Maurice Blanchot

An essential addition to the library of anyone seriously interested in Maurice Blanchot and the evolutions of literary and philosophical thinking in twentieth-century France.-Lydia DavisFinally available in English, John McKeane's crisp and elegant translation of Christophe Bident's Maurice Blanchot is an event of the first magnitude. Illuminating the life and writing of perhaps the century's most compelling, unsettling, and wondrously enigmatic author, Bident takes up an oeuvre shrouded in secrecy and silence, studying it exactingly in view of the difficult and shifting contexts in which it took shape. In method and execution Bident's critical biography stands as a major point of reference in twentieth-century studies.-Tom Conley, Harvard University A triumph! Bident's sinewy prose is light of touch, but can burgeon briefly into telling metaphors and pithy turns of phrase. As a correspondent wrote to Blanchot when the book appeared in French, 'It finally obliges the readers of your work to face up to their responsibilities. From now on there can be no excuse for invoking some veil of secrecy. In that sense, the post-Bident era should be very different from the pre-Bident one.'-Michael Holland, Oxford UniversityMaurice Blanchot has inspired several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers with some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. A journalist and activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy and seclusion. These public and private lives converged at some of the century's most momentous occasions: Blanchot was nearly executed during the Occupation, participated prominently in the May '68 revolution in Paris, and, more controversially, wrote for the far right in the '30s.Bident's magisterial and scrupulous biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot's itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and interviews with the writer's close friends. Sophisticated readings provide a genealogy of his thought and trace the strong links between Blanchot's life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident offers a much-needed corrective to cruder accounts, from detractors and champions alike, of a life too easily sensationalized.Christophe Bident is Professor of Theater Studies at the University of Picardie Jules Verne.