ABSTRACT
Much has already been written on Maurice Blanchot's writing of the 1930s: it is today well known that Blanchot, perhaps the single most important (and influential) French literary critic of the postwar period, was before World War Two a very active right-wing propagandist, a leading contributor to reviews such as Combat and L'Insurgé. 1 My concern here is not with those writings, but instead with Blanchot's work after the war, which cannot at all be said to be “anti-Semitic” in any way that could correspond to prewar right-wing ideologemes (the preservation of French culture, the affirmation of “rootedness” in the face of “cosmopolitanism,” and so on). I certainly have no intention of pilloring Blanchot as an anti-Semite for his writings in the postwar period. Instead what interests me is how a critic such as Blanchot, steeped as he is in the German philosophical tradition of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, attempts to account for anti-Semitism. 2 It would seem that Blanchot, after the war, goes directly against the approach he took in the prewar period: now he affirms Judaism, and attempts to understand the illogic of anti-Semitism. This is an important problem, because Blanchot's work both anticipated (in the late 1940s and 50s) and is representative of much of the work being done in philosophical criticism in France in the sixties: anti- or posthumanist, it nevertheless attempts to defend the rights of an oppressed minority, not on the basis of what can loosely and often disparagingly be called law, democracy, and humanism, but in the name of an anti- or posthumanism, nomadism, and exile. Blanchot's work thus presages and even sums up a trend of French writing most commonly associated with such names as Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida. Problems that appear in Blanchot's approach to anti-Semitism and Judaism in general, then, may very well have significance for an understanding not only of Blanchot's work as a whole, but also for that of an entire stratum of French thought that valorizes the “rhizome,” marginality, dissemination, and so on. But beyond this, they indicate the extreme difficulty—and unavoidable perils—that attends writing on the Holocaust, 3 especially if one is attempting to displace a Western tradition of utility, sense, and transcendent truth.
