Friendship

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by Maurice Blanchot,

Translated by Elizableth Rottenberg

Stanford University Press

Due/Published May 1997, 238 pages, paper

ISBN 0804727597

This collection of twenty-nine critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the Lascaux caves to the atomic era. Essays are devoted to works of fiction (Louis-Ren� des For�ts, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Laporte, Marguerite Duras), to autobiographies or testimonies (Michel Leiris, Robert Antelme, Andr� Gorz, Franz Kafka), on questions of Judaism in the works of Edmond Jab�s, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber, Andr� Malraux's "imaginary museum," the Pl�iade Encyclopedia project of Raymond Queneau, paperback publishing, the work of L�vi-Strauss, Marx and communism, writings on the Holocaust, and the difference between art and writing. The book concludes with an eloquent invocation to friendship on the occasion of the death of Georges Bataille.

Series: Crossing Sesthetics

Review

"How could we agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility, belong to no one. There are no witnesses. Those who were closest say only what was close to them, not the distance that affirmed itself in this proximity..."

Maurice Blanchot, one of the most influential French thinkers of the century, wrote this upon the death of his good friend Georges Bataille. The essay is an eloquent meditation on the elusiveness of friendship, and is part of a remarkable new collection originally published in France in 1971 (this is the first English translation). The essays reflect Blanchot's wide-ranging interests and some of the subjects he writes on include Franz Kafka and Max Brod, which in some ways is another exploration on the nature of friendship; the paintings at Lascaux; other writers (Marguerite Duras, Robert Antelme, Albert Camus, and others); Judaism and the works of Jab�s, Levinas, and Buber; paperback publishing; and Benjamin's "Task of the Translator".

"This is an extraordinary work of criticism -- literary, cultural, political -- but also of writing. It manages to weave together an almost journalistic directness and clarity with a philosophical-theoretical meditation of tingling complexity." -- Thomas Keenan, Princeton