Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot (Quain, Saône-et-Loire, 1907 – Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Yvelines, 2003) was a French writer, literary critic and philosopher. His work, which explores a philosophy of death alongside a reflection on meaning and the act of writing, had a considerable influence on post-structuralist thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.

He studied philosophy at Strasbourg, where he formed a lasting friendship with Emmanuel Levinas despite their very different political views at the time. After reading Heidegger's Being and Time, which he described as an intellectual shock, he worked as a political journalist in Paris. In the 1930s he wrote for radical right-wing magazines, but he gradually distanced himself from them and warned persistently about the danger posed by Nazi Germany. During the occupation he continued to review books, declined to lead the Nouvelle Revue Française under German control, and became a close friend of Georges Bataille. In 1944 he narrowly escaped execution by German soldiers, an episode he later recounted in The Instant of My Death.

After the war he gave up journalism and devoted himself to writing. He settled in Èze, on the Mediterranean coast, and gradually withdrew from public life. His novels and récits, such as Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, Death Sentence and The Most High, are abstract and elusive, and the line between narrative and philosophical inquiry becomes blurred in them. In his critical works, collected in books such as The Space of Literature and The Book to Come, he argued that literature begins at the moment it becomes a question. His thinking on death rejects the possibility of an authentic relation to it, in critical dialogue with Heidegger, and understands it as the impossibility of every possibility. He took part in the Manifesto of the 121 against the war in Algeria and, in 1968, briefly re-emerged in support of the student protests.

His influence reaches across twentieth-century philosophy and literary theory. He died in 2003, surrounded by Derrida and a few close friends.