y a-t-il pas de cas où le refus de servir est un devoir sacré, où la “trahison” signifie le respect 
courageux du vrai?” Blanchot et al., “Déclaration…” 52.  
  216
the other, formal requirements of ethical action not through content, but through the form 
of the “Déclaration” itself.  It met the requirement that ethical action not appeal to any 
transcendental notion of justice, lest it become a hypocritical claim to innocence.  And it 
met the requirement of reasonable culpability, by which one must stake responsibility for 
one’s own action.  The only justification provided in the “Déclaration” was the 
signatories’ own admission of culpability:  “The undersigned, considering that each one 
of us must speak out…considering that they have themselves have the obligation to 
intervene, in their place and according to their means…declare.”  The signatories of the 
“Déclaration” refused to appeal to a transcendental notion of justice because that would 
absolve them of the responsibility.  It would be to displace responsibility for their actions 
onto an other, which would, in turn, exculpate them from their act.  The act of the 
“Déclaration” was only ethical insofar as it abstained from appealing to a transcendental 
justice, and only insofar as the signatories took culpability on themselves.      
Blanchot reiterated the way that the “Déclaration” satisfied the formal 
requirements of ethical action in the one and only interview that he ever gave, with 
Madeleine Chapsal, of the magazine L’Express.  With Blanchot in this interview was the 
novelist Nathalie Sarraute, the actress Simone Signoret (who, with her husband, the actor 
Yves Montand, had become a champion of leftist political causes), the surrealist Maurice 
Nadeau, and a Marxist history professor, Jean Baby – strange accomplices for the writer 
who spent the 1950s in utter solitude.  The interview was instantly censored, and only 
appeared later, when François Maspero – himself one of the signatories of the 
Déclaration – published it in a collection called Le droit à l’insoumission (le dossier des 
  217
“121”), put out by his own publishing house.332   When Chapsal questioned Blanchot on 
the nature of the “Déclaration,” he responded:  
This is not a simple demonstration of protest.  This is a Déclaration, and a 
declaration that decides, in the absence of a legitimate authority, on that which it 
decides to refuse and to proclaim.  Is it thus only speech?  In effect, but speech 
which has all the authority of a solemn oath, of which those who affirm it feel 
responsible henceforth, ready to support it calmly, firmly, as much as is 
necessary, whatever the consequences.333 
 
The responsibility felt by the signatories was matched by their refusal to appeal to any 
notion of justice.  Chapsal asked Blanchot why insubordination was a right, and Blanchot 
responded by explaining why it had to be a right, since the concept of a right let the 
decision fall on each individual who might be faced with the situation of having to bear 
arms: 
The right to insubordination.  I say Right and not Obligation, as certain 
commentators, in a thoughtless way, would have wanted the Déclaration to 
express, doubtlessly because they think that the formulation of an obligation goes 
further than that of a right.  But that is not the case: an obligation calls upon an 
anterior morality which covers it, guarantees it, and justifies it.  When there is an 
obligation, one has only to close one’s eyes and blindness is accomplished.  In 
this way, everything is simple.  Right, on the other hand, calls upon only itself, to 
exercise the liberty of which it is the expression.  Right is a free power of which 
each one of us is responsible for himself, to himself, and which engages each one 
of us completely and freely.  Nothing is stronger.  Nothing is more serious.  That 
is why it must be said: right to insubordination.  Each one decides with 
sovereignty.334   
                                                 
332 Maurice Blanchot et al. interview by Madeleine Chapsal, in François Maspero, ed., Le droit à 
l’insoumission (le dossier des “121”) (Paris: Maspero, 1961), 89-99. 
333 “Ce n’est pas un simple manifeste de protestation.  C’est une Déclaration, et une déclaration qui décide, 
en l’absence d’une autorité légitime, de ce qu’il  convient de refuser et de revendiquer.  Ce n’est donc 
qu’une parole?  En effet, mais qui a toute l’autorité d’une parole grave dont tous ceux qui l’affirment se 
sentent désormais responsible, prêts à la soutenir calmement, fermement, autant qu’il faut, quelles qu’en 
soient les conséquences.” Ibid. 93. 
334 “Droit à l’insoumission.  Je dis bien Droit et non pas Devoir, comme certains, d’une manière 
irréfléchie, auraient voulu que s’exprime la Déclaration, sans doute parce qu’ils croient que la formulation 
d’un devoir va plus loin que celle d’un droit.  Mais cela n’est pas: une obligation renvoie à une morale 
antérieure qui la vouvre, la garantit et la justifie; quand il y a devoir, on n’a plus qu’à fermer les yeux, et à 
l’accomplir aveuglément; alors, tout est simples.  Le droit, au contraire, ne renvoie qu’à lui-même, à 
  218
 
With the notion of right as opposed to obligation, Blanchot and the other signatories 
sought to invest each person with their own sense of reasonable culpability, deprived of 
any recourse to an “anterior morality.”  Each person was also charged with the self-
sovereignty to decide whether they would exercise their right or not, free from any 
anterior morality, but also free from the sovereignty of the state to which the 
“Déclaration” was a direct challenge.  In this way, the “Déclaration” attempted to create a 
new law of reasonable culpability.   
Lastly, the signatories of the “Déclaration” completed their ethical act by 
submitting to the impersonality of the law that they had created.  As Blanchot had argued 
in his re-writing of the Don Juan myth, the creation of a new law – a new rule of conduct 
– required that the creator or creators submit to the law equally, if it were to become a 
law, and move beyond the individual who declared.  The law could only exist qua law if 
it applied to everyone.  Thus, the nature of the law was that it was impersonal: one could 
create a new law, but only if one sacrificed one’s own identity to it, relinquishing the very 
sovereignty that one had used to create the law.  Don Juan was allegorical of this 
principle for Blanchot.  Don Juan submitted women to a rule of impersonality.  He 
treated all women as substitutable objects, with no individual characteristics of their own.  
They simply became another entry in his lista numerosa.  In Blanchot’s rendition of the 
myth, the Commander signified the “coldness” of Don Juan’s law, the impersonality that 
his law imposed on the world.  Don Juan was ethical precisely because he created a law 
                                                                                                                                                 
l’exercise de la liberté dont il est l’expression; le droit est un pouvoir libre don’t chacun, pour lui-même, 
vis-à-vis de lui-même, est responsible et qui l’engage complètement et librement; rien n’est plus fort, rien 
n’est plus grave.  C’est pourquoi, il faut dire: droit à l’insoumission: chacun en décide souverainement.” 
Ibid. 91. 
  219
of impersonality, and allowed himself to be governed by it as well.  If the signatories 
wished their “Déclaration” to carry the force and the applicability of the law, they would 
have so submit to a principle of impersonality as well, in recognition of the fact that the 
law was beyond them, and that none of them stood sovereign over it, or anyone else.  
This task was made doubly difficult by the requirement that they also acknowledge 
personal responsibility for the ethical act of the “Déclaration.”   
The “Déclaration” itself made some effort live up to this principle.  Though it was 
later acknowledged that the “Déclaration” had been written by Blanchot, Mascolo, and 
Schuster, at the time of its dissemination, no authorship was attributed.  The 
“Déclaration” appeared only with the signatures of the one hundred and twenty-one 
appended to the bottom of the text.  In this way, the signatories both acknowledged 
culpability, but did so equally and impersonally, none of them claiming authorship 
directly.  The rest of the work towards submitting to the law of impersonality was done in 
an interrogation in front of a judge, who represented the law of the state, the very law that 
the “Déclaration” was no longer willing to recognize.  Blanchot and other signatories 
were given the opportunity to violate their law of impersonality, and submit to the law of 
the state by taking sole responsibility for the “Déclaration.”  Blanchot held firm in his 
insistence on the collective undertaking of the “Déclaration,” thus affirming his 
submission to the law of impersonality, and guaranteeing that the “Déclaration” became 
an ethical action that founded a law for ethical conduct outside the legal purview of the 
state. 
  220
On September 18, 1960, two weeks after the “Déclaration” was made public, 
Blanchot was charged with “inciting insubordination and desertion” by the chief 
prosecutor of the Department of the Seine.335  The examining magistrate sought to 
“establish a hierarchy of responsibilities” of those who drafted and disseminated the 
“Déclaration.”336  With a resolve that remains striking fifty years later, Blanchot refused 
to accept the terms by which the magistrate questioned him, for the very reason that they 
compromised his submission to the law of impersonality.  When the magistrate asked 
Blanchot if he was the principal author of the “Déclaration,” Blanchot responded by 
affirming the impersonality of the collective text: 
The search that consists of dividing the responsibilities, to seek to establish a 
pseudo-hierarchy of responsibility, is a fundamentally erroneous search.  It 
misunderstands the truth of every collective text, signed collectively: to know that 
“each one has his part and all have the entire thing.”  Everything that you are 
looking to make me say, which will go against this affirmation that is the meaning 
of every collective text, will be false, and I dismiss it in advance.337   
 
At the same time, Blanchot also affirmed the individual responsibility he assumed for his 
signature, and the individual responsibility that each signatory took upon themselves, 
such that every one of them was its true author: “I add that if I admit to being fully 
                                                 
335 “Incitation à l’insoumission et à la désertion.” “Premières inculpations de signataires de la déclaration 
sur l’insoumission,” Le Monde, September 18-19, 1960. 
336 “D’établir une hierarchie dans les résponsibilités.” Ibid. 
337 “La démarche qui consiste à diviser les responsabilités, à chercher à établir une pseudo-hiérarchie de 
responsabilité, est une démarche fondamentalement erronée, elle méconnaît la vérité de tout texte collectif, 
signé collectivement: à savoir que “chacun en a sa part et tous l’ont tout entière.”  Tout ce que vous 
chercherez à me faire dire qui ira contre cette affirmation qui est le sens de tout texte collectif, sera faux, et 
je le révoque par avance.” Blanchot, “Interrogation avec le juge,” Écrits politiques: 1953-1993, 84.  At the 
end of his interrogation, Blanchot insisted on revising the transcript.  It was the custom in French courts of 
law that the examining magistrate took down the transcript of the interrogation, and the accused signed off 
on the transcription.  Blanchot refused to accept the judge’s transcription, and demanded that he be able to 
revise the text so that the official document reflected what he had actually said.  This is both a fascinating 
anecdote, and a materially significant fact, for it verifies that the transcript of Blanchot’s interrogation 
provided in the Écrits politiques contains Blanchot’s actual words.  The text used for the Écrits politiques 
was found among Blanchot’s papers after his death in 2003.     
  221
responsible for this text, each one of the signatories being equally considered as its single 
author, this responsibility I assume globally, in its ensemble, I am not going to go into 
detail.”338  Indeed, the signature, more than the fact of writing was what made one 
responsible for the text.  The signature dissolved the individual signatories’ identities into 
the text itself, as Don Juan’s identity dissolved into the Commander’s icy hand:  
I declare that I admit to being fully responsible for this text, from the moment 
when I signed it.  The fact of the signature is the essential fact.  It signifies that 
not only am I in agreement with this text, but that I merge myself with it, that I am 
this text itself.  Each one of the signatories identifies himself in the text, such that 
each is there before your eyes, such that each has been made public.339 
  
For Blanchot, the text was itself a law to which he had to submit, by the very fact of his 
signature.  By the fact of the signature, each signatory gave up individual authorship, they 
gave up individual identity, and submitted to the law of the collective text.  This 
collective text was impersonal, but fully binding for those who signed, such that to sign 
the “Déclaration” was to submit to the law of conduct that it sought to affirm, just as Don 
Juan submitted to the impersonality of the law he imposed on women when he met the 
Commander.   
 
* 
 The “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” threw the 
French government into disarray.  It created a new law, outside the boundaries of the 
                                                 
338 “J’ajoute que si je me reconnais pleinement responsible de ce texte, chacun des signataires devant être 
également considéré comme son auteur unique, cette responsabilité, je l’assume globalement, dans son 
ensemble, je ne fais pas le détail.” Ibid.  
339 “Je déclare que je me reconnais pleinement responsible de ce texte, à partir du moment où je l’ai signé.  
Le fait de la signature est le fait essentiel.  Il signifie que non seulement je m’accorde avec ce texte, mais 
que je me confonds avec lui, que je suis ce texte lui-même.  Chacun des signataires s’identifie au texte, tel 
qu’il est là devant vos yeux, tel qu’il a été rendu public.” Ibid. 
  222
laws of the French state, and which the government was powerless to combat, since it 
denied the very power of the government.  All the government could do was threaten the 
signatories with the traditional weapons of the law.  The examining magistrate of the 
Department of the Seine wanted to affix guilt to single persons, to assign blame in a 
hierarchy of responsibilities.  But the “Déclaration” confounded the magistrate’s desire to 
assert sovereignty over the signatories by denying the very terms of responsibility, and 
individuality that the magistrate sought to impose.  Against the concepts of responsibility 
and individuality enforced by the magistrate, the signatories of the “Déclaration” asserted 
a new law of ethical conduct.  They made it valid by denying guilt before the law, and 
affirming their own culpability.  They made it legitimate by submitting to it as a law, 
surrendering their individuality to its impersonality, althewhile disavowing any innocence 
that did not rightfully belong to them.   
Moreover, the “Déclaration” also had material legal and political effects.  First, 
the chief prosecutor of the Department of the Seine was eventually forced to withdraw 
many of his charges against Blanchot and the other signatories.  Second, the 
“Déclaration” also helped to turn the tide of public opinion against the war.  After 1960, 
popular disapproval of the war eventually pressured de Gaulle to negotiate a ceasefire 
with the FLN.  The “Déclaration” achieved what no other intellectual protest had 
accomplished, and what Satrean commitment never succeeded in doing: it united the 
intellectual left against the war, it overrode the sovereignty of the state, and it contributed 
to the end of the war in Algeria.   
  223
 With the ethical action of “Déclaration” Blanchot, Mascolo, and the rest of the 
Rue Saint-Benoit group initiated a mode of intellectual engagement in politics beyond 
commitment.  They not only abandoned commitment in politics, they replaced it with a 
mode of ethical action capable of creating new laws.  Unfortunately, Albert Camus’ 
untimely death in January 1960 prevented him from taking part in the “Déclaration” – 
either for it or against it.  But the signatories all owed much to his insistence that 
intellectual engagement in politics had to begin from a solid ethical point of departure, 
rather than from the dream of a political point of arrival.  The genealogy of the 
“Déclaration” passed from the debate between Sartre and Camus, through Blanchot’s 
response and his rewriting of the myth of Don Juan.  While the “Déclaration” was not a 
Camusian document, it was a continuation and an expansion of the ethical critique of 
commitment that Camus made in L’Homme révolté.     
 After tracing this genealogy, it is now possible to return to Blanchot’s vexing 
response to  Bernard Henri-Lévy questions in 1989 regarding his participation in the 
drafting and dissemination of the “Déclaration,” and his abstention from the protests 
against the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution.  At the time Blanchot wrote: 
“Thank you for your letter.  But pardon me for being unable to respond as you wished.  I 
no longer receive even my closest friends, without our friendship being diminished.  And 
today, I think only of Auschwitz.”  Just as the “Déclaration” initially appeared to lack any 
philosophical content, so too did Blanchot’s refusal to answer Henri-Lévy seem not to 
have any higher justification.  But in exactly the same manner as the “Déclaration,”  
Blanchot’s refusal to appeal to a higher justification in explaining why he contributed to 
  224
the “Déclaration” and not to the protests against the Soviet repression of the Hungarian 
revolution, only served to mask the deeper philosophical and ethical reasoning behind 
Blanchot’s actions.  Blanchot’s refusal to explain his abstention from the protests of the 
Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution corresponded exactly to rules for ethical 
conduct that Blanchot established during the 1950s: that he not appeal to any higher 
justification, and that he take his action entirely on his own recognizance.   
 
  224
CHAPTER THREE 
Words Rent by Lightning: Origins after Structuralism 
 
On Saturday, May 20, 1961 Michel Foucault defended his doctoral thesis, Folie et 
Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique.  Typically, doctoral defenses are not 
well-attended affairs.  For Foucault however, the positively staggering crowd of nearly 
one hundred packed into Salle Louis Liard, an august, academic hall of the Sorbonne.  
Word had gotten out that something special was going to take place.  Foucault’s 
committee was comprised of venerable members of the French academy.  His advisor, 
Georges Canguilhem, was a pre-eminent historian of science.  The president of the 
defense, Henri Gouhier, was a respected historian of philosophy.  The committee was 
rounded out by Daniel Lagache, a psychoanalyst who co-founded the Société Française 
de la Psychanalyse with Jacques Lacan; Maurice de Gandillac, a philosophy professor at 
the Sorbonne; and Jean Hyppolite, one of the principal philosophers responsible for 
introducing the work of Hegel to a French audience.  Foucault was questioned on every 
aspect of his project, from his historical methodology, to his underlying metaphysics, to 
his rhetorical stylistics.  Sensing that his defense was going badly Foucault offered the 
resigned conclusion, “To speak about madness requires the talents of a poet.”  His 
resignation proved unwarranted.  Canguilhem leaned over the table and pronounced, “But 
you have those talents, sir.”340    
                                                 
340 “Mais, vous l’avez, monsieur.”  This episode, and this quote are recounted in Foucault’s biography.  
See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), pp. 133.  See also François Dosse, Histoire 
du structuralisme I: Le champ du signe, 1945-1966 (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1991), 190-192. 
  225
Thus began the career of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth 
century.  There is more to this episode than meets the eye.  Foucault’s exasperated claim, 
that to write a history of madness requires the talents of a poet, and Canguilhem’s 
confirmation of those talents within Foucault himself, was not a romanticization of 
rational historical, philosophical, and psychiatric methods.  It was symbolic, rather, of the 
idea of textual engagement that had been germinating ever since Jean Paulhan and 
Maurice Blanchot first critiqued Sartrean commitment during the debate over the postwar 
purge of writers and intellectuals.  Blanchot laid the seeds of the move beyond 
commitment as a means of intellectual engagement in politics, and abandoned 
commitment entirely during the war in Algeria.  But it was not until Foucault’s Folie et 
Déraison, that the idea of a fully-fledged textual engagement in politics was brought to 
fruition.   
This was the idea that the things of the mental world studied by Foucault, and the 
things of the literary world studied by Blanchot, had a shared origin not in tedious 
historical processes, but rather in a spectacular moment of poetic creation.  Blanchot and 
Foucault argued that the lived experience of reality was fundamentally linguistic, and by 
extension, fundamentally poetic, or literary.  For Blanchot, this meant that literature, far 
from expressing life, actually became life itself.  For Foucault however, this meant that 
the human sciences – including psychiatry – which purport to know the human world 
intrinsically, positively, and absolutely, were made of the very same stuff as literature.  
Engagement with this textual world now meant engaging with its poetic creation.  
Canguilhem’s comment that Foucault had the talents of a poet was no less than a 
  226
confirmation that Foucault’s textual engagement with the discourse of mental illness was 
a success.  
The crucial insight that Blanchot and Foucault developed was that if knowledge is 
just words, just a fiction, then it is also a fiction invented by humans.  The human 
sciences came into the world by the very same process of creation as literature.  And yet, 
Foucault argued, the human sciences were experienced as objective realities.  The 
paradoxical mystery of psychiatry for Foucault was that people believed that it really 
knew the inner workings of the mind, and believed that it really could cure the diseases of 
the mind.  Likewise, the paradoxical mystery of literature for Blanchot was that people 
believed it represented an author’s insight into the human condition.  That is, they 
believed it represented something real, the author’s thoughts, whereas for Blanchot, the 
reality of literature was that it is pure fiction, representing nothing other than itself.  What 
was it, Blanchot and Foucault asked, that inhered in psychiatry and in literature – things 
that were manifestly linguistic – that made people accept them as reality? 
The answer to this question, which they developed over the course of a long 
exchange of essays and books between 1961 and 1966, lay in the concept of the origin.  
In “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” published several years later in 1971, Foucault 
criticized the search for origins as “an attempt to capture the exact essence of the thing, 
its purest possibilities, its identity, carefully folded back on itself, its immobile form that 
precedes anything of the external world.”341  Origins were closely linked to essences, but 
                                                 
341 “S’efforce d’y recueillir l’essence exact de la chose, sa possibilité la plus pure, son identité 
soigneusement repliée sur elle-même, sa forme immobile et anterieure à tout e qui est externe, accidentel.” 
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses 
Universitaires de France, 1971), 148. 
  227
because of the linguistic nature of the human world, such origins did not exist.  Many 
historians have used Foucault’s critique of origins to demystify essentialized notions race, 
gender, sexuality, nation, and empire.342  This chapter argues that this was but half of 
Foucault’s argument, and that historians could go even further in their project of 
demystification if they followed Foucault all the way.  This chapter argues that Foucault, 
together with Blanchot, re-thought the idea of origins in the 1960s, prior to his 
“genealogical turn.”343  Together they articulated an idea about the origins of psychiatry 
                                                 
342 Take, for instance, the commonplace notion that the origin of the United States was in the Mayflower, 
the pilgrims, and Plymouth Plantation.  The Mayflower is the origin myth of the United States, and in 
recent years historians have critiqued this myth by demonstrating its fallacy.  Instead, historians have 
shown the complicated, uneven, and problematic history of the development of the United States.  The 
actual United States had little to do with the perpetuation of the original Puritan essence of the 
Massachusetts Bay Colony, and much more to do with apposite desires for territorial expansion, spiritual 
and racial domination, and self-interested gain.  For a discussion of national origin myths, see Benedict 
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 
1983). 
343 One might argue, though this chapter stops well short of doing so, that Foucault’s genealogical turn was 
really just an attempt to place the search for origins back on its feet, after so many false steps taken toward 
nonexistent essences.  Indeed, Foucault gestured toward this position even in “Nietzsche, la généalogie, 
l’histoire,” in which he wrote: “To this confused and anonymous European, who no longer knows himself 
or what name he should use, the historian offers alternative identities, apparently more individualized and 
real than his own.  But the man with historical sense will not be deceived by this substitute that is offered to 
him; he will understand that it is only a disguise.  Little by little, the Revolution was supplied with Roman 
models, Romanticism with knight’s armor, the Wagnerian era was given the sword of a German hero – but 
these were rags whose unreality reflects our own unreality…The good historian, the genealogist will know 
what must be thought of all of this masquerade.  He will not be held back by his serious mind; on the 
contrary, he will want to push the masquerade to its limit, and to make the great carnival of time where 
masks are constantly reappearing into a work of art.”  “A cet homme emmêlé et anonyme qu’est 
l’Européen – et qui ne sait plus qui il est, quel nom il doit porter – l’historien offer des identités de 
rechange, en apparence, mieux individualisées et plus réelles que la sienne.  Mais l’homme du sens 
historique ne doit pas tromper sur ce substitut qu’il offre: ce n’est qu’un déguisement.  Tour à tour, on a 
offert à la Révolution le modèle romain, au romantisme l’armure du chevalier, à l’époque wagnérienne 
l’épee du héros germanique; mais ce sont des oripeaux dont l’irréalité renvoie à notre proper irréalité…Le 
bon historien, le généalogiste, saura ce qu’il faut penser de toute cette mascarade.  Non point qu’il la 
repousse par esprit de sérieux; il veut au contraire la pousser à l’extrême: il veut mettre en œuvre un grand 
carnaval du temps, où les masques ne cesseront de revenir.”  See Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, 
l’histoire,” 167-168.  Here parody must not be understood as a rejection of all origins, and the liberation 
into a world free of origin.  Rather it must be understood simply as a different approach to origins, one 
which parodies the fictional origin that pretends to reality, and instead venerates the actual origin that 
persists as a fiction.  The argument of this chapter is that between 1961 and 1966 Blanchot and Foucault 
attempted to push the masquerade to its limit.  Following this logic, the origin of the United States qua 
  228
and literature, respectively, which explained why people believed in them so completely, 
and which offered an alternative.  Psychiatry promoted a story about its creation that was 
rooted in the scientific method, and the “discovery” of madness by toiling physicians.  
Likewise, literature promoted its own story of creation, in which the writer wrestled with 
his project until it became a book.  But to Blanchot and Foucault these were red herrings 
– the fictions of a fiction, as it were – that shrouded the essential truth that psychiatry, 
like literature, was just words strung together.  They were apocrypha, designed to make 
people believe that psychiatry could cure mental illness, and that literature contains 
insight into life.  
Therein lay the key to the origin of the discourses of psychiatry and literature: if 
scientific discovery was a fiction, masquerading as the real origin of psychiatry, and if the 
writer’s effort at writing was also a fiction, and not the real origin of literature, then the 
actual origins of psychiatry and literature clearly did not lay at the level of reality.  
Rather, Blanchot and Foucault reasoned, the actual origins of psychiatry and literature 
must be in their creation as fictions.  If psychiatry and literature were really just fictions, 
then they must have been created in the very same way that all fictions are created.  
Fiction, as Blanchot pointedly argued in 1947/1948 in “Litérature et le droit à la mort,” 
was nothing more than “[lining] up a few words side by side.”344  They come into being 
not by accurately capturing reality, but through poiesis – the power of words to make.  
They came into being, and they were accepted as reality, by the power of poetic speech.  
                                                                                                                                                 
imagined community was indeed the Mayflower.  As an imagined community, the United States has a 
fictional quality, and its origin must be equally fictional.   
344 “…d'aligner quelques mots.” Blanchot, “Litérature et le droit à la mort,” La Part du feu (Paris: Éditions 
Gallimard, 1949), 309. 
  229
As Blanchot wrote in 1942 in Comment la littérature est-elle possible? the discourse of 
psychiatry and the discourse of literature were “words rent by lighting,” they were words 
given the power of being, through their existence in poetic form.345  Thus Foucault found 
real origins of psychiatry in the literary conception of madness contained in the ship of 
fools, which proliferated in Renaissance literature, but which never actually existed.  
Likewise, Blanchot found the origin of literature in the literary conception of creation 
contained in the myth of the first poetic creator, Orpheus.  Together, they articulated the 
idea that discourses had origins, but that those origins were never “real.”  Rather, they 
always appeared under the halo of the mythic. 
Yet textual engagement was not merely designed to expose the illusions by which 
the world operated.  It was also designed to bring society to a healthy reconciliation with 
those illusions.  The exposure of the linguistic or literary construction of discourses like 
mental illness, and literature was the first step in the program of textual engagement 
developed by Foucault and Blanchot.  The second step was the replacement of each 
discourse’ purported origins (ie. scientific discovery and the sovereign author) with 
mythic origins, like the ship of fools, or the myth of Orpheus.  Unlike Sartrean 
commitment, whose attempt to remake the world through language had been 
demonstrated to be politically inefficacious, and ethically hypocritical, Foucaultian and 
Blanchotian textual engagement recognized the limits of any kind of intellectual 
engagement in politics that took the linguistic construction of the world as its base 
assumption.  As Blanchot demonstrated during the postwar purge of writers and 
                                                 
345 “Paroles déchirées par l’éclair.” Blanchot, Comment la littérature est-elle possible? (Paris: José Corti, 
1942), 27. 
  230
intellectuals in “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” the linguistically-constructed world 
could not simply be remade according to the writer’s wishes.   
The term myth then denoted something quite different in the work of Foucault 
and Blanchot, than it did in the work other contemporaneous thinkers: Theodor Adorno 
and Max Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung on the one hand, and Claude Lévi-
Strauss’ Anthropologie structurale and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies on the other.346  For 
Adorno and Horkheimer, myth was the first step towards the disenchantment of the world 
achieved by enlightenment.  The enlightenment placed humanity in an abstract relation 
with the world by processes of instrumental reason, measurement, and abstraction.  
Likewise, the Greeks invented their myths to mediate between humanity from the world.  
For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth was a concrete historical event, one stage in a larger 
trajectory toward total disenchantment.  But for Blanchot and Foucault however, myth 
was not a historical event.  Orpheus was not the origin of poetry because he was the first 
poet.  Rather, Orpheus was the origin of poetry because the existence of poetry could not 
be explained and believed in purely historical terms.  For Blanchot and Foucault, myth 
was what humanity used to explain a discourse’s passage from a purely poetic 
potentiality, to a historical actuality.  In this way, Blanchot and Foucault suggested that 
myth did not produce enlightenment rationality, but rather served as a corrective to the 
alienation imposed by instrumental reason.    
                                                 
346 See Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente 
(Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp Verlag, 1981).  Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Structural Study of Myth,” 
appeared first in English.  I have provided citations to both the English and French versions.  See Lévi-
Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (Oct. – Dec. 
1955): 426-444; Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958).  See also Roland Barthes, Mythologies 
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957). 
  231
Similarly, Blanchot and Foucault’s idea of mythical origins also departed the 
definition of myth established by Lévi-Strauss and Barthes.  Though Lévi-Strauss and 
Barthes produced very different analyses of myths, they both approached myth as a 
discourse whose very existence required explanation.  And furthermore, both Lévi-
Strauss and Barthes thought that myth required structural analysis.  Seen from this 
structrualist perspective then, Blanchot and Foucault’s idea of mythical origins would 
seem to have essentialized myth.  They did not take it as something that needed 
explanation and accounting for, but rather assumed it to be a regular part of human 
existence.  This charge of essentialism requires qualification however.  Blanchot and 
Foucault understood myth as a constituent element of humanity’s cultural existence.  In 
their view, myth worked on the same epistemological level as any other cultural 
construction.   For them, myth was different only insofar as it had been rigorously 
excluded from the modern world by the discourses of mental illness, and literary 
production.  Blanchot and Foucault saw myth as the antidote to an overly structured 
world. 
In this sense, this chapter argues against the prevailing understanding of the 
relationship between Blanchot and Foucault, which focuses on the occasional essays that 
they wrote on each other’s thought.347  Foucault wrote an essay on Blanchot called “La 
pensée du déhors,” for the special issue of Critique devoted to Blanchot in 1966.  In this 
piece Foucault sutured together an intellectual portrait of Blanchot through readings of 
the latter’s work, testifying to an amor intellectualis sustained in absentia.  Blanchot, for 
                                                 
347 The philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s book, Foucault, provides an enlightening, if unsystematic account of 
Foucault’s indebtedness to the thought of Blanchot.  See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Éditions de 
Minuit, 1986). 
  232
his part, published a panegyric for Foucault, two years after the latter’s death in 1984, 
titled Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine.348  Eleanor Kaufman analyzes these pieces in 
The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski.349  She 
examines Blanchot and Foucault’s essays on each other in order to theorize friendship as 
a relation that can exist, and even thrive in the physical absence of the other.  Yet her 
primary concern is theoretical, and not historical.  A systematic, historical treatment of 
Blanchot and Foucault’s relationship, which takes into account the effect they had on 
each other’s thinking, is still required.  This chapter seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the 
history of Blanchot and Foucault’s coextensive, and overlapping ideas of mythical 
origins. 
This chapter focuses on the idea of mythic origins created between Foucault’s 
Folie et déraison and Blanchot’s essays on Orpheus.  As such, it excludes the occasional 
pieces they wrote on each other, as well as numerous other essays that showed traces of 
each other’s thought.  During the first half of the 1960s Foucault published several works 
that closely mirrored Blanchot’s method of literary criticism, and his choice of literary 
objects.  These literary essays included “Le langage à l’infini,” “La folie, l’absence 
d’œuvre,” as well as the book Raymond Roussel, all three of which actively took on 
Blanchotian themes.350  Foucault also published “Le “non” du père,” “Préface à la 
                                                 
348 Blanchot, Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1986). 
349 Eleanor Kaufman, The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski 
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 
350 Michel Foucault, “Le langage à l’infini,” Tel Quel 15 (1963): 44-53; “La folie, l’absence d’œuvre,” La 
table ronde 196 (1964): 11-21, Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). 
  233
transgression,” and “Le prose d’Acteon,” each of which was implicitly Blanchotian in 
tenor, if not explicitly Blanchotian in content.351  
These pieces are of considerable interest as precursors to Foucault’s later work, 
yet within his exchange with Blanchot in the first half of the 1960s has gone entirely 
unnoticed by historians.352  The exchange between Blanchot and Foucault over Folie et 
déraison and creation stands out for being the only moment in their respective careers 
when they actually engaged in a reciprocal exchange with each other at the same time, 
and were in a position to influence each other directly.  By exploring this exchange, this 
chapter shows that Blanchot and Foucault together articulated a notion of textual 
engagement in the linguistic construction of reality.  In this way, Foucault’s comment at 
his dissertation defense, that writing about madness requires the talent of a poet, takes on 
added significance.  Foucault viewed the reality of madness as Blanchot viewed the 
reality of literature.  Both issued from a moment of poetic creation.  Writing about either 
required the talents of a poet not because one’s account needed to be poetic, but because 
only the poet was capable of apprehending and explaining the imaginary reality of 
madness or literature. 
In this exchange Blanchot also clarified his position against the emerging field of 
structuralism.  During the 1950s structuralism swept through the avant-garde French 
intellectual community.353  As the French philosopher Étienne Balibar succinctly defines 
                                                 
351 Foucault, “Le “non” du père,” Critique 178 (1962): 195-209; “Préface à la transgression,” Critique 
195/196 (1963): 751-769; “Le prose d’Acteon,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 135 (1964): 444-459. 
352 The same cannot be said for those who practice literary studies, to whom Foucault’s work on literature 
ha been fundamental.  See Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Literature 
(London: Routledge, 1992).   
353 On the history of this movement, see Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme I. 
  234
it, structuralism was the agreement on “the necessity of studying structures rather than 
histories, essences, figures of consciousness, or experiences, or on the “primacy” of 
structure with respect to subjectivity, life and historicity.”354  At the same time, Balibar 
insists that structuralism was also innately divided and pluralist, as the agreement on the 
object of study was “only possible insofar as the irreducibility of structures to a single 
epistemological model was immediately and collectively posited.”355  But for Blanchot 
the movement of structuralism was strictly peripheral to his project, and he articulated his 
position vis à vis structuralism entirely through his engagement with Foucault.356  
Structuralism was something that Blanchot felt he had to take cognizance of, if only 
because of its increasing presence in French intellectual culture, and if only to 
demonstrate the distance between it and his own position.  He used his critical reviews of 
Foucault’s work to stage an encounter with the central tenet of structuralism, arguing that 
any structuralist study was incomplete unless it took account of the mythic, and poetic 
origin of structures themselves. 
                                                 
354 Étienne Balibar, “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?” trans. James Swenson, differences 14, 
no. 1 (2003): 3. 
355 Ibid. 
356 Blanchot never fully engaged with the movement of structuralism outside of his work on Foucault, and 
the word scarecley appears throughout his corpus.  Other than Foucault, Blanchot had little to say about the 
recognized avatars of structuralism such as Jacques Lacan, or Louis Althusser.  Furthermore, Blanchot 
never discussed Lévi-Strauss’s work in any detail.  His engagement with Lévi-Strauss’ thought was 
confined to two essays, one of which dealt with the problem of ethnograpy raised by Tristes Tropiques.  
The other dealt with La pensée sauvage, but only as a parenthetical statement in Blanchot’s review of 
Foucault’s Raymond Roussel.  See Blanchot, “L’homme au point zero,” La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue 
Française 40 (April 1956): 683-694; “Le problème de Wittgenstein,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 131 
(November 1963): 866-875. 
  235
In making this argument, this chapter draws on Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire: 
Lacan Against the Historicists.357 Copjec argues that during the 1970s Foucault had a 
debate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan over the origins of discursive structures.  In 
his genealogical work of the 1970s, Copjec argues, Foucault came to believe that it was 
not possible for a historian to grasp the origins of discursive structures.  The actual 
historical causes of discursive structures were always too contingent, too minute, and too 
diffuse to be apprehended by history's logic of linear causality.  There was no 
transcendental principle guiding the movement of history.  Foucault concluded that, 
absent of any origin, historical discourses could be understood only by examining the 
relations of power and knowledge that obtained within them.  Copjec condemns this view 
as historicist.  Indeed, Foucault's attempt to account for discourses strictly by examining 
their indwelling relations closely paralleled the historicist method of understanding 
historical phenomena strictly by examining their context. 
Lacan, on the other hand, argued that this historicist approach was inadequate to 
understand what was going on at any given moment in history.  For Lacan, human 
existence never completely coincided with discursive structures.  While they determined 
the conscious and unconscious lives of human beings, discursive structures were never 
able to determine life completely, always leaving behind a remainder, an extra piece of 
humanity.  This remainder was desire, the inassimilable, illogical, part of the human 
being that drove them to discursive structures in the first place.  Moreover, desire was 
also always hidden from view by the very discursive structure that it brought into being.  
                                                 
357 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology Press, 1994).   
  236
Indeed, for Lacan, the logic of the discursive structure was to occlude this illogical cause.  
Any discursive structure necessarily occluded its cause, since it was not possible to 
believe in that structure's logic while also knowing that its origin lay in the messy illogic 
of desire.  For this reason, Lacan argued that the historicist approach of explaining a 
discursive structure strictly by reference to its internal relations was not capable of 
accounting for the actual history that discursive structure. 
To illustrate this abstract point, Copjec provides the example of Freud, who made 
a similar argument in Totem and Taboo.  In Totem and Taboo Freud suggested that 
egalitarian society – the democratic society of equals – came into being when a 
primordial band of brothers murdered their tyrannical father, thus abolishing injustice.  
On the face of it, this is absurd.  But on closer inspection, a subtle logic reveals itself.  In 
Copjec’s words: 
If this father of the primal horde is preposterous, then he is objectively so.  That is 
to say, he is unbelievable within the regime in which his existence must be 
unthinkable if  relations of equality are to take hold…For if we did not posit his 
existence, we would be incapable, without resorting to psychologism, of 
explaining how the brothers came together in this fashion.  What Freud accounts 
for in Totem and Taboo is the structure, the real structure, of a society of equals, 
which is thus shown to be irreducible to the  labile relations of equality that never 
obtain completely.  The petty jealousies and feelings of powerlessness that 
threaten these relations, that block their permanent realization, betray their guilty 
origin, the cause that they must efface.358  
 
Copjec points to this example because it shows how something that is taken for being 
absolutely natural, in this case human equality, is based on a shared illusion.  Equality, 
like all discursive constructions, is never adequate to reality.  In reality some people are 
                                                 
358 Copjec, 12. 
  237
short and others tall.  Some smart and some stupid.  Strictly speaking, there is no such 
thing as equality. 
 Yet, Copjec argues, there is more to it than that.  It is not simply that discursive 
constructions represent reality only imperfectly, always leaving behind an unrepresented 
remainder, such as that part of humanity that is unequal.  Rather, it is that the attempt to 
represent reality through discursive constructions produces the unrepresentability at the 
same time that it produces representablity.  To put it less abstractly, humanity was not 
unequal until the moment when equality was invented.  To be sure, inequality existed, but 
it was not inequality per se.  Humanity became unequal only once someone had the idea 
that humanity could be equal.  In Copjec's rendering of Totem and Taboo, inequality is 
the effect of the attempt to make humanity equal, rather than the cause of the brothers' 
murder and establishment of relations of equality.  The primordial father is the symbol in 
inequality created by the principle of equality.  He is absurd, but only within the order 
that tries to impose relations of absolute equality.  He serves as a myth that explains the 
fact that at some point, humans invented equality. 
It is in this way that the idea of the mythic origin that Blanchot and Foucault 
shared must be understood.  Neither Blanchot nor Foucault suggested that the actual 
origin of literature, or of madness was a myth.  Rather, their idea of the mythic origin was 
an intervention in the way that modern society had constructed literature and madness.  
The idea of the mythic origin was designed to intervene in the way that modern society 
understood and related to literature.  Just as Copjec (via Freud) suggests that inequality 
came into being only with the attempt to impose relations of absolute equality, Blanchot 
  238
suggested that the unreality of literature came into being only when literature was taken 
for the mirror of nature.  As Freud’s band of brothers was designed to account for the 
contemporary belief in the imaginary equality of all people, so was Blanchot’s rendition 
of the Orpheus myth designed to account for the contemporary belief in the verisimilitude 
of literature, while Foucault’s ship of fools accounted for the belief in the scientific 
reality of psychiatry and mental illness.  
This chapter begins by providing a brief description of Blanchot and Foucault’s 
intellectual and personal biographies up to the moment when the exchange began in 
1961.  After this biographical précis, this chapter examines the exchange between 
Blanchot and Foucault in the context of postwar French intellectual culture, but also at a 
minute level of textual detail.  The description and analysis of this exchange concludes by 
returning to the context of postwar French intellectual culture in order to reveal the 
exchange’s wider effect and significance.  
 
Two Generations of French Intellectuals  
In 1961 Blanchot was a prominent figure among the radical intelligentsia.  After 
eleven years of self-imposed exile in the coastal village of Èze, Blanchot returned to Paris 
in response to the political exigencies of the Algerian War of Independence and Charles 
de Gaulle's seizure of power.  In 1960 Blanchot participated in the drafting of the 
Manifeste des 121, also known as the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la 
guerre d’Algérie.”  Though hardly a public intellectual in the mold of Jean-Paul Sartre, or 
  239
Albert Camus, by 1961 Blanchot was no longer the reclusive writer he had formerly 
been.   
For all this, however, Blanchot made the conversion to a politically engaged 
intellectual identity on his own terms.  When Blanchot returned to Paris the frequency of 
his contributions to La Nouvelle Revue Française declined.359  Where before he had 
contributed to La Nouvelle Revue Française every month, he produced only eight pieces 
in 1960, seven in 1961.  By 1964 Blanchot was contributing only five essays per year.  
While he continued to publish significant essays with the journal – indeed, the bulk of 
Blanchot’s exchange with Foucault occurred in the pages of La Nouvelle Revue 
Française – Blanchot began to devote his energies to other projects.  His experience with 
Le 14 juillet, and subsequently with the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la 
guerre d’Algérie” encouraged Blanchot to pursue the establishment of another journal.  
This project became the ill-fated Revue internationale.360  While this remarkable journal 
never managed to get off the ground, it occupied Blanchot from 1960 to 1964, when 
pieces of it were published in the Italian journal, Il Menabò.  The plan was ambitious.  It 
was to be published in three languages: French, German and Italian.  The French 
contributors included Robert Antelme, Roland Barthes, Michel Butor, Louis-René des 
                                                 
359 The second “nouvelle” was dropped from the title of La Nouvelle Revue Française at the beginning of 
1959. 
360 The internal communications pertaining to the establishment and publication of the Revue 
internationale, including several of Blanchot's letters and pieces intended for publication, were collected in 
a special issue of the journal Lignes dedicated to Blanchot.  See Michel Surya, ed., Lignes 11 (September 
1990).  Several of Blanhot's personal writings for the Revue were re-edited and published in the Écrits 
politiques: 1953-1993, 91-134.  For a general account of the history of the Revue internationale, see 
Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 404-417.  For analyses of 
the review's philosophical and political significant, see Christopher Fynsk, “Blanchot in The International 
Review,” Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 104-120; and Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary 
(London: Routledge, 1997), 211-217.  See also, Christophe Bident, "R/M, 1953," trans. Michael Holland, 
Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 67-83.  
  240
Forêts, Marguerite Duras, Michel Leiris, Dionys Mascolo, Maurice Nadeau; from Italy 
there was Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Vittorini; and from Germany, Hans-
Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Robert Walser.  Blanchot had even 
enlisted the assistance of such far-flung writers as Carlos Fuentes, Leszek Kolakowski, 
Iris Murdoch, and Ernesto Sabato.   
Like its predecessor, the Revue sought to respond to the political exigencies of the 
time.  But where Le 14 juillet responded to the concrete event of De Gaulle’s seizure of 
power, the Revue responded to the more abstract exigency of the Cold War.  The 
catalyzing event for the participants in the Revue internationale was the construction, on 
August 13 1961, of the Berlin Wall.  Christophe Bident, Christopher Fynsk, and Leslie 
Hill discuss the way that the uniquely collective project of writing the Revue sought to 
respond to the exigency of the abstraction of the Cold War.  Fynsk in particular highlights 
the way that Blanchot's contribution to the first issue of the Revue, an essay titled 
"Berlin," "says very precisely what it means to live an insoluble problem."361  For Fynsk 
"Berlin" was an attempt to create a material, and intellectual response to the irresolvable 
situation of the Cold War.   
Yet there was more in Blanchot's "Berlin" than a political response.  It also sought 
to respond to the general construction of reality in postwar Europe, and in doing so it was 
of a piece with Blanchot's more literary work, including his exchange with Foucault.  The 
general argument of "Berlin" was that the division of the city in two by the Berlin Wall 
created a problem for thought that was simultaneously and inseparably a social, political, 
                                                 
361 Fynsk, 113. 
  241
economic, and linguistic problem.  In this situation, to think each of the aspects of the 
problem of Berlin individually was to abjure the whole, while attempting to think the 
whole did an irreparable violence to the particularity of each individual aspect.  For 
Blanchot this - the inability to think Berlin either particularly, or wholely – was the real 
problem posed by the Berlin Wall.  Moreover, this was the very problem of thinking 
about reality for Blanchot:  
The problem of the division – of the fracture – which Berlin poses, not only to 
Berliners, not only to Germans, but, I think, to every reflective man, and which it 
poses in an imperious, I would say painful way, is a problem which cannot 
adequately be formed in its complete reality by deciding to formulate it 
fragmentarily (which is not to say, partially).  In other words, each time that we 
evoke a problem of this type - there are others, all the same - we must recall that 
speaking in a just manner, is a speech that also allows the lack of our words and 
our thoughts to be spoken, and which thus allows us to speak the impossibility of 
speaking in a manner which pretends to be exhaustive.362 
 
The problem of speaking of Berlin in its complete reality brought to a head the problem 
of speaking of anything in its complete reality.  It was not that the division of Berlin was 
the first issue to broach this problem.  Rather, Berlin forced this problem into the political 
sphere.  Blanchot did not assail the construction of the Berlin Wall directly – what he 
challenged, and what he sought to respond to, was the way in which the name of "Berlin" 
abstracted the unrepresentable reality of the political, social, and economic life of Berlin.  
Here abstraction did not mean imprecision.  Here abstraction was the mode of thinking 
by which the unrepresentable reality of things was given a concrete, legible, audible, 
                                                 
362 "Le problème de la division - de la fracture - tel que Berlin le propose, non seulement aux Berliois, non 
seulement aux Allemands, mais, je crois, à toute homme réfléchissant, et le propose d'une manière 
impérieuse, je veux dire douloureuse, est un problème qu'on ne peut formuler adéquatement, dans sa réalité 
complète, qu'en décidant de la formuler fragmentairement (cela ne veut pas dire partiellement).  Autrement 
dit, chaque fois que nous évoquons un problème de ce genre - il y en a d'autres, tout de même -, nous 
devons nous rappeler qu'en parler de manière juste, c'est un parler en laissant aussi parler le manque abrupt 
de no paroles et de notre pensée, en laissant donc parler notre inpossibilité d'en parler d'une manière 
prétendument exhaustive."  Blanchot, "Berlin," Écrits politiques, 130-131.  
  242
communicable expression.  It was only through the abstraction of the name "Berlin" that 
the reality of Berlin could be experienced at all.  In this way, Blanchot argued that 
abstraction was the very world that people actually live in – not a world in which people 
had pure contact with the things in the world, but a world in which language's 
imperfection was the only reason people have contact with things at all.   
This position, that the world was an abstraction that people experienced 
concretely, informed Blanchot’s approach to the developments of the 1960s.  And it also 
informed Blanchot’s understanding of the reality of madness when he encountered 
Foucault’s Folie et déraison. 
 
* 
Blanchot and Foucault never met.  Blanchot wrote at the beginning of Michel 
Foucault tel que je l’imagine: “I have dwelled with Michel Foucault without any personal 
relationship.  I never met him, except once in the courtyard of the Sorbonne during the 
events of May ’68, perhaps in June or July (but I am told he wasn’t there).”363  It was not 
entirely unpredictable that they never met.  They led entirely different lives.  Though they 
were both members of the same avant-garde literary and philosophical community in 
Paris, their public personae took them in opposite directions.  Blanchot was a recluse who 
devoted himself to solitude.  He gave only one interview in his entire life.  Foucault, 
meanwhile, had become the most famous philosopher in France.  He held an appointment 
at the Collège de France where his lectures were attended by hundreds.  He appeared on 
                                                 
363 “Je suis resté avec Michel Foucault sans relations personelles.  Je ne l’ai jamais rencontré, sauf une fois 
dans la cour de la Sorbonne pendant les événements de Mai 68, peut-étre en juin ou juillet (mais on me dit 
qu’il n’était pas là).” Blanchot, Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine, 1. 
  243
television, gave interviews constantly, and created public controversies.  He was a part of 
the university, while Blanchot was a professional writer.  Foucault was a celebrity, 
Blanchot a private individual.  While Blanchot’s story in the 1950s is one of isolation, 
followed by political awakening, Foucault’s story is dominated by the French university 
system, the grandes Écoles, and Parisian academic and intellectual society. 
But another reason that they never met was that Foucault was many years 
Blanchot’s junior, and belonged to an entirely different generation.  A brief, necessarily 
selective, biographical sketch illustrates Foucault’s remove from the pre-World War II 
generation of intellectuals to which Blanchot belonged.  Foucault was born nineteen 
years after Blanchot, on October 15, 1926 in the provincial town of Poitiers, 210 miles to 
the southwest of Paris.  He left Poitiers quickly however, when it became clear that the 
schools there could not prepare him to pass the difficult entrance examination for the 
highly selective École Normale Supérieure.  In 1946 Foucault moved to Paris to attend 
Lycée Henri IV, a well-respected school with an excellent placement record.  Aside from 
its elite status, Foucault’s high school experience was notable also because his 
philosophy instructor was Jean Hyppolite.  Until Hyppolite’s course on Hegel, Foucault 
passion was for history.  In Hyppolite however, he found a teacher that extracted 
philosophy from the Cartesian and neo-Kantian dogma that pervaded the French 
academy, and who breathed new life into philosophy.364  Hyppolite, by contrast, taught a 
course that examined Hegel’s concept of negativity in connection with Mallarmé’s poem, 
                                                 
364 This dogma strictly governed the syllabus of the aggregation, the graduation exam at the École 
Normale Supérieure.  Plato, Descartes, and Kant were stalwarts on the syllabus.  Aristotle, Hegel, and any 
philosopher who did not fit into the linear progression from Plato to Kant were excluded.  See Descombes, 
La Même et L’Autre. 
  244
Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.365  Such was the impression that Hyppolite 
made on the young Foucault, that the latter henceforth devoted himself to philosophy.   
 Foucault passed the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure in 
1947.  While there he came under the tutelage of Louis Althusser, a young professor who 
had been placed in charge of preparations for the aggrégation, the written and oral exam 
required for graduation.  Years later, in the 1960s Althusser made a name for himself 
with his provocative re-readings of Marx that sharply contrasted with the established 
interpretation.  Like Hyppolite before him, Althusser made a strong impression on 
Foucault, but this time it was psychology rather than philosophy that drew his interest.  
Althusser was in the habit of taking his students to visit the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, the 
largest psychiatric hospital in Paris, not far from the École Normale Supérieure’s campus.  
Each week they watched as psychiatrists interviewed their patients, and made 
presentations of their diagnoses, and attended lectures given by Henri Ey.   
 Foucault graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in July, 1951, at the age 
of 24, with twin interests in philosophy and psychology.  Upon graduation Foucault 
gained admission to the Fondation Thiers, a prestigious fellowship organization in Paris 
that combined the roles of a library and a rooming house.  Here Foucault intended to 
pursue academic studies, rather than teaching, as was the custom for graduate of the 
École Normale Supérieure.  As was required of French students seeking a doctoral 
degree, Foucault proposed two theses, one in each of his fields.  The first was a study of 
post-Cartesian philosophy through the eighteenth century.  The second thesis was an 
                                                 
365 See Eribon, 34-35. 
  245
examination of the role of culture in psychology.  The first thesis was never completed, 
Foucault’s attention having been drawn entirely into the study of psychology.  The 
second thesis became the germ of Folie et déraison, which he defended ten years later, in 
1961.  
 In the early 1950s Foucault engaged in a series of endeavors in psychology.  
Some were clinical, such as his apprenticeship at the electroencephalographic laboratory 
at Hôpital Sainte-Anne, and later at Fresnes, the general hospital for the French prison 
system.  Others were more philosophical, such as the translation work that Foucault 
undertook with Jacqueline Verdeaux, his supervisor at Fresnes.  Verdeaux introduced 
Foucault to Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist who was attempting to combine 
psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and Heideggerian phenomenology into a single system called 
“existential analysis.”  Verdeaux was in the process of translating Binswanger’s book, 
Traum und Existenz, into French, as La Rêve et l’existence.  Foucault assisted with the 
technical points of Heideggerian philosophy, which he had read enthusiastically while at 
the École Normale Supérieure.  Indeed, Foucault had learnt German expressly for the 
purpose of reading Heidegger’s philosophy in its original language.  Eventually Verdeaux 
suggested that he write a preface. 366  In this piece, Foucault first articulated the need to 
study forms of experience historically, as well as psychologically.367  In 1954 Foucault 
published his first book, Maladie mentale et Personnalité.368  The basic argument was 
that the diagnostic practices of ordinary medicine were inapplicable to diseases of the 
                                                 
366 See Eribon, 60-69. 
367 Foucault, “Introduction,” in Ludwig Binswanger, Le rêve et l’existence (Brugge: Desclee, 1954), 7-128. 
368 Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954). 
  246
mind.  Although Foucault later disavowed this book, and tried to bar its translation and 
re-publication, albeit unsuccessfully, Maladie mentale et Personnalité remains a 
document of his development during the 1950s, and a testament to the extent of 
Foucault’s interest in mental illness.  
Eventually, Foucault began teaching at the École Normale Supérieure.  
Immediately after Foucault graduated, Althusser was able to secure a teaching position 
for him, in which he instructed one course in psychology per term.  In this post, 
Foucault’s students included Jacques Derrida and Paul Veyne.  He also continued 
Althusser’s practice of taking his students to visit Hôpital Sainte-Anne.  In 1952 Foucault 
became an assistant in psychology at the Université de Lille, albeit in the philosophy 
department.  Foucault never intended to stay in Lille permanently, and he taught all of his 
classes Tuesday through Thursday so that he could return to Paris over the weekend.  
Even while at Lille, Foucault taught his regular course at the École Normale Supérieure 
on Monday night.  
All of this changed in 1955, when Foucault left France for a diplomatic position at 
the Maison de France at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.  Georges Dumézil, a 
professor of philology at the Collége de France, and an unstinting champion of Foucault, 
had arranged for him to be given the job.  At Uppsala Foucault’s duties included the 
teaching of a course on a topic of his choosing, and leading lessons in French language 
studies, as well as operating as a cultural liaison at the Maison.  Since most of Foucault’s 
students were specializing in French literature, his courses often dealt with themes in the 
history of literature, poetry, and theater.  Most of the time however, he was left to 
  247
himself, and he used that freedom to begin working on his primary dissertation, which 
later became Folie et déraison.  A local physician, whose hobby was the collection of 
rare medical texts, had donated his entire library to the University of Uppsala in 1950.  
Freed of all significant teaching obligations, Foucault began the massive historical 
research into this archive, which contributed the majority of the primary material used in 
Folie et déraison.  In 1960 Foucault returned to Paris, when he was 33 years old, and 
ready to defend.  
 
The Unlikely Origin 
Folie et déraison recounted the history of madness, but with the operating 
assumption that madness had no biological essence.  Instead, Foucault recounted the 
history of the way that madness had been defined by those who purported to have 
knowledge about madness.  Madness ceased to be known on its own terms when doctors 
established a body of knowledge about it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  In 
earlier centuries madness had been understood as one stage on a longer continuum, on the 
far side of which lay death, the great unknown.  Afterward, madness became associated 
not with the unknown, but with unreason, cordoned and confined safely by the regimes of 
truth.  Foucault’s aim, in Folie et déraison was to trace the history of madness effaced:  
 We need a history of that other trick that madness plays – that other trick through  
which men, in the gesture of sovereign reason that locks up their neighbor, 
communicate and recognize each other in the merciless language of non-madness; 
we need to identify the moment of that expulsion, before it was definitely 
established in the reign of truth, before it was brought back to life by the lyricism 
of protestation.  To try to recapture, in history, this zero degree of the history of 
  248
madness, when it was undifferentiated experience, the still undivided experience 
of the division itself.369   
 
The other trick of which Foucault wrote, was the trick that madness plays on the non-
mad, convincing them of their sanity.  Foucault described the age of reason as a regime of 
sanity, tyrannizing the insane by confining them and defining them, all in order to 
perpetuate its stranglehold on the mind.  But, Foucault asserted that this was not the 
mind’s natural state.  There was a time prior to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
when madness existed for itself.  Preventing access to this history, and to its zero degree, 
was the rationality of science, of psychiatry – the pathologization of mental illness.  To 
understand the history of this moment was to understand the origin of madness, so distant 
from madness as it was lived and understood in the modern age.  
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which Foucault termed the 
“classical age,” a large and voluminous discourse was articulated from the position of 
reason, about what they considered unreason; in other words, reason came to define 
madness as the other of reason.  This entailed a concomitant shift in the definition of 
reason: reason was now the other of unreason.  
For the classical age unreason had the value of a noun, and had a substantive 
function.  It was in relation to unreason alone that madness could be understood.  
Unreason lay beneath it, or rather defined the space of its possibility.  For men of 
the classical age, madness was not the natural condition, the psychological and 
human root of unreason, but rather its empirical form, and the mad, a humanity 
sliding down towards animal frenzy, revealed the backdrop of unreason that 
                                                 
369 “Il faut faire l’histoire de cet autre tour de folie, - de cet autre tour par lequel les hommes, dans le geste 
souveraine qui enferme leur voison, commmuniquent et se reconnaissent à travers le langage sans merci de 
la non-folie; retrouver le moment de cette conjuration, avant qu’elle n’ait été définitivement établie dans le 
règne de la vérité, avant qu’elle n’ait été ranimée par le lyrisme de la protestation.  Tâcher de rejoinder, 
dans l’histoire, ce degré zéro de l’histoire de la folie, où elle est experience indifférenciée, expérience non 
encore partagée du partage lui-même.” Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique 
(Paris: Plon, 1961), i. 
  249
menaced man and enveloped from afar each form of his natural existence...More 
than any other mode of thinking – more so than our positivism, to be sure – 
classical rationalism was on guard against the peril of unreason, the threatening 
space of absolute liberty.370 
 
In the twentieth century unreason was no longer treated in this way.  Foucault insisted 
that in the twentieth century unreason was not understood as a substantive thing, but 
rather as the condition of being unreasonable.  During the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries however, unreason was understood as the real essence of madness.  In the 
twentieth century, Foucault argued, only children, or someone in the throes of a temper 
tantrum, truly fit into the condition of being unreasonable.  But in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries unreason was the condition of madness.  Reason used unreason to 
solidify its grip on humanity by defining reason as normal, and unreason as madness.  
Prior to the seventeenth century the mad were exiled, and sent to the next town on the 
infamous ship of fools.371  After the seventeenth century it became the standard practice 
to intern the mad in houses of confinement, where they could be sequestered, and 
monitored by the vigilance of reason.  Though they existed chiefly in literary 
representation, Foucault argued that the ship of fools was the essential origin of the 
discourse on mental illness, as exile moved into confinement, and literature became 
                                                 
370 “La déraison, pour le classicisme, a valeur nominale; elle forme une sorte de fonction substantielle.  
C’est par rapport à elle, et à elle seule que peut se comprendre la folie.  Elle en est le support; disons plutôt 
qu’elle définit l’espace de sa possibilité.  Pour l’homme classique, la folie n’est pas la condition naturelle, 
la racine psychologique et humaine de la déraison; elle en est seulement la forme empirique; et le fou, 
parcourant jusqu’à la fureur de l’animalité la courbe de la déchéance humaine, dévoile ce fond de déraison 
qui menace l’homme et envelope de très lois toutes les formes de son existence naturelle…Plus que tout 
autre, mieux en tout cas que notre positivisme, le rationalisme classique a su veiller, et percevoir le péril 
souterrain de la déraison, cet espace menaçant d’une liberté absolue.” Foucault, Folie et déraison, 195.  
371 Foucault used the Latin term for the ship of fools, stultifera navis, as the title of the first chapter of 
Folie et déraison. 
  250
scientific knowledge.  Thus began the modern experience of insanity, in which the mad 
were spoken for, rather than given the ability to speak for themselves. 
When Folie et déraison was first published, there were two interpretations of it: 
one was Maurice Blanchot’s, which placed madness against the concepts of the œuvre 
and désœuvrement, discussed below.  But the other interpretation was the structuralist 
interpretation, and it was by far the more common.  Roland Barthes seized on the 
structural aspect of Foucault’s study.  It is necessary to discuss Barthes’ reading of Folie 
et déraison before moving on to the Blanchot-Foucault exchange, because the latter 
occurred against the backdrop of the former.  While Barthes focused on the composition 
and nature of the structure of the discourse of madness, and on Foucault’s method of 
analyzing historical structures, Blanchot focused instead on the origins of those 
structures.  Barthes’ reading of Folie et déraison exemplified the type of structuralism 
that Blanchot attempted to argue against.  
 Reviewing Folie et déraison for the journal Critique, Barthes argued that 
Foucault described historical structures by identifying the components, and showing how 
they functioned together as a whole.372  In an piece titled “Savoir et folie,” Barthes wrote,  
Foucault shows, for each epoch, what should elsewhere be called sense units,  
whose combination defines the epoch, and whose translation traces the very 
movement of history; animality, knowledge, vice, idleness, sexuality, blasphemy, 
libertinage – these historical components of the demential image thus form 
signifying complexes, according to a kind of historical syntax which varies from 
epoch to epoch; they are, if you like, classes of what is signified, huge 
“semantemes” whose signifiers are themselves transitory, since reason’s 
observation constructs the marks of madness only from its own norms, and since 
these norms are themselves historical.373 
                                                 
372 Roland Barthes, “Savoir et folie,” Critique, 17 (1961): 915-922. 
373 “Michel Foucault met à jour, pour chaque époque, ce que l’on appellerait ailleurs des unités de sens, 
dont la combinaison définit cette époque, et dont la translation trace le mouvement même de l’histoire; 
  251
 
In this passage Barthes described both the historical, and the formal structures of Folie et 
déraison.  On the one hand, Folie et déraison traced historical structures, historical 
combinations of “sense units” that created the discourse on madness for a given epoch.  
Animality, knowledge, vice, etc. operated together, to form a structural totality that 
defined madness for an epoch.  In this sense, Foucault’s object of analysis was the 
historical structure of madness.   
On the other hand, Folie et déraison was able to describe these historical 
structures by applying a structuralist method that treated each constituent term as part of 
whole.  “It is,” as Barthes wrote, “a question, rather, of a structure of structures.”374  Each 
of these terms was a signifier of madness, which reason was able to fill with different 
semantic content based on prevailing historical norms.  Madness, the actual experience of 
madness, was no longer the referent of the discourse on madness.  Instead, reason was 
able to construct structural “semantemes,” which were enormous bodies of knowledge 
capable of being invested with any meaning societies chose, including normative 
meanings.  Meanings, that is, that were used to impose a norm: “Thus it is the excluded 
humanity which is named (mad, insane, alienated, criminal, libertine, etc.), it is the act of 
exclusion, by its very nomination, which in a positive sense accounts for both excluded 
and “included”…Thus it is on the level of this general structure that madness can be, not 
                                                                                                                                                 
animalité, savoir, vice, oisivité, sexualité, blaspheme, libertinage, ces composants historiques de l’image 
démentielle forment ainsi des complexes signifiants, selon une sorte de syntaxe historique qui varie avec 
les ages; ce sont, si l’on veut, des classes de sifnifiés, des vastes “sémantemes”, dont les sifnifiants eux-
mêmes sont transitoires, puisque le regard de la raison ne construit les marques de la folie qu’à partir de ses 
propres normes sont elles-mêmes historiques.” Ibid. 918-919. 
374 “Il s’agirait, si l’on peut dire, d’une forme des formes.” Ibid. 919. 
  252
defined, but structured.”375  In Barthes’ rendition, Foucault was able to connect the 
discourse on madness to the norms of society by approaching the terms of the discourse 
structurally, as links in a signifying chain, detached from their referent, whose power to 
include and exclude came from the act of naming and defining, and whose meaning could 
be apprehended only when taken as a whole.   
Like Barthes, Blanchot’s first reaction to Foucault’s work came in a review of 
Folie et déraison as well, titled “L’Oubli, la déraison.”376  But while Barthes emphasized 
Foucault’s use of a structuralist approach to the discourse on madness, Blanchot took 
Foucault’s structures, and used them to meditate on the nature of origins.  Blanchot used 
his review of Folie et déraison to articulate his own understanding of the meaning and 
the importance of structuralist thought, which boiled down to the question of origins.  
Blanchot’s reading of Folie et déraison dwelt upon this question, which he saw as the 
principle question raised by Foucault’s work.  In other words, if the structure of the 
discourse of madness was real, and if it was indeed total, then how did it come into 
being?  How was it created?  If reason’s discourse on madness was taken as a natural 
reality, how to explain the moment before reason’s discourse on madness emerged?  How 
was it that a natural reality descended onto earth fully formed?  
The story of how Blanchot first encountered Foucault helps to explain why he 
alighted upon this aspect of Foucault’s work.  During the 1960s, it was still customary in 
France to publish one’s dissertation.  Typically this was done with a publishing house 
                                                 
375 “C’est donc l’humanité exclue qui est nommée (fous, insensés, aliénes, criminals, libertines, etc.), c’est 
l’acte d’exclusion, par sa nomination même, qui prend en charge positivement à la fois les exclus et les 
“inclus”…C’est donc, semble-t-il, au niveau de cette forme générale que la folie peut, non se définir, mais 
se structurer.”  Ibid. 919-920. 
376 Blanchot, “L’Oubli, la déraison,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 106 (1961): 676-686. 
  253
that specialized in academic work, such as Presses Universitaires de France.  Foucault, 
however, dreamt of publishing with Gallimard, the famed avant-garde press attached to 
La Nouvelle Revue Française, and publisher of Blanchot and Bataille, but also more well 
known existentialists like Camus and Sartre.  Gallimard was not in the habit of publishing 
doctoral theses, and Foucault’s book was quickly rejected, but not before the manuscript 
fell to Roger Caillois, who sat on the editorial board at Gallimard.  He admired Folie et 
déraison, but something about it bothered him.  He wanted a second opinion, and he lent 
the manuscript to Blanchot.377  Ultimately, without any of the fuss raised by Caillois, 
Blanchot recommended that Gallimard publish Folie et déraison.  Still, the managing 
editors rejected the book, and Foucault was forced to publish with a new press, Plon, 
whose reputation was growing, but not yet fully made.   
Blanchot felt so strongly about the incident that he revisited it in his panegyric for 
Foucault, Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine, published in 1986.  Roger Caillois was 
another French polymath, whose background included participation in Bataille’s anti-
surrealist group, the Collège de Sociologie, and its journal, Acéphale.  His interests 
ranged from literature, to anthropology and philosophy.  It made sense, then, that Folie et 
déraison made its way to Caillois.  First of all, he had been a student of Dumézil’s at the 
École Pratique des Hautes Études.  But more significantly, like Foucault, the diversity of 
interests had prevented him from gaining general acceptance in the French academic 
                                                 
377 This episode is recounted in Eribon’s biography, but the evidence is drawn from a letter Foucault wrote 
to Caillois in thanks for his efforts, and from Blanchot’s reminiscences in his eulogy for Foucault.  See 
Foucault, “À Roger Caillois,” Dits et écrits, Vol. IV (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 162; Blanchot, 
Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine.  
  254
world.378  Blanchot thought that it was this affinity, an almost eerie likeness between 
Caillois and Foucault that caused the former to gainsay his own opinion.  In, Michel 
Foucault tel que je l’imagine, Blanchot wrote, “[Caillois] had forged a very beautiful 
style for himself, even to excess, to the point where he thought he was destined to keep 
watch – a redoubtable watchman! – over the conventions of the French language.”379  
Foucault, too, had developed a unique style that exploited the natural poetry of the French 
language in order to render the peculiar experience of madness.  “Foucault’s style,” wrote 
Blanchot, “with its splendor and precision – seemingly contradictory qualities – left 
[Caillois] perplexed.  He did not know whether this grand, baroque style ruined the 
singular knowledge whose multiple characteristics – philosophical, sociological, 
historical – overwhelmed and excited him.”380   
Clearly, Blanchot understood that Foucault’s book had made a kind of shock to 
Caillois’ senses.  Blanchot even speculated that the psychological reason for this shock 
was that Foucault struck a little to close too home for Caillois: “Perhaps [Caillois] saw in 
Foucault another version of himself, who hid his legacy from him.  No one likes to 
recognize himself, a stranger, in a mirror where he discerns not his double, but the one he 
                                                 
378 Another parallel between Caillois and Foucault is that, even though both were never completed 
accepted within the French university system, both acceded to its highest reaches: Caillois was given a seat 
in the Académie Française in 1971, and Foucault a chair at the Collège de France in the previous year. 
379 “Il s’était forge un style fort beau, parfois jusqu’à l’excès , au point de se croire destiné à veiller – 
veilleur farouche – sur les convenances de la langue Française.” Blanchot, Michel Foucault tel que je 
l’imagine, 11. 
380 “Le style de Foucault, par sa splendeur et sa precision, qualities apparemement contradictories, le laissa 
perplexe.  Il ne savait pas si ce grand style baroque ne ruinait pas le savoir singulier don’t les caractères 
multiples, philosophique, sociologique, historique, l’embarrassaient et l’exaltaient.”  Ibid.  
  255
would have liked to be.”381  And yet it is ironic that Blanchot wrote these words about 
Caillois, for Blanchot too, saw himself in Folie et déraison – and with good reason: 
nearly every page contained a Blanchotian concept, a stylistic device of Blanchot’s, or an 
outright reference to Blanchot.   
Why, then, did Blanchot choose to address the similarities between Foucault’s 
work in Folie et déraison and the work of others through the figure of Caillois, when he 
could so easily have made such a comparison with his own work?  Was it that he, 
Blanchot, experienced an undesired reproach from his own superego in the form of 
Foucault’s work?  Or was it that Caillois was a convenient stand-in for Blanchot’s 
corpus?  Was Caillois a figure onto which Blanchot could displace the burden of a 
coherent style, and a unified project, which he so often refused to admit, even in his most 
autobiographical moments?  Michael Holland has suggested that Blanchot’s 
autobiographical reminiscences were often attempts to revise a previously held position, 
not in order to cover them up, but rather, in order to expose them more clearly, and that 
often these attempts were displaced onto secondary, and sometimes tertiary figures.382   
                                                 
381 “Peut-être vit-il dans Foucault un autre lui-même  qui lui déroberait l’héritage.  Personne n’aime se 
reconnaître, êtranger, dans un miroir où il ne discerne pas son double, mais celui qu’il aurait aimé être.” 
Ibid. 
382 Holland addresses the way that Blanchot attempted to confront his own early, conservative political 
commitments through the figures of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whose thought was “tainted” by 
association with National Socialism. By analyzing the revisions made to the 1958 version of Blanchot’s 
essay, “Nietzsche aujourd’hui” when it was republished in L’Éntretien infini in 1969, Holland argues that, 
“Between these two dates…the way Heidegger’s philosophy is presented changes fundamentally: first it is 
cited for its defence against Nazi ideology; then it is discredited for its defence of that ideology.  In the 
process, Blanchot looks back for the first time in his post-war career to the pre-war period when he hiself 
became involved with extreme nationalist ideology.  It is thus that the history of the writing of this chapter 
of The Infinite Conversation becomes the scene of a confrontation between Blanchot and his own history as 
a writer.”  See, Michael Holland, “‘A Wound to Thought’,” 176. 
  256
 Blanchot attempted something like this in Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine.  
The story of Caillois’ confrontation with Foucault was a blind for his own first reaction to 
Foucault’s work in 1961 – which was not the story Blanchot told in Michel Foucault tel 
que je l’imagine.  The story he told in 1986 was of an intellectual friendship, it was the 
story of Blanchot’s relationship to Foucault, as Blanchot imagined it.  But there was also 
a real relationship between the two, which went far beyond friendship, and which had a 
real impact on Blanchot’s thought.  Like Caillois, Blanchot saw himself in Foucault’s 
work, but put to service in a historical argument about madness and the discourse of 
mental illness.  It spurred Blanchot to revise and widen his own arguments about the 
literary nature of reality.  
It was not that Blanchot saw his influence on Foucault in Folie et déraison, it was 
rather, that Blanchot saw that he and Foucault were talking about the same thing.383  In a 
way, Foucault confirmed the historical implications of Blanchot’s work, which had 
initially been directed strictly at the literary.  Blanchot’s theorization of the literary 
asserted that all human experience of reality was fundamentally poetic and literary, 
insofar as humans experience the world through the names given to the world’s elements.  
Moreover, Blanchot asserted that this process of naming was none other than the process 
of literary creation.  Foucault extended this thesis to the non-literary world, to actual 
institutions such as medicine, and actual discourses such as the psychiatric discourse of 
                                                 
383 This is hardly to say that Blanchot had no influence on Foucault whatsoever.  Foucault’s “grand” and 
“baroque” style bore as much relation to Blanchot’s as it did to Caillois.  Francçois Dosse has even argued 
that Foucault adopted his use of the oxymoron directly in emulation of Blanchot.  Rather, this chapter 
suggests that what happened when Blanchot read Folie et déraison was that he realized that Foucault had 
applied his concepts – the outside, the œuvre, etc. – to the world of medicine.  Reading Folie et déraison, 
Blanchot realized the wider applicability of his ideas.  See Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme I, 188-189. 
  257
mental illness.  This discourse, like every other, was made through the very same process 
as literature.  That is, the discourse of mental illness was made through the naming of 
things.  Seeing that Foucault’s discussion of madness entailed the same principles as his 
discussion of literature determined Blanchot’s response to Foucault’s work, and began 
their intellectual exchange.  It is necessary to survey these points of similarity between 
Blanchot and Foucault’s work before moving on to a discussion of the content of 
Blanchot’s response. 
There were numerous points of overlap between Folie et déraison, and his own 
work that determined Blanchot’s reading.  It will suffice to highlight four of these points, 
prior to an examination of Blanchot’s reading of Folie et déraison.  These four are the 
concept of the outside, the dual concept of the œuvre and désœuvrement, the concept of 
madness, and the shared use of Nietzsche’s concepts of myth and tragedy.   
 
a) The Outside 
Foucault employed the concept of the outside in the opening pages of Folie et 
déraison: “His exclusion was his confinement; if he had no prison other than the 
threshold itself, he was still detained at this place of passage.  He is placed on the inside 
of the outside.”384  Here, the inside of the outside referred to the way that the mad were 
forced into exile, outside city walls, which paradoxically became a form of confinement.  
The outside became society’s space of enclosure.  Foucault’s description of the inside of 
the outside paralleled the way that Blanchot described the writer’s relation to the outside.  
                                                 
384 “Son exclusion doit l’enclore; s’il ne peut et ne doit avoir d’autre prison que le seuil lui-même, on le 
reticent sur le lieu du passage.  Il est mis à l’intérieur.” Foucault, Folie et déraison, 14. 
  258
For Blanchot, the outside designated that function of literature, by which art always 
seemed to refer another world, outside itself.  In the world, art is nothing more than ink 
on paper, nothing more than paint on canvas.  But the power of art is to refer to another 
world – the world where words become literature, and where paint becomes a painting.  
Blanchot wrote of the outside, “art…is linked to what is “outside” the world, it expresses 
the profundity of this outside without intimacy and without repose, this outside which 
appears when the possible withdraws, even with ourselves, even with our death, we no 
longer have relations of possibility.”385  Blanchot’s idea of the world, the real material 
world, in which literature was nothing more than ink markings on pieces of paper, 
corresponded to Foucault’s society located within the city walls.  That is, both were 
material worlds, whose outside was a space of a different mental order.  Reading Folie et 
déraison, Blanchot saw that art corresponded to Foucault’s figuration of madness.386    
 
b) The Œuvre & Désœuvrement 
Blanchot also saw connections between Folie et déraison and his own work in 
Foucault’s systematic use of the term œuvre.  Any member of the avant-garde Parisian 
intellectual community would have instantly recognized this usage as coming directly 
                                                 
385 “L’art…est lié à ce qui est “hors” du monde, il exprime la profondeur de ce dehors sans intimité et sans 
repos, ce qui surgit quand le possible s’atténue, quand, même avec nous, même avec notre mort, nous 
n’avons plus de rapports de possibilité.”  Blanchot, “Kafka et l’exigence de l’œuvre,” Critique, 58 (March, 
1952): 214.   
386 Blanchot developed his concept of the outside in the early 1950s, in several essays on Mallarmé and 
Kafka that were later assembled as L’Éspace littéraire.  These essays were published between 1951 and 
1953 in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, at precisely the time Foucault reports discovering 
Blanchot’s work.  Indeed, Foucault’s prosopoetic portrait of Blanchot in “La Pensée du déhors,” was based 
primarily on L’Espace littéraire and his novels Thomas l’obscur, Aminadab, and Le Trés haut – novels 
whose thematization of the outside Foucault went to great lengths to explain.  On Foucault’s early 
encounter with Blanchot’s work in La Nouvelle nouvelle Revue Française, see Eribon, 78-79. 
  259
from Blanchot.  Throughout the 1950s Blanchot, more than any other, gave shape to the 
French word œuvre, even as he modified it into désœuvrement.  Foucault adapted the 
œuvre and désœuvrement to the history of madness.  Madness, wrote Foucault, was 
“nothing other, undoubtedly, than the absence of an œuvre.”387  And if madness was the 
absence of an œuvre, then the historical development of the science of mental illness was 
the production of the œuvre.  They moved together in tandem, madness perduring as the 
absence of the œuvre, as the absence of production, and achievement.  At the same time, 
medical science produced the œuvre of mental illness through the labors of physicians.  
Foucault described the development of the discourse of mental illness in precisely the 
same way that Blanchot described the writer’s efforts to write the book.   To Blanchot, 
désœuvrement was the process by which the writer strove to achieve the work of art, but 
was always foiled by the impossibility of creating a perfect work.  Indeed, the very 
concept of the perfect work of art prevented the writer from ever actually achieving 
perfection, since perfection always seemed to be beyond his or her grasp.  At the same 
time, the writer was only able to write because he or she dreamt of creating a perfect 
work of art.  In this way, Blanchot’s concept of désœuvrement simultaneously named this 
desire to create the work of art, and the necessary failure of creating the work of art.388   
                                                 
387 “Rien d’autre, sans doute, que l’absence d’œuvre.” Foucault, Folie et déraison, v. 
388 For a paradigmatic statement of Blanchot’s désœuvrement, see Blanchot, “Mallarmé et l’expérience 
littéraire,” Critique 62 (July 1952): 588.  Blanchot writes, “Here is the most hidden moment in all of 
experience.  That the work must be the unique clarity of that which fades and by which everything is 
extinguished, that it can only exist where the extreme of affirmation is verified by the extreme of negation, 
such an exigence we understand even as it runs counter to our need for peace, simplicity and sleep.  We 
understand it intimately, like the brilliant intimacy of this decision that is ourselves, and which gives us 
being only when, at our risk and peril, we reject – with fire, with iron, with silent refusal – the permanence 
and the favor of being.  Yes, we understand that the work is thus pure beginning, the first and last moment 
when being presents itself through the freedom we risk, which makes us exclude it with hubris, without, 
however, including it in the appearance of beings.  But this exigency that makes the work declare being at 
  260
Just as the writer’s effort to write the book never succeeded, just as they were 
always subject to désœuvrement, so the physicians’ efforts to define madness were never 
able to tell the truth about madness, that is, they were never able to speak from madness’ 
position.  Foucault asserted that all social life, and all institutional knowledges operated 
in this way.  Indeed, his project as a historian was to trace the history of the erection of 
these knowledges, all of which were founded on the silence of the thing about which they 
purported to speak, as the discourse of mental illness rested on the silence of the mad. 
“The great œuvre of the history of the world,” wrote Foucault in the preface to Folie et 
déraison, “is indelibly accompanied by the absence of an œuvre, which renews itself at 
every instant, but which runs, in its inevitable void, unaltered through the length of 
history.”389  
In Foucault’s use of the œuvre and the absence of an œuvre – so like 
désœuvrement – Blanchot saw his own theory reflected back at him.  In the 1950s, 
                                                                                                                                                 
the unique moment of rupture, that which we have known as the work of the work, “these very words: IT 
IS,” this point on which the work shines, even as it is basked in its own consuming light – we must also 
understand that it is precisely this point that makes the work impossible, because it is what never permits 
arrival at the work.  It is a region in which nothing is made of being, in which nothing is accomplished.  It 
is the profundity of the désœuvrement of being.”  “Là est le moment le plus caché de l’expérience.  Que 
l’œuvre doive être la clarté unique de ce qui s’étaient et par laquelle tout s’éteint, qu’elle ne soit que là où 
l’extrême de l’affirmation est vérifié par l’extrême de la négation, une telle exigence, nous la comprenon, 
bien qu’elle soit contraire à notre besoin de paix, de simplicité et de sommeil, nous la comprenons 
intimement, comme l’intimité fulfurante de cette décision qui est nous-mêmes et qui nous donne l’être 
seulement quand, à nos risques et périls, nous rejetons, par le feu, par le fer, par le refus silencieux, la 
permanence et la faveur.  Oui, nous comprenons que l’œuvre en cela soit pur commencement, le moment 
premier et dernier où l’être se présente par la liberté risquée qui nous fait l’exclure souverainement, sans 
cependant encore l’inclure dans l’apparence des êtres.  Mais cette exigence qui fait de l’œuvre ce qui 
déclare l’être au moment unique de la rupture, ce que nous avons saisi comme l’œuvre, “ce mot même: 
C’EST,” ce point qu’elle fait briller tandis qu’elle en reçoit l’éclat qui la consume, nous devons aussi 
comprendre qu’il rend précisément l’œuvre impossible, parce qu’il est ce qui ne permet jamais d’arriver à 
l’œuvre, l’en deçà où de l’être il n’est rien fait, en quoi rien ne s’accomplit, la profondeur du désœuvrement 
de l’être.” 
389 “Le grand œuvre de l’histoire du monde est ineffaçablement accompagné d’une absence d’œuvre, qui 
se renouvelle à chaque instant, mais qui court inaltérée en son inevitable vide tout au long de l’histoire.” 
Foucault, Folie et déraison, vi. 
  261
Blanchot had even theorized the connection of the œuvre and of désœuvrement to history.  
When he read Folie et déraison, with its identification of the œuvre with history, and 
madness as the absence of the œuvre, Blanchot saw his own theory of the time of writing 
applied in service of the analysis of the discourses of madness.  For Blanchot, genuine 
creation could occur only outside the mundane world of historical progress.  The building 
of society, the erection of institutions, the conducting of affairs, these were the work of 
historical progress.  They were achieved through time, and through effort; they were 
œuvres, in the sense that Foucault used the term apposite of madness.  Yet, Blanchot 
argued, literary creation could not properly be called an achievement since it occurred 
outside of time, and it happened irrespective of the creator’s actions or intentions.  
Apropos the diary that writers keep as they work, Blanchot wrote in “La Solitude 
essentielle”: “The journal indicates that the one who writes is already no longer capable 
of belonging to time through the ordinary certainty of action, through the community of 
those who hold occupations...  He is no longer truly historical.”390  Others, such as 
scientists, lawyers, doctors, might keep journals as well, but their journals marked the 
passage of time, denoting each moment on a trajectory towards some accomplishment.  
The writer’s journal, in Blanchot’s rendition, marked  the absence of time.  “To write is 
to abandon oneself to the fascination of the absence of time,” Blanchot wrote.391  He 
drew out the implications of this absence of time for history, concluding that it suspends 
the present, as a moment outside of time, a moment with no past, and with no future.  The 
                                                 
390 “Le Journal marque que celui qui écrit n’est déjà plus capable d’appartenir au temps par la fermeté 
ordinaire de l’action, par la communauté du métier…Il n’est déjà plus réellement historique.” Blanchot, 
“La solitude essentielle,” La Nouvelle Nouvelle Reveu Française 1 (January 1953): 85. 
391 “Ecrire, c’est se livrer à la fascination de l’absence de temps.” Blanchot, “La solitude essentielle,” 85-
86. 
  262
time of writing, Blanchot argued, was a time outside of the movement of history, the 
movement of the past to the present.   
 
c) Madness 
In Folie et déraison, Blanchot saw this logic applied to madness.  This similarity 
indicated that Foucault approached madness in the same way that Blanchot approached 
literature.  It even suggested that madness and literature might be made of the same 
substance.  In order to indicate contemporary examples of madness, Foucault made 
recourse to modern authors known for their writing about madness, or known for their 
own madness.  These authors included Sade, Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Raymond 
Roussel, and Antonin Artaud.  These writers attempted to write not from the sovereign 
position of reason, but rather from the position of unreason, all the way “to the point of 
tragedy – that is to say, to the point when the alienation of the experience of unreason 
pushed them into the renunciation of madness.”392  In Foucault’s estimation, these writers 
gave voice to unreason through their literature, and through their philosophy, so much so 
that they became mad themselves.393  Foucault argued that unreason was like the 
literature of Sade and Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Nerval.  But Foucault also argued that the 
discourse on madness promulgated by medical science was just like a book produced by 
any other writer, and just like any other book in which the writer strove to represent the 
                                                 
392 “S’y sont risqués, jusqu’à la tragédie – c’est-à-dire jusqu’à l’aliénation de cette experience de la 
déraison dans le renonçement de la folie.” Foucault, Folie et déraison, 411. 
393 Jacques Derrida famously objected to Folie et déraison on the basis of Foucault’s claim that Descartes 
was the archetypical writer of reason for his rejection of madness.  See Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la 
folie,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 51-98. 
  263
world.  In other words, the discourse on mental illness was a fiction whose authors were 
unable to admit its fictionality.   
Blanchot too had written on madness.  In the 1940s and 1950s Blanchot authored 
several essays in which he identified precisely these writers as some of the most true to 
the essence of literature.394  True to it, because their madness expressed something 
essential about literature, rather than that their madness unleashed the essence of 
literature.  In an essay titled “La Folie par excellence,” Blanchot wrote of Hölderlin, 
whose madness was exceptional, that in his madness Hölderlin gave himself to the  
destiny of the poet, who becomes the mediator of the sacred, who is in immediate  
relation with the sacred and who envelops it in the silence of the poem in order to 
calm it and communicate it to men, a communication requiring that the poet 
remain upright, yet be stricken none the less, a mediation the consequence of 
which is not only a rend in his existence, but which is this very division of the 
poet, the effacement at the core of the word which, existence having disappeared, 
continues, affirming itself, by itself.395 
 
Blanchot was insistent that madness is not creative in and of itself.  Rather, madness is 
only capable of exposing the creator to the real power of poetry.  The experience of 
madness that Blanchot described in “La Folie par excellence” was the rend in the poet’s 
mind that allowed him to understand the power of words to paradoxically destroy and 
                                                 
394 These essays are too numerous, and too diverse to discuss synoptically.  They include primarily pieces 
on Sade, Hölderlin, Lautréamont, and Nietzsche.  I might also have chosen to discuss Sade, as Blanchot’s 
engagement with Sade’s thought was a continuing struggle throughout his career.  Instead, I have elected to 
discuss Blanchot’s work on Hölderlin in detail, because of all of his pieces on madness, it came the closest 
to expressing the innate affinity between his work and Foucault’s. For a representative selection of 
Blanchot’s work on Sade, “A la recontre de Sade,” Les Temps modernes, 25, (October 1947): 577-612; 
“Littérature et la droit à la mort,” in La Part de feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: 
Éditions de Minuit, 1949); “L’inconvenance majeure,” in Sade, Français, encore un effort…(Utrecht: Jean-
Jacques Pauvert, 1965): 9-51.   
395 “Le destin du poète qui se fait le médiateur du sacré, est en rapport immediate avec lui et l’enveloppe 
dans le silence du poème pour l’apaiser et le communiquer aux hommes, communication qui exige que le 
poète demeure debout, mais cependant soit frappé, médiation dont l’existence déchirée n’est pas seulement 
une conséquence, mais qui est cette division même du poète, l’effacement au sein de la parole qui, 
l’existence disparue, continue, s’affirme seule.”  Blanchot, “La folie par excellence,” Critique, 45 
(February 1951): 110-111. 
  264
remake the things that they named, which Blanchot first discussed in “La Littérature et le 
droit à la mort” during the postwar purge.  It was a power given to prophets, seers, and 
poets, to be able to see the world beyond its mundane façade, which convinced people of 
its reality through daily use.  It was the power to see the world as it was made, or 
constructed – that is, it was the power to see the very process of making the world.  
Blanchot argued that this required a rend in the mind order to be sustained, for one could 
not go about everyday life in such a reverie.396   
While Foucault cited Hölderlin as an example of unreason, Blanchot cited him as 
an example of essential poetry.  For Foucault, the work of Hölderlin testified to the 
actuality of unreason, it gave proof that the discourse of mental illness was a construct 
that concealed the essential speech of madness.  But for Blanchot, the work of Hölderlin 
pointed to the essence of literary creation, itself beyond both madness, and mental illness.   
Yet, at the same time this mode of creation also supported the discourses of both madness 
and mental illness.  When Blanchot wrote “La Folie par excellence,” he argued that 
madness was linked to the creation of poetry.  But after encountering Folie et déraison, 
Blanchot became aware that the discourse of mental illness too was a creation, and that it 
was a man-made creation.  While it did not partake of the sacred power to which 
Hölderlin’s madness testified, the discourse of mental still drew on the power of literary 
creation, even as it perverted the creative function into something mute, and tamed.  The 
discourse of mental illness was created through the efforts of physicians, who sought to 
master madness by defining it.  In “La Folie par excellence,” Blanchot made intimations 
                                                 
396 Derrida objected to Blanchot’s characterization of madness too, which he reproached for making 
Hölderlin and Artaud exemplary of the essence of madness.  See Derrida, “La parole soufflée,” in 
L’écriture et la différence, 253-292. 
  265
in this direction, when he wrote of the discourse of mental illness’ inability to understand 
schizophrenia purely through scientific reasoning:  
Causal explanation is a demand that tolerates no limits; but what science explains 
with causes is not necessarily understood.  Understanding seeks what escapes it, 
and advances forcefully and purposefully towards the moment when 
understanding is no longer possible, when the fact, in its absolutely concrete and 
particular reality, becomes obscure and impenetrable.397   
 
Folie et déraison was a sustained attempt to grasp the motivation behind that confounded 
effort to understand, an effort that was doomed to incomprehension a priori, but which 
medical science nonetheless pursued with dogged determination.  It was almost as if 
Foucault realized a potential already present within Blanchot’s essay on Hölderlin to 
explain the other trick of madness – the one whereby reason enchained the mad – that 
was at the heart of the project of Folie et déraison.   
   
d) Nietzsche, Myth, Tragedy 
The final connection Blanchot saw between his own work and Foucault’s was the 
latter’s references to Nietzsche in the preface to Folie et déraison, which was a reference 
that few French thinkers could make in 1960.  If Foucault’s lifelong project was broadly 
Nietzschean in scope, Folie et déraison was inspired specifically by Nietzsche’s Die 
Geburt der Tragödie.  In Folie et déraison, Foucault argued that the experience of 
madness was hidden by the discourse of mental illness, exactly as Nietzsche argued that 
the Dionysian society of tragedy and myth characteristic of the archaic period (c. 8th- 5th 
                                                 
397 “L’explication causale est un exigence qui ne souffre pas de limites; mais ce que la science explique par 
des causes, n’est pas, pour autant, compris.  La compréhension cherche ce qui lui échappe, elle s’avance 
fortement et consciemment vers le moment où comprendre n’est plus possible, où le fait, dans sa réalité 
absolument concrète et particulière, devient l’obscur et l’impénétrable.”  Blanchot, “La folie par 
excellence,” 102.  
  266
centuries B.C.E.) was eclipsed by the Apollonian culture of knowledge and individualism 
characteristic of classical Greece (c. 5th – 3rd centuries B.C.E.).  Even more significantly, 
for Foucault and Blanchot, Nietzsche argued that tragedy, as his contemporaries in the 
late nineteenth century understood it, had its origins not in the theatrical technique of 
drama, but rather in mythic communion with the gods represented by the Bacchanalia.  
Each of these aspects of Nietzsche’s argument must be examined in order to show how 
Foucault appropriated them in Folie et déraison, and also in order to show how Blanchot 
understood, and responded to Foucault’s appropriation of Nietzsche. 
Foucault appropriated Nietzsche’s argument about the origins of tragedy because 
it helped him to explain the difference between the artifice of the discourse of mental 
illness, and the real experience of madness.  Nietzsche argued that Dionysian tragedy 
placed humanity in its proper situation in the world by showing his essential connection 
to the rest of the world.  Indeed, it was out of recognition of this connection that art, the 
images and symbols that described the world, could be born.  The world could only be 
rendered artistically when the artist was conscious of its existence.  Nietzsche wrote of 
the Dionysian artistic creator that he “perceives a world of images and symbols – 
growing out of his state of mystical self-abnegation and oneness.”398   Apollonian 
tragedy, by contrast, knew only the individual, and celebrated only individualism.  Art 
required cognizance of the world, it required recognition of humanity’s connection to the 
earth and to the gods.  But the Apollonian creator, “this apotheosis of individuation 
knows only one law – the individual, i.e., the delimiting of the boundaries of the 
                                                 
398 “Fühlt aus dem mystischen Selbstentäusserungs – und Einheitszustande eine Bilder – und 
Gleichnisswelt hervorwachsen.” Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (Leipzig: 
E.W. Fritzsch, 1872), 40. 
  267
individual, measure in the Hellenic sense.”399  Apollonian tragedy refused to 
acknowledge the existence of the world.  It refused to acknowledge the existence of all of 
the other things in the world beside the individual, and for this reason it was incapable of 
producing anything more than artifice.  And artifice it did produce, Nietzsche argued, in 
the form of moralities, proscriptions, and a thousand other maxims that tore the human 
being asunder from its essential environment, and cut it off from its relation to everything 
outside itself.   
What the Dionysian tragedy showed, by contrast, was not the world of artifice, the 
world of societal institutions, cultural conventions, and civic codes.  Rather, what 
Dionysian tragedy revealed was the real level of human existence.  Dionysian tragedy 
revealed humanity’s existence prior to the fission of human beings from the being of the 
rest of the world.  Dionysian tragedy revealed the lived mode of human reality, those 
agreed upon institutions, conventions, and codes, for their artificiality precisely by 
showing the real world, the world of human connection to the gods and to nature, through 
art.  Dionysian tragedy achieved this by placing the satyr on stage, in whose figure the 
connection between the gods, nature, and humanity was definitively established.  “This is 
the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy,” Nietzsche writes, “that the state and 
society, and the general gulfs between man and man, give way to an overwhelming 
feelings of unity leading back the very heart of nature.”400 The original condition of 
humanity was not a collection of atomized individuals, alienated from their essential 
                                                 
399 “Diese Vergöttlichung der Individuation kennt…nur Ein Gesetz, das Individuum d.h. die Einhaltung 
der Grenzen des Individuums, das Maass im hellenischen Sinne.” Ibid. 36. 
400 “Dies ist die nächste Wirkung der dionysischen Tragödie, dass der Staat und die Gesellschaft, 
überhaupt die Klüfte zwischen Mensch un Mensch einem übermächtigen Einheitsgefühle weichen, welches 
an das Herz der Natur zurückführt.”  Ibid. 52. 
  268
bond to nature and the gods.  Art restored humanity to that essential, primordial reality by 
representing the satyr chorus.401  The half-human, half-divine satyrs provided a visual 
reminder of humanity’s link with the gods and with nature.402  They also transcended the 
barrier between art and reality by simultaneously acting as a spectator and a participant in 
the dramatic action.  Thus, Dionysian tragedy forced the Greeks to displace themselves 
from the comforting, but illusory reality of society, and return to the primordial origin 
when humanity maintained its essential connection with the world. 
Nietzsche’s point was not just that humanity was alienated, and that a natural 
reality underlay the everyday reality that humanity experienced in its wakeful state.  
Rather, Nietzsche’s point was also that the Greeks could only live in the artificial world 
of society, and of culture by simultaneously acknowledging its artifice and its reality.  
Maxims such as “know thyself,” and “nothing in excess,” inculcated society’s rules into 
the Greek individual..403  These tore humanity from its essential and natural experience of 
the world.  Consciousness was bound to an invented concept of the individual and an 
invented concept of society, which failed to recognize the essential fact of humanity: that 
the human, like its natural world, was nothing more, and nothing less than life.404  
Societal maxims were tolerable only to the extent that humanity acknowledged their 
                                                 
401 Nietzsche explained how these two could coexist.  Humanity lives in the everyday world, but this by no 
means suggests that humanity is unable to feel the presence, however remote, of the natural world.  A 
“chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality.  But as soon as this 
everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experience as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating 
mood is the fruit of these states.” “So scheidet sich durch diese Kluft der Vergessenheit die Welt der 
alltäglichen und der dionysischen Wirklichkeit von einander ab.  Sobald aber jene alltägliche Wirklichkeit 
wieder ins Bewusstein tritt, wird sie mit Ekel als solche empfunden: eine asketische, willenverneinende 
Stimmung ist die Frucht jener Zustände.”  Ibid. 
402 Ibid. 49-50. 
403 ““Erkenne dich selbst,”” ““Nicht zu viel.”” Ibid. 36. 
404 For the opposition between maxims and morals on the one hand, and life on the other, see Ibid. 11-13. 
  269
artifice.  In order to be able to cope with this artificial society, and this artificial selfhood-
cum-individuality, the Greek mind had to remind itself of this artifice, which was 
accomplished through the art of the tragedy.  What kind of society, Nietzsche asked, 
would have needed tragedy, an art of pessimism.  “Greeks and the art form of 
pessimism?” Nietzsche asked.  “The best formed, most beautiful, most envied type of 
humanity to date, those most apt to seduce us to life, the Greeks – how do we see it now?  
Of all people, should they have needed tragedy?  And moreover – art?  For what purpose 
was there Greek art?”405  Nietzsche found an unlikely answer to his question: in effect, 
the Greeks required this artistic representation of a mythical creature, the satyr, because 
the vision of humanity that they had developed was completely artificial.  They had 
invented a form of social life, based on the individual, that stood over and above the 
essential vitality of Greek life.  Because society was an invention, they needed also to 
invent its origin.  The origin that they invented was the art of myth: tragedy.  “Art saves 
him,” Nietzsche wrote, “and through art – life.”406  Thus, Nietzsche also argued that the 
Greeks were compelled to admit the mythical origin of humanity – insofar as its 
primordial essence was expressed in the satyr chorus – precisely in order to maintain the 
artificial norms of society.  At bottom, Nietzsche argued that the essential origin of 
humanity – insofar as humanity lived according to social norms – was mythic.   
Nietzsche hoped to hold a mirror up to the modern man of the late nineteenth 
century, the man standing at the apex of civilization, as the triumph of the reason and 
                                                 
405 “Griechen und das Kunstwerk des Pessimismus?  Die wohlgeranthenste, schönste, bestbeneidete, zum 
Leben verführendste Art der bisherigen Menschen, die Griechen – wie? gerade sie hatten die Tragödie 
nöthig?  Mehr noch – die Kunst?  Wozu – griechische Kunst?” Ibid. 6. 
406 “Ihn rettet die Kunst, und durch die Kunst rettet ihn sich – das Leben.”  Ibid. 52. 
  270
Enlightenment, so that he could recognize the Greek individual in his reflection.  He 
meant for the man of the late nineteenth century to realize that he too had allowed his life 
to become abridged and adumbrated by social mores and maxims.  It was, ultimately, to 
modern man that Nietzsche pled for the recognition of the mythical, tragic origin of 
humanity.   
Foucault appropriated this logic almost wholesale in Folie et déraison.   First, 
Foucault argued that the experience of madness was defined by the discourse of mental 
illness.  Second, Foucault argued that the discourse of mental illness was an artificial 
knowledge established not by the mad, but by medical scientists disconnected from the 
mad, secure in their conviction that madness was unreason.  “Beneath the critical 
consciousness of madness,” wrote Foucault, “and its philosophical, scientific, moral and 
medical forms, a tragic and mute consciousness of madness has never ceased.”407  Just as 
the Greek individual was alienated from natural reality and from fellow human beings by 
the imposition of society norms of individualism, the discourse of mental illness alienated 
humanity from the mad.  And finally, Foucault also appropriated Nietzsche’s argument 
about the mythical origin of humanity when he asserted that the origin of the discourse on 
mental illness lay in the stultifera navis, the ship of fools.   
Foucault’s ship of fools reproduced many of the Nietzsche’s arguments about 
tragedy.  Foucault argued that the real origin of the seventeenth and eighteenth century 
discourse on mental illness, and its practice of confining the mad in the asylum, lay not in 
scientific discovery, and medical knowledge.  Rather, Foucault argued that its origin lay 
                                                 
407 “Sous la conscience critique de la folie, et ses formes philosophiques ou scientifiques, morales ou 
médicales, un sourde conscience tragique n’a cessé de veiller.” Foucault, Folie et déraison, 35. 
  271
in the fourteenth and fifteenth century ship of fools.  The ship of fools was “a strange 
drunken boat that went the length of the calm rivers of the Rhineland, and the canals of 
Flanders…that led their insane cargo from one town to the other.”408  Rather than 
confining their mad in asylums, Renaissance towns and cities forced them into exile by 
placing them on barges and sending them down the river to the next town or city.  Much 
has been made of the ship of fools, and many historians of science and medicine have 
questioned whether they actually existed. 409  But Foucault argued that the ship of fools 
was chiefly a literary invention, and that its advent occurred within the “landscape of the 
Renaissance imaginary.”410  Rather than haunting the rivers of Europe, Foucault argued 
that, “these ships of fools…haunted the imagination of the entire Early Renaissance.”411  
Indeed, they may even have come directly from Greek mythology, derived “from the 
ancient cycle of the Argonauts.”412  Moreover, they participated in the common literary 
trope by which authors used ships to impart allegorical morality tales.  Foucault argued 
that “such ships were a literary commonplace, whose crew of imaginary heroes, moral 
models, or social types set out on a great symbolic voyage that brought them, if not 
fortune, then at least the figure of their destiny or their truth.”413   
                                                 
408 “Étrange bateau ivre qui file le long des calmes fleuves de la Rhénanie et des canaux flamands…qui 
d’une ville à l’autre menaient leur cargaison insensée.” Ibid. 10. 
409 Erik Midelfort, “Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel 
Foucault,” in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter 
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 247-265.   
410 “Le paysage imaginaire de la Renaissance.” Ibid. 10. 
411 “Et il se peut que ces nefs de fous, qui ont hanté l’imagination de la toute première Renaissance, aient 
été des navires de pèlerinage des navires hautement symboliques d’insensés en quête de leur raison.” Ibid. 
12. 
412 “Au vieux cycle des Argonautes.” Ibid. 10. 
413 “La mode est à la composition de ces Nefs dont l’équipage de héros imaginaires, de modèles éthiques 
ou de types sociaux, s’embarque pour un grand voyage symbolique qui leur apporte sinon la fortune, du 
moins, la figure de leur destin ou de leur vérité.” Ibid. 
  272
But if the ship of fools was primarily literary, and if it existed primarily in 
imaginary of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was understood to represent the real 
social condition of the insane in society.  Like the satyr chorus in Nietzsche, the ship of 
fools was both literary and very real.  The fact that it occurred on a ship, traveling down a 
river, highlighted the “liminal situation of the mad in the half-real, half-imaginary 
geography of medieval man, which was symbolized and realized at the time by the right 
of the cities to expel the mad outside the city gates.”414  Foucault’s point was that even if 
it was only a literary convention, the ship of fools was generally understood to indicate 
the exclusion of the insane from the city.  Like Nietzsche’s satyr chorus, which was at 
once experienced as part of the human world, and also as a part of the world of the gods, 
the ship of fools existed only on the mental plane, which in no way mitigated its reality 
for those who lived on that plane.  On the mental level, the ship of fools defined how the 
Renaissance mind understood madness.   
Furthermore, as Nietzsche argued that Greek society needed the art of the satyr 
chorus in order to maintain its belief in the artifice of society, so Foucault argued that the 
ship of fools underlay the discourse of mental illness.  This was the most Nietzschean 
aspect of Folie et déraison, because it pointed to the artificiality of the discourse of 
mental illness.  Foucault argued that the discourse of mental illness was agreed upon, 
accepted, and lived as reality.  It was granted truth, just as Nietzsche argued that the 
Greek society granted truth to the strictures and maxims of individualist, Apollonian 
society.  Likewise, the discourse of mental illness was the artifice that overlay the real 
                                                 
414 “D’une géographie mi-réelle, mi-imaginaire, la situation liminaire du fou à l’horizon du souci de 
l’homme medieval – situation sybolisée et realisée à la fois par le privilege qui est donné au fou d’être 
enfermé aux portes de la ville.” Ibid. 14. 
  273
experience of being mad.  It was a discourse invented by physicians and scientists who 
purported to speak for the mad, rather than allowing the mad to speak for themselves.  
Foucault argued that the discourse of mental illness was an artifice lived as reality by 
seventeenth and eighteenth century Europeans in exactly the same way that Nietzsche 
argued that Apollonian individualism was an artifice lived as reality by the Greeks.  
Foucault wrote,  
It is these extreme discoveries, and these alone, that permit us, in our time, to 
finally judge that the experience of madness common since the Sixteenth century 
owes its particular face, and the origin of its meaning, to that absence, to that dark 
night and all that fills it…Then it becomes apparent that beneath each of its forms 
it masks a more complete, more perilous tragic experience – which it is 
nonetheless capable of obliterating entirely.  In the last moment of this constraint, 
an explosion was necessary, which we accelerate, ever since Nietzsche.415 
 
Echoing Nietzsche’s initial question in Die Geburt der Tragödie, one might understand 
Folie et déraison best by asking of Foucault, what kind of society needed to recognize the 
reality of the ship of fools?  The answer also echoes back from Foucault’s appropriation 
of Nietzsche: a society that had lost touch with the genuine experience of madness, a 
society that had allowed madness to be hemmed in by the discourse of mental illness, a 
human society that had shielded itself from the fact that madness was human too.  
Blanchot too, had made a similar argument in 1953 about the origin of literature, 
in an essay titled “Le regard d’Orphée.”416  This essay reproduced Nietzsche’s argument 
about Greek tragedy nearly exactly, and it was unlike anything else in Blanchot’s corpus 
                                                 
415 “Ce sont ces extremes découvertes, et elles seules, qui nous permettent, de nos jours, de juger enfin que 
l’expérience de la folie qui s’étend depuis le XVIe siècle jusqu’à maintenant doit sa figure particulière, et 
l’origine de son sens, à cette absence, à cette nuit et à tout ce qui l’emplit…alors il apparaît que sous 
chacune de ses formes, elle masque d’une manière plus complete, plus périlleuse aussi cette experience 
tragique, qu’elle n’est pas cependant parvenue à réduire du tout au tout.  Au point dernier de la contrainte, 
l’éclatement était nécessaire, auquel nous assistons depuis Nietzsche.” Ibid. 36. 
416 Blanchot, “La Regard d’Orphée,” Cahiers d’Art 28, no. 1 (1953): 1075-1086. 
  274
in its style and content, as well as in the manner of its publication.  Unlike the rest of 
Blanchot’s work, which was made up of philosophical meditations that took literature as 
their point of departure, “Le regard d’Orphée” was a retelling, and re-interpretation of the 
Orpheus myth, with no reference to any author, contemporary or otherwise.417  Orpheus 
was a mythological poet, whose wife Eurydice died on their wedding day, trying to 
escape a covetous satyr.  Orpheus pursued Eurydice to the underworld, where his 
lamentations persuaded Hades and Persephone to release her.  She would be allowed to 
follow Orpheus back to the world of the living, but only on the condition that he not look 
back at her until they reached the end of their journey.  They had gone some way when 
Orpheus’ anxiety got the better of him, and he turned around to see if Eurydice was 
indeed there.  And as he gazed upon her, she disappeared, dissolving like an apparition.  
Orpheus’ grief overcame him, and he wandered Greece alone until he came upon the 
Bacchae, orgiastic revelers of cult of Dionysus, who tore him apart in their frenzy.   
As Foucault used the ship of fools to explain the origin of the discourse of mental 
illness, and as Nietzsche used the satyr chorus to explain the origin of Greek tragedy, 
Blanchot used the Orpheus myth to explain the origin of literature.  “Writing begins and 
ends,” Blanchot argued, “with the gaze of Orpheus.”418  When Blanchot argued that 
                                                 
417 Even the material publication of “Le regard d’Orphée” indicated its remove from Blanchot’s other 
arguments about creation.  Typically, Blanchot published his essays in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue 
Française, Critiques, and sometimes in Les Temps modernes.  But Blanchot abandoned these journals 
when he published “Le regard d’Orphée,” choosing instead to publish in Cahiers d’Art, where his essay 
appeared punctuated by two separate reproductions of portraits by Picasso. Blanchot published only one 
other essay in Cahiers d’Art, an excerpt from his book on Lautréamont, which appeared sandwiched 
between an ongoing review of a show of dinner plates and serving bowls on which Picasso had painted 
some figures.  See Blanchot, “Lautréamont ou l’espérance d’une tête,” Cahiers d’Art 23, no. 1 (1948): 69-
71. 
418 “Ecrire commence et finit avec le regard d’Orphée.”  Blanchot, “Le regard d’Orphée,” 1080.  When 
Blanchot republished “Le regard d’Orphée,” in L’espace littéraire, two years later, he modified this 
  275
Orpheus was the origin of literature he did not mean that the story of the Orpheus myth 
was the first story, and therefore the origin of literature.  Still less did Blanchot argue that 
Orpheus was the origin of literature because he was the first poet.  For Blanchot, as for 
Foucault and for Nietzsche, the origin had nothing to do with order of precedence, or 
order of appearance.  Moreover, when Blanchot argued that Orpheus was the origin of 
literature, he meant that Orpheus was the origin of all literature, for all time, from 
Archilocus to Flaubert, from Proust to Blanchot himself.   
It was with the gaze of Orpheus that writing begins, Blanchot argued, which 
meant two things: first, the gaze of Orpheus was the name Blanchot gave to every 
writer’s desire to see his book become a genuine work of art, insofar as the gaze 
represented Orpheus’ desire to bring Eurydice back to the real world.  Secondly, the gaze 
of Orpheus was a mythical origin of the agreed-upon discourse of literature, in precisely 
the same way that Foucault argued that the ship of fools was the mythical origin of the 
agreed-upon discourse of mental illness.  Just as Nietzsche argued that the Greeks needed 
the myth of tragedy in order to preserve their faith in the illusion of society, and just as 
Foucault argued that the discourse of mental illness originated in the fantastical literature 
of the ship of fools, so too did Blanchot argue that the discourse of literature needed the 
myth of Orpheus in order to preserve the illusion of representation. 
It is necessary to examine each aspect of Blanchot’s argument in “Le regard 
d’Orphée,” respectively, before proceeding to “L’Oubli, la déraison,” Blanchot’s review 
of Folie et déraison.  At the same time that Blanchot responded to Foucault, he also 
                                                                                                                                                 
sentence to emphasize the originary status of Orpheus: “Writing begins with the gaze of Orpheus.”  See 
Blanchot, L’espace littéraire, 234. 
  276
returned to his own arguments about origins, amending and revising them in the process.  
In “Le regard d’Orphée” Blanchot argued that every writer had a desire to see his labors 
transformed into a work of art, to see his book become an œuvre.  Blanchot likened 
Orpheus’ descent into the underworld, and his attempt to bring Eurydice back to the 
world of the living to the writer’s attempts to create a work of art.  Indeed, Blanchot 
argued that Orpheus’ determination to bring Eurydice back was art itself: “When Orpheus 
descends toward Eurydice, art is the power by which he opens the night.”419  For 
Blanchot, Orpheus’ descent and his return were analogues of the creative process.  
Orpheus’ descent towards Eurydice, who had vanished from the world, and who was 
hidden by the veil of death, was the artist’s struggle to get to the perfect representation of 
the world.  Every work of art represented some object – whether an object that existed in 
the material world, or in the emotional life of the author – in words, in images, or in 
sound.  The artist desired to represent this object perfectly, and he viewed the creation of 
the work of art as a process of moving towards a more and more perfect representation.  
Blanchot used Eurydice to analogize the object of representation, this point toward which 
the artist strove: “Eurydice is, for Orpheus, the furthest that art can reach.  Under a name 
that dissimulates her and beneath a veil that covers her, she is the profoundly obscure 
point toward which art, desire, death, and night seem to tend.”420  But Orpheus cannot 
reach Eurydice, she is hidden and dissimulated by death.  She is not there.  She has no 
earthly reality.  For Blanchot, this cemented the analogy between Orpheus’ descent, and 
                                                 
419 “Quand Orphée descend vers Eurydice, l’art est la puissance par laquelle s’ouvre la nuit.” Blanchot, 
“Le regard d’Orphée,” 1075. 
420 “Eurydice est, pour lui, l’extrême que l’art puisse atteindre, elle est, sous un nom qui la dissimule et 
sous un voile qui la couvre, le point profondément obscur vers lequel l’art, le désir, la mort, la nuit 
semblent tendre.” Ibid. 
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the creation of the work of art.  Drawing heavily on “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” 
Blanchot argued that the work of art existed solely because of this absence.  If the object 
were actually present, it would no longer be art – it would simply be life.  Orpheus’ task 
was not actually to reach Eurydice, his task was to bring her back, just as the artist’s task 
was not actually to create the object, his task was rather to represent the object in the 
work of art.  For Blanchot, “Orpheus’ work of art does not consist however, in ensuring 
the approach of this “point,” and the descent toward the deep.”421  Rather, Orpheus’ 
“work of art is to bring [the point] out into the day, and give it form, shape, and reality in 
the day.”422  Blanchot argued that Orpheus descent, and his return, were like the creation 
of a work of art, in that he moved toward Eurydice with the intent of bringing her back.  
But the real creation of the work of art, like the actual task of bringing Eurydice back, 
required faith in her absence. 
Blanchot argued that the Orpheus myth was the origin of the creation of the work 
of art not because Orpheus was the first poet, nor because the Orpheus myth was the first 
story, but rather because the Orpheus myth revealed the essential nature of creation.  For 
Blanchot, the work of art could only exist because the artist failed to represent the thing 
in itself.  The work of art was the failure to make the thing itself present to the viewer.  In 
this sense, Orpheus failed to bring Eurydice back to the world of the live – to the day, as 
Blanchot put it.  Orpheus’ movement toward Eurydice, and her disappearance when he 
turned from the essential structure of désœuvrement.  Orpheus did not create a perfect 
work of art, he did not create an œuvre.  Rather, he failed to bring Eurydice back, his 
                                                 
421 “Ce “point,” l’œuvre d’Orphée ne consiste pas cependant à en assurer l’approche en descendant vers la 
profondeur.” Ibid.  
422  “Son œuvre, c’est de le ramener au jour et de lui donner dans le jour forme, figure et réalité.” Ibid. 
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descent and return were désœuvrement.  Moreover, Blanchot argued that the creation of 
the work of art necessitated Orpheus’ failure.  Orpheus’ dedication to Eurydice, like the 
artist’s dedication to the object, required that he forget his song and look back to check if 
Eurydice was there:  
Orpheus, in the very movement of his migration, could only forget the work of art 
that must be accomplished, and forget it necessarily, because the ultimate demand 
of his movement is not that there be a work of art, but that someone face this 
“point,” and grasp its essence where this essence appears, where it is essential and 
essentially appearance, at the heart of the night.423   
 
Here, Blanchot described the way that the artist must necessarily care more for the object, 
than for the representation of the object.  Orpheus necessarily cared more for the dead 
Eurydice, in his anguish, than for actually returning back to the world with her.  His love 
for her necessitated that he forget his task.  Blanchot claimed that “the Greek myth says: 
the work of art can only be created if the immeasurable experience of the deep – an 
experience which the Greeks recognized as necessary to the work of art, where the work 
of art endures its measurelessness – is not pursued for its own sake.”424  For Blanchot, 
there was no such thing as art for art’s sake: such art made no sense to him.  Art was the 
tragic attempt to capture an object in artistic representation, indeed what was artistic 
about the work of art was the trace of this failed effort that remained on the page, or on 
the canvas.  The work of art was simultaneously the desire for the object, and the 
                                                 
423 “Orphée, dans le mouvement même de sa migration, ne peut qu’oublier l’œuvre qui’il doit accomplir, et 
il l’oublie nécessairement, parce que l’exigence ultime de son mouvement, ce n’est pas qu’il y ait œuvre, 
mais que quelqu’un se tienne en face de ce “point,” en saisisse l’essence, là où cette essence apparaît, où 
elle est essentielle et essentiellement apparence: au cœure de la nuit.” Ibid. 
424 “Le mythe grec dit: l’on ne peut faire œuvre que si l’expérience démesurée de la profondur – 
experience que les Grecs reconnaissent comme nécessaire à l’œuvre, experience où l’œuvre est à l’épreuve 
de sa démesure – n’est pas poursuivie pour elle-même.” Ibid. 
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movement toward it, and at the same time it is the desire to make a work of art.  Art 
would not be art without this failure. 
But what was the substance of this failure?  Blanchot argued that literary creation 
– if it was genuine literature – always failed when measured against the standards of 
rational thought.  In Blanchot’s view, the world could do nothing other than condemn 
Orpheus’s failure, for it wanted only the real Eurydice, alive, and in the light of day.  The 
world, “announces Orpheus’ failure and declares Eurydice lost twice over…as if to 
renounce failure were much graver than to renounce success.”425  The rational world 
wanted only the real, it only wanted full and absolute presence.  It wanted Eurydice 
brought back to life, and it wanted art to represent its objects perfectly.  The rational 
world wanted the figures of a painting to actually become present.  To the rational world 
this is the definition of successful art.  To this rational world Orpheus lost Eurydice 
twice: first when she died running from the satyr, and the second time when Orpheus 
gazed back upon her.   
But to Blanchot such art was neither possible, nor desirable.  If the rational world 
defined art as truthful representation, and Orpheus’s work as a failure to represent 
truthfully, Blanchot argued that “not to turn back toward Eurydice would be no less 
untrue.”426  Every work of art, literary or plastic, failed to make its object completely 
present.  The figures of a painting made the objects manifest themselves for the viewer no 
more than “[lining] up a few words side by side” on the pages of a book made the world 
present itself to the reader.  A work of art then, as Blanchot understood it, was not a 
                                                 
425 “Dit l’échec d’Orphée et Eurydice deux fois perdue…comme si renoncer à échouer était beaucoup plus 
grave que renoncer à réussir.” Ibid. 1076 
426 “Ne pas se tourner ver Eurydice, ce ne serait pas moins trahir.” Ibid. 1075. 
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perfect representation, but rather a failed representation.  And as a failed representation it 
required that the creator fail.  Blanchot’s name for this failure was Orpheus’ gaze.  The 
work of art requires this failure, this desire to plunge toward the object of representation, 
without any care for the work itself:  
[Not to look would] be infidelity to the measureless, imprudent force of his 
movement, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and her everyday 
appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed 
body and sealed face – wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is 
invisible.427   
 
For Blanchot the desire for the work of art was the desire for the unattainable, and 
disappearing object.  It was the desire for Eurydice “in her nocturnal obscurity,” as he put 
it, a dreamt-of Eurydice of fantasy.  Blanchot argued that this desire, this imprudent 
desire to look back on Eurydice, and to move towards the unapproachable object, is what 
makes the work of art possible.  “Had he not looked at her,” Blanchot wrote, “he would 
not have drawn her toward him.”428  In Blanchot’s definition of the work of art as the 
simultaneous desire to attain the object of representation, and the failure to attain this 
object, Orpheus’ disastrous gaze became the work of art’s origin, and its condition of 
possibility. Blanchot argued that Orpheus was the origin of literature in the sense that 
every writer experienced the descent into the measureless depths toward the object of his 
representations, and every writer felt the attraction, the anxious urge to turn back upon his 
object of representation.  Orpheus’ gaze, the gaze that doomed his effort to rescue 
Eurydice to failure, was the essential experience of all creation.   
                                                 
427 “Être infindèle à la profondeur de son mouvement, à la force sans mesure et sans prudence de ce 
mouvment qui ne veut pas Eurydice dans sa vérité diurne et dans son agrément quotidien, qui la veut dans 
son obscurité nocturne, dans son éloignement, avec son corps fermé et son visage scellé, – qui veut la voir, 
non quand elle est visible, mais quand elle est invisible.” Ibid.  
428 “S’il ne l’avait regardée, il ne l’eût pas attiree.” Ibid. 1076. 
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The argument of “Le regard d’Orphée” stood apart from the rest of Blanchot’s 
corpus, in that it offered a very different version of literary creation.  Only in “Le regard 
d’Orphée” did Blanchot link the failure implicit in désœuvrement to a mythical origin.  
But this choice was part of a conscious effort to distinguish “Le regard d’Orphée” from 
the rest of his corpus.  In 1955, when the essay was re-published in L’espace littéraire, 
Blanchot further singled it out with a strange epigraph that identified “Le regard 
d’Orphée” as the vanishing center of the collection:  
A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it.  This center is not 
fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its 
composition.  Yet it is also a fixed center which displaces itself, if it is genuine, 
while maintaining itself in the same position and becoming always more central, 
more hidden, more uncertain and more imperious.  The one who writes the book 
writes out of desire for, and ignorance of this center.  The feeling of having 
touched it can only be the illusion of having reached it.  When it is a matter of a 
book of explanations, there is a kind of methodological good faith in stating 
toward what point the book seems to be directed: here, toward the pages entitled 
“Le regard d’Orphée.”429 
 
This unique epigraph marked “Le regard d’Orphée” as distinct from the rest of L’Espace 
littéraire.  By designating “Le regard d’Orphée” as the center of L’Espace littéraire – the 
rest of which was composed of the essays on Mallarmé, Rilke, Kafka, and Hölderlin that 
Blanchot published between 1951 and 1955 in Critique, Les Temps modernes, and La 
Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française – Blanchot indicated that it had a special status vis à 
vis the discourse of literature.  Where the rest of his corpus articulated his theory of 
                                                 
429 “Un livre, même fragmentaire, a un centre qui l’attire: centre non pas fixe aussi, mais qui se dêplace par 
la pression du livre et les circonstances de sa composition.  Centre fixe aussi, qui se déplace, s’il est 
veritable, en restant le même et en devenant toujours plus central, plus dérobé, plus incertain et plus 
impérieux.  Celui qui écrit le livre l’écrit par désir, par ignorance de ce centre.  Le sentiment de l’avoir 
touché peut bien n’être que l’illusion de l’avoir atteint; quand il s’agit d’un livre d’eclairissements, il y a 
une sorte de loyauté méthodique à dire vers quell point il semble que le livre se dirige: ici, vers les pages 
intitulées “Le regard d’Orphée.” Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 5. 
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literary creation, “Le regard d’Orphée” articulated the origin of literature itself.  It was 
less about the mechanics of creation, than about demonstrating the art and artifice 
inherent in all literature. 
By locating the origin of literature with Orpheus, Blanchot replicated Nietzsche’s 
argument in Die Geburt der Tragödie.  As Nietzsche argued that the satyr chorus of 
Dionysian tragedy made it possible for the Greeks to maintain their belief in the 
Apollonian society of individualism, and as Foucault argued that the ship of fools 
subtended the discourse of mental illness, Blanchot argued that the Orpheus myth was 
necessary to maintain the belief in literature.  The discourse of literature – by necessity a 
discourse of the rational world, of the “day,” as Blanchot called it – required that society 
agree that it represented the world.  Literature could only be taken seriously, its moral 
lessons, its allegorical import could only have veracity if it was agreed that literature 
actually represented the world, including the world of the author’s emotions.  Literature 
required the reader to believe that the writer had special insight into the human condition, 
and that he imparted this insight through his work.  In order to believe that a novel’s 
message about love, for instance, had application in the real world, one had to believe 
that the author had special insight into love, and that he was capable of communicating it 
in novelized form.  Similarly, the maxims that defined Apollonian society could only be 
followed when the Greeks agreed that the human being’s true nature lay in individuality.  
The discourse of mental illness could only be taken seriously when society agreed that it 
was a genuine science, that mental illness really existed, and that physicians were able to 
diagnose and treat it.  But of course, the Greeks also knew that there was no individual, 
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and that the individual was a fabrication, invented by Greek philosophers.  It had reality 
only in the pages of their tomes.  Likewise the discourse of mental illness existed only in 
the medical treatises on madness produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  It 
did not actually represent the experience of madness.  Literature too, did not actually 
represent the world.  Literature was nothing more than “[lining] up a few words side by 
side.”  The worlds that literature represented were imaginary.   
Blanchot and Foucault’s idea, which they derived from Nietzsche, was that 
humanity needed a myth in order to sustain belief in these discourses – otherwise their 
unreality began to permeate the surface of the discourse, making it unbearable.  Nietzsche 
argued that if the Greeks lived their individuality, while knowing that it was only the 
invention of philosophers they would not have been able to bear it.  The Greek mind 
would have torn itself apart if it was required to believe that its exile from every other 
member of Greek society was the invention of a few philosophers.  Similarly, Foucault 
argued that society would not have been able to tolerate the internment of fellow humans 
if the discourse of mental illness had not convinced them that it had scientifically 
discovered the real conditions of madness.  In “Le regard d’Orphée” Blanchot made a 
parallel argument, that in order for literature to be convincing as a representation of the 
world, society had to forget that it was nothing more than “[lining] up a few words side 
by side,” just as Orpheus “forgets the work he is to achieve,” in favor of looking back to 
check if Eurydice was really following behind him.   
Of course, each of these discourses provided their own myths.  The Greek 
discourse of the individual purported to be a natural discovery, it purported that Greek 
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philosophers simply discovered the individual through rational logic.  The discourse of 
mental illness also offered its own origin myth.  It too claimed to be the discovery of a 
natural phenomenon by rational scientists.  The discourse of literature asserted that 
writers created literature through reflection on the world, and then pouring the content of 
that reflection onto the printed page.  But Blanchot and Foucault, like Nietzsche before 
them, argued that each of these were illusory myths: philosophers conjured up the 
individual, and physicians conjured mental illness, by the same process of stringing 
words together that writers conjured literature.  Furthermore, they argued that these 
myths were insufficient.  These were the myths created by the discourses themselves, the 
self-serving myths designed to convince society of their reality.  These myths taught that 
their discourses occurred naturally, and inherently in the world.  They were designed to 
cover up the essential unreality of the discourses.   
Blanchot and Foucault argued that such covering up was no longer believable 
after their exposure.  The satyr chorus, the ship of fools, and the gaze of Orpheus were all 
intended to replace the origin myths proffered by the discourses of individualism, mental 
illness, and literature.  They were different in the sense that they allowed those subject to 
the discourse to know its artificiality, rather than forcing them to accept the illusion of 
natural reality.  If life was experienced as an artificial creation, then they argued that it 
would be more tolerable to abandon the distinction between artifice and reality, and place 
everything at the level of art – since the actual essence of lived discourses was itself 
nothing more than creation.  Only when the mind was not forced to split everything 
between real and unreal, only when everything was simply art, would humanity achieve 
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the dignity that belonged to the human.  Thus it was that Nietzsche argued the Greek 
mind needed the satyr chorus in order to displace itself from the artificiality of 
individualism.  Only at this level could one participate in individualism in good faith.  
Foucault argued that the real origin of the discourse of mental illness was the literary 
convention of the ship of fools because discourse of mental illness was itself essentially a 
literary creation.  Only when the psychiatrist was forced to admit that his claims about the 
mind were literary creations could they be taken seriously.  Finally, Blanchot argued that 
the origin of literature was the gaze of Orpheus because one could believe in the 
discourse of literature only when one understood that literature was a work of art, and not 
a true representation of reality.  
 
The Need to Forget 
Blanchot gathered these themes together in “L’Oubli, la déraison,” the review of 
Folie et déraison that he wrote for La Nouvelle Revue Française after Caillois gave him 
Foucault’s book in the spring of 1961.430  When Blanchot read Foucault’s Folie et 
déraison he saw his own work reflected back at him, only now it came back deformed, 
pressed into the service of structuralist and historical arguments.431  But the structuralism 
                                                 
430 Elsewhere Blanchot used the term “oubli” to designate oblivion.  In “L’oubli, la déraison,” however, 
“l’oubli” consistently referred to forgetting.  See Blanchot, L’attente oubli (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 
1969). 
431 In a footnote attached to the 1969 version “L’oubli, la déraison,” Blanchot drew a direct an explicit link 
between Foucault’s book and L’espace littéraire, as well as La livre à venir, and “La littérature et la droit à 
la mort.”  I argue that this reference accomplished more than establishing a link between the two: I argue 
that this footnote refers to L’espace littéraire in its entirety, including the epigraph.  Curiously, this 
footnote was absent from the 1961 version of the essay.  See Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 
1969), 297.  N.B. I have endeavored to indicate when the discussion shifts to the 1969 version of “L’oubli, 
la déraison,” in the body of the text.  All footnotes referring to the 1969 version refer to L’Entretien infini.  
I have designated the 1961 version as “L’oubli, la déraison,” in all footnotes.   
  286
Blanchot saw in Foucault’s book was very different than the structuralism that Barthes’ 
saw in Folie et déraison.  For Barthes, Folie et déraison proved that structures exist 
historically, and that the practice of history ought to dedicate itself to the excavation of 
those structures.  Blanchot’s understanding of Folie et déraison was no less historical 
than Barthes’, but it focused not on the assemblage of structures, but rather on their lost 
origin.  When Blanchot read Foucault’s account of the ship of fools, he understood that 
Foucault’s structuralism went beyond tracing the structure of the discourse of madness, to 
an assertion that its origin lay in myth.  Moreover, Blanchot was concerned not with the 
loss of the origin necessitated by structures, as much as he was concerned with the effort 
of forgetting that structures required of those on whom they were imposed.  The 
discourse of mental illness, like the discourse of literature, required that its subjects 
actively forget that it was nothing more than “[lining] up a few words side by side.”  For 
Blanchot, Folie et déraison was a book about forgotten origins, above all else. 
In “L’oubli, la déraison,” Blanchot argued that forgetting was essential for the 
discourse of mental illness.  Forgetting was not a loss, rather forgetting was like the 
forgetful, neglectful gaze of Orpheus, the necessary gaze that nonetheless dispersed 
Eurydice before it.  Blanchot argued that forgetting must be understood as an active 
power, it must be understood as making daily living possible.432  “Forgetting is a power,” 
                                                 
432 Blanchot derived his argument about forgetting from Heidegger’s comments on the forgetting of Being 
in Being and Time.  There Heidegger argued that the everyday understanding of the being of things, in 
which their being was totally taken for granted, required that people forget the original Being.  Indeed, 
insofar as humanity lived in the everyday, its relation to being was one of forgetting.  Heidegger wrote: 
“The average everydayness of Da-sein must not be taken as a mere “aspect” [of being].  In it, also – and 
even in the mode of inauthenticity – the structure of existentiality lies a priori.  In it, also, Da-sein is 
concerned with the particular manner of its being, to which it is related in the way of average everydayness, 
even if only in the mode of fleeing from and forgetting it.” “Die durchschnittliche Alltäglichkeit des 
Daseins darf aber nicht als ein bloßer “Aspekt” genommen werden.  Auch in ihr und selbst im Modus der 
  287
Blanchot argued, “we are able to forget and, thanks to this, able to live, to act, to work, 
and to remember – to be present: we are thus able to speak usefully.”433  After reading 
Foucault, Blanchot argued that living, acting, working, remembering, and utility occurred 
at the level of structural discourses.  They were of the same stuff as the discourse of 
mental illness and the discourse of literature.  One lived under the discourse of mental 
illness, and expected it to diagnose and cure madness.  Forgetting was the power that 
enabled this expectation.  It was not that forgetting allowed physicians to diagnose, or to 
treat madness.  That sort of thing operated at the level of the individual physician, and 
required years of medical education and training.  Rather, Blanchot argued that forgetting 
allowed people to expect physicians to be able to diagnose and cure them.  If people had 
lived under the discourse of mental illness and remained cognizant that it was nothing 
more than “[lining] up a few words side by side,” they never would have been able to 
credibly accept its diagnoses and its cures.  Without people forgetting that the discourse 
of mental illness was nothing but “[lining] up a few words side by side,” it never would 
have succeeded. 
Furthermore, Blanchot argued that structural discourses required that people 
forget that they were forgetting.  That is, they required that people believe that discourses 
were natural entities, and that there was nothing to forget in the first place.  In “L’oubli, 
la déraison,” Blanchot wrote: 
                                                                                                                                                 
Uneigentlichkeit liegt a priori die Struktur der Existenzialität.  Auch in ihr geht es dem Dasein in 
bestimmter Weise um sein Sein, zu dem es sich im Modus der durchschnittlichen Alltäglichkeit verhält und 
sei es auch nur im Modus der Flucht davor und des Vergessens seiner.”  Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 
in Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 1, bk. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977). 59. 
433 “Oublier est un pouvoir: nous pouvons oublier, grâce à quoi nous pouvons vivre, agir, travailler et nous 
souvenir – être présent: parler ainsi utilement.” Blanchot, “L’oubli, la déraison,” 677. 
  288
Forgetting forgotten: each time I forget, I do nothing but forget that I am 
forgetting, which is already at work in forgetting.  To forget forgetting, however, 
and to enter into this movement of redoubling, is not to forget twice over; it is to 
forget in forgetting the depth of forgetting, to forget more profoundly by turning 
away from this depth, which lacks any possibility of being reached.”434   
 
In this passage, Blanchot argued that when one necessarily forgets the material origin of a 
discourse – the fact that it is nothing more than “[lining] up a few words side by side” – 
one also necessarily forgets the fact that one has forgotten that material origin.  To not 
forget the second time would be to forget incompletely.  It would allow the trace of the 
material origin to remain, and in order for structural discourses to be given credibility in 
the real world, it was necessary to eradicate every trace of its actual emergence.   
Here, Blanchot replicated his argument in “Le regard d’Orphée” almost verbatim.  
The forgetting twice over reproduced the day’s judgment that Orpheus lost Eurydice 
twice over.  As Blanchot argued that Eurydice was not really lost twice over, and that 
Orpheus was obligated to gaze back upon her, so did he argue that the forgetting of 
forgetting was also necessary.  Again, Blanchot argued that the forgetting of forgetting 
was as essential to the creation of the structural discourse, as Orpheus’ gaze was to the 
désœuvrement of the work of art.  As the day misjudged Orpheus’ effort as a failure 
because he was unable to bring Eurydice back, it was also wrong to say that one forgets 
twice over, as if one ever had a genuine opportunity to remember.  Blanchot drew an 
analogy between Orpheus and the movement of forgetting.  Orpheus’ mad desire to see 
Eurydice, and the artist’s mad desire for the object necessarily failed to reach that object.  
                                                 
434 “L’oubli oublié: chaque fois que j’oublie, je ne fais rien qu’oublier que j’oublie et ce qui est en jeu dans 
l’oubli.  Cependant oublier l’oubli et entrer dans ce mouvement de redoublement, ce n’est pas oublier deux 
fois, c’est oublier en oubliant la profondeur de l’oubli, oublier plus profondément en se détournant de cette 
profondeur, à laquelle manqué toute possibilité d’être approfondie.” Ibid. 677-678.      
  289
Yet at the same time it also made the work of art possible, insofar as the work of art could 
not itself be the object.  There could only be a work of art when the object was not 
present, when the object was represented.  Similarly, there could be a structural discourse 
only when its origin was absent, and forgotten.  In the 1969 version of “L’oubli, la 
déraison,” published in the collection L’Entretien infini, Blanchot explicitly connected 
desire (such as Orpheus’ desire for Eurydice) to forgetting:  
The relation of desire to forgetting as that which is previously inscribed outside 
memory, a relation to that of which there can be no memory, and which always 
forecloses memory, and which effaces the experience of a trace, this movement 
that excludes itself, and designates itself as being exterior to itself through this 
exclusion, thus requires an exteriority that is never articulated: inarticulate.435 
 
The ship of fools, the literary creation that gave voice the inarticulate outside of the 
discourse of mental illness, was necessarily excluded from the structure of the discourse.  
Blanchot argued that the absent origin of the discourse of mental illness was like the 
dispersed Eurydice.  Blanchot argued that people wanted so badly to believe in the 
discourse of mental illness, they wanted so badly to think that it described natural reality, 
and so badly to think that it could cure them, that they forgot the most obvious thing 
about its existence: that it was an invention, that it was a creation, that it was just 
“[lining] up a few words side by side.” 
In “L’oubli, la déraison” Blanchot argued that every structure necessarily 
occluded its own origin.  The discourse of mental illness, the discourse of literature, even 
the discourse of individualism, all required that their humble origins be forgotten, and 
                                                 
435 “Le rapport de désir à l’oubli comme à ce qui s’inscrit préalablement hors mémoire, rapport à ce dont il 
ne peut y avoir souvenir et qui toujours devance, efface l’expérience d’une trace, ce mouvement qui 
s’exclut et, par cette exclusion, se désigne comme extérieur à lui-même, ainsi requiert un extériorité jamais 
articulée: inarticulée.” Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 291-292. 
  290
replaced with fictions that allowed people to believe in them.  People needed to be able to 
trust the discourse of mental illness when they went to it for care, just like they needed to 
be able to trust the literature that they read.  But people also needed to know that 
structural discourses were artificial.  The ship of fools, and the gaze of Orpheus provided 
origin myths that at once allowed people to believe in the discourse of mental illness and 
the discourse of literature, while at the same time grounding them in art.  In this way, 
Blanchot and Foucault intended to make it possible “to enter into an event that is 
necessarily inauthentic, a presence without a presence, an ordeal without possibility.”436 
The discourse of mental illness was a literary creation, and thus it necessarily had its 
origin in literature with the ship of fools.  The discourse of literature was also a literary 
creation, and it too necessarily had its origin in another literary creation, the mythical 
gaze of Orpheus.  By recognizing these myths as the origins of structural discourse, 
Blanchot argued that society could have a more genuine relationship to the discourses 
under which they lived.  
The definitive link between “Le regard d’Orphée,” and “L’oubli, la déraison” was 
the essay “Orphée, Don Juan, Tristan,” discussed above in connection with the work of 
Albert Camus and the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre 
d’Algérie.”  The essay was published first in 1954, and re-published again in 1969 in the 
collection L'Entretien infini, with important revisions.  When it initially appeared, 
"Orphée, Don Juan, Tristan" was folded into Blanchot's engagement with the debate 
between Camus and Sartre, appearing in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française 
                                                 
436 “Entrer dans la consideration de l’événement nécessairement inauthentique, présence sans présence, 
épreuve sans possibilité.” Blanchot, “L’oubli, la déraison,” 678.    
  291
immediately before Blanchot's three-part intervention, "Réflexions sur 
l'enfer"/"Réflexions sur le nihilisme"/"Tu peux tuer cet homme."  In the 1954 version, 
published just nine months after "Le regard d'Orphée," Blanchot connected the Orpheus 
myth to the Don Juan story, in an attempt to respond to Camus' discussion of the absurd, 
and the absurd man in Le Mythe Sisyphe.  But when republished in L'Entretien infini it 
became the link between Blanchot's essays on Camus and his essay on Foucault, 
"L'Oubli, la déraison."  The story of the 1969 re-publication of "Orphée, Don Juan, 
Tristan" is significant largely for the additions that Blanchot wrote in order to make this 
connection.   
The history of this revision indicates the trace of Blanchot's encounter with the 
thought of Foucault in 1961, which allowed Blanchot to realize latent aspects of the 1954 
version of "Orphée, Don Juan, Tristan," and raise them to prominence in the revised 
version of 1969.  The 1954 version of "Orphée, Don Juan, Tristan" ended with the 
sentence "Forgetting is the mute and closed space where desire wanders without coming 
to an end.  Where someone is forgotten, there he or she is desired.  But this must be a 
profound forgetting."437  These were the last words of the final paragraph of the 1954 
version.  Here Blanchot linked forgetting to desire, to Orpheus' desire for Eurydice.  In 
his desire for her, Orpheus forgot the injunction against looking back at her, and so she 
was lost.  In 1954 Blanchot wrote that this was a "profound forgetting," but left the 
profundity unexplained.    
                                                 
437 “L’oubli est l’espace muet, fermé, où erre sans fin le désir.  Là où quelqu’un est oubliée, là il est désiré.  
Mais il faut un profond oubli.” Blanchot, "Orphée, Don Juan, Tristan" La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue 
Française 15 (March 1954): 501.  
  292
In the 1969 version however, when coupled with "L'Oubli, la déraison" this 
forgetting became the very exigency that sustained the world.  Rather than using the 
quotation above as the concluding sentence of a long, final paragraph, Blanchot used it as 
the beginning of a new paragraph in which he added a more explicit discussion of 
forgetting.  The final, expanded paragraph of the 1969 version of "Orphée, Don Juan, 
Tristan" now read: 
Forgetting is the mute and closed space where desire wanders without coming to 
an end.  Where someone is forgotten, there he or she is desired.  But this must be 
a profound forgetting.  Forgetfulness: the movement of forgetting: the infinite that 
opens up in closing upon itself in forgetting – on condition that it be received not 
by the lightness that frees memory from memory but, within remembrance itself, 
as the relation with what hides and that no presence can hold.  The Ancients had 
already sensed that Lethe is not merely the other side of Aletheia, its shadow, the 
negative force from which the knowledge that remembers would deliver us.  
Lethe is also the companion of Eros, the awakening proper to sleep, the distance 
from which one cannot take one's distance since it comes in all that moves away; 
a movement therefore, without a trace, effacing itself in every trace, and 
nonetheless – the expression must be used, however faultily – still announcing 
itself and already designating itself in the lack of writing that writing – this 
senseless game – remember outside memory as its limit or its always prior 
illegitimacy.438 
 
This passage, which immediately preceded "L'Oubli, la déraison" in L'Entretien infini, 
condensed numerous references to texts and thinkers that emerged in the 15 years 
between the two versions of "Orphée, Don Juan, Tristan."  References to Jacques Derrida 
                                                 
438 “L’oubli est l’espace muet, fermé, où erre sans fin le désir; là où quelqu’un est oublié, là il est désiré; 
mais il faut un profond oubli.  L’oubli: le mouvement d’oublier: l’infini qui s’ouvre, se fermant, avec 
l’oubli – à condition de l’acceuillir, non par la légèreté qui libère la mémoire de la mémoire, mais, dans le 
souvenir même, comme le rapport avec ce qui se cache et que nulle présence ne saurait retenir.  Déjà les 
Anciens avaient pressenti que Léthé n’est pas seulement l’envers d’Aléthéia, son ombre, la puissance 
négative don’t nous délivrerait le savoir qui se rappelle: Léthé est aussi le compagnon d’Éros, léveil propre 
au sommeil, cela, l’écart, dont il n’y a pas à s’écarter, puisqu’il vient en tout ce qui s’écarte, mouvement 
donc sans traces, s’effaçant ent toutes traces et qui pourtant – il faut en avancer fautivement l’expression – 
s’annonce encore, se désigne déjà dans le manque à écrire don’t l’écriture – ce jeu insensé – se souvient hor 
mémoire comme de sa limite ou de son illégimité toujours préalable.” Blanchot, "Orphée, Don Juan, 
Tristan," L'Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 288. 
  293
("the lack of writing"), and Martin Heidegger (Aletheia) indicated the passage's 
philosophical influences.  But the central message remained of a piece with Blanchot's 
encounter with Foucault.  Blanchot wrote that Lethe was "not merely the other side of 
Aletheia."  Aletheia was Heidegger's concept of unveiling, the mode of philosophical 
revelation in which truth was exposed after having lain hidden beneath its veil of 
presence.  The implication of Aletheia was that Lethe, its other side, was the movement of 
hiding the truth of things from the apprehension of humanity.  But Blanchot, after his 
encounter with Foucault, no longer saw Lethe as the negative of Aletheia.  Rather, Lethe 
was the essential, and the essentially productive, forgetting that made interaction with the 
world possible.  To forget the thing-in-itself (the infamous Kantian das Ding an sich) 
might have ruined the relation to the thing's essence, but nevertheless it allowed a relation 
with the thing that never could have existed with the thing-in-itself.  By 1969 the Orphic 
had become Lethe, and creation had become forgetting. 
 This aspect of Orphic forgetting is brought to light by drawing an analogy 
between Joan Copjec's Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, and Blanchot's 
essay "Berlin."  Citing Jacques Lacan, Copjec writes that "every phenomenal field 
occludes its cause."439  Belief in a phenomenal field, whether the name of "Berlin" 
analyzed by Blanchot or the discourse of equality analyzed by Copjec via Freud and 
Lacan, requires that its cause be forgotten.  As an abstraction that was lived and 
experienced concretely, the name of "Berlin" operated in the same way.  The discourse of 
equality, taken for reality in Western, democratic societies, requires that its cause (it was 
                                                 
439 Copjec, 11-12. 
  294
created by humans) be forgotten in order for it to cover up its inadequacies (there is no 
actual equality).  The name of "Berlin," taken for a real social entity separated by the 
Berlin Wall during the Cold War, required that its reality be forgotten (the plurality of 
human life that was never completely contained in the name of the city "Berlin") in order 
for East and West Berlin to be "visible" and "tangible."  Thus Blanchot wrote, the wall 
"recalls [to us], to we who constantly forget it, that abstraction is not simply a faulty 
mode of thinking or an apparently impoverished form of language, but that abstraction is 
our world, the one where we live and where we think everyday."440  The same forgetting 
is required by the discourses of mental illness and literature, which also demand that their 
causes (they were created by humans) be forgotten in order for psychiatry's diagnoses and 
treatments to be accepted as real and effective, and for literature to be taken as the mirror 
of nature.  All of these discourses – equality, "Berlin," mental illness, literature – were 
sustained by the same movement of forgetting, which forgets their essential, 
incomprehensible, unrepresentable reality so that they can be known and experienced in 
the everyday world.  In the everyday world, Blanchot realized through his exchange with 
Foucault, living and thinking – however imperfect and inadequate – took priority over the 
achievement of transcendence.  
 This exchange played out in the context of the emergence, and growing 
preeminence of structuralism.  Foucault’s work forced Blanchot to realize the 
significance of his own work for structuralism.  His statements on forgetting actively 
recalled and revised earlier positions that Blanchot articulated in “Mallarmé et 
                                                 
440 "...rapelle, à nous qui l'oublions constamment, que l'abstraction, ce n'est pas un simple mode fautif du 
penser une forme apparemment appauvrie de langage, mais que l'abstraction, c'est notre monde, celui où 
nous vivons et où nous pensons quotidiennement." Blanchot, "Berlin," Écrits politiques, 132. 
  295
l’expérience littéraire,” where he first introduced the concepts of the œuvre and 
désœuvrement.  In this piece from 1952 Blanchot drew on the work of Martin Heidegger 
to describe the œuvre in terms of a linguistic structure that becomes a being in the 
material world: “We call this powerful linguistic construction – this structure calculated 
to exclude chance, which subsists by itself and supports itself – the œuvre, and we call it 
being.”441  In 1952 Blanchot was content simply to point out the difference between the 
ontic being of the œuvre, and the ontological category of Being.  In the very same way 
that discourses of mental illness and literature had no real Being, as they did not actually 
reflect genuine reality, Blanchot argued in 1952 that the œuvre was a real being that did 
not participate in actual Being: “[it is] a being, and for because of this, it is apparently 
nowhere near to being, [nowhere near] to that which escapes all determination and every 
form of existence.”442  But in 1961, after “L’oubli, la déraison,” however, Blanchot’s 
statements had a somewhat different inflection.  In 1961 Blanchot argued that the ontic 
being of linguistic structures required that its ontological Being be forgotten.  It was not 
simply that the being of structures had no actual Being.  Rather, Blanchot argued that 
society needed to forget that structures had no actual Being in order to live with them as 
existing beings. 
After 1961, and after Folie et déraison, Blanchot was able to apply this logic to 
all of reality.  In “Mallarmé et l’expérience littéraire” Blanchot wrote:  
                                                 
441 “Cette puissante construction du langage, cet ensemble calculé pour en exclure le hasard, qui subsiste 
par soi seul et repose sur soi-même, nous l’appelons œuvre et nou l’appelons être.” Blanchot, “Mallarmé et 
l’éxpérience littéraire,” Critique, 62 (July 1952): 584. 
442 “Un être et, à cause de cela, apparemment nullement plus proche de l’être, de ce qui échappe à toute 
détermination et à toute forme d’existence.” Ibid. 
  296
It is the total realization of this unreality, an absolute fiction which speaks being 
when, having “worn away,” “used up” all existing things, having suspended all 
possible beings, it hits an ineradicable, irreducible trace, at the bottom of the 
nothing, affirms the nothing again as a being and makes the nothing become a 
being.  What is left?  “These very words: it is.”  These words sustain all other 
words by letting themselves be hidden by all the others.443  
 
At the time Blanchot referred strictly to the being of the work of art, but after “L’oubli, la 
déraison, these words applied to all of reality for Blanchot.  For what was the discourse of 
mental illness, if not the “total realization of [an] unreality”?  For Blanchot, as for 
Foucault, the discourse of mental illness was an “absolute fiction,” which was able to 
accede to the level of being strictly because society chose to forget that it was just a 
fiction.  In this passage from 1952 the concept that reality was sustained by the words “it 
is” being hidden by all others functioned as a latent form of the forgetting that Blanchot 
articulated in “L’oubli, la déraison.”   
But this was the reality that human beings live and inhabit.  For Foucault it took 
the form of medical sciences, words “lined up side by side” about madness, but which 
never approached the real experience of being mad.  For Blanchot, it took the form of 
literature, and the world experienced as literature.  In ““Mallarmé et l’expérience 
littéraire” Blanchot wrote in a footnote, “languages do not have the reality they express, 
for they are foreign to the reality of things, foreign to obscure natural profundity, and 
belong to that fictive reality which is the human world, detached from being and a tool 
                                                 
443 “Il est la réalisation totale de cette irréalité, fiction absolue qui dit l’être, quand, ayant “usé”, “rongé” 
toutes les choses existantes, suspendu tous les êtres possibles, elle se heurte à ce résidu inéliminable, 
irréductible qui, au fond du néant, affirme encore le néant comme être et fait du néant le voile de l’étre.  
Que reste-t-il?  “Ce mot même: c’est”.  Mot qui soutient tous les mots, qui les soutient en se laissant 
dissimulé par eux.”  Ibid. 587.   
  297
for beings.”444  Here Blanchot argued that life was a “fictive reality” sustained only by 
the conviction in the reality of the being of linguistic structures.  In “L’oubli, la 
déraison,” Blanchot was able to advance this proposition even further, by suggesting that 
this conviction could only be sustained when the actual unreality of linguistic structures 
was forgotten.   
Furthermore, Blanchot and Foucault together articulated the idea that this 
forgetting was sustained by a myth.  In the case of the discourse of mental illness, its 
reality was sustained by the myth that physicians discovered the natural reality of mental 
illness by means of the scientific process.  Foucault argued, on the contrary, that the real 
origin of the discourse of mental illness was in the literary trope of the ship of fools, since 
the discourse of mental illness was itself essentially a literary construction.  Society 
would be far better off, Foucault argued, if it first admitted the discourse of mental illness 
was a fiction, and that its real origin was the mythic ship of fools.  It was not that 
Foucault argued that the discourse of mental illness should be removed from reality 
entirely.  Rather, Foucault argued that the practice of mental illness could be regulated 
more tolerably when it was accepted as having a literary essence.  Likewise, Blanchot did 
not argue that the discourse of literature should be removed from reality either.  Rather, 
he argued that the essential fiction of the world could be more readily accepted if were 
given origins, as a fictional world, unsupported by an origin, would be intolerable.  In 
order for those origins to buttress the fiction of reality, they would need to be equally 
fictional.  Insofar as humanity experienced reality through linguistic structures, and 
                                                 
444 “Les langues n’ont pas la réalité qu’elles expriment, étant étrangères à la réalité des choses, à l’obscure 
profondeur naturelle, appartenant seulement à cette réalité fictive qu’est le monde humain, détaché de l’être 
et outil pour les êtres.”  Ibid. 581. 
  298
insofar as those structures were given their being qua œuvres, then humanity could 
achieve its rightful dignity.  
 
* 
The history of Blanchot and Foucault’s exchange sheds light on the scene of 
Foucault’s dissertation defense. When Canguilhem announced to Foucault that he 
possessed the poetic talents necessary to write about madness, he was not, in all 
likelihood, referring to the fundamentally literary, and poetic nature of reality that 
Blanchot and Foucault saw in the discourse of mental illness and the discourse of 
literature.  Rather, Canguilhem likely referred to the “grand,” “baroque” style that 
allowed Foucault to describe the experience of madness so eloquently.  But his comment 
was prescient nonetheless, for it gave utterance to the quintessence of Foucault’s work, 
that the discourse of mental illness was fundamentally a creation like any other literary 
creation.  It was this aspect of Foucault’s work that Blanchot understood, and amplified 
in “L’oubli, la déraison.” 
Blanchot’s review of Folie et déraison simultaneously accomplished two things.  
On the one hand it responded to Foucault’s book, and generated a discussion between 
them.  But on the other hand, “L’Oubli, la déraison,” was also the site of Blanchot’s 
return to his own corpus, and it was where he made a significant revision.  After reading 
Folie et déraison, Blanchot surveyed his work from the 1950s, and attributed a new 
significance to it, which had been present only in a latent form.  The œuvre no longer 
simply referred to the work of art.  The œuvre now referred to all of human reality.  In 
  299
this way Blanchot defined his position vis à vis structuralism.  Structuralism held that 
structures could be understood by tracing their pieces, and explaining how they defined 
and shaped particular aspects human experience a priori: of madness, for example.  
Blanchot and Foucault argued that this was not enough to understand the way that people 
lived and inhabited structures.  For Blanchot and Foucault, people lived in structures 
diachronically, perpetually forgetting that they were nothing more than “[lining] up a few 
words side by side,” and perpetually putting false origins to those structures: physicians 
with scientific method, the author with special insight into the world.  Indeed, Blanchot 
and Foucault argued that structures could only be lived as realities when one forgot their 
real origins, and believed in the origin myth offered by the structure.  They went even 
further, in suggesting that people should admit the existence of structures, and try to live 
in them qua structure: that is, people should accept the essential fiction of the world, and 
accept that the world could exist only as fiction.  In order to accomplish this, Blanchot 
and Foucault offered new origin myths.  In order to live the discourse of mental illness as 
a fiction with the status of reality, Foucault offered the myth of the ship of fools, and in 
order to live the discourse of literature as a fiction that had the status of reality, Blanchot 
offered the myth of Orpheus’ gaze.   
For Blanchot and Foucault these myths separated the unlivable reality of 
structures as “a few words side by side,” from the livable fiction of words rent by 
lightning, as Blanchot suggested in Comment la littérature est-elle possible?  Quoting 
Mallarmé, Blanchot wrote: “when [words] cease they finally present themselves: (“at that 
instant they shine there and die in a swift efflorescence upon some transparency like 
  300
ether”), “a lightning moment,” “a dazzling burst of light.””445  Words cease to exist as “a 
few words side by side” when they are accepted as actual beings.  Blanchot argued that 
the moment when words are taken as Being is the “lightning moment” when structures 
become reality.  That is, the myths of the ship of fools and the gaze of Orpheus were 
words rent by lightning. 
 
                                                 
445 “Lorsqu’ils cessent, se présente (“l’instant qu’ils y brillent et meurent dans une fleur rapide sur quelque 
transparence comme d’éther”), “moment de foudre”, “éclat fulgurant”.     Blanchot, “Mallarmé et 
l’éxpérience littéraire,” 587. 
  301
CONCLUSION 
 
It is difficult to imagine a French thinker more firmly entrenched in textual 
engagement, and more firmly opposed to Sartrean commitment, that Jacques Derrida.  In 
many ways Derrida’s deconstruction epitomized the mode of textual engagement 
developed by Blanchot.  Yet, in 1996, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Les 
Temps modernes, Derrida admitted the silent role that Sartre and Les Temps modernes 
played in his intellectual life:  
Nothing is more unstable, cleft, divided, antinomic than my friendship for what I 
would call Sartre and Les Temps modernes, and this instability would have been 
one of the most often traces of the T.M., of the "epoch" of the T.M. in my life, 
nearly my whole life.  Without doubt, with many other "intellectuals of my 
generation," as is said, I am, I should have been, that which will not have been 
and that which has been without the T.M.: I + T.M., in two words.446 
 
How to account for this unexpected admission from Derrida?  This question might be 
answered more easily if it is re-formulated in a slightly different way: What was the 
relationship of textual engagement to Sartrean commitment?  Derrida seemed to imply 
that Sartrean commitment was the necessary pre-condition of textual engagement – 
necessary precisely because commitment needed to be silenced, excluded, or moved 
beyond, in order for textual engagement to become possible.  Textual engagement could 
never have emerged sui generis, and so it always carried its ancestor’s imprint like a 
birthmark that could be acknowledged only fifty years after the fact.  The history of 
                                                 
446 “Rien n’est plus instable, divisé, partagé, antinomique que mon amitié pour quoi que ce soit qu’on 
appelle Sartre et Les Temps Modernes, et cette instabilité aura été une des traces des T.M., de l’”époque” 
des T.M. dans ma vie, presque toute ma vie, le plus souvent.  Sans doute avec tant d’autres “intellectuels de 
ma génération,” comme on dit, je suis, j’aurai été cela, ce qui n’aura pas été ce qu’il a été sans les T.M.: Je 
+ T.M., en deux mots.” Jacques Derrida, “‘Il Courait mort’: Salut, Salut,” Les Temps modernes 587 (March, 
April, May 1996): 14. 
  302
French theory based on textual engagement – the “intellectuals of my generation,” as 
Derrida put it – was the history of the move beyond commitment. 
 This dissertation examined the history of the move beyond Sartrean commitment 
to textual engagement in French intellectual culture.  The history of intellectual 
engagement in politics in France predated Sartrean commitment, beginning at least with 
the politicization of intellectuals that occurred during the Dreyfus affair, and perhaps 
even the pre-revolutionary philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau.  In the twentieth 
century the field of engaged intellectuals was split between the left and the right, each 
enjoying an equal amount of prestige and respectability.  After World War II however, 
the right was discredited by its association with the occupation and the Vichy regime, and 
the field of intellectual engagement came to be dominated entirely by the left.  At the 
time, it seemed necessary to remake the intellectual and cultural foundations of France 
and French identity from the ground up, after the corrupting and polluting influence of 
the Vichy regime and collaboration.  But this effort went far beyond simple 
reconstruction.  French intellectual culture undertook to completely reinvent the ideals of 
political community around which the new French national identity would be based.  
Many French intellectuals experienced the liberation and the postwar reconstruction as a 
full-scale revolution.  It was in this atmosphere that Sartre first articulated his theory of 
commitment in the opening issue of his journal, Les Temps modernes. 
 At the same time, the immediate postwar years witnessed the beginning of the 
cold war.  While France was never at stake politically between the United States and the 
Soviet Union, it was an important cultural and intellectual front in the cold war.  
  303
Typically, intellectual historians have seen Sartrean commitment in this context, as 
supporting global communism in its battle against global capital.  Tony Judt, an 
intellectual historian, argues that French intellectuals only abandoned commitment after 
the crimes that the Soviet Union had committed in the gulags and during the repression of 
the Hungarian revolution of 1956 became widely known.  Before 1956, Judt argues, the 
only challenges to commitment came from moderate, and even conservative voices 
among the French intelligentsia.  The implication of this argument is that there were no 
radical leftist challenges to commitment, and that after 1956 French intellectuals all but 
abandoned the radicalism of the immediate postwar years. 
 This dissertation restores commitment to its original context, the postwar purge of 
writers and intellectuals that immediately followed the liberation of France in 1944.  Seen 
in this light, it is clear that there were significant challenges to Sartrean commitment 
voiced by equally radical French intellectuals.  During the purge, intellectuals like 
Paulhan and Blanchot critiqued the legitimacy of commitment’s demand that 
collaborationist writers be purged, on the grounds that the nature of language prevented 
any legal decision over whether or not writing could be judged to have collaborated.  
Furthermore, Paulhan and Blanchot showed that commitment’s attempt to create political 
change through writing also foundered on a mistaken understanding of the nature of 
language.  For Paulhan and Blanchot, no clear distinction between language and politics 
existed.  One could not commit to changing politics through language, since language 
itself constituted the political.  If one were to commit, they argued, one would have to 
commit to language itself.  Paulhan and Blanchot’s critique of commitment was 
  304
completed during the war in Algeria, when Blanchot and Camus demonstrated 
commitment’s hypocritical ethics, and developed an alternative mode of intellectual 
engagement in politics through the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la 
guerre d’Algérie.”  Ultimately, commitment was not abandoned because French 
intellectuals realized the folly of their radicalism, and the hypocrisy of supporting the 
Soviet Union, as Judt suggests.  Rather, commitment was evaluated, dismissed, and 
surpassed because French intellectuals found it to be inadequate to meet the challenges 
posed by the political crises of the postwar era.   
 The history of the move beyond commitment is especially significant to the 
American academy today, because so much contemporary scholarship in the humanities 
employs concepts that were originally articulated in French theory.  This is even more 
true of American scholarship that claims to derive political significance from its use of 
French theory.  Without diminishing the important contributions made by such 
scholarship, this dissertation shows that French theory’s political significance issued not 
only from the theory itself, but also from French theory’s engagement in particular 
political events in postwar French history.  In specific, French theory’s adequation of 
language and politics grew out of the engagement in the postwar purge of writers and 
intellectuals, and the war in Algeria.  To some extent, these events still reside in the 
concept of discourse as productive of subjectivity and experience – a concept which 
continues to provide a political edge to a wide variety of scholarship in the American 
humanities.  
  305
By ignoring the history of the move beyond commitment, scholars in the 
humanities have deprived themselves of some of French theory’s most powerful and 
wide-ranging political implications.  In specific, American scholars have passed by 
Blanchot’s promotion of a mode of intellectual engagement based on self-reflexivity.  
During the postwar purge, and the war in Algeria, Blanchot advocated for intellectuals to 
recognize the limitations of engaging in the linguistic construction of the world.  
Blanchot did not think that French intellectuals needed to abandon the project of 
engagement altogether.  But he did argue that French intellectuals needed to take 
cognizance of what engagement was actually capable of doing.  In his view, one could 
engage in the linguistically constructed world, but one had to abandon any pretense to 
sovereignty.  This meant that any intellectual engagement that intervened in the linguistic 
construction of the world could not pretend to exert control over the world.  It was 
precisely control that the linguistic nature of the world prevented.  One could create for 
political change – as Sartre tried and failed to do during the postwar purge – but  one had 
to allow oneself to be swept away by that very change.  One could establish new ethical 
laws – as the “Déclaration” did during the war in Algeria – but one had to submit to the 
law oneself.   Blanchot and Foucault established their mode of textual engagement on the 
basis of the self-reflexivity that emerged out of the purge, and the war in Algeria.  To 
Blanchot and Foucault, textual engagement was not  capable of undoing the linguistic 
construction of the world.  Rather, it was capable only of altering one’s relationship to the 
linguistic constructions with which one interacted.  It was not enough simply to try to do 
  306
good, as Sartre did.  For Blanchot and Foucault, it was also necessary to self-reflexively 
take the limitations of operating in a linguistically constructed world into account. 
This dissertation also addressed a second issue of contemporary relevance, which 
is the history of French theory.  The operating assumption of this project is that the 
history of French theory is valuable because it provides context for a group of thinkers 
whose reception in the United States has sorely lacked that very thing.  Some might argue 
that the portmanteau of French theory is too broad and diffuse to be of any analytic value 
whatsoever.  The differences between existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, 
and psychoanalysis (to name but a few schools of French thought) are too great to be 
reconciled in a single category, let alone the differences between individual thinkers.  
Historians who research the history of French theory draw scorn from France itself, 
where intellectual historians object that French theory is an American neologism 
unsuitable to the reality of French intellectual life.  But the reality of French intellectual 
life is that at no point in the postwar period were any French theorists not in conversation 
with each other.  Their work was always the product of discussions, debates, and battles 
with each other, and with the current events of the day.  No single French theory was 
created in isolation, and the term French theory helps the intellectual historian to re-
establish the lines of communication between thinkers by offering a generic category of 
analysis.  In short, the history of French theory helps to show the connections between 
theories and theorists that are quashed when the divisions between schools of thought, 
and between individual thinkers are drawn too rigidly.  
  307
Moreover, the history of French theory is useful because it demonstrates that the 
olympian thinkers grouped under this category were also living, breathing human beings.  
By treating French theorists as ordinary people, the history of French theory shows that 
their ideas are not timeless or universal.  Rather, they were ideas – especially insightful 
ideas, to be sure – that emerged out of French history and out of the lives of their 
creators.  It is important to study French theory within the disciplinary conventions of 
history, where the imperative placed on context and narrative helps to account for the 
genesis of French theory without descending into biographical anecdote.   
The history of French theory also shows that French theory mattered beyond the 
confines of the elite intellectual circle that has become familiar in the United States.  By 
adopting the general category of French theory, and placing it in the context of the 
political history of postwar France, this dissertation shows that French theory was a 
significant factor in French society and politics.  In specific, chapter two of this 
dissertation demonstrated how French intellectuals became involved in a showdown with 
the French state over the war in Algeria.  Their protest of the French involvement in the 
war was not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the atrocities of French imperialism.  Rather, 
the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” was inspired by 
French theory both in its form, and in its content.  The “Déclaration” directly challenged 
the sovereignty of the state, and established a space for ethical action outside the state’s 
legal purview.  Precisely because of its theoretical form and content, the French state was 
unable to react to the “Déclaration,” eventually dropping all charges against the 
manifesto’s signatories, and exposing the limits of the state’s sovereignty over its 
  308
subjects.  The “Déclaration” was one of several well-publicized affairs that galvanized 
French opinion against the war, and led to the Évian Accords, the cease-fire agreement 
that ended the war.  In this way, French theory – through its manifestation in the 
“Déclaration” – exerted a positive influence on the end of the war in Algeria, and the 
termination of the French Empire.    
The history of the “Déclaration,” and the history of the move beyond commitment 
in general, demonstrates that it is necessary to revise the standards by which the larger 
historical significance of French theory is judged.  It is no longer possible to judge the 
historical significance of French theory based solely on its social influence, that is, by 
asking how many people actually read French theory.  French theory influenced postwar 
society and politics in more ways than simply affecting the national mentalité.  It is 
necessary to remove some of the disciplinary blinders that have impeded its reception 
until now in order to chart the ways in which French theory actually affected postwar 
France.  To see how theoretical reflections on the work of Sade, for instance, became 
significant to the postwar purge of collaborators, it is necessary to see the two as 
coextensive.  Likewise, in order to see how theory had an impact on the war in Algeria, it 
is necessary to see how theoretical reflection on the myth of Don Juan influenced the 
protest of the war.  Only a historical view, with its careful attention to context is capable 
of attending to the multiple registers in which French theory circulated in the postwar 
period. 
Lastly, the history of the move beyond commitment shows that the battles that 
French intellectuals fought offer a useful site of reflection in which to reconsider 
  309
contemporary intellectual engagement.  It is useful because it demonstrates that there 
were then, and are now more options to the engaged intellectual than radicalism and 
conservativism, more kinds of intellectual production than just politicized writing and 
apolitical writing.  Blanchot’s lesson goes beyond cautioning engaged intellectuals to be 
vigilantly self-reflexive.  Blanchot’s lesson is also that engagement itself is something 
that requires deep self-reflexivity, not just so that one avoids the pitfalls of Sartrean 
commitment, but also so that one’s intellectual engagements are effective.
  310
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