Moreover, Blanchot has influenced several contemporary artists and writers working across media, including Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras, Paul Auster, and Gary Hill.
Blanchot's invisibility, coupled with the significant influence of his work, led some late-twentieth-century critics to question the relationship between writing that sounds like a "voice that comes from elsewhere" (the title of one of Blanchot's late works) and the life of its author. More specifically, they have struggled to articulate the relation between a measured, even reserved oeuvre and its author's involvement with several extremist publications in the 1930s and 1940s. They have sought to understand Blanchot's complex, anti-Hitlerian nationalism in relation to his later politics, especially his strong stance against the Algerian War in 1958, his commitment to the creation of an international literary review, his participation in the students' and writers' groups of May 1968, and his enduring support of Israel. In letters, essays, introductions, and the autobiographical narrative L'instant de ma mort (1994; translated as The Instant of My Death, 2000), Blanchot willingly has acknowledged the bare facts of his life. Yet, these facts may have little or no relation to the works that rigorously engage the question of literature--works that seem to be written by no one, works that conceive of the writer as one who speaks from beyond the grave.
This is a free page. This page contains 194 words. This
biography contains 7,736 words (approx. 26 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Maurice Blanchot Access Pass.
