20 Facts About Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot's work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Maurice Blanchot studied philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, where he became a close friend of the Lithuanian-born French Jewish phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas.

Maurice Blanchot then embarked on a career as a political journalist in Paris.

Maurice Blanchot refused the editorship of the collaborationist Nouvelle Revue Francaise for which, as part of an elaborate ploy, he had been suggested by Jean Paulhan.

Maurice Blanchot was active in the Resistance and remained a bitter opponent of the fascist, anti-semitic novelist and journalist Robert Brasillach, who was the principal leader of the pro-Nazi collaborationist movement.

In June 1944, Maurice Blanchot was almost executed by a Nazi firing squad.

In 1947, Maurice Blanchot left Paris for the secluded village of Eze in the south of France, where he spent the next decade of his life.

Part of the reason for his self-imposed isolation was the fact that, for most of his life, Maurice Blanchot suffered from poor health.

Maurice Blanchot is widely credited with being one of the main authors of the important "Manifesto of the 121", named after the number of its signatories, who included Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Antelme, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Rene Char, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Resnais, Simone Signoret and others, which supported the rights of conscripts to refuse to serve in the colonial war in Algeria.

In May 1968, Maurice Blanchot emerged from personal obscurity, in support of the student protests.

Maurice Blanchot wrote more than thirty works of fiction, literary criticism, and philosophy.

In 1983, Maurice Blanchot published La Communaute inavouable.

Maurice Blanchot died on 20 February 2003 in Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines, France.

Maurice Blanchot's work explores a philosophy of death, not in humanistic terms, but through concerns of paradox, impossibility, nonsense and the noumenal that stem from the conceptual impossibility of death.

Maurice Blanchot constantly engaged with the "question of literature", a simultaneous enactment and interrogation of the idiosyncratic act of writing.

For Maurice Blanchot, "literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question".

Maurice Blanchot drew on the poetics of Stephane Mallarme and Paul Celan, as well as the concept of negation in the Hegelian dialectic, for his theory of literary language as something that is always anti-realist and so distinct from everyday experience that realism does not simply stand for literature about reality, but for literature concerning paradoxes made by the qualities of the act of writing.

Literature, Maurice Blanchot writes, remains fascinated by this presence of absence, and attention is drawn, through the sonority and rhythm of words, to the materiality of language.

Maurice Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question of how literature and death are both experienced as an anonymous passivity, an experience that Maurice Blanchot variously refers to as "the Neutral".

Unlike Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot instead rejects the possibility of an authentic relation to death, because he rejects the conceptual possibility of death.