{"id":54,"date":"2003-03-02T00:04:29","date_gmt":"2003-03-02T04:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=54"},"modified":"2003-03-02T00:04:29","modified_gmt":"2003-03-02T04:04:29","slug":"blanchot-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=54","title":{"rendered":"Blanchot, Still"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has finally (a week after his death was announced) published an obituary for Maurice Blanchot<\/a>. Not only is this obituary so brief and vague as to give no indication of Blanchot’s importance, let alone what he was about–something I am willing to leave aside, since Blanchot himself would have disclaimed what I and many others regard as his extreme importance, as being one of the most profound<\/i> writers of the 20th century–but also, unforgivably, it completely misstates Blanchot’s political history. The last paragraph of the obituary reads: “Before World War II he was an outspoken rightist, but after the German invasion in 1940, his fascism gave way to French nationalism.”– Just for the record: Blanchot’s dubious right-wing political stance of the 1930s was precisely a French nationalist one; after 1940, what he abandoned, and henceforth condemned, was both fascism and nationalism; during the War he travelled in Resistance circles; after the War, and for the rest of his life, he mostly withdrew from any sort of public affiliation, but was active in supporting Algerian independence in the late 50s\/early 60s. was active in the rebellion of 1968, and proclaimed his allegiance to a non-Soviet, pretty much anarchistic and egalitarian form of what he insisted on calling “communism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has finally (a week after his death was announced) published an obituary for Maurice Blanchot<\/a>. Not only is this obituary so brief and vague as to give no indication of Blanchot’s importance, let alone what he was about–something I am willing to leave aside, since Blanchot himself would have disclaimed what I and many others regard as his extreme importance, as being one of the most profound<\/i> writers of the 20th century–but also, unforgivably, it completely misstates Blanchot’s political history. The last paragraph of the obituary reads: “Before World War II he was an outspoken rightist, but after the German invasion in 1940, his fascism gave way to French nationalism.”– Just for the record: Blanchot’s dubious right-wing political stance of the 1930s was precisely a French nationalist one; after 1940, what he abandoned, and henceforth condemned, was both fascism and nationalism; during the War he travelled in Resistance circles; after the War, and for the rest of his life, he mostly withdrew from any sort of public affiliation, but was active in supporting Algerian independence in the late 50s\/early 60s. was active in the rebellion of 1968, and proclaimed his allegiance to a non-Soviet, pretty much anarchistic and egalitarian form of what he insisted on calling “communism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}