Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic, was born in 1907 His life is entirely devoted to literature and the silence of its own. These two short sentences have been with for years the French editions of some books Blanchot. Now you could add the date of death: February 2003 Born in Quain, suffered a serious illness at the end of adolescence will leave consequences for the rest of his life and perhaps mark his frugal nature and removed. At the University of Strasbourg will read Husserl and Heidegger in the company of Emmanuel Levinas, who since he joined an intimate friendship. Linked youth during his ultranationalist right-wing publications, which will be released some of his early articles, known in 1940 to Georges Bataille, who share "the recognition of a common strangeness" and whose influence will be decisive for the future course of his work and radical leftist political orientation. At the time of the publication of his first short stories and novels (Thomas the Obscure Amminadab), in the late forties, Blanchot begins an intense activity as a literary critic, he will gather texts in successive volumes: Missteps (1943), The part of Fire (1949), Lautréamont and Sade (1949), the Literary space (1955), the book to come (1959, Trotta, 2005), the unfinished dialogue (1969) and friendship (1973). It is a deed in which Blanchot constantly questions the possibility of literature, the writer and the work, in a reflection traversed by notions of the neutral, loneliness and "desobra '. To this he devoted one of his last writings, The unmentionable community (1983), in which the convergence of literary and political thought is shown.